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Title: The Victorian Age in Literature

Author: G. K. Chesterton

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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE


No. 61

_Editors:_

THE RT. HON. H. A. L. FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.

PROF. SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.

_A complete classified list of the volumes of The Home University
Library already published to be found at the back of this book._




THE VICTORIAN AGE
IN LITERATURE

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LTD.

COPYRIGHT, 1913,

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




CONTENTS


CHAP.                                           PAGE

      INTRODUCTION                                 7

    I THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES    12

   II THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS               90

  III THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS                  156

   IV THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE             204

      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                       253

      INDEX                                      255


The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an
authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal
statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian
literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.




THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE




INTRODUCTION


A section of a long and splendid literature can be most conveniently
treated in one of two ways. It can be divided as one cuts a currant cake
or a Gruyère cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Or
it can be divided as one cuts wood--along the grain: if one thinks that
there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come
in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a
spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life
of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its
mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the
grain in the branch runs true like an unbroken river.

Mere chronological order, indeed, is almost as arbitrary as alphabetical
order. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of the
birthday book would be to forge about as real a chain as the "Tacitus,
Tolstoy, Tupper" of a biographical dictionary. It might lend itself
more, perhaps, to accuracy: and it might satisfy that school of critics
who hold that every artist should be treated as a solitary craftsman,
indifferent to the commonwealth and unconcerned about moral things. To
write on that principle in the present case, however, would involve all
those delicate difficulties, known to politicians, which beset the
public defence of a doctrine which one heartily disbelieves. It is quite
needless here to go into the old "art for art's sake"--business, or
explain at length why individual artists cannot be reviewed without
reference to their traditions and creeds. It is enough to say that with
other creeds they would have been, for literary purposes, other
individuals. Their views do not, of course, make the brains in their
heads any more than the ink in their pens. But it is equally evident
that mere brain-power, without attributes or aims, a wheel revolving in
the void, would be a subject about as entertaining as ink. The moment we
differentiate the minds, we must differentiate by doctrines and moral
sentiments. A mere sympathy for democratic merry-making and mourning
will not make a man a writer like Dickens. But without that sympathy
Dickens would not be a writer like Dickens; and probably not a writer at
all. A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as
the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But
without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and
probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any
other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart
from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his
individuality: men are never individual when alone.

It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate and
entangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by dates
and names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a task
for which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every
other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not
wholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise
that I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief
peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make
the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for
indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics
the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism
more important than _Liberty_ or talks more of the Oxford Movement than
of _The Christian Year_. I can only answer in the very temper of the
age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise
not a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I
shall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics
more sacred than they were to Mill.




CHAPTER I

THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE AND ITS ENEMIES


The previous literary life of this country had left vigorous many old
forces in the Victorian time, as in our time. Roman Britain and Mediæval
England are still not only alive but lively; for real development is not
leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from
a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the
metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but
improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of
his home. The ancient English literature was like all the several
literatures of Christendom, alike in its likeness, alike in its very
unlikeness. Like all European cultures, it was European; like all
European cultures, it was something more than European. A most marked
and unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the
ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes
of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in
Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens. It is vain to dream of
defining such vivid things; a national soul is as indefinable as a
smell, and as unmistakable. I remember a friend who tried impatiently to
explain the word "mistletoe" to a German, and cried at last, despairing,
"Well, you know holly--mistletoe's the opposite!" I do not commend this
logical method in the comparison of plants or nations. But if he had
said to the Teuton, "Well, you know Germany--England's the
opposite"--the definition, though fallacious, would not have been wholly
false. England, like all Christian countries, absorbed valuable elements
from the forests and the rude romanticism of the North; but, like all
Christian countries, it drank its longest literary draughts from the
classic fountains of the ancients: nor was this (as is so often loosely
thought) a matter of the mere "Renaissance." The English tongue and
talent of speech did not merely flower suddenly into the gargantuan
polysyllables of the great Elizabethans; it had always been full of the
popular Latin of the Middle Ages. But whatever balance of blood and
racial idiom one allows, it is really true that the only suggestion that
gets near the Englishman is to hint how far he is from the German. The
Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectly
seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join together
in words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maiden
or a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temper
of Englishmen is to say that they couldn't do this even for beer. They
can sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must have
in their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefaced
and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,
common and comic, as "Wapping Old Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley." If
it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,
indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or like that superb song (I never
knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from
Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "O
Tarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of _The
Midsummer Night's Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often
shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to
employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half
humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants
of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph
or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But
Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read
that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to--

    "Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
    Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them
    With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with
Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't
stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the
general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief
and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was
buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great
neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death
of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty
chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With
him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which
only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--and
Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have
thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have
called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was one
with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of
no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that
Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth
century the most important event in English history happened in France.
It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,
to say that the most important event in English history was the event
that never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of the
French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or
even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time
when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last
Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of
Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,
burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by
another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich
over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally
enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that
England became finally a land of landlords instead of common
land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst
of it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we may
certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not
only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The
upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,
nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was
that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the
nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form.
In France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England
it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the
English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were
rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of
English and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of
Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced
_Sandford and Merton_. But people forget that in literature the English
were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from
politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It
would be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century
emancipation which in France produced the pictures of David, in England
produced the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave
to the imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the
very borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the
romantic or revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight
of the Antarctic, where the waters were like witches' oils; than Keats
looking out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate
sea. The heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been
quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and
Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies.
In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly;
and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine.
Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed
freely over _Kubla Khan_; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not
already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly have
locked him up for a madman. Even Hébert (the one really vile
Revolutionist), had he been reproached by English poets with worshipping
the Goddess of Reason, might legitimately have retorted that it was
rather the Goddess of Unreason that they set up to be worshipped.
Verbally considered, Carlyle's _French Revolution_ was more
revolutionary than the real French Revolution: and if Carrier, in an
exaggerative phrase, empurpled the Loire with carnage, Turner almost
literally set the Thames on fire.

This trend of the English Romantics to carry out the revolutionary idea
not savagely in works, but very wildly indeed in words, had several
results; the most important of which was this. It started English
literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence
and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and
in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,
were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.
The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in
Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much
milder prejudices and much more _bourgeois_ crotchets, England retained
from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became
much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from
her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,
but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of
Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;
nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the
counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to
a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane
truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and
to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in
Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and
their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of
those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his
decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;
Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of
all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with
his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his
bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier
Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.
He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,
a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented
in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's _Noctes
Ambrosianæ_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It
remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and
brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;
the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are
as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt
of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,
which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney
cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey
with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have
been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got
drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he
himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German
metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas
and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and
most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like
nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern
pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when
Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic
shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he
had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the
pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in
their "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said said
better in _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_.

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only
under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belong
to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, with
Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel with
the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced him
to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomy
religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction of
a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll that
includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who really
employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare's),
but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun is
said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three
meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been
there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the "wit"
of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not
pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to
the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.
For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things
to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood's
genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness
across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.
"Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"--"We
thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"--"Oh God,
that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"--none can
fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a
compactness and point which was well trained in lines like "A
cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he
would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a
punster.

There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the
Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was
part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour
affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish
direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers
were naturally the wits that led the world. But it affected England also
negatively and by reaction; for it associated such men as Byron with
superiority, but not with success. The English middle classes were led
to distrust poetry almost as much as they admired it. They could not
believe that either vision at the one end or violence at the other could
ever be practical. They were deaf to that great warning of Hugo: "You
say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt." Ideals
exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely,
would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly,
because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid
sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the
wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for
Hellas.

The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time
when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr.
Macaulay." Macaulay's literary popularity was representative and it was
deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks an
epoch. He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro," whose
honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre
smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his
colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly
gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the
Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class
and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to
that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not
narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he
did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other in
England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century,
many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at the
Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those once
within this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it was
level. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but the
Whigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers,
with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he found
Sydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable old
heathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a
shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform and
remained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For
the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision
of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of
aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French
Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme.
It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself
more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian
"prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade.
These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and
Macaulay is typical of them; he is the _bourgeois_ in Belgravia. The
alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: it
is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists.
Cobbett was dead.

Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its very
English and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics and
abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual
patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth.
But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian
Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; the
richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two
Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic
Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him
derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh;
but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive
antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.

As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.
The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on
improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere
accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too
strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in
its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can
never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he
did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the
soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of
experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;
birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their
own courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soul
of man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, to
anarchism or to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fall
as sterile and lie as fallow as before man's reason was made. Macaulay
seemed sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had
families of little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other
view he held was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that
we should get the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a
Muggletonian, and the best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an
Irvingite. The compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant in
bulk; but Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. A
good butcher might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist.
A good soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For the
rest, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in
terms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he
upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and
ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like
tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulay
was very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature is
this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic
and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite
for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt and
used names like trumpets. The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's
own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some
resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or
the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best things
in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it is
remarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from making
him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made him
moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It
was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He was
monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessary
that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemen
worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated it
was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite
priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's blood warms with the mere
prospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the
solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and,
it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his
swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,
treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and
strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden."
That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric.
The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded by
names. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gone
mad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under the
eye.

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by
saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had
less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott.
They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he
had learnt from Bentham.

The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the
Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In
substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he
offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul
of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the
central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill
was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate
and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach
a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard
egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that
can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that
brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester
School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a
sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe
rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his
factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is
all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could
only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,
we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the
difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological
order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and
not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will
occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.
Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:
notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good
getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this
sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it
were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus
Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet
delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no
one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some
tenderness for anachronism.

Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition
which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was
the philosophy in office, so to speak. It sustained its march of
codification and inquiry until it had made possible the great victories
of Darwin and Huxley and Wallace. If we take Macaulay at the beginning
of the epoch and Huxley at the end of it, we shall find that they had
much in common. They were both square-jawed, simple men, greedy of
controversy but scornful of sophistry, dead to mysticism but very much
alive to morality; and they were both very much more under the influence
of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was
much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that
when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror
of "plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic,
rhetoric," which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric
as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period had
developed can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither was
of a spiritual sort, Macaulay took it for granted that common sense
required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that
common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about
his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't
got.

But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a
certain sense _was_ the Victorian era, it was assailed on many sides,
and had been assailed even before the beginning of that era. The rest of
the intellectual history of the time is a series of reactions against
it, which come wave after wave. They have succeeded in shaking it, but
not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the
Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing
arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers
or pupils--Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to create
a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and
Rome--Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice--perhaps Tennyson. Browning
also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and
worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own. Though as a boy
he bought eagerly Shelley's revolutionary poems, he did not think of
becoming a revolutionary poet. He concentrated on the special souls of
men; seeking God in a series of private interviews. Hence Browning,
great as he is, is rather one of the Victorian novelists than wholly of
the Victorian poets. From Ruskin, again, descend those who may be called
the Pre-Raphaelites of prose and poetry.

It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the romance of
these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature
begins and proceeds. Bentham was already the prophet of a powerful sect;
Macaulay was already the historian of an historic party, before the true
Victorian epoch began. The middle classes were emerging in a state of
damaged Puritanism. The upper classes were utterly pagan. Their clear
and courageous testimony remains in those immortal words of Lord
Melbourne, who had led the young queen to the throne and long stood
there as her protector. "No one has more respect for the Christian
religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into
private life----" What was pure paganism in the politics of Melbourne
became a sort of mystical cynicism in the politics of Disraeli; and is
well mirrored in his novels--for he was a man who felt at home in
mirrors. With every allowance for aliens and eccentrics and all the
accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic
circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch
centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But
the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very
genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite
easy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;
scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a
Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:
except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by
that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,
to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have
turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more
it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was
not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.
For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not
mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt
against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having
your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious
Victorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they were
fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent
talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So
long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a
shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he
created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first
French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished
peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which
Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have
been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But
their sub-conscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins
had and ordinary Anglicans had not: the exalted excitement of
consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were
a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their
first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not
a Dissenter. The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its
being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it
differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian
compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly
emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if
a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all
days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against
which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.

This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp
spear, of which the spear blade was Newman. It did forget many of the
other forces that were fighting on its side. But the movement could
boast, first and last, many men who had this eager dogmatic quality:
Keble, who spoilt a poem in order to recognise a doctrine; Faber, who
told the rich, almost with taunts, that God sent the poor as eagles to
strip them; Froude, who with Newman announced his return in the arrogant
motto of Achilles. But the greater part of all this happened before what
is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman
alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was
certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that
Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English
literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point
about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that
Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite
unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to
Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer
compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by
compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and
abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written
the _Apologia_. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was
because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his _Apologia_ is a
triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this
sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his
accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their
cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it
was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done
with them for ever. His _Lectures on the Present Position of English
Catholics_, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only
higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is
something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture
about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians.
But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a
man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly
avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality
of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping
definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate
patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.
But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have
said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing
irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the
present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few
imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The
suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of
Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of
Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of
Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in
ours.

The next group of reactionaries or romantics or whatever we elect to
call them, gathers roughly around one great name. Scotland, from which
had come so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical
philosophies of the Victorian Age, was destined also to fling forth (I
had almost said to spit forth) their fiercest and most extraordinary
enemy. The two primary things in Thomas Carlyle were his early Scotch
education and his later German culture. The first was in almost all
respects his strength; the latter in some respects his weakness. As an
ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic
property of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and
their instinctive philosophic consideration of men merely as men. But he
was not an ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village
till death, he would have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a
wild eye, a man with an air of silent anger; perhaps a man at whom
stones were sometimes thrown. A strain of disease and suffering ran
athwart both his body and his soul. In spite of his praise of silence,
it was only through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness. But
while his fellow-peasants would have seen this in him and perhaps mocked
it, they would also have seen something which they always expect in such
men, and they would have got it: vision, a power in the mind akin to
second sight. Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he
was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his
transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or
the Mysteries and Eternities generally, these seem to me to belong more
to his German side and to be less sincere and vital. I mean a real power
of seeing things suddenly, not apparently reached by any process; a
grand power of guessing. He _saw_ the crowd of the new States General,
Danton with his "rude flattened face," Robespierre peering mistily
through his spectacles. He _saw_ the English charge at Dunbar. He
_guessed_ that Mirabeau, however dissipated and diseased, had something
sturdy inside him. He _guessed_ that Lafayette, however brave and
victorious, had nothing inside him. He supported the lawlessness of
Cromwell, because across two centuries he almost physically _felt_ the
feebleness and hopelessness of the moderate Parliamentarians. He said a
word of sympathy for the universally vituperated Jacobins of the
Mountain, because through thick veils of national prejudice and
misrepresentation, he felt the impossibility of the Gironde. He was
wrong in denying to Scott the power of being inside his characters: but
he really had a good deal of that power himself. It was one of his
innumerable and rather provincial crotchets to encourage prose as
against poetry. But, as a matter of fact, he himself was much greater
considered as a kind of poet than considered as anything else; and the
central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

He first emerged, as it were, as a student and disciple of Goethe. The
connection was not wholly fortunate. With much of what Goethe really
stood for he was not really in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way,
he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He
pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very
unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really
represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic
equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian
decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while
the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which
Carlyle not only never found but never even sought, the weaknesses of
Goethe were of a sort that did not draw the best out of Carlyle. The one
civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their
beautiful balance was a sense of humour. And great poet as Goethe was,
there is to the last something faintly fatuous about his half
sceptical, half sentimental self-importance; a Lord Chamberlain of
teacup politics; an earnest and elderly flirt; a German of the Germans.
Now Carlyle had humour; he had it in his very style, but it never got
into his philosophy. His philosophy largely remained a heavy Teutonic
idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things; as when he
perpetually repeated (as with a kind of flat-footed stamping) that
people ought to tell the truth; apparently supposing, to quote
Stevenson's phrase, that telling the truth is as easy as blind hookey.
Yet, though his general honesty is unquestionable, he was by no means
one of those who will give up a fancy under the shock of a fact. If by
sheer genius he frequently guessed right, he was not the kind of man to
admit easily that he had guessed wrong. His version of Cromwell's filthy
cruelties in Ireland, or his impatient slurring over of the most
sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great--these passages
are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a
generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations,
not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic
historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of a
woman.

For the rest there hovered behind all this transcendental haze a certain
presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the
vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems
to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman
Eagle or the Christian Cross. This he combined, allowing for certain
sceptical omissions, with the grisly Old Testament God he had heard
about in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated
(against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism:
Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity.

His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real
good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the
historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his
real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the
great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the
prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run
of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was
getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress.
Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on
any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was
getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that
Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less
pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in
connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the
first prophet of the Socialists. _Sartor Resartus_ is an admirable
fantasia; _The French Revolution_ is, with all its faults, a really
fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly
sketches of personalities. But I think it is in _Past and Present_, and
the essay on _Chartism_, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by
gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by
a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony
than in such _macabre_ descriptions as that of the poor woman proving
her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that
perfect piece of _badinage_ about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which
he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence.
"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of overproduction? We
take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing
at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let
him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when
he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of
Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the
breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a
representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its
highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus.

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;
because it very strongly dominated his disciples--especially Kingsley,
and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at the
cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others
represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to
a fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered,
will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a
thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously
satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be
definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run
finds its right level. It began with what we may call the "Bible of
History" idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken
revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human
settlement--as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America--we must
suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;
and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It
gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other
older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;
that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or
imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for
war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at
Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said these
particular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed to
defend their position. But they said things to the same effect: that
what manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle
said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils
to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was
"fighting against God." And Kingsley even carried the principle so far
as to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainly
because God had put her there. But in spite of its superficial
spirituality and encouragement, it is not hard to see how such a
doctrine could be abused. It practically comes to saying that God is on
the side of the big battalions--or at least, of the victorious ones.
Thus a creed which set out to create conquerors would only corrupt
soldiers; corrupt them with a craven and unsoldierly worship of success:
and that which began as the philosophy of courage ends as the philosophy
of cowardice. If, indeed, Carlyle were right in saying that right is
only "rightly articulated" might, men would never articulate or move in
any way. For no act can have might before it is done: if there is no
right, it cannot rationally be done at all. This element, like the
Anti-Utilitarian element, is to be kept in mind in connection with after
developments: for in this Carlyle is the first cry of Imperialism, as
(in the other case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at
the trumpet are Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Kipling also
carries on from Carlyle the concentration on the purely Hebraic parts of
the Bible. The fallacy of this whole philosophy is that if God is indeed
present at a modern battle, He may be present not as on Gilboa but
Golgotha.

Carlyle's direct historical worship of strength and the rest of it was
fortunately not very fruitful; and perhaps lingered only in Froude the
historian. Even he is more an interruption than a continuity. Froude
develops rather the harsher and more impatient moral counsels of his
master than like Ruskin the more romantic and sympathetic. He carries on
the tradition of Hero Worship: but carries far beyond Carlyle the
practice of worshipping people who cannot rationally be called heroes.
In this matter that eccentric eye of the seer certainly helped Carlyle:
in Cromwell and Frederick the Great there was at least something
self-begotten, original or mystical; if they were not heroes they were
at least demigods or perhaps demons. But Froude set himself to the
praise of the Tudors, a much lower class of people; ill-conditioned
prosperous people who merely waxed fat and kicked. Such strength as
Henry VIII had was the strength of a badly trained horse that bolts, not
of any clear or courageous rider who controls him. There is a sort of
strong man mentioned in Scripture who, because he masters himself, is
more than he that takes a city. There is another kind of strong man
(known to the medical profession) who cannot master himself; and whom it
may take half a city to take alive. But for all that he is a low
lunatic, and not a hero; and of that sort were too many of the heroes
whom Froude attempted to praise. A kind of instinct kept Carlyle from
over-praising Henry VIII; or that highly cultivated and complicated
liar, Queen Elizabeth. Here, the only importance of this is that one of
Carlyle's followers carried further that "strength" which was the real
weakness of Carlyle. I have heard that Froude's life of Carlyle was
unsympathetic; but if it was so it was a sort of parricide. For the
rest, like Macaulay, he was a picturesque and partisan historian: but,
like Macaulay (and unlike the craven scientific historians of to-day) he
was not ashamed of being partisan or of being picturesque. Such studies
as he wrote on the Elizabethan seamen and adventurers, represent very
triumphantly the sort of romance of England that all this school was
attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle
in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents
many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched
English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which
was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set
up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the
Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and
trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None
need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to
associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively
pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption
of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the
strange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear
down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of
which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really
careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men
of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical
headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a
schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic
object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not
know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of
focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on
Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right
hand that wrote of the great mediæval minsters in tall harmonies and
traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and
feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen
away--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.
Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mind
was troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement of
Kingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great deal
more like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would be
quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistency
between his mediæval tastes and his very unmediæval temper: and minor
inconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair to
say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the
altar.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the
extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is
like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of
the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his
ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight
as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even
suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De
Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a
rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's sentences, as I
have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the
turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda. Ruskin's sentence
branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree
branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden
than merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskin
wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he
did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did--except
Turner, of course. It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse and
wild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if a
Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not
remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind
of is the triumphant passage of a railway train.

Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of
inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle's
_Chartism_, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox
economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more
clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really
stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theory
that we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out that
we never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which we
really care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get a
doctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised and
respectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allow
admirals to compete. We do not tell generals to undercut each other on
the eve of a war. We either employ none of them or we employ all of them
at an official rate of pay. All this was set out in the strongest and
least sentimental of his books, _Unto this Last_; but many suggestions
of it are scattered through _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Political Economy
of Art_, and even _Modern Painters_. On this side of his soul Ruskin
became the second founder of Socialism. The argument was not by any
means a complete or unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out
what little remained of the brains of the early Victorian rationalists.
It is entirely nonsensical to speak of Ruskin as a lounging æsthete, who
strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact,
Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he
was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious
nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business
to understand. Within his own limits, he talked the most cold common
sense about political economy, which was no business of his at all.

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of the
wealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence,
earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what
was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a
much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The
word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and
all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.
They used the mediæval imagery to blaspheme the mediæval religion.
Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not
Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that
Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic
and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of
Ruskin's great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the
name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is
Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which
Ruskin's vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater
eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased
Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work
that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and
splendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that
is, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this
moment a single passage in which Pater's style takes a holiday or in
which his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful and
graceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,
and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go about
railways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himself
go for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point
where all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendid
peroration of _The Renaissance_. The only objection to being where all
the keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them.

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of the
æsthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti and
Swinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediæval
tradition without trusting it. These people wanted to see Paganism
_through_ Christianity: because it involved the incidental amusement of
seeing through Christianity itself. They not only tried to be in all
ages at once (which is a very reasonable ambition, though not often
realised), but they wanted to be on all sides at once: which is
nonsense. Swinburne tries to question the philosophy of Christianity in
the metres of a Christmas carol: and Dante Rossetti tries to write as if
he were Christina Rossetti. Certainly the almost successful summit of
all this attempt is Pater's superb passage on the Mona Lisa; in which he
seeks to make her at once a mystery of good and a mystery of evil. The
philosophy is false; even evidently false, for it bears no fruit to-day.
There never was a woman, not Eve herself in the instant of temptation,
who could smile the same smile as the mother of Helen and the mother of
Mary. But it is the high-water mark of that vast attempt at an
impartiality reached through art: and no other mere artist ever rose so
high again.

Apart from this Ruskinian offshoot through Pre-Raphaelitism into what
was called Æstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill a
very large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a part
in the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a
popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very
good novelist. His _Water Babies_ is really a breezy and roaring freak;
like a holiday at the seaside--a holiday where one talks natural history
without taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of his
works are very real songs: notably, "When all the World is Young, Lad,"
which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the
controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed,
no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on
the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or
Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given
even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose
personality floats towards the frankness of the _Boy's Own Paper_; or to
his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather
towards _The Hibbert Journal_. The moral and social influence of these
things is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. The
voice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming of
Kipling and Henley.

One other name of great importance should appear here, because it cannot
appear very appropriately anywhere else: the man hardly belonged to the
same school as Ruskin and Carlyle, but fought many of their battles, and
was even more concentrated on their main task--the task of convicting
liberal _bourgeois_ England of priggishness and provinciality. I mean,
of course, Matthew Arnold. Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's
"strength" and Ruskin's "nature," he set up a new presence and entity
which he called "culture," the disinterested play of the mind through
the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified
in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention.
He sometimes talked of culture almost as if it were a man, or at least a
church (for a church has a sort of personality): some may suspect that
culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold. But Arnold was not
only right but highly valuable. If we have said that Carlyle was a man
that saw things, we may add that Arnold was chiefly valuable as a man
who knew things. Well as he was endowed intellectually, his power came
more from information than intellect. He simply happened to know certain
things, that Carlyle didn't know, that Kingsley didn't know, that Huxley
and Herbert Spencer didn't know: that England didn't know. He knew that
England was a part of Europe: and not so important a part as it had been
the morning after Waterloo. He knew that England was then (as it is now)
an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not. He knew
that a real democracy need not live and does not live in that perpetual
panic about using the powers of the State, which possessed men like
Spencer and Cobden. He knew a rational minimum of culture and common
courtesy could exist and did exist throughout large democracies. He knew
the Catholic Church had been in history "the Church of the multitude":
he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a
part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners
could and did prosper. He was not so much the philosopher as the man of
the world: he reminded us that Europe was a society while Ruskin was
treating it as a picture gallery. He was a sort of Heaven-sent courier.
His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian
utility may be summoned up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked
the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from
Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them "from a dismal and
illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in
Camberwell?"

His attitude to that great religious enigma round which all these great
men were grouped as in a ring, was individual and decidedly curious. He
seems to have believed that a "Historic Church," that is, some
established organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc., could
be perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritual
ideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearly
seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church
and even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need in
man would always be best satisfied by public worship and especially by
the great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the body
that it might often be revisited by the soul--or souls. Something of the
sort has been suggested by Dr. Coit and others of the ethical societies
in our own time. But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of
the Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. You
must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church:
you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say
that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is
fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore
Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much
belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have
thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was
really building it to Divus Cæsar.

As a critic he was chiefly concerned to preserve criticism itself; to
set a measure to praise and blame and support the classics against the
fashions. It is here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer
else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a
new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian
ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how
elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He
would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same
sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed
itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly
exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman's strength was in a
sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then:
"Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I fear.
_Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis._" If Newman seemed suddenly to fly
into a temper, Carlyle seemed never to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a
smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school,
that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If
his opponent had said something foolish, like "the destiny of England is
in the great heart of England," Arnold would repeat the phrase again and
again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs
again and again to "the British College of Health in the New Road" till
the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold's great
error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well
as of his enemies'.

These names are roughly representative of the long series of protests
against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the
schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests
were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten
heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had
been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and
unlettered man of genius.

The rise of Dickens is like the rising of a vast mob. This is not only
because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly
it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens
characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has
the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that
popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the
individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of
the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing
that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is
comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is
not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular
society: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages is
to keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developed
some special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (for
instance, mediæval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that the
mass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion or
over-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissance
poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that
too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that
the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they
are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is
proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the
poor are always nearest to heaven.

Dickens was a mob--and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of
nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offer
the cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I
am content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in a
sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as
human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had
no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty
and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship
and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely
unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who
"didn't know what she did like," but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob
Sawyer) "did know what she didn't like." Dickens did know what he didn't
like. He didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;
the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the
wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,
above all, he didn't like the _mean_ side of the Manchester philosophy:
the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He
hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must
also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had
gone very far--infecting many finer minds who had fought the
Utilitarians. In the _Edinburgh Review_, a thing like Malthus could be
championed by a man like Macaulay.

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,
that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he
attacked it without knowing he was doing it--certainly without knowing
that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we
will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)
that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had
come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was
entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), he
felt a furious hostility. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little
Bethel to which Kit's mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it.
Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root in
religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some
great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in
the moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religious
history than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again,
he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable
exception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated Sir
Mulberry Hawke--by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all the
world was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few.
But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of the
world--as Kate Nickleby. He did write _The Tale of Two Cities_ long
afterwards; but that was when he _had_ been instructed by Carlyle. His
first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick.
Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created
him. In _The Chimes_, conceived in quite his casual and charitable
season, with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Cricket on the Hearth_, he
hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told
him that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not
economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.
But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he only
knew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many,
Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that this
eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and
sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering
the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways,
he wrote that rich chapter in _Mugby Junction_. Matthew Arnold could
have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of
European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two
or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine,
and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least
understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (to
prolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlyle
a man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens a
man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the
silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and
serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto--the power of
appreciating the presence--or the absence--of a particular and positive
pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the
bottle--for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened
his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give
him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I
ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the
chapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should get
the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did
not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the
onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack
from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the
standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint
of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the
standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but one
instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive
educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map
all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought
was _wrong_ with English middle-class education. Despairing of
explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central
public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private
instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English
middle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, with
his buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen any
other kind of school--certainly he had never understood the systematic
State Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the cane
and the buttered toast, and he _knew_ that it was all wrong. In this
sense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also.
For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which
to make a romance.

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which
(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing with
fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker
and stronger than that England of the eighteenth century: here it is
sufficient to say that he represents the return of Cobbett in this vital
sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man. No one can understand
the thousand caricatures by Dickens who does not understand that he is
comparing them all with his own common sense. Dickens, in the bulk,
liked the things that Cobbett had liked; what is perhaps more to the
point, he hated the things that Cobbett had hated; the Tudors, the
lawyers, the leisurely oppression of the poor. Cobbett's fine fighting
journalism had been what is nowadays called "personal," that is, it
supposed human beings to be human. But Cobbett was also personal in the
less satisfactory sense; he could only multiply monsters who were
exaggerations of his enemies or exaggerations of himself. Dickens was
personal in a more godlike sense; he could multiply persons. He could
create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again, with creatures
unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been
achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle,
the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a
crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist
industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the
rush of that unreal army.




CHAPTER II

THE GREAT VICTORIAN NOVELISTS


The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique and
suited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novel
itself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headed
person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own
definition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, that
when I say "novel," I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably,
but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the story
is not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for
the sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught up
in it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between human
beings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One
of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of
woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women
have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue
proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many
women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively
founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to
Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following
a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane
exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single
modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of
undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,
as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no
writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without
seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But
when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;
and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in
her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,
never weak in her own way--and Scott very often is. Charlotte Brontë
dedicated _Jane Eyre_ to the author of _Vanity Fair_. I should hesitate
to say that Charlotte Brontë's is a better book than Thackeray's, but I
think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts
of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the
new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot's novels
were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the
fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever
have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will have
no doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a man
who could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most exciting
occasion in history certainly did not write _The Mill on the Floss_.
This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a
new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be
peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the
last good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that the
modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is a
philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of
the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of
that part of human existence which has always been the woman's province,
or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real
difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should
specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the
Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so.
People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel is a study of
human nature. Human nature is a thing that even men can understand.
Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at
peep-bo when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature
earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel
deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the
twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art,
which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so much
feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer. And
it was inevitable, under such an inspiration, that more attention should
be given to the awkward corners of life than to its even flow. The very
promising domestic channel dug by the Victorian women, in books like
_Cranford_, by Mrs. Gaskell, would have got to the sea, if they had been
left alone to dig it. They might have made domesticity a fairyland.
Unfortunately another idea, the idea of imitating men's cuffs and
collars and documents, cut across this purely female discovery and
destroyed it.

It may seem mere praise of the novel to say it is the art of sympathy
and the study of human variations. But indeed, though this is a good
thing, it is not universally good. We have gained in sympathy; but we
have lost in brotherhood. Old quarrels had more equality than modern
exonerations. Two peasants in the Middle Ages quarrelled about their two
fields. But they went to the same church, served in the same semi-feudal
militia, and had the same morality, which ever might happen to be
breaking it at the moment. The very cause of their quarrel was the cause
of their fraternity; they both liked land. But suppose one of them a
teetotaler who desired the abolition of hops on both farms; suppose the
other a vegetarian who desired the abolition of chickens on both farms:
and it is at once apparent that a quarrel of quite a different kind
would begin; and that in that quarrel it would not be a question of
farmer against farmer, but of individual against individual. This
fundamental sense of human fraternity can only exist in the presence of
positive religion. Man is merely man only when he is seen against the
sky. If he is seen against any landscape, he is only a man of that land.
If he is seen against any house, he is only a householder. Only where
death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel
their fellowship. Once the divine darkness against which we stand is
really dismissed from the mind (as it was very nearly dismissed in the
Victorian time) the differences between human beings become
overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures
of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola.

This can be seen in a sort of picture in the Prologue of the _Canterbury
Tales_; which is already pregnant with the promise of the English novel.
The characters there are at once graphically and delicately
differentiated; the Doctor with his rich cloak, his careful meals, his
coldness to religion; the Franklin, whose white beard was so fresh that
it recalled the daisies, and in whose house it snowed meat and drink;
the Summoner, from whose fearful face, like a red cherub's, the children
fled, and who wore a garland like a hoop; the Miller with his short red
hair and bagpipes and brutal head, with which he could break down a
door; the Lover who was as sleepless as a nightingale; the Knight, the
Cook, the Clerk of Oxford. Pendennis or the Cook, M. Mirabolant, is
nowhere so vividly varied by a few merely verbal strokes. But the great
difference is deeper and more striking. It is simply that Pendennis
would never have gone riding with a cook at all. Chaucer's knight rode
with a cook quite naturally; because the thing they were all seeking
together was as much above knighthood as it was above cookery. Soldiers
and swindlers and bullies and outcasts, they were all going to the
shrine of a distant saint. To what sort of distant saint would Pendennis
and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the
butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess
d'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel,
laughing and telling tales together?

The growth of the novel, therefore, must not be too easily called an
increase in the interest in humanity. It is an increase in the interest
in the things in which men differ; much fuller and finer work had been
done before about the things in which they agree. And this intense
interest in variety had its bad side as well as its good; it has rather
increased social distinctions in a serious and spiritual sense. Most of
the oblivion of democracy is due to the oblivion of death. But in its
own manner and measure, it was a real advance and experiment of the
European mind, like the public art of the Renaissance or the fairyland
of physical science explored in the nineteenth century. It was a more
unquestionable benefit than these: and in that development women played
a peculiar part, English women especially, and Victorian women most of
all.

It is perhaps partly, though certainly not entirely, this influence of
the great women writers that explains another very arresting and
important fact about the emergence of genuinely Victorian fiction. It
had been by this time decided, by the powers that had influence (and by
public opinion also, at least in the middle-class sense), that certain
verbal limits must be set to such literature. The novel must be what
some would call pure and others would call prudish; but what is not,
properly considered, either one or the other: it is rather a more or
less business proposal (right or wrong) that every writer shall draw the
line at literal physical description of things socially concealed. It
was originally merely verbal; it had not, primarily, any dream of
purifying the topic or the moral tone. Dickens and Thackeray claimed
very properly the right to deal with shameful passions and suggest their
shameful culminations; Scott sometimes dealt with ideas positively
horrible--as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as
the _Œdipus_ or _The Cenci_. None of these great men would have
tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur
censors talk to artists to-day) about "wholesome" topics and suggestions
"that cannot elevate." They had to describe the great battle of good and
evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian
compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the
stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have
claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his
purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest
doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why
he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the
secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one
who had read Thackeray's version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan's.
But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the
impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be
wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it
is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal
compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than
purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did
pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the
coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the
word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for
the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly
suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The
great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they
that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.
Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can
count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who
live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the
purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting
of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art," "The
Greek Spirit," "The Platonic Ideal" and so on--which any navvy mending
the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as
it deserved.

This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the
participation of women with men in the matter of fiction. It is an
important point: the sexes can only be coarse separately. It was
certainly also due, as I have already suggested, to the treaty between
the rich _bourgeoisie_ and the old aristocracy, which both had to make,
for the common and congenial purpose of keeping the English people
down. But it was due much more than this to a general moral atmosphere
in the Victorian Age. It is impossible to express that spirit except by
the electric bell of a name. It was latitudinarian, and yet it was
limited. It could be content with nothing less than the whole cosmos:
yet the cosmos with which it was content was small. It is false to say
it was without humour: yet there was something by instinct unsmiling in
it. It was always saying solidly that things were "enough"; and proving
by that sharpness (as of the shutting of a door) that they were not
enough. It took, I will not say its pleasures, but even its
emancipations, sadly. Definitions seem to escape this way and that in
the attempt to locate it as an idea. But every one will understand me if
I call it George Eliot.

I begin with this great woman of letters for both the two reasons
already mentioned. She represents the rationalism of the old Victorian
Age at its highest. She and Mill are like two great mountains at the end
of that long, hard chain which is the watershed of the Early Victorian
time. They alone rise high enough to be confused among the clouds--or
perhaps confused among the stars. They certainly were seeking truth, as
Newman and Carlyle were; the slow slope of the later Victorian vulgarity
does not lower their precipice and pinnacle. But I begin with this name
also because it emphasises the idea of modern fiction as a fresh and
largely a female thing. The novel of the nineteenth century was female;
as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. It is quite
certain that no woman could have written _Roderick Random_. It is not
quite so certain that no woman could have written _Esmond_. The strength
and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when
George Eliot began to write.

Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power
in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood
along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The
latter comes into our present consideration only as that most
exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an
unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the
complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all
the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe
a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do.
She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what
she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished
world before the great progressive age of which I write.

One of the characteristics of the central Victorian spirit was a
tendency to substitute a certain more or less satisfied seriousness for
the extremes of tragedy and comedy. This is marked by a certain change
in George Eliot; as it is marked by a certain limitation or moderation
in Dickens. Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century
and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board
School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in
words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the
spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never
occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift. The other
proof of the same pressure is the change in George Eliot. She was not a
genius in the elemental sense of Dickens; she could never have been
either so strong or so soft. But she did originally represent some of
the same popular realities: and her first books (at least as compared
with her latest) were full of sound fun and bitter pathos. Mr. Max
Beerbohm has remarked (in his glorious essay called _Ichabod_, I think),
that Silas Marner would not have forgotten his miserliness if George
Eliot had written of him in her maturity. I have a great regard for Mr.
Beerbohm's literary judgments; and it may be so. But if literature
means anything more than a cold calculation of the chances, if there is
in it, as I believe, any deeper idea of detaching the spirit of life
from the dull obstacles of life, of permitting human nature really to
reveal itself as human, if (to put it shortly) literature has anything
on earth to do with being _interesting_--then I think we would rather
have a few more Marners than that rich maturity that gave us the
analysed dust-heaps of _Daniel Deronda_.

In her best novels there is real humour, of a cool sparkling sort; there
is a strong sense of substantial character that has not yet degenerated
into psychology; there is a great deal of wisdom, chiefly about women;
indeed there is almost every element of literature except a certain
indescribable thing called _glamour_; which was the whole stock-in-trade
of the Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten
wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray when Esmond with his
melancholy eyes wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues
of Castlewood. Of this quality (which some have called, but hastily, the
essential of literature) George Eliot had not little but nothing. Her
air is bright and intellectually even exciting; but it is like the air
of a cloudless day on the parade at Brighton. She sees people clearly,
but not through an atmosphere. And she can conjure up storms in the
conscious, but not in the subconscious mind.

It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this
deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those
conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that
there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing
atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she
was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought
like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring
common sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly false
as rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;
and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. This
can easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died before
the beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before those
bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the
Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that
Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen
may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth
that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his
faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice
_though not in theory_," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the
intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the
Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane
Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her
later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small
nationalities.

The Brontës suggest themselves here; because their superficial
qualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in this
an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than an
omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely
known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the
diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply
individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be
so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must
merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontës exposed themselves to some
misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature much
more masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though
sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: "Why do our lady
novelists make the men bully the women?" It is, I think, unquestionably
true that the Brontës treated the male as an almost anarchic thing
coming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard a
comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is
not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may
be made that the women in men's novels are equally fallacious. The reply
is probably just.

What the Brontës really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle
brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were
of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that
country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;
where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious
still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons
and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that
country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Brontë's earlier work is
full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned
hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting
the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Brontë
represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early
Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Brontë,
rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry
Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge
of it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, when
he is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry in
its first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fighting
frontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine
sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it
does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës on
this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly
seen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë's who has achieved the real
feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is
really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as
there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they
had known her, apart from her works. She must have been something more
than an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her written
works go she enters English letters only as an original person--and
rather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman--always
inhuman. _Wuthering Heights_ might have been written by an eagle. She is
the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other
sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he
succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Brontë was further narrowed by the
broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as
George Eliot.

In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The
shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that
she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic
club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and
accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and
forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If
the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and
hateful _sanity_ can be, there would really be less point in the
insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife--or the not much milder insanity of
Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the
sensational in the commonplace: and _Jane Eyre_ remains the best of her
books (better even than _Villette_) because while it is a human document
written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective
stories in the world.

But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and
while Charlotte Brontë was at best like that warmer and more domestic
thing, a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the calm of
George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the
feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt
rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of a
hazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as when
men connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homer
with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that all
these great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And the
proof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier time
of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorian
men. If there had not been something in that irritation, we should
hardly have had to speak in these pages of _Diana of the Crossways_ or
of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. To what this strange and very local sex
war has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it was
due to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage, I feel
myself here too close to realities even to discuss. My own guess is that
it has been due to the great neglect of the military spirit by the male
Victorians. The woman felt obscurely that she was still running her
mortal risk, while the man was not still running his. But I know nothing
about it; nor does anybody else.

In so short a book on so vast, complex and living a subject, it is
impossible to drop even into the second rank of good authors, whose name
is legion; but it is impossible to leave that considerable female force
in fiction which has so largely made the very nature of the modern
novel, without mentioning two names which almost brought that second
rank up to the first rank. They were at utterly opposite poles. The one
succeeded by being a much mellower and more Christian George Eliot; the
other succeeded by being a much more mad and unchristian Emily Brontë.
But Mrs. Oliphant and the author calling herself "Ouida" both forced
themselves well within the frontier of fine literature. _The Beleaguered
City_ is literature in its highest sense; the other works of its author
tend to fall into fiction in its best working sense. Mrs. Oliphant was
infinitely saner in that city of ghosts than the cosmopolitan Ouida ever
was in any of the cities of men. Mrs. Oliphant would never have dared to
discover, either in heaven or hell, such a thing as a hairbrush with its
back encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weak
where Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphs
were her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through her
style; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting of
palpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more
timid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christian
mystery--so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion of
thought, did fill her books with Byron and the remains of the French
Revolution. In the track of such genius there has been quite an
accumulation of true talent as in the children's tales of Mrs. Ewing,
the historical tales of Miss Yonge, the tales of Mrs. Molesworth, and so
on. On a general review I do not think I have been wrong in taking the
female novelists first. I think they gave its special shape, its
temporary twist, to the Victorian novel.

Nevertheless it is a shock (I almost dare to call it a relief) to come
back to the males. It is the more abrupt because the first name that
must be mentioned derives directly from the mere maleness of the Sterne
and Smollett novel. I have already spoken of Dickens as the most homely
and instinctive, and therefore probably the heaviest, of all the
onslaughts made on the central Victorian satisfaction. There is
therefore the less to say of him here, where we consider him only as a
novelist; but there is still much more to say than can even conceivably
be said. Dickens, as we have stated, inherited the old comic, rambling
novel from Smollett and the rest. Dickens, as we have also stated,
consented to expurgate that novel. But when all origins and all
restraints have been defined and allowed for, the creature that came out
was such as we shall not see again. Smollett was coarse; but Smollett
was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The
art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of
enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very
human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and
I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily
life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed
everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled
villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the
villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader
always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and
make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from
the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot
get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too. I cannot at the
moment recall that Dickens ever killed a comic villain, except Quilp,
who was deliberately made even more villainous than comic. There can be
no serious fears for the life of Mr. Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr.
Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr. Mantalini to turning a
mangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive:
and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr.
Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr. Mantalini collecting the washing, if
one always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the true
artist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs. Wilfer
deserved death much more than Mr. Quilp, for she had succeeded in
poisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least of
it) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does
not hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer--especially if it
is only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and
after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power of
creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious
and priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth really
only weakens it.

The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one
of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of
Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense
totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases.
Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every
sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for _all_ who
are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower
than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out half
his best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the
champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,
and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in
your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a
manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly
remember Stephen Blackpool--and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.
Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If
in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as
does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great
Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,
which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch--you
will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the
Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to
assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.
Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak
modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood
in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old
factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social
schools that have gone forward since he died.

The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existed
in their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain who
remembers that the Victorian tradition was domestic and genuine, even
when it was hoodwinked and unworldly. There must have been some reason
for making this imaginary duel between two quite separate and quite
amiable acquaintances. And there is, after all, some reason for it. It
is not, as was once cheaply said, that Thackeray went in for truth, and
Dickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth,
down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a mere
mountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite careless
and elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characters
were. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies much
deeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens used
reality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while Thackeray used the
loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an
effect of reality. It was the special and splendid business of Dickens
to introduce us to people who would have been quite incredible if he had
not told us so much truth about them. It was the special and not less
splendid task of Thackeray to introduce us to people whom we knew
already. Paradoxically, but very practically, it followed that his
introductions were the longer of the two. When we hear of Aunt Betsy
Trotwood, we vividly envisage everything about her, from her gardening
gloves to her seaside residence, from her hard, handsome face to her
tame lunatic laughing at the bedroom window. It is all so minutely true
that she must be true also. We only feel inclined to walk round the
English coast until we find that particular garden and that particular
aunt. But when we turn from the aunt of Copperfield to the uncle of
Pendennis, we are more likely to run round the coast trying to find a
watering-place where he isn't than one where he is. The moment one sees
Major Pendennis, one sees a hundred Major Pendennises. It is not a
matter of mere realism. Miss Trotwood's bonnet and gardening tools and
cupboard full of old-fashioned bottles are quite as true in the
materialistic way as the Major's cuffs and corner table and toast and
newspaper. Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism in
order to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order to
make us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet the
old friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleased
to meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend,
a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.
Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to his
well-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say "Major Pendennis paid a
call." Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessant
excitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could have
kept it up.

It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelist
of memory--of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect
all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they
gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody's
past--is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of
dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished
conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever
in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques
now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at
once the hundred ghosts of oneself.

For this purpose Thackeray was equipped with a singularly easy and
sympathetic style, carved in slow soft curves where Dickens hacked out
his images with a hatchet. There was a sort of avuncular indulgence
about his attitude; what he called his "preaching" was at worst a sort
of grumbling, ending with the sentiment that boys will be boys and that
there's nothing new under the sun. He was not really either a cynic or a
_censor morum_; but (in another sense than Chaucer's) a gentle pardoner:
having seen the weaknesses he is sometimes almost weak about them. He
really comes nearer to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any
other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath of
such men is all the more effective; and there are passages in _Vanity
Fair_ and still more in _The Book of Snobs_, where he does make the
dance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian
masquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn the
course of the Victorian Age.

It may seem strange to say that Thackeray did not know enough of the
world; yet this was the truth about him in large matters of the
philosophy of life, and especially of his own time. He did not know the
way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian
epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. In
one of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commenting
erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the
Park, and says: "How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous
comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?" But I think Thackeray
knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome
and Kew; his world was _le monde_. Hence he seemed to take it for
granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who
knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving
platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all
really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were
Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and
straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New
Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all
parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens,
being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that the
country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels.
In _Hard Times_ he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and
became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist,
but certainly an anti-Individualist. In _Our Mutual Friend_ he felt the
strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the
aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that
Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what
we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along
the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must
either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become
very much less so.

There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group of
good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie
Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony
Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his
time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions
were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,
he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism
which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one
of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of
the supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever
been--certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and in
spite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost _de rigueur_--the
strange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism the
Victorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. They
might have ghost stories, but not saints' stories. They could trifle
with the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the
pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that
the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for
example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and
popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the
Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that
Dickens (wishing to have in _The Christmas Carol_ a little happy
supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology
for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and
human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie
Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both
very good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case it
is proper and literal to speak of his "plots." He was a plotter; he went
about to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indians
did. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as in
the repetition of the two white dresses in _The Woman in White_; or of
the dreams with their double explanations in _Armadale_. His ghosts do
walk. They are alive; and walk as softly as Count Fosco, but as solidly.
Finally, _The Moonstone_ is probably the best detective tale in the
world.

Anthony Trollope, a clear and very capable realist, represents rather
another side of the Victorian spirit of comfort; its leisureliness, its
love of detail, especially of domestic detail; its love of following
characters and kindred from book to book and from generation to
generation. Dickens very seldom tried this latter experiment, and then
(as in _Master Humphrey's Clock_) unsuccessfully; those magnesium blazes
of his were too brilliant and glaring to be indefinitely prolonged. But
Thackeray was full of it; and we often feel that the characters in _The
Newcomes_ or _Philip_ might legitimately complain that their talk and
tale are being perpetually interrupted and pestered by people out of
other books. Within his narrower limits, Trollope was a more strict and
masterly realist than Thackeray, and even those who would call his
personages "types" would admit that they are as vivid as characters. It
was a bustling but a quiet world that he described: politics before the
coming of the Irish and the Socialists; the Church in the lull between
the Oxford Movement and the modern High Anglican energy. And it is
notable in the Victorian spirit once more that though his clergymen are
all of them real men and many of them good men, it never really occurs
to us to think of them as the priests of a religion.

Charles Reade may be said to go along with these; and Disraeli and even
Kingsley; not because these three very different persons had anything
particular in common, but because they all fell short of the first rank
in about the same degree. Charles Reade had a kind of cold coarseness
about him, not morally but artistically, which keeps him out of the best
literature as such: but he is of importance to the Victorian development
in another way; because he has the harsher and more tragic note that has
come later in the study of our social problems. He is the first of the
angry realists. Kingsley's best books may be called boys' books. There
is a real though a juvenile poetry in _Westward Ho!_ and though that
narrative, historically considered, is very much of a lie, it is a good,
thundering honest lie. There are also genuinely eloquent things in
_Hypatia_, and a certain electric atmosphere of sectarian excitement
that Kingsley kept himself in, and did know how to convey. He said he
wrote the book in his heart's blood. This is an exaggeration, but there
is a truth in it; and one does feel that he may have relieved his
feelings by writing it in red ink. As for Disraeli, his novels are able
and interesting considered as everything except novels, and are an
important contribution precisely because they are written by an alien
who did not take our politics so seriously as Trollope did. They are
important again as showing those later Victorian changes which men like
Thackeray missed. Disraeli did do something towards revealing the
dishonesty of our politics--even if he had done a good deal towards
bringing it about.

Between this group and the next there hovers a figure very hard to
place; not higher in letters than these, yet not easy to class with
them; I mean Bulwer Lytton. He was no greater than they were; yet
somehow he seems to take up more space. He did not, in the ultimate
reckoning, do anything in particular: but he was a figure; rather as
Oscar Wilde was later a figure. You could not have the Victorian Age
without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his
dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere
polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round
interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic
swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real
touchstone of the time. It is noticeable about him that he is always
turning up everywhere and that he brings other people out, generally in
a hostile spirit. His Byronic and almost Oriental ostentation was used
by the young Thackeray as something on which to sharpen his new razor of
Victorian common sense. His pose as a dilettante satirist inflamed the
execrable temper of Tennyson, and led to those lively comparisons to a
bandbox and a lion in curlpapers. He interposed the glove of warning and
the tear of sensibility between us and the proper ending of _Great
Expectations_. Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming
comedies about _The Caxtons_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_; none of his other
works have a high literary importance now, with the possible exception
of _A Strange Story_; but his _Coming Race_ is historically interesting
as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a
weapon of the Socialists. Lastly, there was an element indefinable about
Lytton, which often is in adventurers; which amounts to a suspicion that
there was something in him after all. It rang out of him when he said to
the hesitating Crimean Parliament: "Destroy your Government and save
your army."

With the next phase of Victorian fiction we enter a new world; the
later, more revolutionary, more continental, freer but in some ways
weaker world in which we live to-day. The subtle and sad change that
was passing like twilight across the English brain at this time is very
well expressed in the fact that men have come to mention the great name
of Meredith in the same breath as Mr. Thomas Hardy. Both writers,
doubtless, disagreed with the orthodox religion of the ordinary English
village. Most of us have disagreed with that religion until we made the
simple discovery that it does not exist. But in any age where ideas
could be even feebly disentangled from each other, it would have been
evident at once that Meredith and Hardy were, intellectually speaking,
mortal enemies. They were much more opposed to each other than Newman
was to Kingsley; or than Abelard was to St. Bernard. But then they
collided in a sceptical age, which is like colliding in a London fog.
There can never be any clear controversy in a sceptical age.

Nevertheless both Hardy and Meredith did mean something; and they did
mean diametrically opposite things. Meredith was perhaps the only man
in the modern world who has almost had the high honour of rising out of
the low estate of a Pantheist into the high estate of a Pagan. A Pagan
is a person who can do what hardly any person for the last two thousand
years could do: a person who can take Nature naturally. It is due to
Meredith to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever
taken Nature so naturally as he did. And it is also due to him to say
that no one outside Colney Hatch ever took Nature so unnaturally as it
was taken in what Mr. Hardy has had the blasphemy to call Wessex Tales.
This division between the two points of view is vital; because the turn
of the nineteenth century was a very sharp one; by it we have reached
the rapids in which we find ourselves to-day.

Meredith really is a Pantheist. You can express it by saying that God is
the great All: you can express it much more intelligently by saying that
Pan is the great god. But there is some sense in it, and the sense is
this: that some people believe that this world is sufficiently good at
bottom for us to trust ourselves to it without very much knowing why. It
is the whole point in most of Meredith's tales that there is something
behind us that often saves us when we understand neither it nor
ourselves. He sometimes talked mere intellectualism about women: but
that is because the most brilliant brains can get tired. Meredith's
brain was quite tired when it wrote some of its most quoted and least
interesting epigrams: like that about passing Seraglio Point, but not
doubling Cape Turk. Those who can see Meredith's mind in that are with
those who can see Dickens' mind in Little Nell. Both were chivalrous
pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly
meaning as ideas.

But what Meredith did do for women was not to emancipate them (which
means nothing) but to express them, which means a great deal. And he
often expressed them right, even when he expressed himself wrong. Take,
for instance, that phrase so often quoted: "Woman will be the last thing
civilised by man." Intellectually it is something worse than false; it
is the opposite of what he was always attempting to say. So far from
admitting any equality in the sexes, it logically admits that a man may
use against a woman any chains or whips he has been in the habit of
using against a tiger or a bear. He stood as the special champion of
female dignity: but I cannot remember any author, Eastern or Western,
who has so calmly assumed that man is the master and woman merely the
material, as Meredith really does in this phrase. Any one who knows a
free woman (she is generally a married woman) will immediately be
inclined to ask two simple and catastrophic questions, first: "Why
should woman be civilised?" and, second: "Why, if she is to be
civilised, should she be civilised by man?" In the mere intellectualism
of the matter, Meredith seems to be talking the most brutal sex
mastery: he, at any rate, has not doubled Cape Turk, nor even passed
Seraglio Point. Now why is it that we all really feel that this
Meredithian passage is not so insolently masculine as in mere logic it
would seem? I think it is for this simple reason: that there is
something about Meredith making us feel that it is not woman he
disbelieves in, but civilisation. It is a dark undemonstrated feeling
that Meredith would really be rather sorry if woman were civilised by
man--or by anything else. When we have got that, we have got the real
Pagan--the man that does believe in Pan.

It is proper to put this philosophic matter first, before the æsthetic
appreciation of Meredith, because with Meredith a sort of passing bell
has rung and the Victorian orthodoxy is certainly no longer safe.
Dickens and Carlyle, as we have said, rebelled against the orthodox
compromise: but Meredith has escaped from it. Cosmopolitanism,
Socialism, Feminism are already in the air; and Queen Victoria has
begun to look like Mrs. Grundy. But to escape from a city is one thing:
to choose a road is another. The free-thinker who found himself outside
the Victorian city, found himself also in the fork of two very different
naturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled but
living forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to a
swamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbed
towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily
dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding
and blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because the
free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they
want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their
small but sincere movement has failed.

For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more
than a Nihilist must sympathise with one version of nature or the
other. The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy
and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made
personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always
coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray
and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would
have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr.
Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how
unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic
out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a
piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical
reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of _its_
mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two
types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break
down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic
self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite
directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were
not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has
the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the
extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new
love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing
that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability;
it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even
its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh.

But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these two
writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly
that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it
is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly
outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had
the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style.
The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above
that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature
naturally. It may be suggested, in tones of some remonstrance, that
things like "though pierced by the cruel acerb," or "thy fleetingness is
bigger in the ghost," or "her gabbling grey she eyes askant," or "sheer
film of the surface awag" are not taking Nature naturally. And this is
true of Meredith's style, but it is not true of his spirit; nor even,
apparently, of his serious opinions. In one of the poems I have quoted
he actually says of those who live nearest to that Nature he was always
praising--

    "Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
    They mouth no sentence of inverted wit";

which certainly was what Meredith himself was doing most of the time.
But a similar paradox of the combination of plain tastes with twisted
phrases can also be seen in Browning. Something of the same can be seen
in many of the cavalier poets. I do not understand it: it may be that
the fertility of a cheerful mind crowds everything, so that the tree is
entangled in its own branches; or it may be that the cheerful mind cares
less whether it is understood or not; as a man is less articulate when
he is humming than when he is calling for help.

Certainly Meredith suffers from applying a complex method to men and
things he does not mean to be complex; nay, honestly admires for being
simple. The conversations between Diana and Redworth fail of their full
contrast because Meredith can afford the twopence for Diana coloured,
but cannot afford the penny for Redworth plain. Meredith's ideals were
neither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He
had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions
profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh
blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly
though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous
complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of
womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, to have begotten
gigantic daughters. He may yet suffer for his chivalric interference as
many champions do. I have little doubt that when St. George had killed
the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess. But certainly neither
of these two vital enthusiasms touched the Victorian trouble. The
disaster of the modern English is not that they are not Celtic, but that
they are not English. The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is
not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly.
This conscious and theorising Meredith did not get very near his problem
and is certainly miles away from ours. But the other Meredith was a
creator; which means a god. That is true of him which is true of so
different a man as Dickens, that all one can say of him is that he is
full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a
schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred
pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but
he gets the impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what
one really gets from such riots of felicity as _Evan Harrington_ or
_Harry Richmond_. His philosophy may be barren, but he was not. And the
chief feeling among those that enjoy him is a mere wish that more people
could enjoy him too.

I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to
open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian
peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might
delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with
Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture,
which is called by some a narrow religion. When we think what even the
best novels about cavaliers have been (written by men like Scott or
Stevenson) it is a wonderful thing that the author of _John Inglesant_
could write a cavalier romance in which he forgot Cromwell but
remembered Hobbes. But Shorthouse is outside the period in fiction in
the same sort of way in which Francis Thompson is outside it in poetry.
He did not accept the Victorian basis. He knew too much.

There is one more matter that may best be considered here, though
briefly: it illustrates the extreme difficulty of dealing with the
Victorian English in a book like this, because of their eccentricity;
not of opinions, but of character and artistic form. There are several
great Victorians who will not fit into any of the obvious categories I
employ; because they will not fit into anything, hardly into the world
itself. Where Germany or Italy would relieve the monotony of mankind by
paying serious respect to an artist, or a scholar, or a patriotic
warrior, or a priest--it was always the instinct of the English to do it
by pointing out a Character. Dr. Johnson has faded as a poet or a
critic, but he survives as a Character. Cobbett is neglected
(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered as
a Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victorian
time; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pages
with a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Character
of gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics is
George Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsies
while every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;
who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casual
friendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether George
Borrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or the
section devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobody
else has ever known, even if he did.

But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptly
original in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meant
merely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is true
that these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (as
was the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safe
to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George
Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write
fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the
real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at
last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But
such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the
Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new
thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing was
really invented to please children. Rather it was invented by old
people trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeeding
only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was
English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:
he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a
richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,
improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I
think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in
the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of
children. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour.

It may appear, because I have used from time to time the only possible
phrases for the case, that I mean the Victorian Englishman to appear as
a blockhead, which means an unconscious buffoon. To all this there is a
final answer: that he was also a conscious buffoon--and a successful
one. He was a humorist; and one of the best humorists in Europe. That
which Goethe had never taught the Germans, Byron did manage to teach the
English--the duty of not taking him seriously. The strong and shrewd
Victorian humour appears in every slash of the pencil of Charles Keene;
in every undergraduate inspiration of Calverley or "Q." or J. K. S. They
had largely forgotten both art and arms: but the gods had left them
laughter.

But the final proof that the Victorians were alive by this laughter, can
be found in the fact they could manage and master for a moment even the
cosmopolitan modern theatre. They could contrive to put "The Bab
Ballads" on the stage. To turn a private name into a public epithet is a
thing given to few: but the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer
than the name Gilbert.

It meant a real Victorian talent; that of exploding unexpectedly and
almost, as it seemed, unintentionally. Gilbert made good jokes by the
thousand; but he never (in his best days) made the joke that could
possibly have been expected of him. This is the last essential of the
Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, conventionalist,
an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a
humorist; and may still be laughing at you.




CHAPTER III

THE GREAT VICTORIAN POETS


What was really unsatisfactory in Victorian literature is something much
easier to feel than to state. It was not so much a superiority in the
men of other ages to the Victorian men. It was a superiority of
Victorian men to themselves. The individual was unequal. Perhaps that is
why the society became unequal: I cannot say. They were lame giants; the
strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other. A
great man in any age must be a common man, and also an uncommon man.
Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence.
But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He was
at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in
circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something
indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from
a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when
George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also
moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of
sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt
and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or
in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as
they knew they knew. It is no disgrace to Homer that he had not
discovered Britain; or to Virgil that he had not discovered America; or
to Chaucer that he had not discovered the solar system; or to Dryden
that he had not discovered the steam-engine. But we do most frequently
feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of
things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not
know. We feel, in a sort of way, that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Carlyle when he asks the Irish why they do not bestir themselves and
re-forest their country: saying not a word about the soaking up of every
sort of profit by the landlords which made that and every other Irish
improvement impossible. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly
and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no
mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find
no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man
like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented
from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a
nun himself. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Tennyson,
when he talks of the French revolutions, the huge crusades that had
recreated the whole of his civilisation, as being "no graver than a
schoolboy's barring out." We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman,
Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn't
come in to the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr. Daniel
O'Connell, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country. We feel
that it _is_ a disgrace to a man like Dickens, when he makes a blind
brute and savage out of a man like St. Dunstan; it sounds as if it were
not Dickens talking but Dombey. We feel it _is_ a disgrace to a man like
Swinburne, when he has a Jingo fit and calls the Boer children in the
concentration camps "Whelps of treacherous dams whom none save we have
spared to starve and slay": we feel that Swinburne, for the first time,
really has become an immoral and indecent writer. All this is a certain
odd provincialism peculiar to the English in that great century: they
were in a kind of pocket; they appealed to too narrow a public opinion;
I am certain that no French or German men of the same genius made such
remarks. Renan was the enemy of the Catholic Church; but who can imagine
Renan writing of it as Kingsley or Dickens did? Taine was the enemy of
the French Revolution; but who can imagine Taine talking about it as
Tennyson or Newman talked? Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril
and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There
must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man
who talks about the _Zeitgeist_ as if it were a living thing.

But this defect is very specially the key to the case of the two great
Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning; the two spirited or beautiful
tunes, so to speak, to which the other events marched or danced. It was
especially so of Tennyson, for a reason which raises some of the most
real problems about his poetry. Tennyson, of course, owed a great deal
to Virgil. There is no question of plagiarism here; a debt to Virgil is
like a debt to Nature. But Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. In such
passages as that about the schoolboy's barring out he might be called a
suburban Virgil. I mean that he tried to have the universal balance of
all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold
of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths,
like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British
Constitution. It is intensely typical of Tennyson's philosophical temper
that he was almost the only Poet Laureate who was not ludicrous. It is
not absurd to think of Tennyson as tuning his harp in praise of Queen
Victoria: that is, it is not absurd in the same sense as Chaucer's harp
hallowed by dedication to Richard II or Wordsworth's harp hallowed by
dedication to George IV is absurd. Richard's court could not properly
appreciate either Chaucer's daisies or his "devotion." George IV would
not have gone pottering about Helvellyn in search of purity and the
simple annals of the poor. But Tennyson did sincerely believe in the
Victorian compromise; and sincerity is never undignified. He really did
hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was
gifted with a more fortunate literary style. If Dickens is Cobbett's
democracy stirring in its grave, Tennyson is the exquisitely ornamental
extinguisher on the flame of the first revolutionary poets. England has
settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was
interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful:
there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish
and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar's
patched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browning
had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's eccentric
style was more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of
people for the time being removed far from the centre of intellectual
interests. The hearty and pleasant task of expressing one's intense
dislike of something one doesn't understand is much more poetically
achieved by saying, in a general way "Grrr--you swine!" than it is by
laboured lines such as "the red fool-fury of the Seine." We all feel
that there is more of the man in Browning here; more of Dr. Johnson or
Cobbett. Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following
his nose like a bull-dog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot
help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself
seriously--an awful sight. One's memory flutters unhappily over a
certain letter about the Papal Guards written by Sir Willoughby
Patterne. It is here chiefly that Tennyson suffers by that very
Virgilian loveliness and dignity of diction which he put to the service
of such a small and anomalous national scheme. Virgil had the best news
to tell as well as the best words to tell it in. His world might be
sad; but it was the largest world one could live in before the coming of
Christianity. If he told the Romans to spare the vanquished and to war
down the mighty, at least he was more or less well informed about who
_were_ mighty and who _were_ vanquished. But when Tennyson wrote verses
like--

    "Of freedom in her regal seat,
    Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
    The blind hysterics of the Celt"

he quite literally did not know one word of what he was talking about;
he did not know what Celts are, or what hysterics are, or what freedom
was, or what regal was or even of what England was--in the living Europe
of that time.

His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;
but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing
that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also he
suffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. He
was quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; the
inarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a great
deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted
for anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height of
his own towering style.

For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a great poet; no mind that feels
itself free, that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can feel
anything but contempt for the later effort to discredit him in that
respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian
poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in
his case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is more
or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the
mere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"--"Flits by
the sea-blue bird of March"--"Leafless ribs and iron horns"--"When the
long dun wolds are ribbed with snow"--in all these cases one word is the
keystone of an arch which would fall into ruin without it. But there are
other strong phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather their common
master, Virgil--"Tears from the depths of some divine despair"--"There
is fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate"--"Was a
great water; and the moon was full"--"God made Himself an awful rose of
dawn." These do not depend on a word but on an idea: they might even be
translated. It is also true, I think, that he was first and last a lyric
poet. He was always best when he expressed himself shortly. In long
poems he had an unfortunate habit of eventually saying very nearly the
opposite of what he meant to say. I will take only two instances of what
I mean. In the _Idylls of the King_, and in _In Memoriam_ (his two
sustained and ambitious efforts), particular phrases are always flashing
out the whole fire of the truth; the truth that Tennyson meant. But
owing to his English indolence, his English aristocratic
irresponsibility, his English vagueness in thought, he always managed to
make the main poem mean exactly what he did not mean. Thus, these two
lines which simply say that

    "Lancelot was the first in tournament,
    But Arthur mightiest in the battle-field"

do really express what he meant to express about Arthur being after all
"the highest, yet most human too; not Lancelot, nor another." But as his
hero is actually developed, we have exactly the opposite impression;
that poor old Lancelot, with all his faults, was much more of a man than
Arthur. He was a Victorian in the bad as well as the good sense; he
could not keep priggishness out of long poems. Or again, take the case
of _In Memoriam_. I will quote one verse (probably incorrectly) which
has always seemed to me splendid, and which does express what the whole
poem should express--but hardly does.

    "That we may lift from out the dust,
    A voice as unto him that hears
    A cry above the conquered years
    Of one that ever works, and trust."

The poem should have been a cry above the conquered years. It might well
have been that if the poet could have said sharply at the end of it, as
a pure piece of dogma, "I've forgotten every feature of the man's face:
I know God holds him alive." But under the influence of the mere
leisurely length of the thing, the reader _does_ rather receive the
impression that the wound has been healed only by time; and that the
victor hours _can_ boast that this is the man that loved and lost, but
all he was is overworn. This is not the truth; and Tennyson did not
intend it for the truth. It is simply the result of the lack of
something militant, dogmatic and structural in him: whereby he could not
be trusted with the trail of a very long literary process without
entangling himself like a kitten playing cat's-cradle.

Browning, as above suggested, got on much better with eccentric and
secluded England because he treated it as eccentric and secluded; a
place where one could do what one liked. To a considerable extent he did
do what he liked; arousing not a few complaints; and many doubts and
conjectures as to why on earth he liked it. Many comparatively
sympathetic persons pondered upon what pleasure it could give any man to
write _Sordello_ or rhyme "end-knot" to "offend not." Nevertheless he
was no anarchist and no mystagogue; and even where he was defective, his
defect has commonly been stated wrongly. The two chief charges against
him were a contempt for form unworthy of an artist, and a poor pride in
obscurity. The obscurity is true, though not, I think, the pride in it;
but the truth about this charge rather rises out of the truth about the
other. The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form;
he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; but
he did. To say that he had not enough mastery over form to express
himself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the
griffin of a mediæval gargoyle without even knowing that it is a
griffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a
classical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did
not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He
might be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-room
story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza;
giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or
proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning
certainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning,
especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or graven
in some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate.
In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song.
The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a different
shape. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as
that horrible one beginning "John, Master of the Temple of God," with
its weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not even
Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Pisgah-sights_. No
one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time's
Revenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same
style as _Meeting at Night_ and _Parting at Morning_. No one, not even
Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of the
Duchess_, or in the same style as _The Grammarian's Funeral_, or in the
same style as _A Star_, or in the same style as that astounding lyric
which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and
manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual
experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not
chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over
and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the
man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to
leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His
curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun
to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In
Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if
anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of
setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it
is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun
presupposes that you _do_ rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under
persecution, that "Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us" does not rhyme to
it.

The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was,
curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the
deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it
was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and
he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the
fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes
flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are
the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true
things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply.
Thus he really did want to say that God had indeed made man and woman
one flesh; that the sex relation was religious in this real sense that
even in our sin and despair we take it for granted and expect a sort of
virtue in it. The feelings of the bad husband about the good wife, for
instance, are about as subtle and entangled as any matter on this earth;
and Browning really had something to say about them. But he said it in
some of the plainest and most unmistakable words in all literature; as
lucid as a flash of lightning. "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
Or again, he did really want to say that death and such moral terrors
were best taken in a military spirit; he could not have said it more
simply than: "I was ever a fighter; one fight more, the best and the
last." He did really wish to say that human life was unworkable unless
immortality were implied in it every other moment; he could not have
said it more simply: "leave now to dogs and apes; Man has for ever." The
obscurities were not merely superficial, but often covered quite
superficial ideas. He was as likely as not to be most unintelligible of
all in writing a compliment in a lady's album. I remember in my boyhood
(when Browning kept us awake like coffee) a friend reading out the poem
about the portrait to which I have already referred, reading it in that
rapid dramatic way in which this poet must be read. And I was profoundly
puzzled at the passage where it seemed to say that the cousin
disparaged the picture, "while John scorns ale." I could not think what
this sudden teetotalism on the part of John had to do with the affair,
but I forgot to ask at the time and it was only years afterwards that,
looking at the book, I found it was "John's corns ail," a very
Browningesque way of saying he winced. Most of Browning's obscurity is
of that sort--the mistakes are almost as quaint as misprints--and the
Browning student, in that sense, is more a proof reader than a disciple.
For the rest his real religion was of the most manly, even the most
boyish sort. He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a
calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What
he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure
rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away;
he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and
metaphysics: like the _Jongleurs de Dieu_ of St. Francis. He may be said
to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to
climb there with a rope ladder. Thus his most vivid things are the
red-hot little love lyrics, or rather, little love dramas. He did one
really original and admirable thing: he managed the real details of
modern love affairs in verse, and love is the most realistic thing in
the world. He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded
garden of Watteau, and the "blue spirt of a lighted match" for the
monotony of the evening star.

Before leaving him it should be added that he was fitted to deepen the
Victorian mind, but not to broaden it. With all his Italian sympathies
and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out
of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so
narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense;
for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central
European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and
intelligently, as one conscious of the case against them both. As to
why it now seems simple to defend the first Italian King, but absurd to
defend the last French Emperor--well, the reason is sad and simple. It
is concerned with certain curious things called success and failure, and
I ought to have considered it under the heading of _The Book of Snobs_.
But Elizabeth Barrett, at least, was no snob: her political poems have
rather an impatient air, as if they were written, and even published,
rather prematurely--just before the fall of her idol. These old
political poems of hers are too little read to-day; they are amongst the
most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern
blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth
Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of
the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as
Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: "Martyrs by the pang without the
palm"--or "Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse,"
these expressions, which are witty after the old fashion of the conceit,
came quite freshly and spontaneously to her quite modern mind. But the
first fact is this, that these epigrams of hers were never so true as
when they turned on one of the two or three pivots on which contemporary
Europe was really turning. She is by far the most European of all the
English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater
husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. Take
any positive political fact, such as the final fall of Napoleon.
Tennyson wrote these profoundly foolish lines--

    "He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak
    Madman!"

as if the defeat of an English regiment were a violation of the laws of
Nature. Mrs. Browning knew no more facts about Napoleon, perhaps, than
Tennyson did; but she knew the truth. Her epigram on Napoleon's fall is
in one line

    "And kings crept out again to feel the sun."

Talleyrand would have clapped his horrible old hands at that. Her
instinct about the statesman and the soldier was very like Jane Austen's
instinct for the gentleman and the man. It is not unnoticeable that as
Miss Austen spent most of her life in a village, Miss Barrett spent most
of her life on a sofa. The godlike power of guessing seems (for some
reason I do not understand) to grow under such conditions. Unfortunately
Mrs. Browning was like all the other Victorians in going a little lame,
as I have roughly called it, having one leg shorter than the other. But
her case was, in one sense, extreme. She exaggerated both ways. She was
too strong and too weak, or (as a false sex philosophy would express it)
too masculine and too feminine. I mean that she hit the centre of
weakness with almost the same emphatic precision with which she hit the
centre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels
"grinding life down from its mark," a strong and strictly true
observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides "with his
droppings of warm tears." She could write in _A Drama of Exile_, a
really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the
animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong
moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only
broken by the dropping of angel's tears. How much noise is made by
angel's tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or
of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth
Barrett's extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask.
Yet the question, as asked, does her a heavy historical injustice; we
remember all the lines in her work which were weak enough to be called
"womanly," we forget the multitude of strong lines that are strong
enough to be called "manly"; lines that Kingsley or Henley would have
jumped for joy to print in proof of their manliness. She had one of the
peculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration. As
to the critic who thinks her poetry owed anything to the great poet who
was her husband, he can go and live in the same hotel with the man who
can believe that George Eliot owed anything to the extravagant
imagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes. So far from Browning inspiring or
interfering, he did not in one sense interfere enough. Her real
inferiority to him in literature is that he was consciously while she
was unconsciously absurd.

It is natural, in the matter of Victorian moral change, to take
Swinburne as the next name here. He is the only poet who was also, in
the European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertian
song, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucial
was happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened. It
is even a little amusing, indeed, that these two Pro-Italian poets
almost conducted a political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browning
sternly reproached those who had ever doubted the good faith of the King
of Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne,
lyrically alluding to her as "Sea-eagle of English feather," broadly
hinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support of
an autocratic adventurer: "calling a crowned man royal, that was no more
than a king." But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to
judge Swinburne by _Songs Before Sunrise_. They were songs before a
sunrise that has never turned up. Their dogmatic assertions have for a
long time past stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for instance, the
phrase "Glory to Man in the Highest, for man is the master of things";
after which there is evidently nothing to be said, except that it is
not true. But even where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in that
grave and partly just poem _Before a Crucifix_, Swinburne, the most
Latin, the most learned, the most largely travelled of the Victorians,
still knows far less of the facts than even Mrs. Browning. The whole of
the poem, _Before a Crucifix_, breaks down by one mere mistake. It
imagines that the French or Italian peasants who fell on their knees
before the Crucifix did so because they were slaves. They fell on their
knees because they were free men, probably owning their own farms.
Swinburne could have found round about Putney plenty of slaves who had
no crucifixes: but only crucifixions.

When we come to ethics and philosophy, doubtless we find Swinburne in
full revolt, not only against the temperate idealism of Tennyson, but
against the genuine piety and moral enthusiasm of people like Mrs.
Browning. But here again Swinburne is very English, nay, he is very
Victorian, for his revolt is illogical. For the purposes of intelligent
insurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to have
described the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved from
this both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains.
Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried to
rebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he had
done. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorrow
are. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh is
grass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrained
answer, "So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark." When he
went forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, he
heard uplifted the grand choruses of his own _Atalanta_, in his rear,
refusing hope.

The splendid diction that blazes through the whole of that drama, that
still dances exquisitely in the more lyrical _Poems and Ballads_, makes
some marvellous appearances in _Songs Before Sunrise_, and then mainly
falters and fades away, is, of course, the chief thing about Swinburne.
The style is the man; and some will add that it does not, thus
unsupported, amount to much of a man. But the style itself suffers some
injustice from those who would speak thus. The views expressed are often
quite foolish and often quite insincere; but the style itself is a
manlier and more natural thing than is commonly made out. It is not in
the least languorous or luxurious or merely musical and sensuous, as one
would gather from both the eulogies and the satires, from the conscious
and the unconscious imitations. On the contrary, it is a sort of
fighting and profane parody of the Old Testament; and its lines are made
of short English words like the short Roman swords. The first line of
one of his finest poems, for instance, runs, "I have lived long enough
to have seen one thing, that love hath an end." In that sentence only
one small "e" gets outside the monosyllable. Through all his
interminable tragedies, he was fondest of lines like--

    "If ever I leave off to honour you
    God give me shame; I were the worst churl born."

The dramas were far from being short and dramatic; but the words really
were. Nor was his verse merely smooth; except his very bad verse, like
"the lilies and languors of virtue, to the raptures and roses of vice,"
which both, in cheapness of form and foolishness of sentiment, may be
called the worst couplet in the world's literature. In his real poetry
(even in the same poem) his rhythm and rhyme are as original and
ambitious as Browning; and the only difference between him and Browning
is, not that he is smooth and without ridges, but that he always crests
the ridge triumphantly and Browning often does not--

    "On thy bosom though many a kiss be,
    There are none such as knew it of old.
    Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,
    Male ringlets or feminine gold,
    That thy lips met with under the statue
    Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves
    From the eyes of the garden-god at you
    Across the fig-leaves."

Look at the rhymes in that verse, and you will see they are as stiff a
task as Browning's: only they are successful. That is the real strength
of Swinburne--a style. It was a style that nobody could really imitate;
and least of all Swinburne himself, though he made the attempt all
through his later years. He was, if ever there was one, an inspired
poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover
who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

With Swinburne we step into the circle of that later Victorian influence
which was very vaguely called Æsthetic. Like all human things, but
especially Victorian things, it was not only complex but confused.
Things in it that were at one on the emotional side were flatly at war
on the intellectual. In the section of the painters, it was the allies
or pupils of Ruskin, pious, almost painfully exact, and copying mediæval
details rather for their truth than their beauty. In the section of the
poets it was pretty loose, Swinburne being the leader of the revels. But
there was one great man who was in both sections, a painter and a poet,
who may be said to bestride the chasm like a giant. It is in an odd and
literal sense true that the name of Rossetti is important here, for the
name implies the nationality. I have loosely called Carlyle and the
Brontës the romance from the North; the nearest to a general definition
of the Æsthetic movement is to call it the romance from the South. It is
that warm wind that had never blown so strong since Chaucer, standing in
his cold English April, had smelt the spring in Provence. The Englishman
has always found it easier to get inspiration from the Italians than
from the French; they call to each other across that unconquered castle
of reason. Browning's _Englishman in Italy_, Browning's _Italian in
England_, were both happier than either would have been in France.
Rossetti was the Italian in England, as Browning was the Englishman in
Italy; and the first broad fact about the artistic revolution Rossetti
wrought is written when we have written his name. But if the South lets
in warmth or heat, it also lets in hardness. The more the orange tree is
luxuriant in growth, the less it is loose in outline. And it is exactly
where the sea is slightly warmer than marble that it looks slightly
harder. This, I think, is the one universal power behind the Æsthetic
and Pre-Raphaelite movements, which all agreed in two things at least:
strictness in the line and strength, nay violence, in the colour.

Rossetti was a remarkable man in more ways than one; he did not succeed
in any art; if he had he would probably never have been heard of. It was
his happy knack of half failing in both the arts that has made him a
success. If he had been as good a poet as Tennyson, he would have been a
poet who painted pictures. If he had been as good a painter as
Burne-Jones, he would have been a painter who wrote poems. It is odd to
note on the very threshold of the extreme art movement that this great
artist largely succeeded by not defining his art. His poems were too
pictorial. His pictures were too poetical. That is why they really
conquered the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because they did mean
something, even if it was a small artistic thing.

Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one hand, and Swinburne on the
other, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. While
Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his
friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That
frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by
Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti's case, of such sadness as sometimes
to amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediæval point of
view, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insist
on a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediæval, but they would
have been even more mediæval if he could ever have written such a
refrain as "Tally Ho!" or even "Tooral-ooral" instead of "Tall Troy's on
fire." With Rossetti goes, of course, his sister, a real poet, though
she also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite's conflict of views that
covered their coincidence of taste. Both used the angular outlines, the
burning transparencies, the fixed but still unfathomable symbols of the
great mediæval civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious imagery (on
the whole) irreligiously, Christina Rossetti used it religiously but (on
the whole) so to make it seem a narrower religion.

One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the same
general atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languid
atmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew from
hotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. Edward
Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced what
professed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrote
quatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether the
Persian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than this
version I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it
is quite clear that Fitzgerald's work is much too good to be a good
translation. It is as personal and creative a thing as ever was written;
and the best expression of a bad mood, a mood that may, for all I know,
be permanent in Persia, but was certainly at this time particularly
fashionable in England. In the technical sense of literature it is one
of the most remarkable achievements of that age; as poetical as
Swinburne and far more perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting
quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows
by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and
pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some
pagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscription
that remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses that
first rose in Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the wit
and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from
the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust"
are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane"
or "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways." But--

    "Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
    I swore; but was I sober when I swore?"

is equally successful in the same sense as--

    "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer
    And without sneering teach the rest to sneer."

It thus earned a right to be considered the complete expression of that
scepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature was
more and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit
had followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: he
had set out to break down without having, or even thinking he had, the
rudiments of rebuilding in him; and he effected nothing national even in
the way of destruction. The Tennysonians still walked past him as primly
as a young ladies' school--the Browningites still inked their eyebrows
and minds in looking for the lost syntax of Browning; while Browning
himself was away looking for God, rather in the spirit of a truant boy
from their school looking for birds' nests. The nineteenth-century
sceptics did not really shake the respectable world and alter it, as the
eighteenth-century sceptics had done; but that was because the
eighteenth-century sceptics were something more than sceptics, and
believed in Greek tragedies, in Roman laws, in the Republic. The
Swinburnian sceptics had nothing to fight for but a frame of mind; and
when ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusion
that it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about than
experience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in
all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached
individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these
songs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almost
songs without words. It is because there is something which is after all
indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald's way of
phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling
down to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for a
white man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimes
a medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner command
not only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and not
only to grow but to build.

And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of such sad extremes even in the
next name among the major poets; we see the Swinburnian parody of
mediævalism, the inverted Catholicism of the decadents, struggling to
get back somehow on its feet. The æsthetic school had, not quite
unjustly, the name of mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in the
next of them, a workman and a tradesman, we already feel something of
that return to real issues leading up to the real revolts that broke up
Victorianism at last. In the mere art of words, indeed, William Morris
carried much further than Swinburne or Rossetti the mere imitation of
stiff mediæval ornament. The other mediævalists had their modern
moments; which were (if they had only known it) much more mediæval than
their mediæval moments. Swinburne could write--

    "We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
    Kick heels with his throat in a rope."

One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris would have written
something like--

    "And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte
    Hath a high gallows for all his part."

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and
call her "Jenny." One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would have
called her "Jehanne."

But all that seems at first more archaic and decorative about Morris
really arose from the fact that he was more virile and real than either
Swinburne or Rossetti. It arose from the fact that he really was, what
he so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculine
strength to be tidy: that is, after the masculine manner, tidy about his
own trade. If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he
really could make wallpapers. He knew that lines of poetry ought to be
in a row, as palings ought to be in a row; and he knew that neither
palings nor poetry looks any the worse for being simple or even severe.
In a sense Morris was all the more creative because he felt the hard
limits of creation as he would have felt them if he were not working in
words but in wood; and if he was unduly dominated by the mere
conventions of the mediævals, it was largely because they were (whatever
else they were) the very finest fraternity of free workmen the world is
ever likely to see.

The very things that were urged against Morris are in this sense part of
his ethical importance; part of the more promising and wholesome turn he
was half unconsciously giving to the movement of modern art. His hazier
fellow-Socialists blamed him because he made money; but this was at
least in some degree because he made other things to make money: it was
part of the real and refreshing fact that at last an æsthete had
appeared who could make something. If he was a capitalist, at least he
was what later capitalists cannot or will not be--something higher than
a capitalist, a tradesman. As compared with aristocrats like Swinburne
or aliens like Rossetti, he was vitally English and vitally Victorian.
He inherits some of that paradoxical glory which Napoleon gave
reluctantly to a nation of shopkeepers. He was the last of that nation;
he did not go out golfing: like that founder of the artistic shopman,
Samuel Richardson, "he kept his shop, and his shop kept him." The
importance of his Socialism can easily be exaggerated. Among other
lesser points, he was not a Socialist; he was a sort of Dickensian
anarchist. His instinct for titles was always exquisite. It is part of
his instinct of decoration: for on a page the title always looks
important and the printed mass of matter a mere dado under it. And no
one had ever nobler titles than _The Roots of the Mountains_ or _The
Wood at the End of the World_. The reader feels he hardly need read the
fairy-tale because the title is so suggestive. But, when all is said, he
never chose a better title than that of his social Utopia, _News from
Nowhere_. He wrote it while the last Victorians were already embarked on
their bold task of fixing the future--of narrating to-day what has
happened to-morrow. They named their books by cold titles suggesting
straight corridors of marble--titles like _Looking Backward_. But Morris
was an artist as well as an anarchist. _News from Nowhere_ is an
irresponsible title; and it is an irresponsible book. It does not
describe the problem solved; it does not describe wealth either wielded
by the State or divided equally among the citizens. It simply describes
an undiscovered country where every one feels good-natured all day. That
he could even dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was the first
of the Æsthetes to smell mediævalism as a smell of the morning; and not
as a mere scent of decay.

With him the poetry that had been peculiarly Victorian practically
ends; and, on the whole, it is a happy ending. There are many other
minor names of major importance; but for one reason or other they do not
derive from the schools that had dominated this epoch as such. Thus
Thompson, the author of _The City of Dreadful Night_, was a fine poet;
but his pessimism combined with a close pugnacity does not follow any of
the large but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But he was a great
person--he knew how to be democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Patmore
was a much greater person. He was bursting with ideas, like
Browning--and truer ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid and
Elizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that even
Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the
first time he read Patmore's hint that the cosmos is a thing that God
made huge only "to make dirt cheap"; just as nobody will ever forget the
sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for the
rough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, but
discoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the
Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such.
The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, as
they did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.
Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that last
Victorian group who were called "Minor Poets." They numbered many other
fine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in that
he made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to the
right reason of Wordsworth--

        "I have not paid the world
    The evil and the insolent courtesy
    Of offering it my baseness as a gift."

But none of them were able even to understand Francis Thompson; his
sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional
and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps the
shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.




CHAPTER IV

THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE


If it be curiously and carefully considered it will, I think, appear
more and more true that the struggle between the old spiritual theory
and the new material theory in England ended simply in a deadlock; and a
deadlock that has endured. It is still impossible to say absolutely that
England is a Christian country or a heathen country; almost exactly as
it was impossible when Herbert Spencer began to write. Separate elements
of both sorts are alive, and even increasingly alive. But neither the
believer nor the unbeliever has the impudence to call himself the
Englishman. Certainly the great Victorian rationalism has succeeded in
doing a damage to religion. It has done what is perhaps the worst of all
damages to religion. It has driven it entirely into the power of the
religious people. Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men who
would have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being much
more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious
country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian
men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting
things which men's normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. But
certainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended like
the battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, and
both did beat, and both did run away. They have left to their
descendants a treaty that has become a dull torture. Men may believe in
immortality, and none of the men know why. Men may not believe in
miracles, and none of the men know why. The Christian Church had been
just strong enough to check the conquest of her chief citadels. The
rationalist movement had been just strong enough to conquer some of her
outposts, as it seemed, for ever. Neither was strong enough to expel the
other; and Victorian England was in a state which some call liberty and
some call lockjaw.

But the situation can be stated another way. There came a time, roughly
somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western
Europe had for the time exhausted each other--Christianity and the
French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not
unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria might
very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same
way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and
the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was
concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time.
On the one hand Darwin, especially through the strong journalistic
genius of Huxley, had won a very wide spread though an exceedingly
vague victory. I do not mean that Darwin's own doctrine was vague; his
was merely one particular hypothesis about how animal variety might have
arisen; and that particular hypothesis, though it will always be
interesting, is now very much the reverse of secure. But it is only in
the strictly scientific world and among strictly scientific men that
Darwin's detailed suggestion has largely broken down. The general public
impression that he had entirely proved his case (whatever it was) was
early arrived at, and still remains. It was and is hazily associated
with the negation of religion. But (and this is the important point) it
was also associated with the negation of democracy. The same
Mid-Victorian muddle-headedness that made people think that "evolution"
meant that we need not admit the supremacy of God, also made them think
that "survival" meant that we must admit the supremacy of men. Huxley
had no hand in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair fighter; and he
told his own followers, who spoke thus, most emphatically not to play
the fool. He said most strongly that his or any theory of evolution left
the old philosophical arguments for a creator, right or wrong, exactly
where they were before. He also said most emphatically that any one who
used the argument of Nature against the ideal of justice or an equal
law, was as senseless as a gardener who should fight on the side of the
ill weeds merely because they grew apace. I wish, indeed, that in such a
rude summary as this, I had space to do justice to Huxley as a literary
man and a moralist. He had a live taste and talent for the English
tongue, which he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian rationalism
rational. He did not succeed. As so often happens when a rather
unhealthy doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest words of their great
captain could not keep the growing crowds of agnostics back from the
most hopeless and inhuman extremes of destructive thought. Nonsense not
yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began
to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of
"advanced thought" are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism
as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition
ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the
ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of
Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful
faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air
of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had
redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay--all that seemed slowly and
sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in
the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was
bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation
evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in
clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One
must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how
they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled
out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the
debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing,
which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the
experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and
reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I
can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well
acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the art
of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain
that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic
superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of
politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion,
which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that
they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level
where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his
enemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this
particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of
dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one
can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow
come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something
about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase,
being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and
tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity
repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people
come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the
telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to
have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;
or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientific
inquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There had
begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and
smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously
unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. This
began with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to the
early licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort of
fitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing called
Eugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneers
had not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule of
respectability, they were not required to prove it. This rather abrupt
twist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power,
certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile it
was being weakened by heavy blows from without.

There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that was
the turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolution
faltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberal
ideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While the
new foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damaging
democracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings,
were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemed
that the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombined
against France. But there was just this difference: that the Holy
Alliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.
It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny the
dignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope of
denying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was
Protestant and probably religious. Nineteenth-century Prussia was almost
utterly atheist. Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut up at
both ends, that which was called progressive and that which was called
reactionary: barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and by Darwin by
blood and bones. The enormous depression which infects many excellent
people born about this time, probably has this cause.

It was a great calamity that the freedom of Wilkes and the faith of Dr.
Johnson fought each other. But it was an even worse calamity that they
practically killed each other. They killed each other almost
simultaneously, like Herminius and Mamilius. Liberalism (in Newman's
sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through
head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared
intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite
Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did
succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more
or less to the heart of the Utilitarian--and finding that he had none.
Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian
Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead
together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who saw
them fall almost until the hour at which I write.

This coincident collapse of both religious and political idealism
produced a curious cold air of emptiness and real subconscious
agnosticism such as is extremely unusual in the history of mankind. It
is what Mr. Wells, with his usual verbal delicacy and accuracy, spoke of
as that ironical silence that follows a great controversy. It is what
people less intelligent than Mr. Wells meant by calling themselves _fin
de siècle_; though, of course, rationally speaking, there is no more
reason for being sad towards the end of a hundred years than towards the
end of five hundred fortnights. There was no arithmetical autumn, but
there was a spiritual one. And it came from the fact suggested in the
paragraphs above; the sense that man's two great inspirations had
failed him together. The Christian religion was much more dead in the
eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth century. But the
republican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism was
cold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildly
idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they were
gloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In the
same way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in the
feudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, than it was even a
century later; but if creative politics were at their lowest, creative
theology was almost at its highest point of energy.

The modern world, in fact, had fallen between two stools. It had fallen
between that austere old three-legged stool which was the tripod of the
cold priestess of Apollo; and that other mystical and mediæval stool
that may well be called the Stool of Repentance. It kept neither of the
two values as intensely valuable. It could not believe in the bonds that
bound men; but, then, neither could it believe in the men they bound. It
was always restrained in its hatred of slavery by a half remembrance of
its yet greater hatred of liberty. They were almost alone, I think, in
thus carrying to its extreme the negative attitude already noted in Miss
Arabella Allen. Anselm would have despised a civic crown, but he would
not have despised a relic. Voltaire would have despised a relic; but he
would not have despised a vote. We hardly find them both despised till
we come to the age of Oscar Wilde.

These years that followed on that double disillusionment were like one
long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that
everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody
believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing happening.
It was in this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of the old
Swinburnian flame survived; and were called Art. The great men of the
older artistic movement did not live in this time; rather they lived
through it. But this time did produce an interregnum of art that had a
truth of its own; though that truth was near to being only a consistent
lie.

The movement of those called Æsthetes (as satirised in _Patience_) and
the movement of those afterwards called Decadents (satirised in Mr.
Street's delightful _Autobiography of a Boy_) had the same captain; or
at any rate the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked in front of the
first procession wearing a sunflower, and in front of the second
procession wearing a green carnation. With the æsthetic movement and its
more serious elements, I deal elsewhere; but the second appearance of
Wilde is also connected with real intellectual influences, largely
negative, indeed, but subtle and influential. The mark in most of the
arts of this time was a certain quality which those who like it would
call "uniqueness of aspect," and those who do not like it "not quite
coming off." I mean the thing meant something from one standpoint; but
its mark was that the _smallest_ change of standpoint made it unmeaning
and unthinkable--a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rembrandt is as
solid as a statue, however roughly he is sketched in; the soul can walk
all round him like a public monument. We see he would have other
aspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if one
did not admit the extraordinary qualities in the painting, one would
have to admit the ordinary qualities in the sitter. If it is not a
masterpiece it is a man. But a nocturne by Whistler of mist on the
Thames is either a masterpiece or it is nothing; it is either a nocturne
or a nightmare of childish nonsense. Made in a certain mood, viewed
through a certain temperament, conceived under certain conventions, it
may be, it often is, an unreplaceable poem, a vision that may never be
seen again. But the moment it ceases to be a splendid picture it ceases
to be a picture at all. Or, again, if _Hamlet_ is not a great tragedy it
is an uncommonly good tale. The people and the posture of affairs would
still be there even if one thought that Shakespeare's moral attitude was
wrong. Just as one could imagine all the other sides of Rembrandt's
beggar, so, with the mind's eye (Horatio), one can see all four sides of
the castle of Elsinore. One might tell the tale from the point of view
of Laërtes or Claudius or Polonius or the gravedigger; and it would
still be a good tale and the same tale. But if we take a play like
_Pelléas and Mélisande_, we shall find that unless we grasp the
particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather hazily flings to us,
we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme poetic point
of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it is a mass of
clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going to look for a
ring in a distant cave when they both know they have dropped it down a
well. Seen from some secret window on some special side of the soul's
turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our human life.
But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth that one kind of
sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter and rotten eggs. In
the same play the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife
remarking at intervals "I am not gay." Now there may really be an idea
in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
optimism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at
a party, "I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should." But it is
plain that unless one thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) the
expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos; it is very broad and
highly successful farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in short, may
fairly boast of being subtle; but they must not mind if they are called
narrow.

This is the spirit of Wilde's work and of most of the literary work done
in that time and fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude;
but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, but
the cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at from
the front. In Wilde's own poetry we have particularly a perpetually
toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or
just going too far. "Plant lilies at my head" has something wrong about
it; something silly that is not there in--

    "And put a grey stone at my head"

in the old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being
right with this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy (and gravity)
which was the mark of all these men with a "point of view." There is a
very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy,
as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but ends
by saying--

                                  "And yet
    These Christs that die upon the barricades
    God knows that I am with them--in some ways."

Now that is really very true; that is the way a man of wide reading and
worldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about the
mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour to
human nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wilde
is poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comes
very near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case of
Maeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the
popular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh,
hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like an
elegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying between the whiffs of a scented
cigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized on
and mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwise
in a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter.

In less dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went
entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough
(unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be
insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be
subtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in the
welding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet and
the unity of the mood. Wilde himself wrote some things that were not
immorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservative
suburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real bad
taste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressed
woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time to
laugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was very
curious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way of
speaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he were
stroking a lot of dogs and cats. But there was a sort of power--or at
least weight--in his coarseness. His lapses were those proper to the one
good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler--a fighter. Some of the
Roman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the same
courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent
critics, the decadent illustrators--there were even decadent publishers.
And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they were
masters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example.
Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enter
into the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certain
brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, which he renders to the
imagination rightly. It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in
Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or painted
faces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. This being the
thing Beardsley could express (and the only thing he could express), it
is the solemn and awful fact that he was set down to illustrate Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist's
sense, must have been utterly dead. They might as well have employed
Burne-Jones to illustrate _Martin Chuzzlewit_. It would not have been
more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their
thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children's, to
trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow of
Lancelot.

To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end of
the individual story: there was horror and there was expiation. And, as
my conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that could
weaken the horror--or the pardon. But there is one literary consequence
of the thing which must be mentioned, because it bears us on to that
much breezier movement which first began to break in upon all this
ghastly idleness--I mean the Socialist Movement. I do not mean "_De
Profundis_"; I do not think he had got to the real depths when he wrote
that book. I mean the one real thing he ever wrote: _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_; in which we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhood
very much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of the
populace to-day, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in the
boldest pages of Bernard Shaw.

Before we pass on to the two expansive movements in which the Victorian
Age really ended, the accident of a distinguished artist is available
for estimating this somewhat cool and sad afternoon of the epoch at its
purest; not in lounging pessimism or luxurious aberrations, but in
earnest skill and a high devotion to letters. This change that had come,
like the change from a golden sunset to a grey twilight, can be very
adequately measured if we compare the insight and intricacy of Meredith
with the insight and intricacy of Mr. Henry James. The characters of
both are delicate and indisputable; but we must all have had a feeling
that the characters in Meredith are gods, but that the characters in
Henry James are ghosts. I do not mean that they are unreal: I believe in
ghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest
literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep
sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But
Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a
disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an
embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves
one of the two or three things which most of the Victorians did not
understand--the thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a natural
affinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of his
affectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or
ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is
at the other extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysterious
emblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mind
and mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowing
too much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a
feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, wind
or wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and his
prey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot but
admire the figures that walk about in his afternoon drawing-rooms; but
we have a certain sense that they are figures that have no faces.

For the rest, he is most widely known, or perhaps only most widely
chaffed, because of a literary style that lends itself to parody and is
a glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It may be called The Hampered, or
Obstacle Race Style, in which one continually trips over commas and
relative clauses; and where the sense has to be perpetually qualified
lest it should mean too much. But such satire, however friendly, is in
some sense unfair to him; because it leaves out his sense of general
artistic design, which is not only high, but bold. This appears, I
think, most strongly in his short stories; in his long novels the reader
(or at least one reader) does get rather tired of everybody treating
everybody else in a manner which in real life would be an impossible
intellectual strain. But in his short studies there is the unanswerable
thing called real originality; especially in the very shape and point of
the tale. It may sound odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling: but he
is like Kipling and also like Wells in this practical sense: that no one
ever wrote a story at all like the _Mark of the Beast_; no one ever
wrote a story at all like _A Kink in Space_: and in the same sense no
one ever wrote a story like _The Great Good Place_. It is alone in order
and species; and it is masterly. He struck his deepest note in that
terrible story, _The Turn of the Screw_; and though there is in the
heart of that horror a truth of repentance and religion, it is again
notable of the Victorian writers that the only supernatural note they
can strike assuredly is the tragic and almost the diabolic. Only Mr. Max
Beerbohm has been able to imagine Mr. Henry James writing about
Christmas.

Now upon this interregnum, this cold and brilliant waiting-room which
was Henry James at its highest and Wilde at its worst, there broke in
two positive movements, largely honest though essentially unhistoric and
profane, which were destined to crack up the old Victorian solidity past
repair. The first was Bernard Shaw and the Socialists: the second was
Rudyard Kipling and the Imperialists. I take the Socialists first not
because they necessarily came so in order of time, but because they were
less the note upon which the epoch actually ended.

William Morris, of whom we have already spoken, may be said to
introduce the Socialists, but rather in a social sense than a
philosophical. He was their friend, and in a sort of political way,
their father; but he was not their founder, for he would not have
believed a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this the
conventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity of
the young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, but
the tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was a
Revolutionist; he didn't know much more about what he was; but he knew
that. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats the
genial sulkiness of Dickens. And if we take this fact about him first,
we shall find it a key to the whole movement of this time. For the one
dominating truth which overshadows everything else at this point is a
political and economic one. The Industrial System, run by a small class
of Capitalists on a theory of competitive contract, had been quite
honestly established by the early Victorians and was one of the primary
beliefs of Victorianism. The Industrial System, so run, had become
another name for hell. By Morris's time and ever since, England has been
divided into three classes: Knaves, Fools, and Revolutionists.

History is full of forgotten controversies; and those who speak of
Socialism now have nearly all forgotten that for some time it was an
almost equal fight between Socialism and Anarchism for the leadership of
the exodus from Capitalism. It is here that Herbert Spencer comes in
logically, though not chronologically; also that much more interesting
man, Auberon Herbert. Spencer has no special place as a man of letters;
and a vastly exaggerated place as a philosopher. His real importance was
that he was very nearly an Anarchist. The indefinable greatness there is
about him after all, in spite of the silliest and smuggest limitations,
is in a certain consistency and completeness from his own point of
view. There is something mediæval, and therefore manful, about writing a
book about everything in the world. Now this simplicity expressed itself
in politics in carrying the Victorian worship of liberty to the most
ridiculous lengths; almost to the length of voluntary taxes and
voluntary insurance against murder. He tried, in short, to solve the
problem of the State by eliminating the State from it. He was resisted
in this by the powerful good sense of Huxley; but his books became
sacred books for a rising generation of rather bewildered rebels, who
thought we might perhaps get out of the mess if everybody did as he
liked.

Thus the Anarchists and Socialists fought a battle over the death-bed of
Victorian Industrialism; in which the Socialists (that is, those who
stood for increasing instead of diminishing the power of Government) won
a complete victory and have almost exterminated their enemy. The
Anarchist one meets here and there nowadays is a sad sight; he is
disappointed with the future, as well as with the past.

This victory of the Socialists was largely a literary victory; because
it was effected and popularised not only by a wit, but by a sincere wit;
and one who had the same sort of militant lucidity that Huxley had shown
in the last generation and Voltaire in the last century. A young Irish
journalist, impatient of the impoverished Protestantism and Liberalism
to which he had been bred, came out as the champion of Socialism not as
a matter of sentiment, but as a matter of common sense. The primary
position of Bernard Shaw towards the Victorian Age may be roughly
summarised thus: the typical Victorian said coolly: "Our system may not
be a perfect system, but it works." Bernard Shaw replied, even more
coolly: "It may be a perfect system, for all I know or care. But it does
not work." He and a society called the Fabians, which once exercised
considerable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hint
to avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and to
concentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its own
work. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educated
world) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of that
campaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool at the end of it.
But while it won the educated classes it lost the populace for ever. It
dried up those springs of blood and tears out of which all revolt must
come if it is to be anything but bureaucratic readjustment. We began
this book with the fires of the French Revolution still burning, but
burning low. Bernard Shaw was honestly in revolt in his own way: but it
was Bernard Shaw who trod out the last ember of the Great Revolution.
Bernard Shaw proceeded to apply to many other things the same sort of
hilarious realism which he thus successfully applied to the industrial
problem. He also enjoyed giving people a piece of his mind; but a piece
of his mind was a more appetising and less raw-looking object than a
piece of Hardy's. There were many modes of revolt growing all around
him; Shaw supported them--and supplanted them. Many were pitting the
realism of war against the romance of war: they succeeded in making the
fight dreary and repulsive, but the book dreary and repulsive too. Shaw,
in _Arms and the Man_, did manage to make war funny as well as
frightful. Many were questioning the right of revenge or punishment; but
they wrote their books in such a way that the reader was ready to
release all mankind if he might revenge himself on the author. Shaw, in
_Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, really showed at its best the merry
mercy of the pagan; that beautiful human nature that can neither rise to
penance nor sink to revenge. Many had proved that even the most
independent incomes drank blood out of the veins of the oppressed: but
they wrote it in such a style that their readers knew more about
depression than oppression. In _Widowers' Houses_ Shaw very nearly (but
not quite) succeeded in making a farce out of statistics. And the
ultimate utility of his brilliant interruption can best be expressed in
the very title of that play. When ages of essential European ethics have
said "widows' houses," it suddenly occurs to him to say "but what about
widowers' houses?" There is a sort of insane equity about it which was
what Bernard Shaw had the power to give, and gave.

Out of the same social ferment arose a man of equally unquestionable
genius, Mr. H. G. Wells. His first importance was that he wrote great
adventure stories in the new world the men of science had discovered. He
walked on a round slippery world as boldly as Ulysses or Tom Jones had
worked on a flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron Munchausen, or other
typical men of science, had treated the moon as a mere flat silver
mirror in which Man saw his own image--the Man in the Moon. Wells
treated the moon as a globe, like our own; bringing forth monsters as
moonish as we are earthy. The exquisitely penetrating political and
social satire he afterwards wrote belongs to an age later than the
Victorian. But because, even from the beginning, his whole trend was
Socialist, it is right to place him here.

While the old Victorian ideas were being disturbed by an increasing
torture at home, they were also intoxicated by a new romance from
abroad. It did not come from Italy with Rossetti and Browning, or from
Persia with Fitzgerald: but it came from countries as remote, countries
which were (as the simple phrase of that period ran) "painted red" on
the map. It was an attempt to reform England through the newer nations;
by the criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather than of the forgotten
classes. Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to the
Victorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like
Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism
would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only
be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very
individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. As
I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay shared
with most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement or
flat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas
rather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma
of progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard.
Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takes
some time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time to
test a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to sift
evidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the later
Victorians was this: that they began to value the time more than the
truth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found
the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never
found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing
evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all.
This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was called
progress.

Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find them
in historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any one
who comes before a strong movement as the "forerunner" of that movement.
That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a great
army. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,
for whom the phrase "forerunner" was rather peculiarly invented. Equally
obviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divine
event: otherwise the forerunner would be a founder. Unless Jesus had
been the Baptist's God, He would simply have been his disciple.

Nevertheless the fallacy of the "forerunner" has been largely used in
literature. Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a
"morning star of the Reformation," or some such rubbish; whereas the
Reformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland. It was
simply the victory of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants, over
another class of his foes, the lazy abbots. In real history this
constantly occurs; that some small movement happens to favour one of the
million things suggested by some great man; whereupon the great man is
turned into the running slave of the small movement. Thus certain
sectarian movements borrowed the sensationalism without the
sacramentalism of Wesley. Thus certain groups of decadents found it
easier to imitate De Quincey's opium than his eloquence. Unless we grasp
this plain common sense (that you or I are not responsible for what some
ridiculous sect a hundred years hence may choose to do with what we say)
the peculiar position of Stevenson in later Victorian letters cannot
begin to be understood. For he was a very universal man; and talked some
sense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logically
possible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victorian
compromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by
mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. And
yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he
would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling,
though with many healthy hesitations; but he would not have liked the
triumph of Kipling: which was the success of the politician and the
failure of the poet. Yet when we look back up the false perspective of
time, Stevenson does seem in a sense to have prepared that imperial and
downward path.

I shall not talk here, any more than anywhere else in this book, about
the "sedulous ape" business. No man ever wrote as well as Stevenson who
cared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,
in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purely
philosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which he
himself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglect
romance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase of
one of his letters "our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:
it drops so much out of a man." On the whole he concluded that what had
been dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe
would have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in that
touching _cri de cœur_ "shall we never shed blood?" He did for the
penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He proved
that, because it was really human, it could really rise as near to
heaven as human nature could take it. If Thackeray is our youth,
Stevenson is our boyhood: and though this is not the most artistic
thing in him, it is the most important thing in the history of Victorian
art. All the other fine things he did were, for curious reasons, remote
from the current of his age. For instance, he had the good as well as
the bad of coming from a Scotch Calvinist's house. No man in that age
had so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In _The
Master of Ballantrae_ he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devil
is a gentleman--but is none the less the Devil. It is also
characteristic of him (and of the revolt from Victorian respectability
in general) that his most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is also
that which contains his most intimate and bitter truth. _Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde_ is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that
belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry
James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that
while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one
Englishman has seen the joke--I mean the point. You will find twenty
allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also
find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal,
neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means
that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab
of the story is that man _can't_: because while evil does not care for
good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape
from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience.
This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also
good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good
story-telling.

If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep and
even tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less were
they of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of his
style; in which he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his
pen, like a man playing spillikins. But that style also had a quality
that could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an _acies_; and there
was a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led,
not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fighting
spirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a
great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to
hear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which had
really given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet another
circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly
fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the
credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious
optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualities
of sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false in
these matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mere
provincial bully that Henley sometimes sank to be.

For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an invalid like himself, a man
of courage and stoicism like himself; but a man in whom everything that
Stevenson made delicate and rational became unbalanced and blind. The
difference is, moreover, that Stevenson was quite right in claiming that
he could treat his limitation as an accident; that his medicines "did
not colour his life." His life was really coloured out of a shilling
paint-box, like his toy-theatre: such high spirits as he had are the key
to him: his sufferings are not the key to him. But Henley's sufferings
are the key to Henley; much must be excused him, and there is much to be
excused. The result was that while there was always a certain dainty
equity about Stevenson's judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley
seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better.
There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable
when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions
mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new
fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the
Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did not
spread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of the
conquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showed
the stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous and
often temporary thing.

For it is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part of
Victorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He has
many other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes him
exquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence which
makes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the Indian; a vague
journalistic sympathy with the men that misrepresent everything that has
happened to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues, nothing.

All that was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the final
convulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest that
any honest man can come to the thing called "impartiality" is to confess
that he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn of
the Victorian Age was an unfortunate turn; much on the other side can be
said, and I hope will be said. But about the facts there can be no
question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the
Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite
seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new
forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the
guns opened across Africa; and the great queen died.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of what will now be the future of so separate and almost secretive an
adventure of the English, the present writer will not permit himself,
even for an instant, to prophesy. The Victorian Age made one or two
mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is,
mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a
country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They
thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote
prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were
experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If _we_ continue the
capitalist use of the populace--if _we_ continue the capitalist use of
external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not
be on the dead.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


After having surveyed the immense field presented in such a volume as
Mr. George Mair's _Modern English Literature_ in this series, or, more
fully, in the _Cambridge History of Modern Literature_, the later volume
of Chambers' _English Literature_, Mr. Gosse's _History of Modern
English Literature_, or Henry Morley's _English Literature in the Reign
of Victoria_, the wise reader will choose some portion for closer study,
and will go straight to the originals before he has any further traffic
with critics or commentators, however able.

He will then need the aid of fuller biographies. Some Victorian _Lives_
are already classic, or nearly so, among them Sir G. Trevelyan's
_Macaulay_, Forster's _Dickens_, Mrs. Gaskell's _Charlotte Brontë_,
Froude's _Carlyle_, and Sir E. T. Cook's _Ruskin_. With these may be
ranged the great _Dictionary of National Biography_. The "English Men of
Letters" Series includes H. D. Traill's _Coleridge_, Ainger's _Lamb_,
Trollope's _Thackeray_, Leslie Stephen's _George Eliot_, Herbert Paul's
_Matthew Arnold_, Sir A. Lyall's _Tennyson_, G. K. Chesterton's _Robert
Browning_, and A. C. Benson's _Fitzgerald_. At least two autobiographies
must be named, those of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, and, as
antidote to Newman's _Apologia_, the gay self-revelations of Borrow, and
Jefferies' _Story of My Heart_. Other considerable volumes are W. J.
Cross's _George Eliot_, Lionel Johnson's _Art of Thomas Hardy_, Mr. W. M.
Rossetti's _Dante G. Rossetti_, Colvin's _R. L. Stevenson_, J. W.
Mackail's _William Morris_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_,
Sir Leslie Stephen's _The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our Living
Poets_, Edward Thomas's _Swinburne_, Monypenny's _Disraeli_, Dawson's
_Victorian Novelists_, and Stedman's _Victorian Poets_. The "Everyman"
_Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature_ is useful for
dates.

The latter half of the second volume of Mr. F. A. Mumby's _Letters of
Literary Men_ is devoted to the Victorian Age. There are fuller
collections of the _Letters_ of Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, Dickens, the
Brownings, Fitzgerald, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and more
recently the _Letters of George Meredith_, edited by his son.

Among the important critical writers of the period, Matthew Arnold
(_Essays in Criticism_, _Study of Celtic Literature_, etc.) stands
easily first. Others are John, now Lord, Morley (_Studies in
Literature_, etc.), Augustine Birrell (_Obiter Dicta_, _Essays_), W. E.
Henley (_Views and Reviews_), J. Addington Symonds (_Essays_), J.
Churton Collins, Richard Garnett, Stopford A. Brooke, George E. B.
Saintsbury (_History of Criticism_), R. H. Hutton (_Contemporary
Thought_), J. M. Robertson (_Modern Humanists_, _Buckle_, etc.), Frederic
Harrison (_The Choice of Books_, etc.), Andrew Lang, Walter Bagehot,
Edmund Gosse, Prof. Dowden, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir A. T. Quiller
Couch.




INDEX


Æsthetes, the, and Decadents, 218-27
Arnold, Matthew, 73-79, 87
Austen, Jane, 92, 105, 109

Bentham, 36
Blake, 20
Borrow, 151
Brontë, Charlotte, 92, 105, 110-14
----, Emily, 113
Browning, Elizabeth B., 176-82
----, R., 40-41, 159, 162-63
Byron, 22

Carlyle, 40, 49-62, 158
Carroll, Lewis, 153
Cobbett, 16-17, 88, 151
Coleridge, 20
Collins, Wilkie, 130, 132

Darwin, 38, 206-7, 209
De Quincey, 23-25, 65
Dickens, 40, 79-89, 100, 106, 119-23, 129, 131
Disraeli, 42, 135

Eliot, George, 92, 103-9, 157

Faber, 46
Fitzgerald, 192-95
French Revolution, Influence of, 18-21
Froude, 60, 62

Gaskell, Mrs., 94
Gilbert, 154

Hardy, Thomas, 138-39, 143-45
Hazlitt, 23
Henley, W. E., 247-48
Hood, Thomas, 25-27
Hughes, Tom, 73
Humour, Victorian, 152-55
Hunt, Leigh, 23
Huxley, 39-40, 205

Imperialism, 60, 239

James, Henry, 228-31

Keats, 20
Keble, 45
Kingsley, 40, 59, 64, 72, 134-35
Kipling, R., 60, 249-50

Lamb, 23
Landor, 23
Lear, Edward, 153
Literary temperament, the English, 13-16
Lytton, Bulwer, 135-37

Macaulay, 28-36, 55
Macdonald, George, 152
Maurice, F. D., 40, 73
Melbourne, Lord, 42
Meredith, George, 138-49, 228
Mill, J. S., 36-37, 55
Morris, Wm., 196-200, 232

Newman, 38, 40, 45-48, 78, 159
Novel, The Modern, 90-99

Oliphant, Mrs., 116-17
"Ouida," 117
Oxford Movement, 42-45

Pater, Walter, 69-71
Patmore, 48, 201-2
Pre-Raphaelite School, 68, 72

Reade, Charles, 134
Rossetti, D. G. and C., 71, 188-91
Ruskin, 40, 62-8, 70, 158

Science, Victorian, 208-12
Shaw, G. B., 60, 235-38
Shelley, 22-23
Shorthouse, 149-50
Socialism, 60, 67, 122, 198, 227, 231-39
Spencer, Herbert, 75, 233-34
Stevenson, R. L., 243-49
Swinburne, 69, 159, 181-88

Tennyson, 40, 64, 160-69
Thackeray, 100, 110, 123-30, 158
Thompson, Francis, 48, 201, 202
Trollope, Anthony, 130, 132-33

Watson, Wm., 202
Wells, H. G., 238-39
Wilde, Oscar, 218-23
Women, Victorian, 91, 99, 104, 115-16, 140





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of All Things Considered, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: All Things Considered

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: March 7, 2004 [EBook #11505]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALL THINGS CONSIDERED ***




Produced by Robert Shimmin, jayam and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team





ALL THINGS CONSIDERED



BY

G. K. CHESTERTON




Ninth Edition



CONTENTS

THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES

THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS

ON RUNNING AFTER ONE'S HAT

THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE

CONCEIT AND CARICATURE

PATRIOTISM AND SPORT

AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES

FRENCH AND ENGLISH

THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY

OXFORD FROM WITHOUT

WOMAN

THE MODERN MARTYR

ON POLITICAL SECRECY

EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND

THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK

THE BOY

LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS

ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC

THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

THE METHUSELAHITE

SPIRITUALISM

THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY

PHONETIC SPELLING

HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH

WINE WHEN IT IS RED

DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES

THE "EATANSWILL GAZETTE"

FAIRY TALES

TOM JONES AND MORALITY

THE MAID OF ORLEANS

A DEAD POET

CHRISTMAS

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED




THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL


I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can
love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this
book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or
rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they
stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were
handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our
commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been
handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their
imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too
vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think
of, except dynamite.

Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had
no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard
to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments,
and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he
would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front
page of the _Times_, which is full of long leading articles, or the
front page of _Tit-Bits,_ which is full of short jokes. If the reader
is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply
that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten _Times_
articles than one _Tit-Bits_ joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious
responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can
do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for
politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of
mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to
dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keep
myself on the whole on the level of the _Times_: it is only occasionally
that I leap upwards almost to the level of _Tit-Bits._

I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have
another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written;
they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantages
of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start for
High-gate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have to
start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest. In these
essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for
not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to
be quick. There are several maddening cases in which I took two or three
pages in attempting to describe an attitude of which the essence could
be expressed in an epigram; only there was no time for epigrams. I do
not repent of one shade of opinion here expressed; but I feel that they
might have been expressed so much more briefly and precisely. For
instance, these pages contain a sort of recurring protest against the
boast of certain writers that they are merely recent. They brag that
their philosophy of the universe is the last philosophy or the new
philosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy. I have said much
against a mere modernism. When I use the word "modernism," I am not
alluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church,
though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting so
weak and unphilosophical a name. It is incomprehensible to me that any
thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call
himself a Thursdayite. But apart altogether from that particular
disturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed against
the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the
discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear
and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The real
objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It
is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some
mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or
particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the
last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that
we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into
philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like
introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is
irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a
month behind the fashion Similarly I find that I have tried in these
pages to express the real objection to philanthropists and have not
succeeded. I have not seen the quite simple objection to the causes
advocated by certain wealthy idealists; causes of which the cause called
teetotalism is the strongest case. I have used many abusive terms about
the thing, calling it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy;
but I have not seen and stated the quite simple objection to
philanthropy; which is that it is religious persecution. Religious
persecution does not consist in thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the
essence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens to
have material power in the State, either by wealth or by official
position, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to their
religion or philosophy, but according to his own. If, for instance,
there is such a thing as a vegetarian nation; if there is a great united
mass of men who wish to live by the vegetarian morality, then I say in
the emphatic words of the arrogant French marquis before the French
Revolution, "Let them eat grass." Perhaps that French oligarch was a
humanitarian; most oligarchs are. Perhaps when he told the peasants to
eat grass he was recommending to them the hygienic simplicity of a
vegetarian restaurant. But that is an irrelevant, though most
fascinating, speculation. The point here is that if a nation is really
vegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight of
vegetarianism. Let its government give the national guests a State
vegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the most literal and awful
sense of the words, give them beans. That sort of tyranny is all very
well; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons. But
"temperance reformers" are like a small group of vegetarians who should
silently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely
unfamiliar to the mass of the people. They would always be giving
peerages to greengrocers. They would always be appointing Parliamentary
Commissions to enquire into the private life of butchers. Whenever they
found a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper or a convict or a lunatic,
they would force him to add the final touch to his inhuman isolation by
becoming a vegetarian. All the meals for school children will be
vegetarian meals. All the State public houses will be vegetarian public
houses. There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared with
teetotalism. Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy be
drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder.
The objection to both processes is not that the two creeds, teetotal and
vegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted.
The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on the
existing religion of the democracy. These people ask the poor to accept
in practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not accept
in theory. That is the very definition of religious persecution. I was
against the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic
theology in which they do not believe. I am even more against the
attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively
deny.

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great
deal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism is
dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so
rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about our
contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society. The
modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more nameless
than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past;
but he is more of a coward. The rich publisher may treat the poor poet
better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice.
But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him. Nowadays it is
the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of
responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The clerk of Mr.
Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman
also gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she is concealed
under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not
concealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant.
But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where the
dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to. It may be Mr.
Solomon or Mr. Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt in
Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman's rich creditor in Berlin. The elaborate
machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely
in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of
tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants.
We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking
modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to
be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather we
must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through
ostentation they may at last find their way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply
this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.
For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their
nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of
such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of
the philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to us
whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It
will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.




COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES


A writer in the _Yorkshire Evening Post_ is very angry indeed with my
performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G.
K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist." I do
not mind his saying that I am not a humourist--in which (to tell the
truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am
not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French
writer said of me, "He is no metaphysician: not even an English
metaphysician," I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I
should feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge that
I am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney. If I were a
humourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a saint,
I should certainly be a Cockney saint. I need not recite the splendid
catalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on our noble
old City churches. I need not trouble you with the long list of the
Cockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed to
discharge them) in our noble old City taverns. We can weep together
over the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has never
produced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world. And we
can smile together when he says that somebody or other is "not even" a
Cockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb. It is surely
sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our
language is Cockney humour. Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his house
close to the Abbey. Dickens was a Cockney; he said he could not think
without the London streets. The London taverns heard always the
quaintest conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson's at the Mermaid or
Sam Johnson's at the Cock. Even in our own time it may be noted that the
most vital and genuine humour is still written about London. Of this
type is the mild and humane irony which marks Mr. Pett Ridge's studies
of the small grey streets. Of this type is the simple but smashing
laughter of the best tales of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, telling of the smoke and
sparkle of the Thames. No; I concede that I am not a Cockney humourist.
No; I am not worthy to be. Some time, after sad and strenuous
after-lives; some time, after fierce and apocalyptic incarnations; in
some strange world beyond the stars, I may become at last a Cockney
humourist. In that potential paradise I may walk among the Cockney
humourists, if not an equal, at least a companion. I may feel for a
moment on my shoulder the hearty hand of Dryden and thread the
labyrinths of the sweet insanity of Lamb. But that could only be if I
were not only much cleverer, but much better than I am. Before I reach
that sphere I shall have left behind, perhaps, the sphere that is
inhabited by angels, and even passed that which is appropriated
exclusively to the use of Yorkshiremen.

No; London is in this matter attacked upon its strongest ground. London
is the largest of the bloated modern cities; London is the smokiest;
London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most sombre; London
is, if you will, the most miserable. But London is certainly the most
amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we have the most
tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy, that we have the
most farce. We have at the very worst a splendid hypocrisy of humour. We
conceal our sorrow behind a screaming derision. You speak of people who
laugh through their tears; it is our boast that we only weep through our
laughter. There remains always this great boast, perhaps the greatest
boast that is possible to human nature. I mean the great boast that the
most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part.
The poor can forget that social problem which we (the moderately rich)
ought never to forget. Blessed are the poor; for they alone have not the
poor always with them. The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The
honest rich can never forget it.

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of
vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be
certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men
who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except
by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they
could only express by something indelicate. I remember that Mr. Max
Beerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to analyse the
jokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three sections:
jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such as
foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese. Mr. Max Beerbohm thought he
understood the first two forms; but I am not sure that he did. In order
to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One must
also be vulgar, as I am. And in the first case it is surely obvious that
it is not merely at the fact of something being hurt that we laugh (as I
trust we do) when a Prime Minister sits down on his hat. If that were so
we should laugh whenever we saw a funeral. We do not laugh at the mere
fact of something falling down; there is nothing humorous about leaves
falling or the sun going down. When our house falls down we do not
laugh. All the birds of the air might drop around us in a perpetual
shower like a hailstorm without arousing a smile. If you really ask
yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street you
will discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimately
religious. All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really
theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. They
refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things
around him and yet is at their mercy.

Quite equally subtle and spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing
at foreigners. It concerns the almost torturing truth of a thing being
like oneself and yet not like oneself. Nobody laughs at what is entirely
foreign; nobody laughs at a palm tree. But it is funny to see the
familiar image of God disguised behind the black beard of a Frenchman or
the black face of a Negro. There is nothing funny in the sounds that are
wholly inhuman, the howling of wild beasts or of the wind. But if a man
begins to talk like oneself, but all the syllables come out different,
then if one is a man one feels inclined to laugh, though if one is a
gentleman one resists the inclination.

Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two
forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He
could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I can
tell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle and
philosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish.
Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen
on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a
great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the
inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of
matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. And
it is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the
democracy condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes
about marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the democracy
would never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love is a piece
of priggishness.

As a matter of fact, it will be generally found that the popular joke is
not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The vulgar joke is
generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. For
instance, it is not in the least true that mothers-in-law are as a class
oppressive and intolerable; most of them are both devoted and useful.
All the mothers-in-law I have ever had were admirable. Yet the legend of
the comic papers is profoundly true. It draws attention to the fact that
it is much harder to be a nice mother-in-law than to be nice in any
other conceivable relation of life. The caricatures have drawn the worst
mother-in-law a monster, by way of expressing the fact that the best
mother-in-law is a problem. The same is true of the perpetual jokes in
comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked husbands. It is all a
frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of a truth; whereas all
the modern mouthings about oppressed women are the exaggerations of a
falsehood. If you read even the best of the intellectuals of to-day you
will find them saying that in the mass of the democracy the woman is the
chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed. But if you read the comic
literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides under the
bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel. This is not the fact, but
it is much nearer the truth. Every man who is married knows quite well,
not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man
can conceivably ever have done so. The joke stands for an ultimate
truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state
correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that,
even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.

But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies,
do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose, though you should
certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty and good English. If
you want to know what will happen, study the pages of _Snaps_ or
_Patchy Bits_ as if they were the dark tablets graven with the
oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness,
they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the
sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the
actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself,
we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people,
but in the literature which the people studies.

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a
much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured
observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General
Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct
difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the
populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most
careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese.
According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether
certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with
our constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would have
been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It all
sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popular
joke looked, of course, very poor. For the popular joke against the
Chinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objection
to an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtails
and yellow faces. It seemed that the Liberal politicians were raising an
intellectual objection to a doubtful document of State; while it seemed
that the Radical populace were merely roaring with idiotic laughter at
the sight of a Chinaman's clothes. But the popular instinct was
justified, for the vices revealed were Chinese vices.

But there is another case more pleasant and more up to date. The popular
papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the
Suffragette as an ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes,
and generally falling off a bicycle. As a matter of plain external fact,
there was not a word of truth in this. The leaders of the movement of
female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are
extraordinarily good-looking. Nor are they at all indifferent to art or
decorative costume; many of them are alarmingly attached to these
things. Yet the popular instinct was right. For the popular instinct was
that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of
indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to
be grotesque. These women did truly despise the pontifical quality of
woman. And in our streets and around our Parliament we have seen the
stately woman of art and culture turn into the comic woman of _Comic
Bits_. And whether we think the exhibition justifiable or not, the
prophecy of the comic papers is justified: the healthy and vulgar masses
were conscious of a hidden enemy to their traditions who has now come
out into the daylight, that the scriptures might be fulfilled. For the
two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are
a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.




THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS


There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles
which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever
known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of
chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover,
the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious
tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are
about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you
may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men
how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even
succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such
thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is
not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a
millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a
donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have
succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad
philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the
ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. These
writers profess to tell the ordinary man how he may succeed in his trade
or speculation--how, if he is a builder, he may succeed as a builder;
how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed as a stockbroker. They
profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting
yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer;
and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon. This is a
definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people
who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a
legal, right to ask for their money back. Nobody would dare to publish
a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about
electricity; no one would dare to publish an article on botany which
showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the
earth. Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and
successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely
any kind of verbal sense.

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as
bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special
sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by
cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation.
If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else,
or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to
succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked
cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about
whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want
a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success
such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the
book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want
to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or
that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said
anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The
jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to
jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He
must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little
Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to _do his best_. He
must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive,
and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE
WALL." That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it
would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man
just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his
intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other
case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run--"In playing
cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by
maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to
win the game. You must have grit and snap and go _in to win_. The days
of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science
and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any
game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL." It is
all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards
I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of
the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of
talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the
other--which, it is not for me to say.

Turning over a popular magazine, I find a queer and amusing example.
There is an article called "The Instinct that Makes People Rich." It is
decorated in front with a formidable portrait of Lord Rothschild. There
are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich;
the only "instinct" I know of which does it is that instinct which
theological Christianity crudely describes as "the sin of avarice."
That, however, is beside the present point. I wish to quote the
following exquisite paragraphs as a piece of typical advice as to how to
succeed. It is so practical; it leaves so little doubt about what should
be our next step--"The name of Vanderbilt is synonymous with wealth
gained by modern enterprise. 'Cornelius,' the founder of the family, was
the first of the great American magnates of commerce. He started as the
son of a poor farmer; he ended as a millionaire twenty times over."

"He had the money-making instinct. He seized his opportunities, the
opportunities that were given by the application of the steam-engine to
ocean traffic, and by the birth of railway locomotion in the wealthy but
undeveloped United States of America, and consequently he amassed an
immense fortune.

"Now it is, of course, obvious that we cannot all follow exactly in the
footsteps of this great railway monarch. The precise opportunities that
fell to him do not occur to us. Circumstances have changed. But,
although this is so, still, in our own sphere and in our own
circumstances, we _can_ follow his general methods; we can seize those
opportunities that are given us, and give ourselves a very fair chance
of attaining riches."

In such strange utterances we see quite clearly what is really at the
bottom of all these articles and books. It is not mere business; it is
not even mere cynicism. It is mysticism; the horrible mysticism of
money. The writer of that passage did not really have the remotest
notion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else is to
make his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some
scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He merely
wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire. For
when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its
obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility. Thus, for instance, when a
man is in love with a woman he takes special pleasure in the fact that a
woman is unreasonable. Thus, again, the very pious poet, celebrating his
Creator, takes pleasure in saying that God moves in a mysterious way.
Now, the writer of the paragraph which I have quoted does not seem to
have had anything to do with a god, and I should not think (judging by
his extreme unpracticality) that he had ever been really in love with a
woman. But the thing he does worship--Vanderbilt--he treats in exactly
this mystical manner. He really revels in the fact his deity Vanderbilt
is keeping a secret from him. And it fills his soul with a sort of
transport of cunning, an ecstasy of priestcraft, that he should pretend
to be telling to the multitude that terrible secret which he does not
know.

Speaking about the instinct that makes people rich, the same writer
remarks---

"In olden days its existence was fully understood. The Greeks enshrined
it in the story of Midas, of the 'Golden Touch.' Here was a man who
turned everything he laid his hands upon into gold. His life was a
progress amidst riches. Out of everything that came in his way he
created the precious metal. 'A foolish legend,' said the wiseacres of
the Victorian age. 'A truth,' say we of to-day. We all know of such men.
We are ever meeting or reading about such persons who turn everything
they touch into gold. Success dogs their very footsteps. Their life's
pathway leads unerringly upwards. They cannot fail."

Unfortunately, however, Midas could fail; he did. His path did not lead
unerringly upward. He starved because whenever he touched a biscuit or a
ham sandwich it turned to gold. That was the whole point of the story,
though the writer has to suppress it delicately, writing so near to a
portrait of Lord Rothschild. The old fables of mankind are, indeed,
unfathomably wise; but we must not have them expurgated in the interests
of Mr. Vanderbilt. We must not have King Midas represented as an example
of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had
the ears of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons)
he endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember
right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to
this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead
person of the Succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King
Midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal to
the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said that they also
whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. I look reverently at
the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits
of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I touch to gold;
but then I also know that I have never tried, having a preference for
other substances, such as grass, and good wine. I know that these people
have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly overcome
somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no men were ever
kings before; that they create markets and bestride continents. Yet it
always seems to me that there is some small domestic fact that they are
hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon the wind the laughter
and whisper of the reeds.

At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books
about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not
teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish;
they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are
always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books
that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years
ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that
by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was
fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our
society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it
may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man,
but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice
rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall
we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the
Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?




ON RUNNING AFTER ONE'S HAT


I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in
my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been, I
understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters. Battersea
was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of human
localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great sheets of
water, there must be something quite incomparable in the landscape (or
waterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be a vision of
Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher's must have shot
along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange smoothness of the
gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the corner of the
Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly grace of
the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; and
when a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago.

Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in
reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite
as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an
opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible
than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunity
for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or
having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but
scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and
as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very
longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or
women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences--things
altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people
complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a
train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a
railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a
railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of
poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on
the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the
wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king
had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament
of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also
serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations may
be full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my
life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose,
under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical that
the water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed it
particularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said,
everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safely
apply the test to almost every one of the things that are currently
talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to
have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the
well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and
running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and
sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting;
little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an
idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say
it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but
man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic--eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are
exactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love. A man
running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a
wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard
himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no
animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that
hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the
future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground
on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants
have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the
technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree
combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they
were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting
pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were
looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in
Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be
filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected
pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment
giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry.
A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out
of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him
think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and
let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose.
Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their
distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no
doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and
they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly afflicted
in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in
consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed out
to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it
rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and
would come out easily. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that
you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle
will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are
tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up a
fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are a
boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English."
Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at all that my
words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that every day of
his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face
and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and
seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring.

So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to
suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed
poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been
caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect,
and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really
romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly
considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything,
have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the Roman
Catholic priest in the story said: "Wine is good with everything except
water," and on a similar principle, water is good with everything except
wine.




THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE


Most of us will be canvassed soon, I suppose; some of us may even
canvass. Upon which side, of course, nothing will induce me to state,
beyond saying that by a remarkable coincidence it will in every case be
the only side in which a high-minded, public-spirited, and patriotic
citizen can take even a momentary interest. But the general question of
canvassing itself, being a non-party question, is one which we may be
permitted to approach. The rules for canvassers are fairly familiar to
any one who has ever canvassed. They are printed on the little card
which you carry about with you and lose. There is a statement, I think,
that you must not offer a voter food or drink. However hospitable you
may feel towards him in his own house, you must not carry his lunch
about with you. You must not produce a veal cutlet from your tail-coat
pocket. You must not conceal poached eggs about your person. You must
not, like a kind of conjurer, produce baked potatoes from your hat. In
short, the canvasser must not feed the voter in any way. Whether the
voter is allowed to feed the canvasser, whether the voter may give the
canvasser veal cutlets and baked potatoes, is a point of law on which I
have never been able to inform myself. When I found myself canvassing a
gentleman, I have sometimes felt tempted to ask him if there was any
rule against his giving me food and drink; but the matter seemed a
delicate one to approach. His attitude to me also sometimes suggested a
doubt as to whether he would, even if he could. But there are voters who
might find it worth while to discover if there is any law against
bribing a canvasser. They might bribe him to go away.

The second veto for canvassers which was printed on the little card said
that you must not persuade any one to personate a voter. I have no idea
what it means. To dress up as an average voter seems a little vague.
There is no well-recognised uniform, as far as I know, with civic
waistcoat and patriotic whiskers. The enterprise resolves itself into
one somewhat similar to the enterprise of a rich friend of mine who went
to a fancy-dress ball dressed up as a gentleman. Perhaps it means that
there is a practice of personating some individual voter. The canvasser
creeps to the house of his fellow-conspirator carrying a make-up in a
bag. He produces from it a pair of white moustaches and a single
eyeglass, which are sufficient to give the most common-place person a
startling resemblance to the Colonel at No. 80. Or he hurriedly affixes
to his friend that large nose and that bald head which are all that is
essential to an illusion of the presence of Professor Budger. I do not
undertake to unravel these knots. I can only say that when I was a
canvasser I was told by the little card, with every circumstance of
seriousness and authority, that I was not to persuade anybody to
personate a voter: and I can lay my hand upon my heart and affirm that I
never did.

The third injunction on the card was one which seemed to me, if
interpreted exactly and according to its words, to undermine the very
foundations of our politics. It told me that I must not "threaten a
voter with any consequence whatever." No doubt this was intended to
apply to threats of a personal and illegitimate character; as, for
instance, if a wealthy candidate were to threaten to raise all the
rents, or to put up a statue of himself. But as verbally and
grammatically expressed, it certainly would cover those general threats
of disaster to the whole community which are the main matter of
political discussion. When a canvasser says that if the opposition
candidate gets in the country will be ruined, he is threatening the
voters with certain consequences. When the Free Trader says that if
Tariffs are adopted the people in Brompton or Bayswater will crawl about
eating grass, he is threatening them with consequences. When the Tariff
Reformer says that if Free Trade exists for another year St. Paul's
Cathedral will be a ruin and Ludgate Hill as deserted as Stonehenge, he
is also threatening. And what is the good of being a Tariff Reformer if
you can't say that? What is the use of being a politician or a
Parliamentary candidate at all if one cannot tell the people that if the
other man gets in, England will be instantly invaded and enslaved, blood
be pouring down the Strand, and all the English ladies carried off into
harems. But these things are, after all, consequences, so to speak.

The majority of refined persons in our day may generally be heard
abusing the practice of canvassing. In the same way the majority of
refined persons (commonly the same refined persons) may be heard
abusing the practice of interviewing celebrities. It seems a very
singular thing to me that this refined world reserves all its
indignation for the comparatively open and innocent element in both
walks of life. There is really a vast amount of corruption and hypocrisy
in our election politics; about the most honest thing in the whole mess
is the canvassing. A man has not got a right to "nurse" a constituency
with aggressive charities, to buy it with great presents of parks and
libraries, to open vague vistas of future benevolence; all this, which
goes on unrebuked, is bribery and nothing else. But a man has got the
right to go to another free man and ask him with civility whether he
will vote for him. The information can be asked, granted, or refused
without any loss of dignity on either side, which is more than can be
said of a park. It is the same with the place of interviewing in
journalism. In a trade where there are labyrinths of insincerity,
interviewing is about the most simple and the most sincere thing there
is. The canvasser, when he wants to know a man's opinions, goes and asks
him. It may be a bore; but it is about as plain and straight a thing as
he could do. So the interviewer, when he wants to know a man's opinions,
goes and asks him. Again, it may be a bore; but again, it is about as
plain and straight as anything could be. But all the other real and
systematic cynicisms of our journalism pass without being vituperated
and even without being known--the financial motives of policy, the
misleading posters, the suppression of just letters of complaint. A
statement about a man may be infamously untrue, but it is read calmly.
But a statement by a man to an interviewer is felt as indefensibly
vulgar. That the paper should misrepresent him is nothing; that he
should represent himself is bad taste. The whole error in both cases
lies in the fact that the refined persons are attacking politics and
journalism on the ground of vulgarity. Of course, politics and
journalism are, as it happens, very vulgar. But their vulgarity is not
the worst thing about them. Things are so bad with both that by this
time their vulgarity is the best thing about them. Their vulgarity is at
least a noisy thing; and their great danger is that silence that always
comes before decay. The conversational persuasion at elections is
perfectly human and rational; it is the silent persuasions that are
utterly damnable.

If it is true that the Commons' House will not hold all the Commons, it
is a very good example of what we call the anomalies of the English
Constitution. It is also, I think, a very good example of how highly
undesirable those anomalies really are. Most Englishmen say that these
anomalies do not matter; they are not ashamed of being illogical; they
are proud of being illogical. Lord Macaulay (a very typical Englishman,
romantic, prejudiced, poetical), Lord Macaulay said that he would not
lift his hand to get rid of an anomaly that was not also a grievance.
Many other sturdy romantic Englishmen say the same. They boast of our
anomalies; they boast of our illogicality; they say it shows what a
practical people we are. They are utterly wrong. Lord Macaulay was in
this matter, as in a few others, utterly wrong. Anomalies do matter
very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do
matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason
that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself.
All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the
idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the
power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times
before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this
power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do
my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea,
they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea
could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads
for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end
of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently
sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me
to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown
accustomed to insanity.

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is
necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must
think injustice _absurd_; above all, they must think it startling. They
must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment. That is the
explanation of the singular fact which must have struck many people in
the relations of philosophy and reform. It is the fact (I mean) that
optimists are more practical reformers than pessimists. Superficially,
one would imagine that the railer would be the reformer; that the man
who thought that everything was wrong would be the man to put everything
right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way;
curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really
makes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than
the pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory of
human nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like David Hume thinks
that almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative, and
wishes to keep them as they are. A man like Godwin believes existence to
be kindly; but he is a rebel. A man like Carlyle believes existence to
be cruel; but he is a Tory. Everywhere the man who alters things begins
by liking things. And the real explanation of this success of the
optimistic reformer, of this failure of the pessimistic reformer, is,
after all, an explanation of sufficient simplicity. It is because the
optimist can look at wrong not only with indignation, but with a
startled indignation. When the pessimist looks at any infamy, it is to
him, after all, only a repetition of the infamy of existence. The Court
of Chancery is indefensible--like mankind. The Inquisition is
abominable--like the universe. But the optimist sees injustice as
something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action. The
pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be
surprised at it.

And it is the same with the relations of an anomaly to the logical
mind. The pessimist resents evil (like Lord Macaulay) solely because it
is a grievance. The optimist resents it also, because it is an anomaly;
a contradiction to his conception of the course of things. And it is not
at all unimportant, but on the contrary most important, that this course
of things in politics and elsewhere should be lucid, explicable and
defensible. When people have got used to unreason they can no longer be
startled at injustice. When people have grown familiar with an anomaly,
they are prepared to that extent for a grievance; they may think the
grievance grievous, but they can no longer think it strange. Take, if
only as an excellent example, the very matter alluded to before; I mean
the seats, or rather the lack of seats, in the House of Commons. Perhaps
it is true that under the best conditions it would never happen that
every member turned up. Perhaps a complete attendance would never
actually be. But who can tell how much influence in keeping members away
may have been exerted by this calm assumption that they would stop away?
How can any man be expected to help to make a full attendance when he
knows that a full attendance is actually forbidden? How can the men who
make up the Chamber do their duty reasonably when the very men who built
the House have not done theirs reasonably? If the trumpet give an
uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle? And what if
the remarks of the trumpet take this form, "I charge you as you love
your King and country to come to this Council. And I know you won't."




CONCEIT AND CARICATURE


If a man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he should
be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really
possess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial; it
remains a mere mistake of fact, like that of a man who thinks he
inherits the royal blood or thinks he has an infallible system for Monte
Carlo. Because the merit is an unreal merit, it does not corrupt or
sophisticate his real merits. He is vain about the virtue he has not
got; but he may be humble about the virtues that he has got. His truly
honourable qualities remain in their primordial innocence; he cannot see
them and he cannot spoil them. If a man's mind is erroneously possessed
with the idea that he is a great violinist, that need not prevent his
being a gentleman and an honest man. But if once his mind is possessed
in any strong degree with the knowledge that he is a gentleman, he will
soon cease to be one.

But there is a third kind of satisfaction of which I have noticed one or
two examples lately--another kind of satisfaction which is neither a
pleasure in the virtues that we do possess nor a pleasure in the virtues
we do not possess. It is the pleasure which a man takes in the presence
or absence of certain things in himself without ever adequately asking
himself whether in his case they constitute virtues at all. A man will
plume himself because he is not bad in some particular way, when the
truth is that he is not good enough to be bad in that particular way.
Some priggish little clerk will say, "I have reason to congratulate
myself that I am a civilised person, and not so bloodthirsty as the Mad
Mullah." Somebody ought to say to him, "A really good man would be less
bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not because
you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal less of a
man. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare your enemy,
but because you would run away from him." Or again, some Puritan with a
sullen type of piety would say, "I have reason to congratulate myself
that I do not worship graven images like the old heathen Greeks." And
again somebody ought to say to him, "The best religion may not worship
graven images, because it may see beyond them. But if you do not worship
graven images, it is only because you are mentally and morally quite
incapable of graving them. True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry.
But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship a
lump of stone."

Mr. F. C. Gould, the brilliant and felicitous caricaturist, recently
delivered a most interesting speech upon the nature and atmosphere of
our modern English caricature. I think there is really very little to
congratulate oneself about in the condition of English caricature. There
are few causes for pride; probably the greatest cause for pride is Mr.
F. C. Gould. But Mr. F. C. Gould, forbidden by modesty to adduce this
excellent ground for optimism, fell back upon saying a thing which is
said by numbers of other people, but has not perhaps been said lately
with the full authority of an eminent cartoonist. He said that he
thought "that they might congratulate themselves that the style of
caricature which found acceptation nowadays was very different from the
lampoon of the old days." Continuing, he said, according to the
newspaper report, "On looking back to the political lampoons of
Rowlandson's and Gilray's time they would find them coarse and brutal.
In some countries abroad still, 'even in America,' the method of
political caricature was of the bludgeon kind. The fact was we had
passed the bludgeon stage. If they were brutal in attacking a man, even
for political reasons, they roused sympathy for the man who was
attacked. What they had to do was to rub in the point they wanted to
emphasise as gently as they could." (Laughter and applause.)

Anybody reading these words, and anybody who heard them, will certainly
feel that there is in them a great deal of truth, as well as a great
deal of geniality. But along with that truth and with that geniality
there is a streak of that erroneous type of optimism which is founded on
the fallacy of which I have spoken above. Before we congratulate
ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society,
we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we
without the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we without
the fault because we have the opposite fault? It is a good thing
assuredly, to be innocent of any excess; but let us be sure that we are
not innocent of excess merely by being guilty of defect. Is it really
true that our English political satire is so moderate because it is so
magnanimous, so forgiving, so saintly? Is it penetrated through and
through with a mystical charity, with a psychological tenderness? Do we
spare the feelings of the Cabinet Minister because we pierce through all
his apparent crimes and follies down to the dark virtues of which his
own soul is unaware? Do we temper the wind to the Leader of the
Opposition because in our all-embracing heart we pity and cherish the
struggling spirit of the Leader of the Opposition? Briefly, have we left
off being brutal because we are too grand and generous to be brutal? Is
it really true that we are _better_ than brutality? Is it really true
that we have _passed_ the bludgeon stage?

I fear that there is, to say the least of it, another side to the
matter. Is it not only too probable that the mildness of our political
satire, when compared with the political satire of our fathers, arises
simply from the profound unreality of our current politics? Rowlandson
and Gilray did not fight merely because they were naturally pothouse
pugilists; they fought because they had something to fight about. It is
easy enough to be refined about things that do not matter; but men
kicked and plunged a little in that portentous wrestle in which swung to
and fro, alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, the
independence of Ireland, the independence of France. If we wish for a
proof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from mere
brutality, the proof is easy. The proof is that in that struggle no
personalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities.
None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by nature
polished and sensitive. Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and good
manners of a woman: nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson
"brutal." But when he was touched upon the national matter, there sprang
out of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to "Kill! kill!
kill the d----d Frenchmen." It would be as easy to take examples on the
other side. Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the same type, not only
elegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously tender and
humanitarian. But he was ready, he said, "to embrace Liberty upon a pile
of corpses." In Ireland there were even more instances. Robert Emmet was
only one famous example of a whole family of men at once sensitive and
savage. I think that Mr. F.C. Gould is altogether wrong in talking of
this political ferocity as if it were some sort of survival from ruder
conditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man. Cruelty is, perhaps, the
worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of
cruelty. But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant about
intellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance artists who mixed colours
exquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissance
princes who designed instruments of music also designed instruments of
torture. Barbarity, malignity, the desire to hurt men, are the evil
things generated in atmospheres of intense reality when great nations or
great causes are at war. We may, perhaps, be glad that we have not got
them: but it is somewhat dangerous to be proud that we have not got
them. Perhaps we are hardly great enough to have them. Perhaps some
great virtues have to be generated, as in men like Nelson or Emmet,
before we can have these vices at all, even as temptations. I, for one,
believe that if our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not
because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not
big enough to hate. I do not think we have passed the bludgeon stage. I
believe we have not come to the bludgeon stage. We must be better,
braver, and purer men than we are before we come to the bludgeon stage.

Let us then, by all means, be proud of the virtues that we have not got;
but let us not be too arrogant about the virtues that we cannot help
having. It may be that a man living on a desert island has a right to
congratulate himself upon the fact that he can meditate at his ease. But
he must not congratulate himself on the fact that he is on a desert
island, and at the same time congratulate himself on the self-restraint
he shows in not going to a ball every night. Similarly our England may
have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are
very quiet, amicable, and humdrum. But she must not congratulate herself
upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the self-restraint she
shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into rags. Between two
English Privy Councillors polite language is a mark of civilisation, but
really not a mark of magnanimity.

Allied to this question is the kindred question on which we so often
hear an innocent British boast--the fact that our statesmen are
privately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit on
opposite sides of the House. Here, again, it is as well to have no
illusions. Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity or
insane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve and
to love him from twelve to three. If our social relations are more
peaceful than those of France or America or the England of a hundred
years ago, it is simply because our politics are more peaceful; not
improbably because our politics are more fictitious. If our statesmen
agree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agree
more in public. And the reason they agree so much in both cases is
really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining
life is the real life. Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but
it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both
exclusive.

       *       *       *       *       *




PATRIOTISM AND SPORT.


I notice that some papers, especially papers that call themselves
patriotic, have fallen into quite a panic over the fact that we have
been twice beaten in the world of sport, that a Frenchman has beaten us
at golf, and that Belgians have beaten us at rowing. I suppose that the
incidents are important to any people who ever believed in the
self-satisfied English legend on this subject. I suppose that there are
men who vaguely believe that we could never be beaten by a Frenchman,
despite the fact that we have often been beaten by Frenchmen, and once
by a Frenchwoman. In the old pictures in _Punch_ you will find a
recurring piece of satire. The English caricaturists always assumed that
a Frenchman could not ride to hounds or enjoy English hunting. It did
not seem to occur to them that all the people who founded English
hunting were Frenchmen. All the Kings and nobles who originally rode to
hounds spoke French. Large numbers of those Englishmen who still ride to
hounds have French names. I suppose that the thing is important to any
one who is ignorant of such evident matters as these. I suppose that if
a man has ever believed that we English have some sacred and separate
right to be athletic, such reverses do appear quite enormous and
shocking. They feel as if, while the proper sun was rising in the east,
some other and unexpected sun had begun to rise in the north-north-west
by north. For the benefit, the moral and intellectual benefit of such
people, it may be worth while to point out that the Anglo-Saxon has in
these cases been defeated precisely by those competitors whom he has
always regarded as being out of the running; by Latins, and by Latins of
the most easy and unstrenuous type; not only by Frenchman, but by
Belgians. All this, I say, is worth telling to any intelligent person
who believes in the haughty theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority. But,
then, no intelligent person does believe in the haughty theory of
Anglo-Saxon superiority. No quite genuine Englishman ever did believe in
it. And the genuine Englishman these defeats will in no respect dismay.

The genuine English patriot will know that the strength of England has
never depended upon any of these things; that the glory of England has
never had anything to do with them, except in the opinion of a large
section of the rich and a loose section of the poor which copies the
idleness of the rich. These people will, of course, think too much of
our failure, just as they thought too much of our success. The typical
Jingoes who have admired their countrymen too much for being conquerors
will, doubtless, despise their countrymen too much for being conquered.
But the Englishman with any feeling for England will know that athletic
failures do not prove that England is weak, any more than athletic
successes proved that England was strong. The truth is that athletics,
like all other things, especially modern, are insanely individualistic.
The Englishmen who win sporting prizes are exceptional among Englishmen,
for the simple reason that they are exceptional even among men. English
athletes represent England just about as much as Mr. Barnum's freaks
represent America. There are so few of such people in the whole world
that it is almost a toss-up whether they are found in this or that
country.

If any one wants a simple proof of this, it is easy to find. When the
great English athletes are not exceptional Englishmen they are generally
not Englishmen at all. Nay, they are often representatives of races of
which the average tone is specially incompatible with athletics. For
instance, the English are supposed to rule the natives of India in
virtue of their superior hardiness, superior activity, superior health
of body and mind. The Hindus are supposed to be our subjects because
they are less fond of action, less fond of openness and the open air. In
a word, less fond of cricket. And, substantially, this is probably true,
that the Indians are less fond of cricket. All the same, if you ask
among Englishmen for the very best cricket-player, you will find that he
is an Indian. Or, to take another case: it is, broadly speaking, true
that the Jews are, as a race, pacific, intellectual, indifferent to war,
like the Indians, or, perhaps, contemptuous of war, like the Chinese:
nevertheless, of the very good prize-fighters, one or two have been
Jews.

This is one of the strongest instances of the particular kind of evil
that arises from our English form of the worship of athletics. It
concentrates too much upon the success of individuals. It began, quite
naturally and rightly, with wanting England to win. The second stage was
that it wanted some Englishmen to win. The third stage was (in the
ecstasy and agony of some special competition) that it wanted one
particular Englishman to win. And the fourth stage was that when he had
won, it discovered that he was not even an Englishman.

This is one of the points, I think, on which something might really be
said for Lord Roberts and his rather vague ideas which vary between
rifle clubs and conscription. Whatever may be the advantages or
disadvantages otherwise of the idea, it is at least an idea of procuring
equality and a sort of average in the athletic capacity of the people;
it might conceivably act as a corrective to our mere tendency to see
ourselves in certain exceptional athletes. As it is, there are millions
of Englishmen who really think that they are a muscular race because
C.B. Fry is an Englishman. And there are many of them who think vaguely
that athletics must belong to England because Ranjitsinhji is an Indian.

But the real historic strength of England, physical and moral, has never
had anything to do with this athletic specialism; it has been rather
hindered by it. Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on
Eton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark, for the
English contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very much more
than is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank and file in
an almost desperate situation. The Battle of Waterloo was won by the
stubbornness of the common soldier--that is to say, it was won by the
man who had never been to Eton. It was absurd to say that Waterloo was
won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said that
Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very
clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that was
strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a
nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was
won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of
athletic instincts and habits.

It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows
that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation
when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few
experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely
looking on. Suppose that whenever we heard of walking in England it
always meant walking forty-five miles a day without fatigue. We should
be perfectly certain that only a few men were walking at all, and that
all the other British subjects were being wheeled about in Bath-chairs.
But if when we hear of walking it means slow walking, painful walking,
and frequent fatigue, then we know that the mass of the nation still is
walking. We know that England is still literally on its feet.

The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of
athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of the
tournament being a healthy _mêlée_ into which any ordinary man would
rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded
tilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no
ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. If
Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket was
probably much more careless then than it is now. As long as the game was
a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every
one wants to look at it. When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo:
when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein.

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticism
among average Englishmen. It cannot be re-created by cricket, or by
conscription, or by any artificial means. It was a thing of the soul. It
came out of laughter, religion, and the spirit of the place. But it was
like the modern French duel in this--that it might happen to anybody. If
I were a French journalist it might really happen that Monsieur
Clemenceau might challenge me to meet him with pistols. But I do not
think that it is at all likely that Mr. C. B. Fry will ever challenge me
to meet him with cricket-bats.




AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES.

A little while ago I fell out of England into the town of Paris. If a
man fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that it
was the capital of a great nation. If, however, he fell (perhaps off
some other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he would
not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate,
he would not know that the nation was so great as it is. This would be
so even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not read our
alphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary education in
that planet has gone to rather unsuspected lengths. But it is true that
a great part of the distinctive quality which separates Paris from
London may be even seen in the names. Real democrats always insist that
England is an aristocratic country. Real aristocrats always insist (for
some mysterious reason) that it is a democratic country. But if any one
has any real doubt about the matter let him consider simply the names of
the streets. Nearly all the streets out of the Strand, for instance, are
named after the first name, second name, third name, fourth, fifth, and
sixth names of some particular noble family; after their relations,
connections, or places of residence--Arundel Street, Norfolk Street,
Villiers Street, Bedford Street, Southampton Street, and any number of
others. The names are varied, so as to introduce the same family under
all sorts of different surnames. Thus we have Arundel Street and also
Norfolk Street; thus we have Buckingham Street and also Villiers Street.
To say that this is not aristocracy is simply intellectual impudence. I
am an ordinary citizen, and my name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton; and I
confess that if I found three streets in a row in the Strand, the first
called Gilbert Street, the second Keith Street, and the third Chesterton
Street, I should consider that I had become a somewhat more important
person in the commonwealth than was altogether good for its health. If
Frenchmen ran London (which God forbid!), they would think it quite as
ludicrous that those streets should be named after the Duke of
Buckingham as that they should be named after me. They are streets out
of one of the main thoroughfares of London. If French methods were
adopted, one of them would be called Shakspere Street, another Cromwell
Street, another Wordsworth Street; there would be statues of each of
these persons at the end of each of these streets, and any streets left
over would be named after the date on which the Reform Bill was passed
or the Penny Postage established.

Suppose a man tried to find people in London by the names of the places.
It would make a fine farce, illustrating our illogicality. Our hero
having once realised that Buckingham Street was named after the
Buckingham family, would naturally walk into Buckingham Palace in search
of the Duke of Buckingham. To his astonishment he would meet somebody
quite different. His simple lunar logic would lead him to suppose that
if he wanted the Duke of Marlborough (which seems unlikely) he would
find him at Marlborough House. He would find the Prince of Wales. When
at last he understood that the Marlboroughs live at Blenheim, named
after the great Marlborough's victory, he would, no doubt, go there. But
he would again find himself in error if, acting upon this principle, he
tried to find the Duke of Wellington, and told the cabman to drive to
Waterloo. I wonder that no one has written a wild romance about the
adventures of such an alien, seeking the great English aristocrats, and
only guided by the names; looking for the Duke of Bedford in the town of
that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke of Norfolk in Norfolk. He
might sail for Wellington in New Zealand to find the ancient seat of the
Wellingtons. The last scene might show him trying to learn Welsh in
order to converse with the Prince of Wales.

But even if the imaginary traveller knew no alphabet of this earth at
all, I think it would still be possible to suppose him seeing a
difference between London and Paris, and, upon the whole, the real
difference. He would not be able to read the words "Quai Voltaire;" but
he would see the sneering statue and the hard, straight roads; without
having heard of Voltaire he would understand that the city was
Voltairean. He would not know that Fleet Street was named after the
Fleet Prison. But the same national spirit which kept the Fleet Prison
closed and narrow still keeps Fleet Street closed and narrow. Or, if you
will, you may call Fleet Street cosy, and the Fleet Prison cosy. I think
I could be more comfortable in the Fleet Prison, in an English way of
comfort, than just under the statue of Voltaire. I think that the man
from the moon would know France without knowing French; I think that he
would know England without having heard the word. For in the last resort
all men talk by signs. To talk by statues is to talk by signs; to talk
by cities is to talk by signs. Pillars, palaces, cathedrals, temples,
pyramids, are an enormous dumb alphabet: as if some giant held up his
fingers of stone. The most important things at the last are always said
by signs, even if, like the Cross on St. Paul's, they are signs in
heaven. If men do not understand signs, they will never understand
words.

For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of
education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the
chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object
of education is to unlearn things. The chief object of education is to
unlearn all the weariness and wickedness of the world and to get back
into that state of exhilaration we all instinctively celebrate when we
write by preference of children and of boys. If I were an examiner
appointed to examine all examiners (which does not at present appear
probable), I would not only ask the teachers how much knowledge they had
imparted; I would ask them how much splendid and scornful ignorance they
had erected, like some royal tower in arms. But, in any case, I would
insist that people should have so much simplicity as would enable them
to see things suddenly and to see things as they are. I do not care so
much whether they can read the names over the shops. I do care very much
whether they can read the shops. I do not feel deeply troubled as to
whether they can tell where London is on the map so long as they can
tell where Brixton is on the way home. I do not even mind whether they
can put two and two together in the mathematical sense; I am content if
they can put two and two together in the metaphorical sense. But all
this longer statement of an obvious view comes back to the metaphor I
have employed. I do not care a dump whether they know the alphabet, so
long as they know the dumb alphabet.

Unfortunately, I have noticed in many aspects of our popular education
that this is not done at all. One teaches our London children to see
London with abrupt and simple eyes. And London is far more difficult to
see properly than any other place. London is a riddle. Paris is an
explanation. The education of the Parisian child is something
corresponding to the clear avenues and the exact squares of Paris. When
the Parisian boy has done learning about the French reason and the
Roman order he can go out and see the thing repeated in the shapes of
many shining public places, in the angles of many streets. But when the
English boy goes out, after learning about a vague progress and
idealism, he cannot see it anywhere. He cannot see anything anywhere,
except Sapolio and the _Daily Mail_. We must either alter London to suit
the ideals of our education, or else alter our education to suit the
great beauty of London.




FRENCH AND ENGLISH


It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being
international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international.
Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we
must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves
the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction
that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they
belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace
after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the
destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like
the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each
other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each
other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a
curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man
really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he
will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something
in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The Englishman who has a
fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admires
France will remain obstinately English. This is to be particularly
noticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is one
of the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are all
on the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed. One might
almost say that their vices are the flower of their virtues.

Thus their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of
dragging all things into the light. The avarice of their peasants means
the independence of their peasants. What the English call their rudeness
in the streets is a phase of their social equality. The worried look of
their women is connected with the responsibility of their women; and a
certain unconscious brutality of hurry and gesture in the men is related
to their inexhaustible and extraordinary military courage. Of all
countries, therefore, France is the worst country for a superficial fool
to admire. Let a fool hate France: if the fool loves it he will soon be
a knave. He will certainly admire it, not only for the things that are
not creditable, but actually for the things that are not there. He will
admire the grace and indolence of the most industrious people in the
world. He will admire the romance and fantasy of the most determinedly
respectable and commonplace people in the world. This mistake the
Englishman will make if he admires France too hastily; but the mistake
that he makes about France will be slight compared with the mistake that
he makes about himself. An Englishman who professes really to like
French realistic novels, really to be at home in a French modern
theatre, really to experience no shock on first seeing the savage French
caricatures, is making a mistake very dangerous for his own sincerity.
He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping where he
has not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying to
taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree. He is trying to
pluck the exquisite fruit of French cynicism, when he has never tilled
the rude but rich soil of French virtue.

The thing can only be made clear to Englishmen by turning it round.
Suppose a Frenchman came out of democratic France to live in England,
where the shadow of the great houses still falls everywhere, and where
even freedom was, in its origin, aristocratic. If the Frenchman saw our
aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he
set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know
that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive
little gnat. He would be imitating English aristocracy; he would be
imitating the English vice. But he would not even understand the vice he
plagiarised: especially he would not understand that the vice is partly
a virtue. He would not understand those elements in the English which
balance snobbishness and make it human: the great kindness of the
English, their hospitality, their unconscious poetry, their sentimental
conservatism, which really admires the gentry. The French Royalist sees
that the English like their King. But he does not grasp that while it is
base to worship a King, it is almost noble to worship a powerless King.
The impotence of the Hanoverian Sovereigns has raised the English loyal
subject almost to the chivalry and dignity of a Jacobite. The Frenchman
sees that the English servant is respectful: he does not realise that he
is also disrespectful; that there is an English legend of the humorous
and faithful servant, who is as much a personality as his master; the
Caleb Balderstone, the Sam Weller. He sees that the English do admire a
nobleman; he does not allow for the fact that they admire a nobleman
most when he does not behave like one. They like a noble to be
unconscious and amiable: the slave may be humble, but the master must
not be proud. The master is Life, as they would like to enjoy it; and
among the joys they desire in him there is none which they desire more
sincerely than that of generosity, of throwing money about among
mankind, or, to use the noble mediæval word, largesse--the joy of
largeness. That is why a cabman tells you are no gentleman if you
give him his correct fare. Not only his pocket, but his soul is hurt.
You have wounded his ideal. You have defaced his vision of the perfect
aristocrat. All this is really very subtle and elusive; it is very
difficult to separate what is mere slavishness from what is a sort of
vicarious nobility in the English love of a lord. And no Frenchman
could easily grasp it at all. He would think it was mere slavishness;
and if he liked it, he would be a slave. So every Englishman must (at
first) feel French candour to be mere brutality. And if he likes it, he
is a brute. These national merits must not be understood so easily. It
requires long years of plenitude and quiet, the slow growth of great
parks, the seasoning of oaken beams, the dark enrichment of red wine in
cellars and in inns, all the leisure and the life of England through
many centuries, to produce at last the generous and genial fruit of
English snobbishness. And it requires battery and barricade, songs in
the streets, and ragged men dead for an idea, to produce and justify the
terrible flower of French indecency.

When I was in Paris a short time ago, I went with an English friend of
mine to an extremely brilliant and rapid succession of French plays,
each occupying about twenty minutes. They were all astonishingly
effective; but there was one of them which was so effective that my
friend and I fought about it outside, and had almost to be separated by
the police. It was intended to indicate how men really behaved in a
wreck or naval disaster, how they break down, how they scream, how they
fight each other without object and in a mere hatred of everything. And
then there was added, with all that horrible irony which Voltaire began,
a scene in which a great statesman made a speech over their bodies,
saying that they were all heroes and had died in a fraternal embrace. My
friend and I came out of this theatre, and as he had lived long in
Paris, he said, like a Frenchman: "What admirable artistic arrangement!
Is it not exquisite?" "No," I replied, assuming as far as possible the
traditional attitude of John Bull in the pictures in _Punch_--"No, it is
not exquisite. Perhaps it is unmeaning; if it is unmeaning I do not
mind. But if it has a meaning I know what the meaning is; it is that
under all their pageant of chivalry men are not only beasts, but even
hunted beasts. I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanity
talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human
soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I know that 'Cyrano de
Bergerac' (where the actors talked even quicker) was meant to encourage
man. And I know that this was meant to discourage him." "These
sentimental and moral views of art," began my friend, but I broke into
his words as a light broke into my mind. "Let me say to you," I said,
"what Jaurès said to Liebknecht at the Socialist Conference: 'You have
not died on the barricades'. You are an Englishman, as I am, and you
ought to be as amiable as I am. These people have some right to be
terrible in art, for they have been terrible in politics. They may
endure mock tortures on the stage; they have seen real tortures in the
streets. They have been hurt for the idea of Democracy. They have been
hurt for the idea of Catholicism. It is not so utterly unnatural to them
that they should be hurt for the idea of literature. But, by blazes, it
is altogether unnatural to me! And the worst thing of all is that I, who
am an Englishman, loving comfort, should find comfort in such things as
this. The French do not seek comfort here, but rather unrest. This
restless people seeks to keep itself in a perpetual agony of the
revolutionary mood. Frenchmen, seeking revolution, may find the
humiliation of humanity inspiring. But God forbid that two
pleasure-seeking Englishmen should ever find it pleasant!"




THE ZOLA CONTROVERSY


The difference between two great nations can be illustrated by the
coincidence that at this moment both France and England are engaged in
discussing the memorial of a literary man. France is considering the
celebration of the late Zola, England is considering that of the
recently deceased Shakspere. There is some national significance, it may
be, in the time that has elapsed. Some will find impatience and
indelicacy in this early attack on Zola or deification of him; but the
nation which has sat still for three hundred years after Shakspere's
funeral may be considered, perhaps, to have carried delicacy too far.
But much deeper things are involved than the mere matter of time. The
point of the contrast is that the French are discussing whether there
shall be any monument, while the English are discussing only what the
monument shall be. In other words, the French are discussing a living
question, while we are discussing a dead one. Or rather, not a dead one,
but a settled one, which is quite a different thing.

When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather it is
immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of
Shakspere. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at
its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting. The French,
therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question. It is
still living as a question, because it is not yet solved. But Shakspere
is not a living question: he is a living answer.

For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much more
practical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission of
Zola to the Pantheon may be regarded as defining Zola's position. But
nobody could say that a statue of Shakspere, even fifty feet high, on
the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, could define Shakspere's position. It
only defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; it
is we who are unstable. The nearest approach to an English parallel to
the Zola case would be furnished if it were proposed to put some
savagely controversial and largely repulsive author among the ashes of
the greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed to
bury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be against
burying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (and
here I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest); and
second, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing space
for the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreign
interruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr.
Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kipling
has certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid and
cool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that Geoffrey
Chaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets'
Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr.
George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotous
statue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier under
some huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods.

As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has
its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be
said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in
erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German
monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badly
done. And there is the English monumental method, the great English way
with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A statue may
be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always dignified. For my
part, I feel there is something national, something wholesomely
symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere. There is, of
course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where it stands
shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There is surely
something modest and manly about not attempting to express our greatest
poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We honour Shakspere
as the Jews honour God--by not daring to make of him a graven image. Our
sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers and
philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is our
benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we triumph by
the very art in which we fail?

England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It is
especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of
amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable
or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a
careless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academic
monument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He had
small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been
commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothing
clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was
nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it. Those great schools and
Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his death;
but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say of him
what we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from nowhere
and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is out of
place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as it
would be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens in
Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We
should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.

But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon when
he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he should go
to prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the nation
shall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument to Zola
they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The question is
one which will have to be settled in most European countries; but like
all such questions, it has come first to a head in France; because
France is the battlefield of Christendom. That question is, of course,
roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal licence on
certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy or an
aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn. Is
indecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is gay?
For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter. When a book or a
play strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that it is a
serious crime. If a man has written something vile, I am not comforted
by the explanation that he quite meant to do it. I know all the evils of
flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight of virtue. But
I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue and complains
bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not reassured, when ethics
are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave and
sincere as suicide. And I think there is an obvious fallacy in the
bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen's
"Ghosts" and the popularity of some such joke as "Dear Old Charlie."
Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popular
preference. The joke of "Dear Old Charlie" is passed--because it is a
joke. "Ghosts" are exorcised--because they are ghosts.

This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do
not worry myself much about Zola's immorality. The thing I cannot stand
is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the
tremendous text, "But if the light in your body be darkness, how great
is the darkness," it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto, Rabelais,
and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin,
sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, are
indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with a
convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best things in the
world: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere youth;
Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness of
mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola's mercy is
colder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is more bitter in the mouth than
injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us,
like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us
into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books
nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles,
and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola's truth answers
the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is
something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but which is
quite dead, even when it is discovered. Macaulay said that the Puritans
hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it
gave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was this
Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than the
Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man
actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it. Zola was worse than
a pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage sin: he
encouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to him lust
meant life.




OXFORD FROM WITHOUT


Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecuted
outlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how much
persecuted they were. For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made some
extremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect that
Oxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too much
merely plutocratic playgrounds. One would have thought that an Anglican
Bishop might be allowed to know something about the English University
system, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (as
I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be
restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the
_Outlook_ feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has
such simple sublimity that I must quote it--

"Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of the
older Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle. In the first
place, the rich men there are not idle. Some of the rich men are, and so
are some of the poor men. On the whole, the sons of noble and wealthy
families keep up the best traditions of academic life."

So far this seems all very nice. It is a part of the universal principle
on which Englishmen have acted in recent years. As you will not try to
make the best people the most powerful people, persuade yourselves that
the most powerful people are the best people. Mad Frenchmen and Irishmen
try to realise the ideal. To you belongs the nobler (and much easier)
task of idealising the real. First give your Universities entirely into
the power of the rich; then let the rich start traditions; and then
congratulate yourselves on the fact that the sons of the rich keep up
these traditions. All that is quite simple and jolly. But then this
critic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne of the _Outlook_, goes
on in a way that is really perplexing. "It is distinctly advantageous,"
he says, "that rich and poor--_i. e._, young men with a smooth path in
life before them, and those who have to hew out a road for
themselves--should be brought into association. Each class learns a
great deal from the other. On the one side, social conceit and
exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition amongst all
classes; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are rubbed
away." Even this I might have swallowed. But the paragraph concludes
with this extraordinary sentence: "We get the net result in such careers
as those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith."

Those three names lay my intellect prostrate. The rest of the argument I
understand quite well. The social exclusiveness of aristocrats at Oxford
and Cambridge gives way before the free spirit of competition amongst
all classes. That is to say, there is at Oxford so hot and keen a
struggle, consisting of coal-heavers, London clerks, gypsies, navvies,
drapers' assistants, grocers' assistants--in short, all the classes that
make up the bulk of England--there is such a fierce competition at
Oxford among all these people that in its presence aristocratic
exclusiveness gives way. That is all quite clear. I am not quite sure
about the facts, but I quite understand the argument. But then, having
been called upon to contemplate this bracing picture of a boisterous
turmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked to accept as
example of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present Chancellor of
the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the mental process?
Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men whose angularities
have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom Oxford immediately
deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His Oxford reputation does
not seem to bear out either account of him. To regard Lord Milner as a
typical product of Oxford would surely be unfair. It would be to deprive
the educational tradition of Germany of one of its most typical
products. English aristocrats have their faults, but they are not at all
like Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was meant to prove, whether he was a
rich man who lost his exclusiveness, or a poor man who lost his angles,
I am utterly unable to conceive.

There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps be
mentioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent persons
is, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word is
understood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There are
no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can talk
about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what the
modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the Earl in
the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert, whose
angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by an old
English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added--


  "A third adorer had the girl,
    A man of lowly station;
   A miserable grovelling Earl
    Besought her approbation."


Perhaps, indeed, some allusion to our University system, and to the
universal clash in it of all the classes of the community, may be found
in the verse a little farther on, which says--


  "He'd had, it happily befell,
    A decent education;
  His views would have befitted well
    A far superior station."


Possibly there was as simple a chasm between Lord Curzon and Lord
Milner. But I am afraid that the chasm will become almost imperceptible,
a microscopic crack, if we compare it with the chasm that separates
either or both of them from the people of this country.

Of course the truth is exactly as the Bishop of Birmingham put it. I am
sure that he did not put it in any unkindly or contemptuous spirit
towards those old English seats of learning, which whether they are or
are not seats of learning, are, at any rate, old and English, and those
are two very good things to be. The Old English University is a
playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a bad
thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if there
is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing class.
I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by men who
do not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by a rich
section of the community, it is certainly very important that that
section should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the sensitive man
on the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, "Playground of the rich," I
can suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford perhaps with
more precision. It is a place for humanising those who might otherwise
be tyrants, or even experts.

To pretend that the aristocrat meets all classes at Oxford is too
ludicrous to be worth discussion. But it may be true that he meets more
different kinds of men than he would meet under a strictly aristocratic
_regime_ of private tutors and small schools. It all comes back to the
fact that the English, if they were resolved to have an aristocracy,
were at least resolved to have a good-natured aristocracy. And it is due
to them to say that almost alone among the peoples of the world, they
have succeeded in getting one. One could almost tolerate the thing, if
it were not for the praise of it. One might endure Oxford, but not the
_Outlook_.

When the poor man at Oxford loses his angles (which means, I suppose,
his independence), he may perhaps, even if his poverty is of that highly
relative type possible at Oxford, gain a certain amount of worldly
advantage from the surrender of those angles. I must confess, however,
that I can imagine nothing nastier than to lose one's angles. It seems
to me that a desire to retain some angles about one's person is a desire
common to all those human beings who do not set their ultimate hopes
upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply our shapes. I
cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and exquisite vileness
which is poisoning and weakening our country than such a phrase as this,
about the desirability of rubbing down the angularities of poor men.
Reduced to permanent and practical human speech, it means nothing
whatever except the corrupting of that first human sense of justice
which is the critic of all human institutions.

It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we
should approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues and
the deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son does
not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a good
son cheerily assert that she is "all right." There are many good
arguments for leaving the two historic Universities exactly as they are.
There are many good arguments for smashing them or altering them
entirely. But in either case the plain truth told by the Bishop of
Birmingham remains. If these Universities were destroyed, they would not
be destroyed as Universities. If they are preserved, they will not be
preserved as Universities. They will be preserved strictly and literally
as playgrounds; places valued for their hours of leisure more than for
their hours of work. I do not say that this is unreasonable; as a matter
of private temperament I find it attractive. It is not only possible to
say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the
highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that
the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden;
heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one
can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can
treat everything as a joke--that may be, perhaps, the real end and final
holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard the
Universe as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially wrong to regard the
University as a lark. But the plain and present fact is that our upper
classes do regard the University as a lark, and do not regard it as a
University. It also happens very often that through some oversight they
neglect to provide themselves with that extreme degree of holiness which
I have postulated as a necessary preliminary to such indulgence in the
higher frivolity.

Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and at
ease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes in
some celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens of
Atlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picture
them as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually be
seen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets. And this never
was (as some silly Germans say) a worship of pride and scorn; mankind
never really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn for
scorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of the
spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their noblest
aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to be said
for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it is not
even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate indulgence in a
certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose; every Duchess is
(in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough's "Duchess of
Devonshire." She is only beautiful because, at the back of all, the
English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way, the lads at
Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in the depths of
its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is very human and
pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in
the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But if
aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all
visions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all your
happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is not
a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere
fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given the
luckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy enough, like the
writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils. Oh
what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love
it!




WOMAN


A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the
matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens. He
defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the
calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot
apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with
which such calculation has nothing at all to do. He knows it would be
cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same
table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at
different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the
question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying?
It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.

My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants,
etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I
do not desire to connect the two facts together. It seems fairly clear
that a man could not dine at a restaurant because he had just committed
suicide; and it would be extreme, perhaps, to suggest that he commits
suicide because he has just dined at a restaurant. But the two cases,
when put side by side, are enough to indicate the falsity and
poltroonery of this eternal modern argument from what is in fashion. The
question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is increasing; the
question is whether we are increasing it. I dine very often in
restaurants because the nature of my trade makes it convenient: but if I
thought that by dining in restaurants I was working for the creation of
communal meals, I would never enter a restaurant again; I would carry
bread and cheese in my pocket or eat chocolate out of automatic
machines. For the personal element in some things is sacred. I heard Mr.
Will Crooks put it perfectly the other day: "The most sacred thing is to
be able to shut your own door."

My correspondent says, "Would not our women be spared the drudgery of
cooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for higher
culture?" The first thing that occurs to me to say about this is very
simple, and is, I imagine, a part of all our experience. If my
correspondent can find any way of preventing women from worrying, he
will indeed be a remarkable man. I think the matter is a much deeper
one. First of all, my correspondent overlooks a distinction which is
elementary in our human nature. Theoretically, I suppose, every one would
like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would always
like to be freed from worrying occupations. I should very much like (as
far as my feelings at the moment go) to be free from the consuming
nuisance of writing this article. But it does not follow that I should
like to be free from the consuming nuisance of being a journalist.
Because we are worried about a thing, it does not follow that we are not
interested in it. The truth is the other way. If we are not interested,
why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried about housekeeping,
but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are still
more worried about their husbands and their children. And I suppose if
we strangled the children and poleaxed the husbands it would leave women
free for higher culture. That is, it would leave them free to begin to
worry about that. For women would worry about higher culture as much as
they worry about everything else.

I believe this way of talking about women and their higher culture is
almost entirely a growth of the classes which (unlike the journalistic
class to which I belong) have always a reasonable amount of money. One
odd thing I specially notice. Those who write like this seem entirely to
forget the existence of the working and wage-earning classes. They say
eternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always a
drudge. And what, in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man?
These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister.
They are always talking about man going forth to wield power, to carve
his own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and to
be obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are not
drudges; but, then, neither are Duchesses. The Ladies and Gentlemen of
the Smart Set are quite free for the higher culture, which consists
chiefly of motoring and Bridge. But the ordinary man who typifies and
constitutes the millions that make up our civilisation is no more free
for the higher culture than his wife is.

Indeed, he is not so free. Of the two sexes the woman is in the more
powerful position. For the average woman is at the head of something
with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders
and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick,
and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull
figure, and do nothing else. The woman's world is a small one, perhaps,
but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she
deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does this to
the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid the
vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all, as I said
in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small
degree creative and individual. She can put the flowers or the furniture
in fancy arrangements of her own. I fear the bricklayer cannot put the
bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and
others. If the woman is only putting a patch into a carpet, she can
choose the thing with regard to colour. I fear it would not do for the
office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his stamps with a view to
colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the sixpenny to the crude scarlet
of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may not always cook artistically;
still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and
imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is
not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into
the figures in a ledger.

The trouble is that the real question I raised is not discussed. It is
argued as a problem in pennies, not as a problem in people. It is not
the proposals of these reformers that I feel to be false so much as
their temper and their arguments. I am not nearly so certain that
communal kitchens are wrong as I am that the defenders of communal
kitchens are wrong. Of course, for one thing, there is a vast difference
between the communal kitchens of which I spoke and the communal meal
(_monstrum horrendum, informe_) which the darker and wilder mind of my
correspondent diabolically calls up. But in both the trouble is that
their defenders will not defend them humanly as human institutions. They
will not interest themselves in the staring psychological fact that
there are some things that a man or a woman, as the case may be, wishes
to do for himself or herself. He or she must do it inventively,
creatively, artistically, individually--in a word, badly. Choosing your
wife (say) is one of these things. Is choosing your husband's dinner one
of these things? That is the whole question: it is never asked.

And then the higher culture. I know that culture. I would not set any
man free for it if I could help it. The effect of it on the rich men who
are free for it is so horrible that it is worse than any of the other
amusements of the millionaire--worse than gambling, worse even than
philanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greater
than the greatest poet of England. It means losing every democratic
sympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about sport, or about
beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about patriotism, or
about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to talk about. It
means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do. It
means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy indecency. Its
disciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is a
grave-digger's spade. The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent,
unkind, without honesty and without ease. In short, it is "high." That
abominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it.

No; if you were setting women free for something else, I might be more
melted. If you can assure me, privately and gravely, that you are
setting women free to dance on the mountains like mænads, or to worship
some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request. If you are
quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking,
will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree
that the occupation is at least human and is more or less entertaining.
Women have been set free to be Bacchantes; they have been set free to be
Virgin Martyrs; they have been set free to be Witches. Do not ask them
now to sink so low as the higher culture.

I have my own little notions of the possible emancipation of women; but
I suppose I should not be taken very seriously if I propounded them. I
should favour anything that would increase the present enormous
authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The
average woman, as I have said, is a despot; the average man is a serf. I
am for any scheme that any one can suggest that will make the average
woman more of a despot. So far from wishing her to get her cooked meals
from outside, I should like her to cook more wildly and at her own will
than she does. So far from getting always the same meals from the same
place, let her invent, if she likes, a new dish every day of her life.
Let woman be more of a maker, not less. We are right to talk about
"Woman;" only blackguards talk about women. Yet all men talk about men,
and that is the whole difference. Men represent the deliberative and
democratic element in life. Woman represents the despotic.




THE MODERN MARTYR


The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains
to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most
modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself up and
then complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks retard
the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone can
advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have the
smallest effect one way or the other.

The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration of
unpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail is
largely a mistake. It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular value
of martyrdom. People look at human history and see that it has often
happened that persecutions have not only advertised but even advanced a
persecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and dreadful
witness of dying men. The paradox was pictorially expressed in Christian
art, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the very tools
that had slain them. And because his martyrdom is thus a power to the
martyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself slightly
uncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously popular. This
element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the Suffragettes; it
is true of many movements I respect and some that I agree with. It was
true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who had pieces of their
furniture sold up. The assumption is that if you show your ordinary
sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being a nuisance to
yourself as well as to other people, you will have the strength of the
great saints who passed through the fire. Any one who can be hustled in
a hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five days, has achieved
what was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the Christian art of the
future. Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding a policeman in each
hand--the instruments of her martyrdom. The Passive Resister will be
shown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn from him by
tyrannical auctioneers.

But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom. The truth is that
the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only
happens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the modern
enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he holds only
proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted. No one doubts
that the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity than he
does for his teapot. No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a vote more
than she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair. All our ordinary
intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember during the
Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen's Hall, and
giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it one of the
incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman
amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there is
something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to give
his time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture of
Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their
opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of
opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It is
that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite specially
strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can only
be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all the
current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man is
seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive,
it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses of
his mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiled
and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces,
the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental
honesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of
pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strength
of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quite
positive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinary
as conjuring. The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a man
happy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make me
happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the
street?" The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not
prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as to
suppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, strongly
suggest, was that something had entered human psychology which was
stronger than strong pain. If a young girl, scourged and bleeding to
death, saw nothing but a crown descending on her from God, the first
mental step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that she was
certainly feeding on something. But this particular point of psychology
does not arise at all in the modern cases of mere public discomfort or
inconvenience. The causes of Miss Pankhurst's cheerfulness require no
mystical explanations. If she were being burned alive as a witch, if she
then looked up in unmixed rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out of
heaven, then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive, was
frightfully impressive. It would not prove logically that she ought to
have the vote, or that anybody ought to have the vote. But it would
prove this: that there was, for some reason, a sacramental reality in
the vote, that the soul could take the vote and feed on it; that it was
in itself a positive and overpowering pleasure, capable of being pitted
against positive and overpowering pain.

I should advise modern agitators, therefore, to give up this particular
method: the method of making very big efforts to get a very small
punishment. It does not really go down at all; the punishment is too
small, and the efforts are too obvious. It has not any of the
effectiveness of the old savage martyrdom, because it does not leave the
victim absolutely alone with his cause, so that his cause alone can
support him. At the same time it has about it that element of the
pantomimic and the absurd, which was the cruellest part of the slaying
and the mocking of the real prophets. St. Peter was crucified upside
down as a huge inhuman joke; but his human seriousness survived the
inhuman joke, because, in whatever posture, he had died for his faith.
The modern martyr of the Pankhurst type courts the absurdity without
making the suffering strong enough to eclipse the absurdity. She is like
a St. Peter who should deliberately stand on his head for ten seconds
and then expect to be canonised for it.

Or, again, the matter might be put in this way. Modern martyrdoms fail
even as demonstrations, because they do not prove even that the martyrs
are completely serious. I think, as a fact, that the modern martyrs
generally are serious, perhaps a trifle too serious. But their martyrdom
does not prove it; and the public does not always believe it.
Undoubtedly, as a fact, Dr. Clifford is quite honourably indignant with
what he considers to be clericalism, but he does not prove it by having
his teapot sold; for a man might easily have his teapot sold as an
actress has her diamonds stolen--as a personal advertisement. As a
matter of fact, Miss Pankhurst is quite in earnest about votes for
women. But she does not prove it by being chucked out of meetings. A
person might be chucked out of meetings just as young men are chucked
out of music-halls--for fun. But no man has himself eaten by a lion as a
personal advertisement. No woman is broiled on a gridiron for fun. That
is where the testimony of St. Perpetua and St. Faith comes in. Doubtless
it is no fault of these enthusiasts that they are not subjected to the
old and searching penalties; very likely they would pass through them as
triumphantly as St. Agatha. I am simply advising them upon a point of
policy, things being as they are. And I say that the average man is not
impressed with their sacrifices simply because they are not and cannot
be more decisive than the sacrifices which the average man himself would
make for mere fun if he were drunk. Drunkards would interrupt meetings
and take the consequences. And as for selling a teapot, it is an act, I
imagine, in which any properly constituted drunkard would take a
positive pleasure. The advertisement is not good enough; it does not
tell. If I were really martyred for an opinion (which is more improbable
than words can say), it would certainly only be for one or two of my
most central and sacred opinions. I might, perhaps, be shot for England,
but certainly not for the British Empire. I might conceivably die for
political freedom, but I certainly wouldn't die for Free Trade. But as
for kicking up the particular kind of shindy that the Suffragettes are
kicking up, I would as soon do it for my shallowest opinion as for my
deepest one. It never could be anything worse than an inconvenience; it
never could be anything better than a spree. Hence the British public,
and especially the working classes, regard the whole demonstration with
fundamental indifference; for, while it is a demonstration that probably
is adopted from the most fanatical motives, it is a demonstration which
might be adopted from the most frivolous.




ON POLITICAL SECRECY


Generally, instinctively, in the absence of any special reason, humanity
hates the idea of anything being hidden--that is, it hates the idea of
anything being successfully hidden. Hide-and-seek is a popular pastime;
but it assumes the truth of the text, "Seek and ye shall find."
Ordinary mankind (gigantic and unconquerable in its power of joy) can
get a great deal of pleasure out of a game called "hide the thimble,"
but that is only because it is really a game of "see the thimble."
Suppose that at the end of such a game the thimble had not been found at
all; suppose its place was unknown for ever: the result on the players
would not be playful, it would be tragic. That thimble would hag-ride
all their dreams. They would all die in asylums. The pleasure is all in
the poignant moment of passing from not knowing to knowing. Mystery
stories are very popular, especially when sold at sixpence; but that is
because the author of a mystery story reveals. He is enjoyed not because
he creates mystery, but because he destroys mystery. Nobody would have
the courage to publish a detective-story which left the problem exactly
where it found it. That would rouse even the London public to
revolution. No one dare publish a detective-story that did not detect.

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human
wisdom does permit privacy. The first is the case I have mentioned--that
of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only
in order to explode and smash privacy. The author makes first a
fastidious secret of how the Bishop was murdered, only in order that he
may at last declare, as from a high tower, to the whole democracy the
great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. In that case,
ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest
preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life.
Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest
preparation for receiving the happy revelations of St. John.

This first sort of secrecy we may dismiss, for its whole ultimate object
is not to keep the secret, but to tell it. Then there is a second and
far more important class of things which humanity does agree to hide.
They are so important that they cannot possibly be discussed here. But
every one will know the kind of things I mean. In connection with these,
I wish to remark that though they are, in one sense, a secret, they are
also always a "sécret de Polichinelle." Upon sex and such matters we are
in a human freemasonry; the freemasonry is disciplined, but the
freemasonry is free. We are asked to be silent about these things, but
we are not asked to be ignorant about them. On the contrary, the
fundamental human argument is entirely the other way. It is the thing
most common to humanity that is most veiled by humanity. It is exactly
because we all know that it is there that we need not say that it is
there.

Then there is a third class of things on which the best civilisation
does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in
the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be
explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible--caprices, sudden
impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be
asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does
not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow or
quick, simply because he could not answer. A man must take his own road
through a wood, and make his own use of a holiday. And the reason is
this: not because he has a strong reason, but actually because he has a
weak reason; because he has a slight and fleeting feeling about the
matter which he could not explain to a policeman, which perhaps the very
appearance of a policeman out of the bushes might destroy. He must act
on the impulse, because the impulse is unimportant, and he may never
have the same impulse again. If you like to put it so he must act on the
impulse because the impulse is not worth a moment's thought. All these
fancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never proposed
to interfere with them.

Now, for the last fortnight the newspapers have been full of very varied
comments upon the problem of the secrecy of certain parts of our
political finance, and especially of the problem of the party funds.
Some papers have failed entirely to understand what the quarrel is
about. They have urged that Irish members and Labour members are also
under the shadow, or, as some have said, even more under it. The ground
of this frantic statement seems, when patiently considered, to be simply
this: that Irish and Labour members receive money for what they do. All
persons, as far as I know, on this earth receive money for what they do;
the only difference is that some people, like the Irish members, do it.

I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human being
capable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receive
money. The simple point is that, as we know that some money is given
rightly and some wrongly, an elementary common-sense leads us to look
with indifference at the money that is given in the middle of Ludgate
Circus, and to look with particular suspicion at the money which a man
will not give unless he is shut up in a box or a bathing-machine. In
short, it is too silly to suppose that anybody could ever have discussed
the desirability of funds. The only thing that even idiots could ever
have discussed is the concealment of funds. Therefore, the whole
question that we have to consider is whether the concealment of
political money-transactions, the purchase of peerages, the payment of
election expenses, is a kind of concealment that falls under any of the
three classes I have mentioned as those in which human custom and
instinct does permit us to conceal. I have suggested three kinds of
secrecy which are human and defensible. Can this institution be defended
by means of any of them?

Now the question is whether this political secrecy is of any of the
kinds that can be called legitimate. We have roughly divided legitimate
secrets into three classes. First comes the secret that is only kept in
order to be revealed, as in the detective stories; secondly, the secret
which is kept because everybody knows it, as in sex; and third, the
secret which is kept because it is too delicate and vague to be
explained at all, as in the choice of a country walk. Do any of these
broad human divisions cover such a case as that of secrecy of the
political and party finances? It would be absurd, and even delightfully
absurd, to pretend that any of them did. It would be a wild and charming
fancy to suggest that our politicians keep political secrets only that
they may make political revelations. A modern peer only pretends that he
has earned his peerage in order that he may more dramatically declare,
with a scream of scorn and joy, that he really bought it. The Baronet
pretends that he deserved his title only in order to make more exquisite
and startling the grand historical fact that he did not deserve it.
Surely this sounds improbable. Surely all our statesmen cannot be saving
themselves up for the excitement of a death-bed repentance. The writer
of detective tales makes a man a duke solely in order to blast him with
a charge of burglary. But surely the Prime Minister does not make a man
a duke solely in order to blast him with a charge of bribery. No; the
detective-tale theory of the secrecy of political funds must (with a
sigh) be given up.

Neither can we say that the thing is explained by that second case of
human secrecy which is so secret that it is hard to discuss it in
public. A decency is preserved about certain primary human matters
precisely because every one knows all about them. But the decency
touching contributions, purchases, and peerages is not kept up because
most ordinary men know what is happening; it is kept up precisely
because most ordinary men do not know what is happening. The ordinary
curtain of decorum covers normal proceedings. But no one will say that
being bribed is a normal proceeding.

And if we apply the third test to this problem of political secrecy, the
case is even clearer and even more funny. Surely no one will say that
the purchase of peerages and such things are kept secret because they
are so light and impulsive and unimportant that they must be matters of
individual fancy. A child sees a flower and for the first time feels
inclined to pick it. But surely no one will say that a brewer sees a
coronet and for the first time suddenly thinks that he would like to be
a peer. The child's impulse need not be explained to the police, for the
simple reason that it could not be explained to anybody. But does any
one believe that the laborious political ambitions of modern commercial
men ever have this airy and incommunicable character? A man lying on the
beach may throw stones into the sea without any particular reason. But
does any one believe that the brewer throws bags of gold into the party
funds without any particular reason? This theory of the secrecy of
political money must also be regretfully abandoned; and with it the two
other possible excuses as well. This secrecy is one which cannot be
justified as a sensational joke nor as a common human freemasonry, nor
as an indescribable personal whim. Strangely enough, indeed, it violates
all three conditions and classes at once. It is not hidden in order to
be revealed: it is hidden in order to be hidden. It is not kept secret
because it is a common secret of mankind, but because mankind must not
get hold of it. And it is not kept secret because it is too unimportant
to be told, but because it is much too important to bear telling. In
short, the thing we have is the real and perhaps rare political
phenomenon of an occult government. We have an exoteric and an esoteric
doctrine. England is really ruled by priestcraft, but not by priests. We
have in this country all that has ever been alleged against the evil
side of religion; the peculiar class with privileges, the sacred words
that are unpronounceable; the important things known only to the few. In
fact we lack nothing except the religion.

       *       *       *       *       *


EDWARD VII. AND SCOTLAND

I have received a serious, and to me, at any rate, an impressive
remonstrance from the Scottish Patriotic Association. It appears that I
recently referred to Edward VII. of Great Britain and Ireland, King,
Defender of the Faith, under the horrible description of the King of
England. The Scottish Patriotic Association draws my attention to the
fact that by the provisions of the Act of Union, and the tradition of
nationality, the monarch should be referred to as the King of Britain.
The blow thus struck at me is particularly wounding because it is
particularly unjust. I believe in the reality of the independent
nationalities under the British Crown much more passionately and
positively than any other educated Englishman of my acquaintance
believes in it. I am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am quite
certain that nationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite certain that
all our success with Scotland has been due to the fact that we have in
spirit treated it as a nation. I am quite certain that Ireland is a
nation; I am quite certain that nationality is the key to Ireland; I am
quite certain that all our failure in Ireland arose from the fact that
we would not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be difficult to
find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger example
of the immensely superior importance of sentiment to what is called
practicality than this case of the two sister nations. It is not that we
have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that we have
encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have encouraged a
Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely encouraged a
Scotchman to be Scotch.

A vague, but vivid impression was received from all our writers of
history, philosophy, and rhetoric that the Scottish element was
something really valuable in itself, was something which even Englishmen
were forced to recognise and respect. If we ever admitted the beauty of
Ireland, it was as something which might be loved by an Englishman but
which could hardly be respected even by an Irishman. A Scotchman might
be proud of Scotland; it was enough for an Irishman that he could be
fond of Ireland. Our success with the two nations has been exactly
proportioned to our encouragement of their independent national
emotion; the one that we would not treat nationally has alone produced
Nationalists. The one nation that we would not recognise as a nation in
theory is the one that we have been forced to recognise as a nation in
arms. The Scottish Patriotic Association has no need to draw my
attention to the importance of the separate national sentiment or the
need of keeping the Border as a sacred line. The case is quite
sufficiently proved by the positive history of Scotland. The place of
Scottish loyalty to England has been taken by English admiration of
Scotland. They do not need to envy us our titular leadership, when we
seem to envy them their separation.

I wish to make very clear my entire sympathy with the national sentiment
of the Scottish Patriotic Association. But I wish also to make clear
this very enlightening comparison between the fate of Scotch and of
Irish patriotism. In life it is always the little facts that express the
large emotions, and if the English once respected Ireland as they
respect Scotland, it would come out in a hundred small ways. For
instance, there are crack regiments in the British Army which wear the
kilt--the kilt which, as Macaulay says with perfect truth, was regarded
by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief. The Highland
officers carry a silver-hilted version of the old barbarous Gaelic
broadsword with a basket-hilt, which split the skulls of so many English
soldiers at Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. When you have a regiment of
men in the British Army carrying ornamental silver shillelaghs you will
have done the same thing for Ireland, and not before--or when you
mention Brian Boru with the same intonation as Bruce.

Let me be considered therefore to have made quite clear that I believe
with a quite special intensity in the independent consideration of
Scotland and Ireland as apart from England. I believe that, in the
proper sense of the words, Scotland is an independent nation, even if
Edward VII. is the King of Scotland. I believe that, in the proper sense
of words, Ireland is an independent nation, even if Edward VII. is King
of Ireland. But the fact is that I have an even bolder and wilder belief
than either of these. I believe that England is an independent nation. I
believe that England also has its independent colour and history, and
meaning. I believe that England could produce costumes quite as queer as
the kilt; I believe that England has heroes fully as untranslateable as
Brian Boru, and consequently I believe that Edward VII. is, among his
innumerable other functions, really King of England. If my Scotch
friends insist, let us call it one of his quite obscure, unpopular, and
minor titles; one of his relaxations. A little while ago he was Duke of
Cornwall; but for a family accident he might still have been King of
Hanover. Nor do I think that we should blame the simple Cornishmen if
they spoke of him in a rhetorical moment by his Cornish title, nor the
well-meaning Hanoverians if they classed him with Hanoverian Princes.

Now it so happens that in the passage complained of I said the King of
England merely because I meant the King of England. I was speaking
strictly and especially of English Kings, of Kings in the tradition of
the old Kings of England. I wrote as an English nationalist keenly
conscious of the sacred boundary of the Tweed that keeps (or used to
keep) our ancient enemies at bay. I wrote as an English nationalist
resolved for one wild moment to throw off the tyranny of the Scotch and
Irish who govern and oppress my country. I felt that England was at
least spiritually guarded against these surrounding nationalities. I
dreamed that the Tweed was guarded by the ghosts of Scropes and Percys;
I dreamed that St. George's Channel was guarded by St. George. And in
this insular security I spoke deliberately and specifically of the King
of England, of the representative of the Tudors and Plantagenets. It is
true that the two Kings of England, of whom I especially spoke, Charles
II. and George III., had both an alien origin, not very recent and not
very remote. Charles II. came of a family originally Scotch. George III.
came of a family originally German. But the same, so far as that goes,
could be said of the English royal houses when England stood quite
alone. The Plantagenets were originally a French family. The Tudors were
originally a Welsh family. But I was not talking of the amount of
English sentiment in the English Kings. I was talking of the amount of
English sentiment in the English treatment and popularity of the English
Kings. With that Ireland and Scotland have nothing whatever to do.

Charles II. may, for all I know, have not only been King of Scotland; he
may, by virtue of his temper and ancestry, have been a Scotch King of
Scotland. There was something Scotch about his combination of
clear-headedness with sensuality. There was something Scotch about his
combination of doing what he liked with knowing what he was doing. But I
was not talking of the personality of Charles, which may have been
Scotch. I was talking of the popularity of Charles, which was certainly
English. One thing is quite certain: whether or no he ever ceased to be
a Scotch man, he ceased as soon as he conveniently could to be a Scotch
King. He had actually tried the experiment of being a national ruler
north of the Tweed, and his people liked him as little as he liked them.
Of Presbyterianism, of the Scottish religion, he left on record the
exquisitely English judgment that it was "no religion for a gentleman."
His popularity then was purely English; his royalty was purely English;
and I was using the words with the utmost narrowness and deliberation
when I spoke of this particular popularity and royalty as the popularity
and royalty of a King of England. I said of the English people specially
that they like to pick up the King's crown when he has dropped it. I do
not feel at all sure that this does apply to the Scotch or the Irish. I
think that the Irish would knock his crown off for him. I think that the
Scotch would keep it for him after they had picked it up.

For my part, I should be inclined to adopt quite the opposite method of
asserting nationality. Why should good Scotch nationalists call Edward
VII. the King of Britain? They ought to call him King Edward I. of
Scotland. What is Britain? Where is Britain? There is no such place.
There never was a nation of Britain; there never was a King of Britain;
unless perhaps Vortigern or Uther Pendragon had a taste for the title.
If we are to develop our Monarchy, I should be altogether in favour of
developing it along the line of local patriotism and of local
proprietorship in the King. I think that the Londoners ought to call him
the King of London, and the Liverpudlians ought to call him the King of
Liverpool. I do not go so far as to say that the people of Birmingham
ought to call Edward VII. the King of Birmingham; for that would be high
treason to a holier and more established power. But I think we might
read in the papers: "The King of Brighton left Brighton at half-past two
this afternoon," and then immediately afterwards, "The King of Worthing
entered Worthing at ten minutes past three." Or, "The people of Margate
bade a reluctant farewell to the popular King of Margate this morning,"
and then, "His Majesty the King of Ramsgate returned to his country and
capital this afternoon after his long sojourn in strange lands." It
might be pointed out that by a curious coincidence the departure of the
King of Oxford occurred a very short time before the triumphal arrival
of the King of Reading. I cannot imagine any method which would more
increase the kindly and normal relations between the Sovereign and his
people. Nor do I think that such a method would be in any sense a
depreciation of the royal dignity; for, as a matter of fact, it would
put the King upon the same platform with the gods. The saints, the most
exalted of human figures, were also the most local. It was exactly the
men whom we most easily connected with heaven whom we also most easily
connected with earth.




THOUGHTS AROUND KOEPENICK


A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; it
seems clear that life really caricatures it. I suggested recently that
the Germans submitted to, and even admired, a solemn and theatrical
assertion of authority. A few hours after I had sent up my "copy," I saw
the first announcement of the affair of the comic Captain at Koepenick.
The most absurd part of this absurd fraud (at least, to English eyes) is
one which, oddly enough, has received comparatively little comment. I
mean the point at which the Mayor asked for a warrant, and the Captain
pointed to the bayonets of his soldiery and said. "These are my
authority." One would have thought any one would have known that no
soldier would talk like that. The dupes were blamed for not knowing that
the man wore the wrong cap or the wrong sash, or had his sword buckled
on the wrong way; but these are technicalities which they might surely
be excused for not knowing. I certainly should not know if a soldier's
sash were on inside out or his cap on behind before. But I should know
uncommonly well that genuine professional soldiers do not talk like
Adelphi villains and utter theatrical epigrams in praise of abstract
violence.

We can see this more clearly, perhaps, if we suppose it to be the case
of any other dignified and clearly distinguishable profession. Suppose a
Bishop called upon me. My great modesty and my rather distant reverence
for the higher clergy might lead me certainly to a strong suspicion that
any Bishop who called on me was a bogus Bishop. But if I wished to test
his genuineness I should not dream of attempting to do so by examining
the shape of his apron or the way his gaiters were done up. I have not
the remotest idea of the way his gaiters ought to be done up. A very
vague approximation to an apron would probably take me in; and if he
behaved like an approximately Christian gentleman he would be safe
enough from my detection. But suppose the Bishop, the moment he entered
the room, fell on his knees on the mat, clasped his hands, and poured
out a flood of passionate and somewhat hysterical extempore prayer, I
should say at once and without the smallest hesitation, "Whatever else
this man is, he is not an elderly and wealthy cleric of the Church of
England. They don't do such things." Or suppose a man came to me
pretending to be a qualified doctor, and flourished a stethoscope, or
what he said was a stethoscope. I am glad to say that I have not even
the remotest notion of what a stethoscope looks like; so that if he
flourished a musical-box or a coffee-mill it would be all one to me. But
I do think that I am not exaggerating my own sagacity if I say that I
should begin to suspect the doctor if on entering my room he flung his
legs and arms about, crying wildly, "Health! Health! priceless gift of
Nature! I possess it! I overflow with it! I yearn to impart it! Oh, the
sacred rapture of imparting health!" In that case I should suspect him
of being rather in a position to receive than to offer medical
superintendence.

Now, it is no exaggeration at all to say that any one who has ever known
any soldiers (I can only answer for English and Irish and Scotch
soldiers) would find it just as easy to believe that a real Bishop would
grovel on the carpet in a religious ecstasy, or that a real doctor would
dance about the drawing-room to show the invigorating effects of his own
medicine, as to believe that a soldier, when asked for his authority,
would point to a lot of shining weapons and declare symbolically that
might was right. Of course, a real soldier would go rather red in the
face and huskily repeat the proper formula, whatever it was, as that he
came in the King's name.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are
never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught
severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is
obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is
held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn to
obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a
title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable
things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are weak
things. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They are
parts of an idea: of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of
tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his own
bayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he came
in the name of his own bayonets. It would be as absurd as if a postman
said that he came inside his bag. I do not, as I have said, underrate
the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic.
It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. It
tends moreover (both through its specialisation and through its constant
obedience) to a certain loss of real independence and strength of
character. This has almost always been found when people made the
mistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under the mistaken
impression that he was a strong man. The Duke of Wellington, for
instance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak statesman. But the
soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something. And as
long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere
force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of
anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under lowering
skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when a
soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has already accepted its
defeat.

Nevertheless, it does appear to be possible in Germany for a man to
point to fixed bayonets and say, "These are my authority," and yet to
convince ordinarily sane men that he is a soldier. If this is so, it
does really seem to point to some habit of high-faultin' in the German
nation, such as that of which I spoke previously. It almost looks as if
the advisers, and even the officials, of the German Army had become
infected in some degree with the false and feeble doctrine that might is
right. As this doctrine is invariably preached by physical weaklings
like Nietzsche it is a very serious thing even to entertain the
supposition that it is affecting men who have really to do military work
It would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by German
philosophy. Energetic people use energy as a means, but only very tired
people ever use energy as a reason. Athletes go in for games, because
athletes desire glory. Invalids go in for calisthenics; for invalids
(alone of all human beings) desire strength. So long as the German Army
points to its heraldic eagle and says, "I come in the name of this
fierce but fabulous animal," the German Army will be all right. If ever
it says, "I come in the name of bayonets," the bayonets will break like
glass, for only the weak exhibit strength without an aim.

At the same time, as I said before, do not let us forged our own faults.
Do not let us forget them any the more easily because they are the
opposite to the German faults. Modern England is too prone to present
the spectacle of a person who is enormously delighted because he has not
got the contrary disadvantages to his own. The Englishman is always
saying "My house is not damp" at the moment when his house is on fire.
The Englishman is always saying, "I have thrown off all traces of
anæmia" in the middle of a fit of apoplexy. Let us always remember
that if an Englishman wants to swindle English people, he does not dress
up in the uniform of a soldier. If an Englishman wants to swindle
English people he would as soon think of dressing up in the uniform of a
messenger boy. Everything in England is done unofficially, casually, by
conversations and cliques. The one Parliament that really does rule
England is a secret Parliament; the debates of which must not be
published--the Cabinet. The debates of the Commons are sometimes
important; but only the debates in the Lobby, never the debates in the
House. Journalists do control public opinion; but it is not controlled
by the arguments they publish--it is controlled by the arguments between
the editor and sub-editor, which they do not publish. This casualness is
our English vice. It is at once casual and secret. Our public life is
conducted privately. Hence it follows that if an English swindler wished
to impress us, the last thing he would think of doing would be to put on
a uniform. He would put on a polite slouching air and a careless,
expensive suit of clothes; he would stroll up to the Mayor, be so
awfully sorry to disturb him, find he had forgotten his card-case,
mention, as if he were ashamed of it, that he was the Duke of Mercia,
and carry the whole thing through with the air of a man who could get
two hundred witnesses and two thousand retainers, but who was too tired
to call any of them. And if he did it very well I strongly suspect that
he would be as successful as the indefensible Captain at Koepenick.

Our tendency for many centuries past has been, not so much towards
creating an aristocracy (which may or may not be a good thing in
itself), as towards substituting an aristocracy for everything else. In
England we have an aristocracy instead of a religion. The nobility are
to the English poor what the saints and the fairies are to the Irish
poor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor--the
poetry of life. In the same way in England we have an aristocracy
instead of a Government. We rely on a certain good humour and education
in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution. No
educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he
has to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad
people. We get good people to restrain bad laws. And last of all we in
England have an aristocracy instead of an Army. We have an Army of which
the officers are proud of their families and ashamed of their uniforms.
If I were a king of any country whatever, and one of my officers were
ashamed of my uniform, I should be ashamed of my officer. Beware, then,
of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose clothes are at
once quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once diffident and frank.
Beware how you admit him into your domestic secrets, for he may be a
bogus Earl. Or, worse still, a real one.




THE BOY


I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken
seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it
is quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they are
human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it is
of no use at all to anybody. If the aggressor gets anything out of it,
then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of utility
or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not
steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat; but he does not annex
his friend's hat. For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out
somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after
their immense raids--the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of
Napoleon; "they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an
epic."

Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers which
make my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy. I have had the
misfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises and
proclamations of my country in recent times. But the other day I found
in the _Tribune_ the following paragraph, which I may be permitted to
set down as an example of the kind of international outrage with which I
have by far the most instinctive sympathy. There is something
attractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the affair is set
forth--

"Geneva, Oct. 31.

"The English schoolboy Allen, who was arrested at Lausanne railway
station on Saturday, for having painted red the statue of General Jomini
of Payerne, was liberated yesterday, after paying a fine of £24. Allen
has proceeded to Germany, where he will continue his studies. The people
of Payerne are indignant, and clamoured for his detention in prison."

Now I have no doubt that ethics and social necessity require a contrary
attitude, but I will freely confess that my first emotions on reading of
this exploit were those of profound and elemental pleasure. There is
something so large and simple about the operation of painting a whole
stone General a bright red. Of course I can understand that the people
of Payerne were indignant. They had passed to their homes at twilight
through the streets of that beautiful city (or is it a province?), and
they had seen against the silver ending of the sunset the grand grey
figure of the hero of that land remaining to guard the town under the
stars. It certainly must have been a shock to come out in the broad
white morning and find a large vermilion General staring under the
staring sun. I do not blame them at all for clamouring for the
schoolboy's detention in prison; I dare say a little detention in prison
would do him no harm. Still, I think the immense act has something about
it human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse the reason of
this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the thing was big or
bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was perfectly
useless to everybody, including the person who did it. The raid ends in
itself; and so Master Allen is sucked back again, having accomplished
nothing but an epic.

There is one thing which, in the presence of average modern journalism,
is perhaps worth saying in connection with such an idle matter as this.
The morals of a matter like this are exactly like the morals of anything
else; they are concerned with mutual contract, or with the rights of
independent human lives. But the whole modern world, or at any rate the
whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain
morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral
grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of
Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say
everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is
wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency
of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell
whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother.
Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they
will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of
manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will
talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is,
they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This
again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that
the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the
process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical
critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of
thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is
an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on
the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that
is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your
grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple
moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It
will call the action anything else--mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic,
rather than call it sinful.

One example can be found in such cases as that of the prank of the boy
and the statue. When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers
opposed to it always describe it as "a senseless joke." What is the good
of saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its nature
a protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for being
successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a
celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as "Alice
in Wonderland." It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But the
real answer to the affair is not to say that it is nonsensical or even
to say that it is not funny, but to point out that it is wrong to spoil
statues which belong to other people. If the modern world will not
insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of resisting
the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world will simply
be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thing
in a nice way. Every murderer who can murder entertainingly will be
allowed to murder. Every burglar who burgles in really humorous
attitudes will burgle as much as he likes.

There is another case of the thing that I mean. Why on earth do the
newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political
assassination, call it a "dastardly outrage" or a cowardly outrage? It
is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It is
perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going
to the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of being
torn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is not
cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it is
very infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that our
modern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything,
rather than appeal to right and wrong.

In most of the matters of modern England, the real difficulty is that
there is a negative revolution without a positive revolution. Positive
aristocracy is breaking up without any particular appearance of positive
democracy taking its place. The polished class is becoming less polished
without becoming less of a class; the nobleman who becomes a guinea-pig
keeps all his privileges but loses some of his tradition; he becomes
less of a gentleman without becoming less of a nobleman. In the same way
(until some recent and happy revivals) it seemed highly probable that
the Church of England would cease to be a religion long before it had
ceased to be a Church. And in the same way, the vulgarisation of the
old, simple middle class does not even have the advantage of doing away
with class distinctions; the vulgar man is always the most
distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

At the same time, it must be remembered that when a class has a morality
it does not follow that it is an adequate morality. The middle-class
ethic was inadequate for some purposes; so is the public-school ethic,
the ethic of the upper classes. On this last matter of the public
schools Dr. Spenser, the Head Master of University College School, has
lately made some valuable observations. But even he, I think, overstates
the claim of the public schools. "The strong point of the English public
schools," he says, "has always lain in their efficiency as agencies for
the formation of character and for the inculcation of the great notion
of obligation which distinguishes a gentleman. On the physical and moral
sides the public-school men of England are, I believe, unequalled." And
he goes on to say that it is on the mental side that they are defective.
But, as a matter of fact, the public-school training is in the strict
sense defective upon the moral side also; it leaves out about half of
morality. Its just claim is that, like the old middle class (and the
Zulus), it trains some virtues and therefore suits some people for some
situations. Put an old English merchant to serve in an army and he would
have been irritated and clumsy. Put the men from English public schools
to rule Ireland, and they make the greatest hash in human history.

Touching the morality of the public schools, I will take one point only,
which is enough to prove the case. People have got into their heads an
extraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English youth
generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught absolutely
nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even suggested,
except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is
suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not
to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through all
civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference between
the two things. When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth," we do
merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing
we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of
giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of
not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible
arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to
prove an _ex parte_ case, not telling all the nice stories about the
Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be
disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when
you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by
any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that--that
there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it
we are happy.

If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public
schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question. Can any one on
earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were
really one of the ideals of the English governing class, there could
conceivably exist such a thing as the English party system? Why, the
English party system is founded upon the principle that telling the
whole truth does not matter. It is founded upon the principle that half
a truth is better than no politics. Our system deliberately turns a
crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. It
teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. It
gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he may
and defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a room
full of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues, fighting
and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a game. I only
say that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation which believed in
telling the truth.



LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION


It is customary to remark that modern problems cannot easily be attacked
because they are so complex. In many cases I believe it is really
because they are so simple. Nobody would believe in such simplicity of
scoundrelism even if it were pointed out. People would say that the
truth was a charge of mere melodramatic villainy; forgetting that
nearly all villains really are melodramatic. Thus, for instance, we say
that some good measures are frustrated or some bad officials kept in
power by the press and confusion of public business; whereas very often
the reason is simple healthy human bribery. And thus especially we say
that the Yellow Press is exaggerative, over-emotional, illiterate, and
anarchical, and a hundred other long words; whereas the only objection
to it is that it tells lies. We waste our fine intellects in finding
exquisite phraseology to fit a man, when in a well-ordered society we
ought to be finding handcuffs to fit him.

This criticism of the modern type of righteous indignation must have
come into many people's minds, I think, in reading Dr. Horton's eloquent
expressions of disgust at the "corrupt Press," especially in connection
with the Limerick craze. Upon the Limerick craze itself, I fear Dr.
Horton will not have much effect; such fads perish before one has had
time to kill them. But Dr. Horton's protest may really do good if it
enables us to come to some clear understanding about what is really
wrong with the popular Press, and which means it might be useful and
which permissible to use for its reform. We do not want a censorship of
the Press; but we are long past talking about that. At present it is not
we that silence the Press; it is the Press that silences us. It is not a
case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is
a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If
we attack the Press we shall be rebelling, not repressing. But shall we
attack it?

Now it is just here that the chief difficulty occurs. It arises from
the very rarity and rectitude of those minds which commonly inaugurate
such crusades. I have the warmest respect for Dr. Horton's thirst after
righteousness; but it has always seemed to me that his righteousness
would be more effective without his refinement. The curse of the
Nonconformists is their universal refinement. They dimly connect being
good with being delicate, and even dapper; with not being grotesque or
loud or violent; with not sitting down on one's hat. Now it is always a
pleasure to be loud and violent, and sometimes it is a duty. Certainly
it has nothing to do with sin; a man can be loudly and violently
virtuous--nay, he can be loudly and violently saintly, though that is
not the type of saintliness that we recognise in Dr. Horton. And as for
sitting on one's hat, if it is done for any sublime object (as, for
instance, to amuse the children), it is obviously an act of very
beautiful self-sacrifice, the destruction and surrender of the symbol of
personal dignity upon the shrine of public festivity. Now it will not do
to attack the modern editor merely for being unrefined, like the great
mass of mankind. We must be able to say that he is immoral, not that he
is undignified or ridiculous. I do not mind the Yellow Press editor
sitting on his hat. My only objection to him begins to dawn when he
attempts to sit on my hat; or, indeed (as is at present the case), when
he proceeds to sit on my head.

But in reading between the lines of Dr. Horton's invective one
continually feels that he is not only angry with the popular Press for
being unscrupulous: he is partly angry with the popular Press for being
popular. He is not only irritated with Limericks for causing a mean
money-scramble; he is also partly irritated with Limericks for being
Limericks. The enormous size of the levity gets on his nerves, like the
glare and blare of Bank Holiday. Now this is a motive which, however
human and natural, must be strictly kept out of the way. It takes all
sorts to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary that
everybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections in
the matter of manners or literature which does often go with the type of
the ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that everybody
should be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody should be
honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse and
cheerful character. But the ineffectualness of most protests against the
abuse of the Press has been very largely due to the instinct of
democracy (and the instinct of democracy is like the instinct of one
woman, wild but quite right) that the people who were trying to purify
the Press were also trying to refine it; and to this the democracy very
naturally and very justly objected. We are justified in enforcing good
morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in
enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. We
have no right to purge the popular Press of all that we think vulgar or
trivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and detest Limericks just as I
loathe and detest riddles; but I have no right to call them flippant
and unprofitable; there are wild people in the world who like riddles.
I am so afraid of this movement passing off into mere formless rhetoric
and platform passion that I will even come close to the earth and lay
down specifically some of the things that, in my opinion, could be, and
ought to be, done to reform the Press.

First, I would make a law, if there is none such at present, by which an
editor, proved to have published false news without reasonable
verification, should simply go to prison. This is not a question of
influences or atmospheres; the thing could be carried out as easily and
as practically as the punishment of thieves and murderers. Of course
there would be the usual statement that the guilt was that of a
subordinate. Let the accused editor have the right of proving this if he
can; if he does, let the subordinate be tried and go to prison. Two or
three good rich editors and proprietors properly locked up would take
the sting out of the Yellow Press better than centuries of Dr. Horton.

Second, it's impossible to pass over altogether the most unpleasant, but
the most important part of this problem. I will deal with it as
distantly as possible. I do not believe there is any harm whatever in
reading about murders; rather, if anything, good; for the thought of
death operates very powerfully with the poor in the creation of
brotherhood and a sense of human dignity. I do not believe there is a
pennyworth of harm in the police news, as such. Even divorce news,
though contemptible enough, can really in most cases be left to the
discretion of grown people; and how far children get hold of such
things is a problem for the home and not for the nation. But there is a
certain class of evils which a healthy man or woman can actually go
through life without knowing anything about at all. These, I say, should
be stamped and blackened out of every newspaper with the thickest black
of the Russian censor. Such cases should either be always tried _in
camera_ or reporting them should be a punishable offence. The common
weakness of Nature and the sins that flesh is heir to we can leave
people to find in newspapers. Men can safely see in the papers what they
have already seen in the streets. They may safely find in their journals
what they have already found in themselves. But we do not want the
imaginations of rational and decent people clouded with the horrors of
some obscene insanity which has no more to do with human life than the
man in Bedlam who thinks he is a chicken. And, if this vile matter is
admitted, let it be simply with a mention of the Latin or legal name of
the crime, and with no details whatever. As it is, exactly the reverse
is true. Papers are permitted to terrify and darken the fancy of the
young with innumerable details, but not permitted to state in clean
legal language what the thing is about. They are allowed to give any
fact about the thing except the fact that it is a sin.

Third, I would do my best to introduce everywhere the practice of signed
articles. Those who urge the advantages of anonymity are either people
who do not realise the special peril of our time or they are people who
are profiting by it. It is true, but futile, for instance, to say that
there is something noble in being nameless when a whole corporate body
is bent on a consistent aim: as in an army or men building a cathedral.
The point of modern newspapers is that there is no such corporate body
and common aim; but each man can use the authority of the paper to
further his own private fads and his own private finances.

ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS

The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and,
unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail
is important. It is not anybody's fault but my own; it arises from the
fact that I take such a long time to get to the point. Somebody, the
other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write
prefaces. He was perfectly right, for I always write a preface to the
preface, and then I am stopped; also quite justifiably.

In my last article I said that I favoured three things--first, the legal
punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction,
in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any
healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see
anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of
cases upon the signing of articles. It was at this point that I was cut
short, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own
lawlessness in the matter of space. In any case, there is something more
that ought to be said.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I hope some day to see an
anonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. For
some time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing the
policy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at any
rate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never think
the worse of any one for writing one. But I should certainly say that
writing anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that of
the leading article. Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;
writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to be
not only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought always
to be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. The
journalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret the
origin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to put
us who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of Jesuits
or Freemasons.

As has often been said, anonymity would be all very well if one could
for a moment imagine that it was established from good motives. Suppose,
for instance, that we were all quite certain that the men on the
_Thunderer_ newspaper were a band of brave young idealists who were so
eager to overthrow Socialism, Municipal and National, that they did not
care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it
down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe,
or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the
_Thunderer_ arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil motives,
any one of which would lose simply by being named. A jerry-builder
whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and becomes the
_Thunderer_. A Socialist who has quarrelled with the other Socialists
writes anonymously, and he becomes the _Thunderer_. A monopolist who has
lost his monopoly, and a demagogue who has lost his mob, can both write
anonymously and become the same newspaper. It is quite true that there
is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men do not care to reveal
their names. But there is a more elderly and a much more common
excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.

Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I
should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing
that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed
upon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be a
list of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularly
undemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man's name be
printed on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if there
are any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they are
being served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state of
excitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting them
to public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics through
beer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too fascinating
for any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man may control
politics through journalism, and no ordinary English citizen know that
he is controlling them at all. Again and again in the lists of Birthday
Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson suddenly elevated to the
Peerage without any apparent reason. Even the Society papers (which we
read with avidity) could tell us nothing about him except that he was a
sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in the breeding of badgers.
Now I should like the name of that Mr. Robinson to be already familiar
to the British public. I should like them to know already the public
services for which they have to thank him. I should like them to have
seen the name already on the outside of that organ of public opinion
called _Tootsie's Tips_, or _The Boy Blackmailer_, or _Nosey Knows_,
that bright little financial paper which did so much for the Empire and
which so narrowly escaped a criminal prosecution. If they had seen it
thus, they would estimate more truly and tenderly the full value of the
statement in the Society paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound
Churchman.

Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that
it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and
practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any
paper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The old
editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for
the transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he was
supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material
was actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editor
regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can
select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a
caricaturist. He "makes up" the paper as man "makes up" a fairy tale, he
considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give pleasure,
not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he thinks it
clever. He puts in these three or four letters because he thinks them
silly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it wrong. He
suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he thinks it
right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the expression of the
public, an "organ" of opinion, seems to have entirely vanished from his
mind. To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays on
the organ. For in all our modern movements we move away from Democracy.

This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the
oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression
which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past, has
commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple as the
oppressed, and as lonely. The aristocrat sometimes hated his inferiors;
he always hated his equals. The plutocrat was an individualist. But in
our time even the plutocrat has become a Socialist. They have science
and combination, and may easily inaugurate a much greater tyranny than
the world has ever seen.




ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC


Surely the art of reporting speeches is in a strange state of
degeneration. We should not object, perhaps, to the reporter's making
the speeches much shorter than they are; but we do object to his making
all the speeches much worse than they are. And the method which he
employs is one which is dangerously unjust. When a statesman or
philosopher makes an important speech, there are several courses which
the reporter might take without being unreasonable. Perhaps the most
reasonable course of all would be not to report the speech at all. Let
the world live and love, marry and give in marriage, without that
particular speech, as they did (in some desperate way) in the days when
there were no newspapers. A second course would be to report a small
part of it; but to get that right. A third course, far better if you can
do it, is to understand the main purpose and argument of the speech, and
report that in clear and logical language of your own. In short, the
three possible methods are, first, to leave the man's speech alone;
second, to report what he says or some complete part of what he says;
and third, to report what he means. But the present way of reporting
speeches (mainly created, I think, by the scrappy methods of the _Daily
Mail_) is something utterly different from both these ways, and quite
senseless and misleading.

The present method is this: the reporter sits listening to a tide of
words which he does not try to understand, and does not, generally
speaking, even try to take down; he waits until something occurs in the
speech which for some reason sounds funny, or memorable, or very
exaggerated, or, perhaps, merely concrete; then he writes it down and
waits for the next one. If the orator says that the Premier is like a
porpoise in the sea under some special circumstances, the reporter gets
in the porpoise even if he leaves out the Premier. If the orator begins
by saying that Mr. Chamberlain is rather like a violoncello, the
reporter does not even wait to hear why he is like a violoncello. He has
got hold of something material, and so he is quite happy. The strong
words all are put in; the chain of thought is left out. If the orator
uses the word "donkey," down goes the word "donkey." If the orator uses
the word "damnable," down goes the word "damnable." They follow each
other so abruptly in the report that it is often hard to discover the
fascinating fact as to what was damnable or who was being compared with
a donkey. And the whole line of argument in which these things occurred
is entirely lost. I have before me a newspaper report of a speech by Mr.
Bernard Shaw, of which one complete and separate paragraph runs like
this--

"Capital meant spare money over and above one's needs. Their country was
not really their country at all except in patriotic songs."

I am well enough acquainted with the whole map of Mr. Bernard Shaw's
philosophy to know that those two statements might have been related to
each other in a hundred ways. But I think that if they were read by an
ordinary intelligent man, who happened not to know Mr. Shaw's views, he
would form no impression at all except that Mr. Shaw was a lunatic of
more than usually abrupt conversation and disconnected mind. The other
two methods would certainly have done Mr. Shaw more justice: the
reporter should either have taken down verbatim what the speaker really
said about Capital, or have given an outline of the way in which this
idea was connected with the idea about patriotic songs.

But we have not the advantage of knowing what Mr. Shaw really did say,
so we had better illustrate the different methods from something that we
do know. Most of us, I suppose, know Mark Antony's Funeral Speech in
"Julius Cæsar." Now Mark Antony would have no reason to complain if he
were not reported at all; if the _Daily Pilum_ or the _Morning Fasces_,
or whatever it was, confined itself to saying, "Mr. Mark Antony also
spoke," or "Mr. Mark Antony, having addressed the audience, the meeting
broke up in some confusion." The next honest method, worthy of a noble
Roman reporter, would be that since he could not report the whole of the
speech, he should report some of the speech. He might say--"Mr. Mark
Antony, in the course of his speech, said--

 'When that the poor have cried Cæsar hath wept:
  Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.'"

In that case one good, solid argument of Mark Antony would be correctly
reported. The third and far higher course for the Roman reporter would
be to give a philosophical statement of the purport of the speech. As
thus--"Mr. Mark Antony, in the course of a powerful speech, conceded the
high motives of the Republican leaders, and disclaimed any intention of
raising the people against them; he thought, however, that many
instances could be quoted against the theory of Cæsar's ambition, and
he concluded by reading, at the request of the audience, the will of
Cæsar, which proved that he had the most benevolent designs towards the
Roman people." That is (I admit) not quite so fine as Shakspere, but it
is a statement of the man's political position. But if a _Daily Mail_
reporter were sent to take down Antony's oration, he would simply wait
for any expressions that struck him as odd and put them down one after
another without any logical connection at all. It would turn out
something like this: "Mr. Mark Antony wished for his audience's ears. He
had thrice offered Cæsar a crown. Cæsar was like a deer. If he were
Brutus he would put a wound in every tongue. The stones of Rome would
mutiny. See what a rent the envious Casca paid. Brutus was Cæsar's
angel. The right honourable gentleman concluded by saying that he and
the audience had all fallen down." That is the report of a political
speech in a modern, progressive, or American manner, and I wonder
whether the Romans would have put up with it.

The reports of the debates in the Houses of Parliament are constantly
growing smaller and smaller in our newspapers. Perhaps this is partly
because the speeches are growing duller and duller. I think in some
degree the two things act and re-act on each other. For fear of the
newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for
the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate,
because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And exactly
because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so likely to
be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not interesting
enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has, after all,
some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of heaven. Precisely
because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not
worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be
read, nobody reads them.

Thus we may concede that politicians have done something towards
degrading journalism. It was not entirely done by us, the journalists.
But most of it was. It was mostly the fruit of our first and most
natural sin--the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than
priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his
audience, while a priest is a part of his. The conjurer despises his
congregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself. The
curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which
is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than
the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally even
stupider. But this insolence has its Nemesis; and that Nemesis is well
illustrated in this matter of reporting.

For the journalist, having grown accustomed to talking down to the
public, commonly talks too low at last, and becomes merely barbaric and
unintelligible. By his very efforts to be obvious he becomes obscure.
This just punishment may specially be noticed in the case of those
staggering and staring headlines which American journalism introduced
and which some English journalism imitates. I once saw a headline in a
London paper which ran simply thus: "Dobbin's Little Mary." This was
intended to be familiar and popular, and therefore, presumably, lucid.
But it was some time before I realised, after reading about half the
printed matter underneath, that it had something to do with the proper
feeding of horses. At first sight, I took it, as the historical leader
of the future will certainly take it, as containing some allusion to the
little daughter who so monopolised the affections of the Major at the
end of "Vanity Fair." The Americans carry to an even wilder extreme this
darkness by excess of light. You may find a column in an American paper
headed "Poet Brown Off Orange-flowers," or "Senator Robinson Shoehorns
Hats Now," and it may be quite a long time before the full meaning
breaks upon you: it has not broken upon me yet.

And something of this intellectual vengeance pursues also those who
adopt the modern method of reporting speeches. They also become
mystical, simply by trying to be vulgar. They also are condemned to be
always trying to write like George R. Sims, and succeeding, in spite of
themselves, in writing like Maeterlinck. That combination of words
which I have quoted from an alleged speech of Mr. Bernard Shaw's was
written down by the reporter with the idea that he was being
particularly plain and democratic. But, as a matter of fact, if there is
any connection between the two sentences, it must be something as dark
as the deepest roots of Browning, or something as invisible as the most
airy filaments of Meredith. To be simple and to be democratic are two
very honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to all the
snobs and self-seekers to achieve them. High above even Maeterlinck or
Meredith stand those, like Homer and Milton, whom no one can
misunderstand. And Homer and Milton are not only better poets than
Browning (great as he was), but they would also have been very much
better journalists than the young men on the _Daily Mail_.

As it is, however, this misrepresentation of speeches is only a part of
a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is. Journalism
is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and
life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is
more or less conscious of the difference. People do not believe, for
instance, that the debates in the House of Commons are as dramatic as
they appear in the daily papers. If they did they would go, not to the
daily paper, but to the House of Commons. The galleries would be crowded
every night as they were in the French Revolution; for instead of seeing
a printed story for a penny they would be seeing an acted drama for
nothing. But the, people know in their hearts that journalism is a
conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and
falsifies. Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it
loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise. The modern who
paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the
earthquake at San Francisco. And the journalist who reports a speech too
cleverly makes it mean nothing at all.




THE WORSHIP OF THE WEALTHY


There has crept, I notice, into our literature and journalism a new way
of flattering the wealthy and the great. In more straightforward times
flattery itself was more straight-forward; falsehood itself was more
true. A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he was
the wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and most
beautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that he
wasn't that, the thing did the less harm. When courtiers sang the
praises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirely
improbable, as that he resembled the sun at noonday, that they had to
shade their eyes when he entered the room, that his people could not
breathe without him, or that he had with his single sword conquered
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The safety of this method was its
artificiality; between the King and his public image there was really no
relation. But the moderns have invented a much subtler and more
poisonous kind of eulogy. The modern method is to take the prince or
rich man, to give a credible picture of his type of personality, as that
he is business-like, or a sportsman, or fond of art, or convivial, or
reserved; and then enormously exaggerate the value and importance of
these natural qualities. Those who praise Mr. Carnegie do not say that
he is as wise as Solomon and as brave as Mars; I wish they did. It would
be the next most honest thing to giving their real reason for praising
him, which is simply that he has money. The journalists who write about
Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not say that he is as beautiful as Apollo; I wish
they did. What they do is to take the rich man's superficial life and
manner, clothes, hobbies, love of cats, dislike of doctors, or what not;
and then with the assistance of this realism make the man out to be a
prophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is merely a private and
stupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike doctors. The old
flatterer took for granted that the King was an ordinary man, and set to
work to make him out extraordinary. The newer and cleverer flatterer
takes for granted that he is extraordinary, and that therefore even
ordinary things about him will be of interest.

I have noticed one very amusing way in which this is done. I notice the
method applied to about six of the wealthiest men in England in a book
of interviews published by an able and well-known journalist. The
flatterer contrives to combine strict truth of fact with a vast
atmosphere of awe and mystery by the simple operation of dealing almost
entirely in negatives. Suppose you are writing a sympathetic study of
Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps there is not much to say about what he
does think, or like, or admire; but you can suggest whole vistas of his
taste and philosophy by talking a great deal about what he does not
think, or like, or admire. You say of him--"But little attracted to the
most recent schools of German philosophy, he stands almost as resolutely
aloof from the tendencies of transcendental Pantheism as from the
narrower ecstasies of Neo-Catholicism." Or suppose I am called upon to
praise the charwoman who has just come into my house, and who certainly
deserves it much more. I say--"It would be a mistake to class Mrs. Higgs
among the followers of Loisy; her position is in many ways different;
nor is she wholly to be identified with the concrete Hebraism of
Harnack." It is a splendid method, as it gives the flatterer an
opportunity of talking about something else besides the subject of the
flattery, and it gives the subject of the flattery a rich, if somewhat
bewildered, mental glow, as of one who has somehow gone through agonies
of philosophical choice of which he was previously unaware. It is a
splendid method; but I wish it were applied sometimes to charwomen
rather than only to millionaires.

There is another way of flattering important people which has become
very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere. It
consists in applying to them the phrases "simple," or "quiet," or
"modest," without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom
they are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be
modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I am
rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of
noise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great
deal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and
royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings,
and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man
in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old
soldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to
fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have
desired to see these things and have not seen them. But in the
description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they
are used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to
describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially
the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always
says, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white
waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple
flower in his button-hole." As if any one would expect him to have a
crimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him
to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole.

But this process, which is absurd enough when applied to the ordinary
and external lives of worldly people, becomes perfectly intolerable when
it is applied, as it always is applied, to the one episode which is
serious even in the lives of politicians. I mean their death. When we
have been sufficiently bored with the account of the simple costume of
the millionaire, which is generally about as complicated as any that he
could assume without being simply thought mad; when we have been told
about the modest home of the millionaire, a home which is generally much
too immodest to be called a home at all; when we have followed him
through all these unmeaning eulogies, we are always asked last of all to
admire his quiet funeral. I do not know what else people think a funeral
should be except quiet. Yet again and again, over the grave of every one
of those sad rich men, for whom one should surely feel, first and last,
a speechless pity--over the grave of Beit, over the grave of
Whiteley--this sickening nonsense about modesty and simplicity has been
poured out. I well remember that when Beit was buried, the papers said
that the mourning-coaches contained everybody of importance, that the
floral tributes were sumptuous, splendid, intoxicating; but, for all
that, it was a simple and quiet funeral. What, in the name of Acheron,
did they expect it to be? Did they think there would be human
sacrifice--the immolation of Oriental slaves upon the tomb? Did they
think that long rows of Oriental dancing-girls would sway hither and
thither in an ecstasy of lament? Did they look for the funeral games of
Patroclus? I fear they had no such splendid and pagan meaning. I fear
they were only using the words "quiet" and "modest" as words to fill up
a page--a mere piece of the automatic hypocrisy which does become too
common among those who have to write rapidly and often. The word
"modest" will soon become like the word "honourable," which is said to
be employed by the Japanese before any word that occurs in a polite
sentence, as "Put honourable umbrella in honourable umbrella-stand;" or
"condescend to clean honourable boots." We shall read in the future that
the modest King went out in his modest crown, clad from head to foot in
modest gold and attended with his ten thousand modest earls, their
swords modestly drawn. No! if we have to pay for splendour let us praise
it as splendour, not as simplicity. When next I meet a rich man I intend
to walk up to him in the street and address him with Oriental hyperbole.
He will probably run away.



SCIENCE AND RELIGION


In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in
saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself.
It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a
watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health
will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it
is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition: it is
either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is
only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a
science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private
physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for
my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed. I
apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is, that I have
just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly
intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in
their lives.

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally
reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him "brilliant;"
which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of
contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too
much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a
shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon
imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that
everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been
reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number
of men for whom I have a high respect, and called "New Theology and
Applied Religion." And it is literally true that I have read through
whole columns of the things without knowing what the people were talking
about. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religion
in which they were brought up, and of which I never even heard, or else
they must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God which
they have found, which I have never found, and which by its very
splendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the best
instance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter of
the business of physical science on the earth, of which I have just
spoken. The following words are written over the signature of a man
whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail of them--

"When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a
historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the
story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain
that the Pauline scheme--I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's
scheme of salvation--had lost its very foundation; for was not that
foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their
first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed."

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one
on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with
everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown
morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way
have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being
raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in
the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any
relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and
failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there may have been
any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am honestly
bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in which the
advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing about the
Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because science has
not found something which obviously it could not find, therefore
something entirely different--the psychological sense of evil--is
untrue. You might sum up this writer's argument abruptly, but
accurately, in some way like this--"We have not dug up the bones of the
Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left
to themselves, will not be selfish." To me it is all wild and whirling;
as if a man said--"The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so
I suppose that my wife does love me."

I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or
into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer
calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it
had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man's primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the
vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as
the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something
that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something
that one cannot help finding.

Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man
says, "I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally
from fermented liquor," I quite understand what he means, and how his
view could be defended. If a man says, "I wish to abolish beer because I
am a temperance man," his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is
like saying, "I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker."
If a man says, "I am not a Trinitarian," I understand. But if he says
(as a lady once said to me), "I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual
sense," I go away dazed. In what other sense could one believe in the
Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of progressive
religious views is full of baffling observations of that kind. What can
people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin?
What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it?
Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that
science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did
they think that immortality was a gas?

Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle
into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the
world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from
the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things;
it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and
loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you
like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of
that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made
any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat
him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a
thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My chief objection to
these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all
revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do not shake
religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only answer the
great paradox by repeating the truism.




THE METHUSELAHITE


I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining
and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at
Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I
suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry
about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity the
man wrote down the word "Methuselahite." Whoever looks over such papers
must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless
the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge he
could not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations
of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and
tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. The
soldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could."

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that
answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of
quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious
problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some new
philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two
thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as
that word "Methuselahite." The whole meaning of literature is simply to
cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are
never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature;
he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor
Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.

Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new
religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the
way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be
able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will
begin, "The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in
Nature...." "Methuselahite," I shall say sharply; "good morning." "Human
Life," another will say, "Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freed
from creed and dogma...." "Methuselahite!" I shall yell. "Out you go!"
"My religion is the Religion of Joy," a third will explain (a bald old
man with a cough and tinted glasses), "the Religion of Physical Pride
and Rapture, and my...." "Methuselahite!" I shall cry again, and I shall
slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down. Then a pale
young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did only
the other day): "Moods and impressions are the only realities, and these
are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly therefore define my
religion...." "I can," I should say, somewhat sternly. "Your religion is
to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won't
fulfil it."

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old
vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it
masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls
it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends
idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen--it can
almost certainly be prophesied--that in this saturnalia of sophistry
there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise
cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild
words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is not
life a lovely thing and worth saving?" the soldier would say as he ran
away. "Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?" the
householder would say as he hid under the table. "As long as there are
roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?" would come the
voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would be quite as easy to
defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in many
recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic,
or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When that last grand
sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you may
depend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, a
great stir among the little people who live among books and platforms.
There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism: with
pomps and priests and altars. Its devout crusaders will vow themselves
in thousands with a great vow to live long. But there is one comfort:
they won't.

For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which
is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of
courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be
killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that a
man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. And
in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the
theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one
riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was the
man's religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he
enlisting as a soldier?



SPIRITUALISM.


I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at what
he considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism. I
thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being
accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in most
controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that
the man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and
the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him. There
seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject
properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it by
grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or
example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and
four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or
eight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets or
eight pigs. Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, that
grave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving an
umbrella. But the case is stronger than this. There is a distinct
philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious
discussion.

I think seriously, on the whole, that the more serious is the discussion
the more grotesque should be the terms. For this, as I say, there is an
evident reason. For a subject is really solemn and important in so far
as it applies to the whole cosmos, or to some great spheres and cycles
of experience at least. So far as a thing is universal it is serious.
And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things. If you
take a small thing, it may be entirely serious: Napoleon, for instance,
was a small thing, and he was serious: the same applies to microbes. If
you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity. But if you
take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it _must_ be comic, at
least in parts. The germs are serious, because they kill you. But the
stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth
to fun. If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only
prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may
be a quite frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking about the
butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal. So
far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious
questions, it is one's duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions.
It is the test of one's seriousness. It is the test of a responsible
religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and
boots and butter-tubs. It is the test of a good philosophy whether you
can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you
can joke about it.

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar
habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to
mine have probably noticed also. It goes along with the fixed belief of
printers that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be a
Nationalist. I mean the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic"
into the word "comic." It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have
come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is
always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that
we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all
grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a
thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a man
should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or
intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that
anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one
sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate
absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars
with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of
thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high
buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we
laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is
the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a
parenthises. It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent who
rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism. My
correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is very angry with
me indeed. He uses the strongest language. He says I remind him of a
brother of his: which seems to open an abyss or vista of infamy. The
main substance of his attack resolves itself into two propositions.
First, he asks me what right I have to talk about Spiritualism at all,
as I admit I have never been to a _séance_. This is all very well, but
there are a good many things to which I have never been, but I have not
the smallest intention of leaving off talking about them. I refuse (for
instance) to leave off talking about the Siege of Troy. I decline to be
mute in the matter of the French Revolution. I will not be silenced on
the late indefensible assassination of Julius Cæsar. If nobody has any
right to judge of Spiritualism except a man who has been to a _séance_,
the results, logically speaking, are rather serious: it would almost
seem as if nobody had any right to judge of Christianity who had not
been to the first meeting at Pentecost. Which would be dreadful. I
conceive myself capable of forming my opinion of Spiritualism without
seeing spirits, just as I form my opinion of the Japanese War without
seeing the Japanese, or my opinion of American millionaires without
(thank God) seeing an American millionaire. Blessed are they who have
not seen and yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as
a prophecy of modern journalism.

But my correspondent's second objection is more important. He charges me
with actually ignoring the value of communication (if it exists) between
this world and the next. I do not ignore it. But I do say this--That a
different principle attaches to investigation in this spiritual field
from investigation in any other. If a man baits a line for fish, the
fish will come, even if he declares there are no such things as fishes.
If a man limes a twig for birds, the birds will be caught, even if he
thinks it superstitious to believe in birds at all. But a man cannot
bait a line for souls. A man cannot lime a twig to catch gods. All wise
schools have agreed that this latter capture depends to some extent on
the faith of the capturer. So it comes to this: If you have no faith in
the spirits your appeal is in vain; and if you have--is it needed? If
you do not believe, you cannot. If you do--you will not.

That is the real distinction between investigation in this department
and investigation in any other. The priest calls to the goddess, for the
same reason that a man calls to his wife, because he knows she is there.
If a man kept on shouting out very loud the single word "Maria," merely
with the object of discovering whether if he did it long enough some
woman of that name would come and marry him, he would be more or less in
the position of the modern spiritualist. The old religionist cried out
for his God. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his. The
whole point of religion as it has hitherto existed in the world was that
you knew all about your gods, even before you saw them, if indeed you
ever did. Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical
side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The
incredible part of it seems to me obviously true. But I think it so far
dangerous or unsatisfactory that it is in some degree scientific. It
inquires whether its gods are worth inquiring into. A man (of a certain
age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to see that they are
beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young man to look into her
eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same vanity and idiosyncrasy
has been generally observed in gods. Praise them; or leave them alone;
but do not look for them unless you know they are there. Do not look for
them unless you want them. It annoys them very much.




THE ERROR OF IMPARTIALITY


The refusal of the jurors in the Thaw trial to come to an agreement is
certainly a somewhat amusing sequel to the frenzied and even fantastic
caution with which they were selected. Jurymen were set aside for
reasons which seem to have only the very wildest relation to the
case--reasons which we cannot conceive as giving any human being a real
bias. It may be questioned whether the exaggerated theory of
impartiality in an arbiter or juryman may not be carried so far as to be
more unjust than partiality itself. What people call impartiality may
simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply
mean mental activity. It is sometimes made an objection, for instance,
to a juror that he has formed some _primâ-facie_ opinion upon a case: if
he can be forced under sharp questioning to admit that he has formed
such an opinion, he is regarded as manifestly unfit to conduct the
inquiry. Surely this is unsound. If his bias is one of interest, of
class, or creed, or notorious propaganda, then that fact certainly
proves that he is not an impartial arbiter. But the mere fact that he
did form some temporary impression from the first facts as far as he
knew them--this does not prove that he is not an impartial arbiter--it
only proves that he is not a cold-blooded fool.

If we walk down the street, taking all the jurymen who have not formed
opinions and leaving all the jurymen who have formed opinions, it seems
highly probable that we shall only succeed in taking all the stupid
jurymen and leaving all the thoughtful ones. Provided that the opinion
formed is really of this airy and abstract kind, provided that it has no
suggestion of settled motive or prejudice, we might well regard it not
merely as a promise of capacity, but literally as a promise of justice.
The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports would
probably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further and
different things from the evidence. The man who had the sense to form an
opinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it.

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on this minor aspect of the
matter because the error about impartiality and justice is by no means
confined to a criminal question. In much more serious matters it is
assumed that the agnostic is impartial; whereas the agnostic is merely
ignorant. The logical outcome of the fastidiousness about the Thaw
jurors would be that the case ought to be tried by Esquimaux, or
Hottentots, or savages from the Cannibal Islands--by some class of
people who could have no conceivable interest in the parties, and
moreover, no conceivable interest in the case. The pure and starry
perfection of impartiality would be reached by people who not only had
no opinion before they had heard the case, but who also had no opinion
after they had heard it. In the same way, there is in modern discussions
of religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man is in some
way just and well-poised because he has come to no conclusion; and that
a man is in some way knocked off the list of fair judges because he has
come to a conclusion. It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias;
whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism. I remember
once arguing with an honest young atheist, who was very much shocked at
my disputing some of the assumptions which were absolute sanctities to
him (such as the quite unproved proposition of the independence of
matter and the quite improbable proposition of its power to originate
mind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he delivered
with an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: "Well, can you tell
me any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who accepted
the miraculous?" I said, "With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton,
Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere--as many more
as you please." To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man
made this astonishing reply--"Oh, but of course they _had_ to say that;
they were Christians." First he challenged me to find a black swan, and
then he ruled out all my swans because they were black. The fact that
all these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or
other a proof either that they were not great intellects or that they
had not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in a
charmingly convenient form: "All men that count have come to my
conclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count."

It did not seem to occur to such controversialists that if Cardinal
Newman was really a man of intellect, the fact that he adhered to
dogmatic religion proved exactly as much as the fact that Professor
Huxley, another man of intellect, found that he could not adhere to
dogmatic religion; that is to say (as I cheerfully admit), it proved
precious little either way. If there is one class of men whom history
has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all
directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always
prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat. But
whatever be the truth about exceptional intelligence and the masses, it
is manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided
upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who
cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every
clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we
seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has
taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive
objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of his
reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a
thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say that
the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say
that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that the
sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted.



PHONETIC SPELLING


A correspondent asks me to make more lucid my remarks about phonetic
spelling. I have no detailed objection to items of spelling-reform; my
objection is to a general principle; and it is this. It seems to me that
what is really wrong with all modern and highly civilised language is
that it does so largely consist of dead words. Half our speech consists
of similes that remind us of no similarity; of pictorial phrases that
call up no picture; of historical allusions the origin of which we have
forgotten. Take any instance on which the eye happens to alight. I saw
in the paper some days ago that the well-known leader of a certain
religious party wrote to a supporter of his the following curious words:
"I have not forgotten the talented way in which you held up the banner
at Birkenhead." Taking the ordinary vague meaning of the word
"talented," there is no coherency in the picture. The trumpets blow, the
spears shake and glitter, and in the thick of the purple battle there
stands a gentleman holding up a banner in a talented way. And when we
come to the original force of the word "talent" the matter is worse: a
talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the
mental capital committed to an individual at birth. If the religious
leader in question had really meant anything by his phrases, he would
have been puzzled to know how a man could use a Greek coin to hold up a
banner. But really he meant nothing by his phrases. "Holding up the
banner" was to him a colourless term for doing the proper thing, and
"talented" was a colourless term for doing it successfully.

Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling is
that it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters and
not as coins. The original life in a word (as in the word "talent")
burns low as it is: sensible spelling might extinguish it altogether.
Suppose any sentence you like: suppose a man says, "Republics generally
encourage holidays." It looks like the top line of a copy-book. Now, it
is perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence exactly as it is
pronounced, even by highly educated people, the sentence would run:
"Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies." It looks ugly: but I have not
the smallest objection to ugliness. My objection is that these four
words have each a history and hidden treasures in them: that this
history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is)
phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether. Republic does not
mean merely a mode of political choice. Republic (as we see when we look
at the structure of the word) means the Public Thing: the abstraction
which is us all.

A Republican is not a man who wants a Constitution with a President. A
Republican is a man who prefers to think of Government as impersonal; he
is opposed to the Royalist, who prefers to think of Government as
personal. Take the second word, "generally." This is always used as
meaning "in the majority of cases." But, again, if we look at the shape
and spelling of the word, we shall see that "generally" means something
more like "generically," and is akin to such words as "generation" or
"regenerate." "Pigs are generally dirty" does not mean that pigs are, in
the majority of cases, dirty, but that pigs as a race or genus are
dirty, that pigs as pigs are dirty--an important philosophical
distinction. Take the third word, "encourage." The word "encourage" is
used in such modern sentences in the merely automatic sense of promote;
to encourage poetry means merely to advance or assist poetry. But to
encourage poetry means properly to put courage into poetry--a fine idea.
Take the fourth word, "holidays." As long as that word remains, it will
always answer the ignorant slander which asserts that religion was
opposed to human cheerfulness; that word will always assert that when a
day is holy it should also be happy. Properly spelt, these words all
tell a sublime story, like Westminster Abbey. Phonetically spelt, they
might lose the last traces of any such story. "Generally" is an exalted
metaphysical term; "jenrally" is not. If you "encourage" a man, you pour
into him the chivalry of a hundred princes; this does not happen if you
merely "inkurrij" him. "Republics," if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be public. "Holidays," if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be holy.

Here is a case that has just occurred. A certain magistrate told
somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always be
polite to the police." I do not know whether the magistrate noticed the
circumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the same
origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of the
city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the
representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human
civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly
connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness
without thinking of a policeman; it is even possible that our eyes often
alight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to the
subject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only the
link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the only
serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a mere
frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotism
and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is because
they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of the
beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is not
really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave
and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and
vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness
is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon:
a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the
accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is
politeness; a veiled image of politeness--sometimes impenetrably veiled.
But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which
is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually
degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that
politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose all
delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for
something civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of a
knight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of a
knight-errant. But I am not sure that he would succeed any the better n
remembering this obligation of romantic grace if his name were spelt
phonetically, supposing that it could be spelt phonetically. Some
spelling-reformers, I am told, in the poorer parts of London do spell
his name phonetically, very phonetically. They call him a "pleeceman."
Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word, and
the policeman's reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quite
suddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution
in spelling. If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think
it wrong.



HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH


Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress. I have
forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a
certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and
true. In any case, what I say now is this. Human history is so rich and
complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement
or retrogression. I could make out that the world has been growing more
democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more
democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more
aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more
aristocratic I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of
flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of
standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way.
I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately
men have invented absinthe and the _Westminster Gazette_. I could prove
the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters,
and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world
was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in
all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have
you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses,
half consciously, how very _conventional_ progress is?--


  "Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
  grooves of change."


Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging
thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps
there was never anything so groovy.

Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss
adequately a great political matter like the question of the military
punishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be observed
by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by neither.
Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that
we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and
Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the
metaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons." Very well; let
those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let
us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are
large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their
own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture
and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them
with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our
Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not
with other people's. It is not true that superiority suggests a tit for
tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at the
Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice immediately realises that his
only chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at the
little hooligan. The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all for
the Lord Chief Justice: that is a matter which we may contentedly leave
as a solemn psychological mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect
at all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended to
the Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out.

Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the
civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is
precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients.
According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads of
dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead Zulus.
Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their slaves,
Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a similar
principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight
cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive a
menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English
gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must fight
the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own weapons are
knives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that to do
this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of our supremacy. All the
mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of the white man, so
far as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact that
we do not do such things. The Zulus point at us and say, "Observe the
advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cut
off the noses of their enemies." The Soudanese say to each other, "This
hardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplest
and most obvious human pleasures." And the cannibals say, "The austere
and terrible race, the race that denies itself even boiled missionary,
is upon us: let us flee."

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general
proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements that
make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are
precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For
the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same
as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is
imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination
that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing
of the other man's point of view is in the main a thing in which
Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with
all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace
and war.

They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented
ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for
the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve
a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East,
with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is
weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are
still--merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy's sufferings
they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the
Englishman's head they might really borrow it. For if you do not
understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him,
very probably you will not.

When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern
danger was a danger of over-civilisation. I am inclined to think now
that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards barbarism,
just such a return towards barbarism as is indicated in the suggestions
of barbaric retaliation of which I have just spoken. Civilisation in the
best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all
externals. Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude
and unconquered state. Barbarism means the worship of Nature; and in
recent poetry, science, and philosophy there has been too much of the
worship of Nature. Wherever men begin to talk much and with great
solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of it is barbaric.
When men talk much about heredity and environment they are almost
barbarians. The modern men of science are many of them almost
barbarians. Mr. Blatchford is in great danger of becoming a barbarian.
For barbarians (especially the truly squalid and unhappy barbarians) are
always talking about these scientific subjects from morning till night.
That is why they remain squalid and unhappy; that is why they remain
barbarians. Hottentots are always talking about heredity, like Mr.
Blatchford. Sandwich Islanders are always talking about environment,
like Mr. Suthers. Savages--those that are truly stunted or
depraved--dedicate nearly all their tales and sayings to the subject of
physical kinship, of a curse on this or that tribe, of a taint in this
or that family, of the invincible law of blood, of the unavoidable evil
of places. The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what
he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and is always talking
about what he may do. Hence all the Zola heredity and Ibsen heredity
that has been written in our time affects me as not merely evil, but as
essentially ignorant and retrogressive. This sort of science is almost
the only thing that can with strict propriety be called reactionary.
Scientific determinism is simply the primal twilight of all mankind; and
some men seem to be returning to it.

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about
material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked
about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of
Drink--as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the
problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about
curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim
stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it
is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is
a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably
progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them
calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of
housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and
for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the
stationers' shops by Act of Parliament.

I cannot help thinking that there is some shadow of this uncivilised
materialism lying at present upon a much more dignified and valuable
cause. Every one is talking just now about the desirability of
ingeminating peace and averting war. But even war and peace are physical
states rather than moral states, and in talking about them only we have
by no means got to the bottom of the matter. How, for instance, do we as
a matter of fact create peace in one single community? We do not do it
by vaguely telling every one to avoid fighting and to submit to anything
that is done to him. We do it by definitely defining his rights and then
undertaking to avenge his wrongs. We shall never have a common peace in
Europe till we have a common principle in Europe. People talk of "The
United States of Europe;" but they forget that it needed the very
doctrinal "Declaration of Independence" to make the United States of
America. You cannot agree about nothing any more than you can quarrel
about nothing.



WINE WHEN IT IS RED


I suppose that there will be some wigs on the green in connection with
the recent manifesto signed by a string of very eminent doctors on the
subject of what is called "alcohol." "Alcohol" is, to judge by the sound
of it, an Arabic word, like "algebra" and "Alhambra," those two other
unpleasant things. The Alhambra in Spain I have never seen; I am told
that it is a low and rambling building; I allude to the far more
dignified erection in Leicester Square. If it is true, as I surmise,
that "alcohol" is a word of the Arabs, it is interesting to realise that
our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things comes
from a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose that
some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent and,
brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine as
the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly enough
to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat out the
horrible word "alcohol." The fact that the doctors had to use this word
for the sake of scientific clearness was really a great disadvantage to
them in fairly discussing the matter. For the word really involves one
of those beggings of the question which make these moral matters so
difficult. It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when a man desires an
alcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol.

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty
English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. The fact
that beer has a very slight stimulating quality will be quite among the
smallest reasons that induce him to ask for it. In short, he will not be
in the least desiring alcohol; he will be desiring beer. But, of course,
the question cannot be settled in such a simple way. The real difficulty
which confronts everybody, and which especially confronts doctors, is
that the extraordinary position of man in the physical universe makes it
practically impossible to treat him in either one direction or the other
in a purely physical way. Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If
he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is
not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the
animals went entirely off its head. In neither case can we really argue
very much from the body of man simply considered as the body of an
innocent and healthy animal. His body has got too much mixed up with his
soul, as we see in the supreme instance of sex. It may be worth while
uttering the warning to wealthy philanthropists and idealists that this
argument from the animal should not be thoughtlessly used, even against
the atrocious evils of excess; it is an argument that proves too little
or too much.

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is
unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his
tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes
his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist
wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by
thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that
affects the beasts--sex, poetry, property, religion. The real case
against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls
up the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would not
matter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiable
creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There is nothing
bestial about intoxication; and certainly there is nothing intoxicating
or even particularly lively about beasts. Man is always something worse
or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal
perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either
chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad
as drunkenness--or so good as drink.

The pronouncement of these particular doctors is very clear and
uncompromising; in the modern atmosphere, indeed, it even deserves some
credit for moral courage. The majority of modern people, of course, will
probably agree with it in so far as it declares that alcoholic drinks
are often of supreme value in emergencies of illness; but many people, I
fear, will open their eyes at the emphatic terms in which they describe
such drink as considered as a beverage; but they are not content with
declaring that the drink is in moderation harmless: they distinctly
declare that it is in moderation beneficial. But I fancy that, in saying
this, the doctors had in mind a truth that runs somewhat counter to the
common opinion. I fancy that it is the experience of most doctors that
giving any alcohol for illness (though often necessary) is about the
most morally dangerous way of giving it. Instead of giving it to a
healthy person who has many other forms of life, you are giving it to a
desperate person, to whom it is the only form of life. The invalid can
hardly be blamed if by some accident of his erratic and overwrought
condition he comes to remember the thing as the very water of vitality
and to use it as such. For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is
not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so
far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst
way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink
is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and
especially not caring for the drink.

The doctor, of course, ought to be able to do a great deal in the way of
restraining those individual cases where there is plainly an evil
thirst; and beyond that the only hope would seem to be in some increase,
or, rather, some concentration of ordinary public opinion on the
subject. I have always held consistently my own modest theory on the
subject. I believe that if by some method the local public-house could
be as definite and isolated a place as the local post-office or the
local railway station, if all types of people passed through it for all
types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a man
behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present
against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the
presence of his ordinary sensible neighbours. In such a place the kind
of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be
treated with the same severity with which the post office authorities
would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an
unlimited number of stamps. It is a small matter whether in either case
a technical refusal would be officially employed. It is an essential
matter that in both cases the authorities could rapidly communicate with
the friends and family of the mentally afflicted person. At least, the
postmistress would not dangle a strip of tempting sixpenny stamps before
the enthusiast's eyes as he was being dragged away with his tongue out.
If we made drinking open and official we might be taking one step
towards making it careless. In such things to be careless is to be sane:
for neither drunkards nor Moslems can be careless about drink.



DEMAGOGUES AND MYSTAGOGUES


I once heard a man call this age the age of demagogues. Of this I can
only say, in the admirably sensible words of the angry coachman in
"Pickwick," that "that remark's political, or what is much the same, it
ain't true." So far from being the age of demagogues, this is really and
specially the age of mystagogues. So far from this being a time in which
things are praised because they are popular, the truth is that this is
the first time, perhaps, in the whole history of the world in which
things can be praised because they are unpopular. The demagogue succeeds
because he makes himself understood, even if he is not worth
understanding. But the mystagogue succeeds because he gets himself
misunderstood; although, as a rule, he is not even worth
misunderstanding. Gladstone was a demagogue: Disraeli a mystagogue. But
ours is specially the time when a man can advertise his wares not as a
universality, but as what the tradesmen call "a speciality." We all know
this, for instance, about modern art. Michelangelo and Whistler were
both fine artists; but one is obviously public, the other obviously
private, or, rather, not obvious at all. Michelangelo's frescoes are
doubtless finer than the popular judgment, but they are plainly meant to
strike the popular judgment. Whistler's pictures seem often meant to
escape the popular judgment; they even seem meant to escape the popular
admiration. They are elusive, fugitive; they fly even from praise.
Doubtless many artists in Michelangelo's day declared themselves to be
great artists, although they were unsuccessful. But they did not declare
themselves great artists because they were unsuccessful: that is the
peculiarity of our own time, which has a positive bias against the
populace.

Another case of the same kind of thing can be found in the latest
conceptions of humour. By the wholesome tradition of mankind, a joke was
a thing meant to amuse men; a joke which did not amuse them was a
failure, just as a fire which did not warm them was a failure. But we
have seen the process of secrecy and aristocracy introduced even into
jokes. If a joke falls flat, a small school of æsthetes only ask us to
notice the wild grace of its falling and its perfect flatness after its
fall. The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has
been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not
worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism
into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously
communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made
laughter lonelier than tears.

There is a third thing to which the mystagogues have recently been
applying the methods of a secret society: I mean manners. Men who sought
to rebuke rudeness used to represent manners as reasonable and ordinary;
now they seek to represent them as private and peculiar. Instead of
saying to a man who blocks up a street or the fireplace, "You ought to
know better than that," the moderns say, "You, of course, don't know
better than that."

I have just been reading an amusing book by Lady Grove called "The
Social Fetich," which is a positive riot of this new specialism and
mystification. It is due to Lady Grove to say that she has some of the
freer and more honourable qualities of the old Whig aristocracy, as well
as their wonderful worldliness and their strange faith in the passing
fashion of our politics. For instance, she speaks of Jingo Imperialism
with a healthy English contempt; and she perceives stray and striking
truths, and records them justly--as, for instance, the greater democracy
of the Southern and Catholic countries of Europe. But in her dealings
with social formulæ here in England she is, it must frankly be said, a
common mystagogue. She does not, like a decent demagogue, wish to make
people understand; she wishes to make them painfully conscious of not
understanding. Her favourite method is to terrify people from doing
things that are quite harmless by telling them that if they do they are
the kind of people who would do other things, equally harmless. If you
ask after somebody's mother (or whatever it is), you are the kind of
person who would have a pillow-case, or would not have a pillow-case. I
forget which it is; and so, I dare say, does she. If you assume the
ordinary dignity of a decent citizen and say that you don't see the harm
of having a mother or a pillow-case, she would say that of course _you_
wouldn't. This is what I call being a mystagogue. It is more vulgar than
being a demagogue; because it is much easier.

The primary point I meant to emphasise is that this sort of aristocracy
is essentially a new sort. All the old despots were demagogues; at
least, they were demagogues whenever they were really trying to please
or impress the demos. If they poured out beer for their vassals it was
because both they and their vassals had a taste for beer. If (in some
slightly different mood) they poured melted lead on their vassals, it
was because both they and their vassals had a strong distaste for
melted lead. But they did not make any mystery about either of the two
substances. They did not say, "You don't like melted lead?.... Ah! no,
of course, _you_ wouldn't; you are probably the kind of person who would
prefer beer.... It is no good asking you even to imagine the curious
undercurrent of psychological pleasure felt by a refined person under
the seeming shock of melted lead." Even tyrants when they tried to be
popular, tried to give the people pleasure; they did not try to overawe
the people by giving them something which they ought to regard as
pleasure. It was the same with the popular presentment of aristocracy.
Aristocrats tried to impress humanity by the exhibition of qualities
which humanity admires, such as courage, gaiety, or even mere splendour.
The aristocracy might have more possession in these things, but the
democracy had quite equal delight in them. It was much more sensible to
offer yourself for admiration because you had drunk three bottles of
port at a sitting, than to offer yourself for admiration (as Lady Grove
does) because you think it right to say "port wine" while other people
think it right to say "port." Whether Lady Grove's preference for port
wine (I mean for the phrase port wine) is a piece of mere nonsense I do
not know; but at least it is a very good example of the futility of such
tests in the matter even of mere breeding. "Port wine" may happen to be
the phrase used in certain good families; but numberless aristocrats say
"port," and all barmaids say "port wine." The whole thing is rather
more trivial than collecting tram-tickets; and I will not pursue Lady
Grove's further distinctions. I pass over the interesting theory that I
ought to say to Jones (even apparently if he is my dearest friend), "How
is Mrs. Jones?" instead of "How is your wife?" and I pass over an
impassioned declamation about bedspreads (I think) which has failed to
fire my blood.

The truth of the matter is really quite simple. An aristocracy is a
secret society; and this is especially so when, as in the modern world,
it is practically a plutocracy. The one idea of a secret society is to
change the password. Lady Grove falls naturally into a pure perversity
because she feels subconsciously that the people of England can be more
effectively kept at a distance by a perpetual torrent of new tests than
by the persistence of a few old ones. She knows that in the educated
"middle class" there is an idea that it is vulgar to say port wine;
therefore she reverses the idea--she says that the man who would say
"port" is a man who would say, "How is your wife?" She says it because
she knows both these remarks to be quite obvious and reasonable.

The only thing to be done or said in reply, I suppose, would be to apply
the same principle of bold mystification on our own part. I do not see
why I should not write a book called "Etiquette in Fleet Street," and
terrify every one else out of that thoroughfare by mysterious allusions
to the mistakes that they generally make. I might say: "This is the kind
of man who would wear a green tie when he went into a tobacconist's," or
"You don't see anything wrong in drinking a Benedictine on
Thursday?.... No, of course _you_ wouldn't." I might asseverate with
passionate disgust and disdain: "The man who is capable of writing
sonnets as well as triolets is capable of climbing an omnibus while
holding an umbrella." It seems a simple method; if ever I should master
it perhaps I may govern England.



THE "EATANSWILL GAZETTE."


The other day some one presented me with a paper called the _Eatanswill
Gazette_. I need hardly say that I could not have been more startled if
I had seen a coach coming down the road with old Mr. Tony Weller on the
box. But, indeed, the case is much more extraordinary than that would
be. Old Mr. Weller was a good man, a specially and seriously good man, a
proud father, a very patient husband, a sane moralist, and a reliable
ally. One could not be so very much surprised if somebody pretended to
be Tony Weller. But the _Eatanswill Gazette_ is definitely depicted in
"Pickwick" as a dirty and unscrupulous rag, soaked with slander and
nonsense. It was really interesting to find a modern paper proud to take
its name. The case cannot be compared to anything so simple as a
resurrection of one of the "Pickwick" characters; yet a very good
parallel could easily be found. It is almost exactly as if a firm of
solicitors were to open their offices to-morrow under the name of
Dodson and Fogg.

It was at once apparent, of course, that the thing was a joke. But what
was not apparent, what only grew upon the mind with gradual wonder and
terror, was the fact that it had its serious side. The paper is
published in the well-known town of Sudbury, in Suffolk. And it seems
that there is a standing quarrel between Sudbury and the county town of
Ipswich as to which was the town described by Dickens in his celebrated
sketch of an election. Each town proclaims with passion that it was
Eatanswill. If each town proclaimed with passion that it was not
Eatanswill, I might be able to understand it. Eatanswill, according to
Dickens, was a town alive with loathsome corruption, hypocritical in all
its public utterances, and venal in all its votes. Yet, two highly
respectable towns compete for the honour of having been this particular
cesspool, just as ten cities fought to be the birthplace of Homer. They
claim to be its original as keenly as if they were claiming to be the
original of More's "Utopia" or Morris's "Earthly Paradise." They grow
seriously heated over the matter. The men of Ipswich say warmly, "It
must have been our town; for Dickens says it was corrupt, and a more
corrupt town than our town you couldn't have met in a month." The men of
Sudbury reply with rising passion, "Permit us to tell you, gentlemen,
that our town was quite as corrupt as your town any day of the week. Our
town was a common nuisance; and we defy our enemies to question it."
"Perhaps you will tell us," sneer the citizens of Ipswich, "that your
politics were ever as thoroughly filthy as----" "As filthy as anything,"
answer the Sudbury men, undauntedly. "Nothing in politics could be
filthier. Dickens must have noticed how disgusting we were." "And could
he have failed to notice," the others reason indignantly, "how
disgusting we were? You could smell us a mile off. You Sudbury fellows
may think yourselves very fine, but let me tell you that, compared to
our city, Sudbury was an honest place." And so the controversy goes on.
It seems to me to be a new and odd kind of controversy.

Naturally, an outsider feels inclined to ask why Eatanswill should be
either one or the other. As a matter of fact, I fear Eatanswill was
every town in the country. It is surely clear that when Dickens
described the Eatanswill election he did not mean it as a satire on
Sudbury or a satire on Ipswich; he meant it as a satire on England. The
Eatanswill election is not a joke against Eatanswill; it is a joke
against elections. If the satire is merely local, it practically loses
its point; just as the "Circumlocution Office" would lose its point if
it were not supposed to be a true sketch of all Government offices; just
as the Lord Chancellor in "Bleak House" would lose his point if he were
not supposed to be symbolic and representative of all Lord Chancellors.
The whole moral meaning would vanish if we supposed that Oliver Twist
had got by accident into an exceptionally bad workhouse, or that Mr.
Dorrit was in the only debtors' prison that was not well managed.
Dickens was making game, not of places, but of methods. He poured all
his powerful genius into trying to make the people ashamed of the
methods. But he seems only to have succeeded in making people proud of
the places. In any case, the controversy is conducted in a truly
extraordinary way. No one seems to allow for the fact that, after all,
Dickens was writing a novel, and a highly fantastic novel at that. Facts
in support of Sudbury or Ipswich are quoted not only from the story
itself, which is wild and wandering enough, but even from the yet wilder
narratives which incidentally occur in the story, such as Sam Weller's
description of how his father, on the way to Eatanswill, tipped all the
voters into the canal. This may quite easily be (to begin with) an
entertaining tarradiddle of Sam's own invention, told, like many other
even more improbable stories, solely to amuse Mr. Pickwick. Yet the
champions of these two towns positively ask each other to produce a
canal, or to fail for ever in their attempt to prove themselves the most
corrupt town in England. As far as I remember, Sam's story of the canal
ends with Mr. Pickwick eagerly asking whether everybody was rescued, and
Sam solemnly replying that one old gentleman's hat was found, but that
he was not sure whether his head was in it. If the canal is to be taken
as realistic, why not the hat and the head? If these critics ever find
the canal I recommend them to drag it for the body of the old gentleman.

Both sides refuse to allow for the fact that the characters in the story
are comic characters. For instance, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, the eminent
student of Dickens, writes to the _Eatanswill Gazette_ to say that
Sudbury, a small town, could not have been Eatanswill, because one of
the candidates speaks of its great manufactures. But obviously one of
the candidates would have spoken of its great manufactures if it had had
nothing but a row of apple-stalls. One of the candidates might have said
that the commerce of Eatanswill eclipsed Carthage, and covered every
sea; it would have been quite in the style of Dickens. But when the
champion of Sudbury answers him, he does not point out this plain
mistake. He answers by making another mistake exactly of the same kind.
He says that Eatanswill was not a busy, important place. And his odd
reason is that Mrs. Pott said she was dull there. But obviously Mrs.
Pott would have said she was dull anywhere. She was setting her cap at
Mr. Winkle. Moreover, it was the whole point of her character in any
case. Mrs. Pott was that kind of woman. If she had been in Ipswich she
would have said that she ought to be in London. If she was in London she
would have said that she ought to be in Paris. The first disputant
proves Eatanswill grand because a servile candidate calls it grand. The
second proves it dull because a discontented woman calls it dull.

The great part of the controversy seems to be conducted in the spirit of
highly irrelevant realism. Sudbury cannot be Eatanswill, because there
was a fancy-dress shop at Eatanswill, and there is no record of a
fancy-dress shop at Sudbury. Sudbury must be Eatanswill because there
were heavy roads outside Eatanswill, and there are heavy roads outside
Sudbury. Ipswich cannot be Eatanswill, because Mrs. Leo Hunter's country
seat would not be near a big town. Ipswich must be Eatanswill because
Mrs. Leo Hunter's country seat would be near a large town. Really,
Dickens might have been allowed to take liberties with such things as
these, even if he had been mentioning the place by name. If I were
writing a story about the town of Limerick, I should take the liberty of
introducing a bun-shop without taking a journey to Limerick to see
whether there was a bun-shop there. If I wrote a romance about Torquay,
I should hold myself free to introduce a house with a green door without
having studied a list of all the coloured doors in the town. But if, in
order to make it particularly obvious that I had not meant the town for
a photograph either of Torquay or Limerick, I had gone out of my way to
give the place a wild, fictitious name of my own, I think that in that
case I should be justified in tearing my hair with rage if the people of
Limerick or Torquay began to argue about bun-shops and green doors. No
reasonable man would expect Dickens to be so literal as all that even
about Bath or Bury St. Edmunds, which do exist; far less need he be
literal about Eatanswill, which didn't exist.

I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of the
argument. This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthy
people have for small places as against big ones; it arises from some
really good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication. First of
all, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible and
humorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich--at least, those
that appear in this discussion. Even the Sudbury champion, bent on
finding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr. Percy
Fitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer's famous statement that he was
neither Buff nor Blue, "but a sort of plaid," must have been copied from
some silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were "half and
half." Anybody might have made either of the two jokes. But it was the
whole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself to making
jokes that anybody might have made a little better than anybody would
have made them.




FAIRY TALES


Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial
people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they
base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in
the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged
in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection,
however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The
fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent,
but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being
moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but
there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official
accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern souls, feeling that
modern life is about as black a slavery as ever oppressed mankind (they
are right enough there), have especially described elfland as a place of
utter ease and abandonment--a place where the soul can turn every way at
will like the wind. Science denounces the idea of a capricious God; but
Mr. Yeats's school suggests that in that world every one is a capricious
god. Mr. Yeats himself has said a hundred times in that sad and splendid
literary style which makes him the first of all poets now writing in
English (I will not say of all English poets, for Irishmen are familiar
with the practice of physical assault), he has, I say, called up a
hundred times the picture of the terrible freedom of the fairies, who
typify the ultimate anarchy of art--


  "Where nobody grows old or weary or wise,
  Where nobody grows old or godly or grave."


But, after all (it is a shocking thing to say), I doubt whether Mr.
Yeats really knows the real philosophy of the fairies. He is not simple
enough; he is not stupid enough. Though I say it who should not, in good
sound human stupidity I would knock Mr. Yeats out any day. The fairies
like me better than Mr. Yeats; they can take me in more. And I have my
doubts whether this feeling of the free, wild spirits on the crest of
hill or wave is really the central and simple spirit of folk-lore. I
think the poets have made a mistake: because the world of the
fairy-tales is a brighter and more varied world than ours, they have
fancied it less moral; really it is brighter and more varied because it
is more moral. Suppose a man could be born in a modern prison. It is
impossible, of course, because nothing human can happen in a modern
prison, though it could sometimes in an ancient dungeon. A modern prison
is always inhuman, even when it is not inhumane. But suppose a man were
born in a modern prison, and grew accustomed to the deadly silence and
the disgusting indifference; and suppose he were then suddenly turned
loose upon the life and laughter of Fleet Street. He would, of course,
think that the literary men in Fleet Street were a free and happy race;
yet how sadly, how ironically, is this the reverse of the case! And so
again these toiling serfs in Fleet Street, when they catch a glimpse of
the fairies, think the fairies are utterly free. But fairies are like
journalists in this and many other respects. Fairies and journalists
have an apparent gaiety and a delusive beauty. Fairies and journalists
seem to be lovely and lawless; they seem to be both of them too
exquisite to descend to the ugliness of everyday duty. But it is an
illusion created by the sudden sweetness of their presence. Journalists
live under law; and so in fact does fairyland.

If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs
from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can
only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is
the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs
upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on
supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must
be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to
the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results
will follow. Bluebeard's wife may open all doors but one. A promise is
broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to
a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride
of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him,
and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not
open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her.
A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat
one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the
earth.

This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore--the idea that
all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one
negative. Now, it is obvious that there are many philosophical and
religious ideas akin to or symbolised by this; but it is not with them I
wish to deal here. It is surely obvious that all ethics ought to be
taught to this fairy-tale tune; that, if one does the thing forbidden,
one imperils all the things provided. A man who breaks his promise to
his wife ought to be reminded that, even if she is a cat, the case of
the fairy-cat shows that such conduct may be incautious. A burglar just
about to open some one else's safe should be playfully reminded that he
is in the perilous posture of the beautiful Pandora: he is about to
lift the forbidden lid and loosen evils unknown. The boy eating some
one's apples in some one's apple tree should be a reminder that he has
come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of all
others. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which, so far from
being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (like
common books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment, they
find the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in this
fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions
under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The vetoes are
indeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The idea of
property, the idea of some one else's apples, is a rum idea; but then
the idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. It is strange and
weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne; but then
the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If I
have drunk of the fairies' drink it is but just I should drink by the
fairies' rules. We may not see the direct logical connection between
three beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly policeman; but then who
in fairy tales ever could see the direct logical connection between
three bears and a giant, or between a rose and a roaring beast? Not only
can these fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality
can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of
wonder and of war.




TOM JONES AND MORALITY


The two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly
celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated
by the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merely
chronological incident should induce the people who write about Fielding
to read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for glory. A
great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. This
is not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain respect for
the realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of mankind. I have
never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek Pindar; Peter
Pindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I have not read
Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly would not prevent
me from talking of "the masterpieces of Pindar," or of "great poets like
Pindar or Æschylus." The very learned men are angularly unenlightened on
this as on many other subjects; and the position they take up is really
quite unreasonable. If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading
alludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer
to say to the man, "You cannot read mediæval French," or "You cannot
read Homeric Greek." But it is not a triumphant sneer--or, indeed, a
sneer at all. A man has got as much right to employ in his speech the
established and traditional facts of human history as he has to employ
any other piece of common human information. And it is as reasonable for
a man who knows no French to assume that Villon was a good poet as it
would be for a man who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven was
a good musician. Because he himself has no ear for music, that is no
reason why he should assume that the human race has no ear for music.
Because I am ignorant (as I am), it does not follow that I ought to
assume that I am deceived. The man who would not praise Pindar unless he
had read him would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of
sceptic, who doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man who
could not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be
like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had
been there.

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this
process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a
Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to
abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose
Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and
outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well
perhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know a
little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same
situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out
that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and
beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against
the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;
and when they bring such attacks against the morality of Fielding, I
regret very much that they cannot read English.

There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that Fielding was in some
way an immoral or offensive writer. I have been astounded by the number
of the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles written
about him just now in which there is a curious tone of apologising for
the man. One critic says that after all he couldn't help it, because he
lived in the eighteenth century; another says that we must allow for the
change of manners and ideas; another says that he was not altogether
without generous and humane feelings; another suggests that he clung
feebly, after all, to a few of the less important virtues. What on earth
does all this mean? Fielding described Tom Jones as going on in a
certain way, in which, most unfortunately, a very large number of young
men do go on. It is unnecessary to say that Henry Fielding knew that it
was an unfortunate way of going on. Even Tom Jones knew that. He said in
so many words that it was a very unfortunate way of going on; he said,
one may almost say, that it had ruined his life; the passage is there
for the benefit of any one who may take the trouble to read the book.
There is ample evidence (though even this is of a mystical and indirect
kind), there is ample evidence that Fielding probably thought that it
was better to be Tom Jones than to be an utter coward and sneak. There
is simply not one rag or thread or speck of evidence to show that
Fielding thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be a good
man. All that he is concerned with is the description of a definite and
very real type of young man; the young man whose passions and whose
selfish necessities sometimes seemed to be stronger than anything else
in him.

The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad,
_spiritually_ speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis or
the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as the
profound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda. The practical morality
of Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his theoretical
morality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the majority of
modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics of Henry
Fielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of archangels if
they lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones. Tom Jones is
still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is walking about the
streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we drink with him, we
smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him. The only difference
is that we have no longer the intellectual courage to write about him.
We split up the supreme and central human being, Tom Jones, into a
number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J.M. Barrie write about him in
his good moments, and make him out better than he is. We let Zola write
about him in his bad moments, and make him out much worse than he is. We
let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of spiritual panic which he
knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard Kipling celebrate those
moments of brutality which he knows to be far more cowardly. We let
obscene writers write about the obscenities of this ordinary man. We let
puritan writers write about the purities of this ordinary man. We look
through one peephole that makes men out as devils, and we call it the
new art. We look through another peephole that makes men out as angels,
and we call it the New Theology. But if we pull down some dusty old
books from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mildewed leaves, and
if in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale about
a complete man, such a man as is walking on the pavement outside, we
suddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone
age.

The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's "Gin
Lane" or "Stages of Cruelty," or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, "God's dreadful judgment" against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that morality
is somehow merely a matter of human taste--an accident of psychology.
And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to
praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there
is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme.
Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is
visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt in some
vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern instinct is
that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good.
But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil,
there was something that remained good--goodness remained good. An
actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that men rose,
or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law itself was as
much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If Tom Jones
violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding did not
feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of Tom
Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say destroying
the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking the law; but
it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern people call the
foulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the severity and moral
stringency of Fielding. He would not have thought that he was serving
morality at all if he had written a book all about nice people. Fielding
would have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely immoral; and there is
something to be said for that view. Telling the truth about the terrible
struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the
ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. This
older and firmer conception of right as existing outside human weakness
and without reference to human error can be felt in the very lightest
and loosest of the works of old English literature. It is commonly
unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a great moralist; but in this
particular way Shakspere is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes
to right and wrong it is always with this old implication. Right is
right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is
wrong about it.



THE MAID OF ORLEANS


A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read
Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of
Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again
for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to
turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and
graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender
sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble
tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl
through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even
respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan
the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to
the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.

When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great
religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a
common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a
saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy
little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though
it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not
specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into
Joan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of
the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with
startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned
anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jésus." It has just the same general
intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least
patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite
the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest
blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to
attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply that
he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to
write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who told
him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how t is sent up to the
sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and level
clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small beanstalk,
and told his too imaginative companion that this also might be made to
scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite exceptional
psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a union of the
prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost irrelevant
eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the void, we shall
no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was sent this sweet,
though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting earth and heaven."
That is the way that Renan and France write, only they do it better.
But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a little impatient and
feels inclined to say, "But, hang it all, what do you know about the
heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know nothing about Jack
at all, except that some people say that he climbed up a beanstalk.
Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he hadn't. You must
interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you cannot merely
interpret religion in terms of him. We have the materials of this story,
and we can believe them or not. But we have not got the materials to
make another story."

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole
France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to
his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it
and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a
real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a
scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof.
It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said
that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into
the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example,
the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never
existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a
certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the
multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for
this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not
possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to
remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant
by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have
learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from _a_ priest, is
like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have
learnt it from _a_ Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour
Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society.

But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When
you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the
outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the
rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts,
he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts. As
Anatole France, on his own intellectual principle, cannot believe in
what Joan of Arc did, he professes to be her dearest friend, and to know
exactly what she meant. I cannot feel it to be a very rational manner of
writing history; and sooner or later we shall have to find some more
solid way of dealing with those spiritual phenomena with which all
history is as closely spotted and spangled as the sky is with stars.

Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner
than most of her critics and biographers. We shall not recover the
common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism. Our wars
fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious--such as
getting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded--because it
began with something wild and perfect--the saints delivering France. She
put her idealism in the right place, and her realism also in the right
place: we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her
sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her
practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is
reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical.
It is our practice that is dreamy.

It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired
and querulous culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the
blaze of such fixed stars. Those who called her a witch hot from hell
were much more sensible than those who depict her as a silly sentimental
maiden prompted by her parish priest. If I have to choose between the
two schools of her scattered enemies, I could take my place with those
subtle clerks who thought her divine mission devilish, rather than with
those rustic aunts and uncles who thought it impossible.



A DEAD POET


With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning.
His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectually
intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain
himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any
explanation. But his real energy, and the real energy of Francis
Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once
fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common Imperialist can
have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas
also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as
he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But great poets use
the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for two
opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too
large for any one to understand, and now again because they are talking
about something too small for any one to see. Francis Thompson possessed
both these infinities. He escaped by being too small, as the microbe
escapes; or he escaped by being too large, as the universe escapes. Any
one who knows Francis Thompson's poetry knows quite well the truth to
which I refer. For the benefit of any person who does not know it, I may
mention two cases taken from memory. I have not the book by me, so I can
only render the poetical passages in a clumsy paraphrase. But there was
one poem of which the image was so vast that it was literally difficult
for a time to take it in; he was describing the evening earth with its
mist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rolling
upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of the
earth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly
before God. That is the case of the image too large for comprehension.
Another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. In
one of his poems, he says that abyss between the known and the unknown
is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and
theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a
pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that
death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least
priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get
separated from another thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are all
actually concentrated in the word "pontifical." In Francis Thompson's
poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out
and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark
of greatness; and he was a great poet.

Beneath the tide of praise which was obviously due to the dead poet,
there is an evident undercurrent of discussion about him; some charges
of moral weakness were at least important enough to be authoritatively
contradicted in the _Nation_; and, in connection with this and other
things, there has been a continuous stir of comment upon his attraction
to and gradual absorption in Catholic theological ideas. This question
is so important that I think it ought to be considered and understood
even at the present time. It is, of course, true that Francis Thompson
devoted himself more and more to poems not only purely Catholic, but,
one may say, purely ecclesiastical. And it is, moreover, true that (if
things go on as they are going on at present) more and more good poets
will do the same. Poets will tend towards Christian orthodoxy for a
perfectly plain reason; because it is about the simplest and freest
thing now left in the world. On this point it is very necessary to be
clear. When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they
seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing
there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the
world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world
has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has
never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

Now, poets in our epoch will tend towards ecclesiastical religion
strictly because it is just a little more free than anything else. Take,
for instance, the case of symbol and ritualism. All reasonable men
believe in symbol; but some reasonable men do not believe in ritualism;
by which they mean, I imagine, a symbolism too complex, elaborate, and
mechanical. But whenever they talk of ritualism they always seem to mean
the ritualism of the Church. Why should they not mean the ritual of the
world? It is much more ritualistic. The ritual of the Army, the ritual
of the Navy, the ritual of the Law Courts, the ritual of Parliament are
much more ritualistic. The ritual of a dinner-party is much more
ritualistic. Priests may put gold and great jewels on the chalice; but
at least there is only one chalice to put them on. When you go to a
dinner-party they put in front of you five different chalices, of five
weird and heraldic shapes, to symbolise five different kinds of wine; an
insane extension of ritual from which Mr. Percy Dearmer would fly
shrieking. A bishop wears a mitre; but he is not thought more or less of
a bishop according to whether you can see the very latest curves in his
mitre. But a swell is thought more or less of a swell according to
whether you can see the very latest curves in his hat. There is more
_fuss_ about symbols in the world than in the Church.

And yet (strangely enough) though men fuss more about the worldly
symbols, they mean less by them. It is the mark of religious forms that
they declare something unknown. But it is the mark of worldly forms that
they declare something which is known, and which is known to be untrue.
When the Pope in an Encyclical calls himself your father, it is a matter
of faith or of doubt. But when the Duke of Devonshire in a letter calls
himself yours obediently, you know that he means the opposite of what he
says. Religious forms are, at the worst, fables; they might be true.
Secular forms are falsehoods; they are not true. Take a more topical
case. The German Emperor has more uniforms than the Pope. But, moreover,
the Pope's vestments all imply a claim to be something purely mystical
and doubtful. Many of the German Emperor's uniforms imply a claim to be
something which he certainly is not and which it would be highly
disgusting if he were. The Pope may or may not be the Vicar of Christ.
But the Kaiser certainly is not an English Colonel. If the thing were
reality it would be treason. If it is mere ritual, it is by far the most
unreal ritual on earth.

Now, poetical people like Francis Thompson will, as things stand, tend
away from secular society and towards religion for the reason above
described: that there are crowds of symbols in both, but that those of
religion are simpler and mean more. To take an evident type, the Cross
is more poetical than the Union Jack, because it is simpler. The more
simple an idea is, the more it is fertile in variations. Francis
Thompson could have written any number of good poems on the Cross,
because it is a primary symbol. The number of poems which Mr. Rudyard
Kipling could write on the Union Jack is, fortunately, limited, because
the Union Jack is too complex to produce luxuriance. The same principle
applies to any possible number of cases. A poet like Francis Thompson
could deduce perpetually rich and branching meanings out of two plain
facts like bread and wine; with bread and wine he can expand everything
to everywhere. But with a French menu he cannot expand anything; except
perhaps himself. Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas.
Mongrels do not breed. Religious ritual attracts because there is some
sense in it. Religious imagery, so far from being subtle, is the only
simple thing left for poets. So far from being merely superhuman, it is
the only human thing left for human beings.



CHRISTMAS


There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating
Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the very
essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly,
that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great
day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and
sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps up
and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for in one burst and
blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are a
worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possibly
with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand, you are a modern Christian
Englishman, you hail (of course) with the same explosion of gaiety the
appearance of the English Sunday. But I say that whatever the day is
that is to you festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should be
a quite clear black line between it and the time going before. And all
the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the
effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something
before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance, children
were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed
hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out of
which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally
stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmas
ceremonies and publications. Especially it ought to be observed in
connection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines. The
editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long
before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for
the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid
anticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of
magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day.
On consideration, I should favour the editors being tied up in brown
paper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to
protrude I leave to individual choice.

Of course, all this secrecy about Christmas is merely sentimental and
ceremonial; if you do not like what is sentimental and ceremonial, do
not celebrate Christmas at all. You will not be punished if you don't;
also, since we are no longer ruled by those sturdy Puritans who won for
us civil and religious liberty, you will not even be punished if you do.
But I cannot understand why any one should bother about a ceremonial
except ceremonially. If a thing only exists in order to be graceful, do
it gracefully or do not do it. If a thing only exists as something
professing to be solemn, do it solemnly or do not do it. There is no
sense in doing it slouchingly; nor is there even any liberty. I can
understand the man who takes off his hat to a lady because it is the
customary symbol. I can understand him, I say; in fact, I know him quite
intimately. I can also understand the man who refuses to take off his
hat to a lady, like the old Quakers, because he thinks that a symbol is
superstition. But what point would there be in so performing an
arbitrary form of respect that it was not a form of respect? We respect
the gentleman who takes off his hat to the lady; we respect the fanatic
who will not take off his hat to the lady. But what should we think of
the man who kept his hands in his pockets and asked the lady to take his
hat off for him because he felt tired?

This is combining insolence and superstition; and the modern world is
full of the strange combination. There is no mark of the immense
weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general
disposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally and
feebly. Why take something which was only meant to be respectful and
preserve it disrespectfully? Why take something which you could easily
abolish as a superstition and carefully perpetuate it as a bore? There
have been many instances of this half-witted compromise. Was it not
true, for instance, that the other day some mad American was trying to
buy Glastonbury Abbey and transfer it stone by stone to America? Such
things are not only illogical, but idiotic. There is no particular
reason why a pushing American financier should pay respect to
Glastonbury Abbey at all. But if he is to pay respect to Glastonbury
Abbey, he must pay respect to Glastonbury. If it is a matter of
sentiment, why should he spoil the scene? If it is not a matter of
sentiment, why should he ever have visited the scene? To call this kind
of thing Vandalism is a very inadequate and unfair description. The
Vandals were very sensible people. They did not believe in a religion,
and so they insulted it; they did not see any use for certain buildings,
and so they knocked them down. But they were not such fools as to
encumber their march with the fragments of the edifice they had
themselves spoilt. They were at least superior to the modern American
mode of reasoning. They did not desecrate the stones because they held
them sacred.

Another instance of the same illogicality I observed the other day at
some kind of "At Home." I saw what appeared to be a human being dressed
in a black evening-coat, black dress-waistcoat, and black
dress-trousers, but with a shirt-front made of Jaegar wool. What can be
the sense of this sort of thing? If a man thinks hygiene more important
than convention (a selfish and heathen view, for the beasts that perish
are more hygienic than man, and man is only above them because he is
more conventional), if, I say, a man thinks that hygiene is more
important than convention, what on earth is there to oblige him to wear
a shirt-front at all? But to take a costume of which the only
conceivable cause or advantage is that it is a sort of uniform, and then
not wear it in the uniform way--this is to be neither a Bohemian nor a
gentleman. It is a foolish affectation, I think, in an English officer
of the Life Guards never to wear his uniform if he can help it. But it
would be more foolish still if he showed himself about town in a scarlet
coat and a Jaeger breast-plate. It is the custom nowadays to have Ritual
Commissions and Ritual Reports to make rather unmeaning compromises in
the ceremonial of the Church of England. So perhaps we shall have an
ecclesiastical compromise by which all the Bishops shall wear Jaeger
copes and Jaeger mitres. Similarly the King might insist on having a
Jaeger crown. But I do not think he will, for he understands the logic
of the matter better than that. The modern monarch, like a reasonable
fellow, wears his crown as seldom as he can; but if he does it at all,
then the only point of a crown is that it is a crown. So let me assure
the unknown gentleman in the woollen vesture that the only point of a
white shirt-front is that it is a white shirt-front. Stiffness may be
its impossible defect; but it is certainly its only possible merit.

Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep
customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism,
you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I
should suggest the birthday of Mr. M'Cabe. No doubt you could have a
sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly
instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it
then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of fellow,
and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are really
interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will ever be
much interested in you. Humanity is unhygienic from its very nature and
beginning. It is so much an exception in Nature that the laws of Nature
really mean nothing to it. Now Christmas is attacked also on the
humanitarian ground. Ouida called it a feast of slaughter and gluttony.
Mr. Shaw suggested that it was invented by poulterers. That should be
considered before it becomes more considerable.

I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or
a worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or no
Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and suffering
brotherhood to which I belong and owe everything, Mankind, would have a
much worse time if there were no such thing as Christmas or Christmas
dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had
experienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less
attractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture.
But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier
for getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet. What
life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of
Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall induce
me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to insult human
gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some hypothetical knowledge
which Nature curtained from our eyes. We men and women are all in the
same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic
loyalty. If we catch sharks for food, let them be killed most
mercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet the sharks,
and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and teach them to
dance. But if once a man suggests that a shark is to be valued against a
sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to bite off a nigger's
leg occasionally; then I would court-martial the man--he is a traitor to
the ship.

And while I take this view of humanitarianism of the anti-Christmas
kind, it is cogent to say that I am a strong anti-vivisectionist. That
is, if there is any vivisection, I am against it. I am against the
cutting-up of conscious dogs for the same reason that I am in favour of
the eating of dead turkeys. The connection may not be obvious; but that
is because of the strangely unhealthy condition of modern thought. I am
against cruel vivisection as I am against a cruel anti-Christmas
asceticism, because they both involve the upsetting of existing
fellowships and the shocking of normal good feelings for the sake of
something that is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human
thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring
hungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of the
woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater.
Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to
think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you
were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians' fancy
about the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and the
vivisectionists' fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog, are
unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is certain for
the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The
vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be
useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas
humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man
can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the
happiness of millions of the poor.

It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet.
Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian
non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They
are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted,
looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered.
Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling and
dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both
based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug. But
I am specially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I
have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty--they both permit a
dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound
moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me
in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital than
this: that casuistical exceptions, though admitted, should be admitted
as exceptions. And it follows from this, I think, that, though we may do
a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite certain that we
actually and already are in that situation. Thus, all sane moralists
admit that one may sometimes tell a lie; but no sane moralist would
approve of telling a little boy to practise telling lies, in case he
might one day have to tell a justifiable one. Thus, morality has often
justified shooting a robber or a burglar. But it would not justify going
into the village Sunday school and shooting all the little boys who
looked as if they might grow up into burglars. The need may arise; but
the need must have arisen. It seems to me quite clear that if you step
across this limit you step off a precipice.

Now, whether torturing an animal is or is not an immoral thing, it is,
at least, a dreadful thing. It belongs to the order of exceptional and
even desperate acts. Except for some extraordinary reason I would not
grievously hurt an animal; with an extraordinary reason I would
grievously hurt him. If (for example) a mad elephant were pursuing me
and my family, and I could only shoot him so that he would die in
agony, he would have to die in agony. But the elephant would be there. I
would not do it to a hypothetical elephant. Now, it always seems to me
that this is the weak point in the ordinary vivisectionist argument,
"Suppose your wife were dying." Vivisection is not done by a man whose
wife is dying. If it were it might be lifted to the level of the moment,
as would be lying or stealing bread, or any other ugly action. But this
ugly action is done in cold blood, at leisure, by men who are not sure
that it will be of any use to anybody--men of whom the most that can be
said is that they may conceivably make the beginnings of some discovery
which may perhaps save the life of some one else's wife in some remote
future. That is too cold and distant to rob an act of its immediate
horror. That is like training the child to tell lies for the sake of
some great dilemma that may never come to him. You are doing a cruel
thing, but not with enough passion to make it a kindly one.

So much for why I am an anti-vivisectionist; and I should like to say,
in conclusion, that all other anti-vivisectionists of my acquaintance
weaken their case infinitely by forming this attack on a scientific
speciality in which the human heart is commonly on their side, with
attacks upon universal human customs in which the human heart is not at
all on their side. I have heard humanitarians, for instance, speak of
vivisection and field sports as if they were the same kind of thing. The
difference seems to me simple and enormous. In sport a man goes into a
wood and mixes with the existing life of that wood; becomes a destroyer
only in the simple and healthy sense in which all the creatures are
destroyers; becomes for one moment to them what they are to him--another
animal. In vivisection a man takes a simpler creature and subjects it to
subtleties which no one but man could inflict on him, and for which man
is therefore gravely and terribly responsible.

Meanwhile, it remains true that I shall eat a great deal of turkey this
Christmas; and it is not in the least true (as the vegetarians say) that
I shall do it because I do not realise what I am doing, or because I do
what I know is wrong, or that I do it with shame or doubt or a
fundamental unrest of conscience. In one sense I know quite well what I
am doing; in another sense I know quite well that I know not what I do.
Scrooge and the Cratchits and I are, as I have said, all in one boat;
the turkey and I are, to say the most of it, ships that pass in the
night, and greet each other in passing. I wish him well; but it is
really practically impossible to discover whether I treat him well. I
can avoid, and I do avoid with horror, all special and artificial
tormenting of him, sticking pins in him for fun or sticking knives in
him for scientific investigation. But whether by feeding him slowly and
killing him quickly for the needs of my brethren, I have improved in his
own solemn eyes his own strange and separate destiny, whether I have
made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the gods
love and who die young--that is far more removed from my possibilities
of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of mysticism or
theology. A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and
archangels In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world,
he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us
what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an
hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather
increased than diminished.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Crimes of England, by G.K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Crimes of England

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: March 13, 2004 [EBook #11554]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND ***




Produced by Robert Shimmin, Caitlin and PG Distributed Proofreaders





THE CRIMES OF
ENGLAND

BY
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

MCMXVI

1916


_CONTENTS_


CHAPTER I

SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND

The German Professor, his need of Education
for Debate--Three Mistakes of German
Controversialists--The Multiplicity of
Excuses--Falsehood against Experience--
Kultur preached by Unkultur--The Mistake
about Bernard Shaw--German Lack of
Welt-Politik--Where England is really
Wrong.


CHAPTER II

THE PROTESTANT HERO

Suitable Finale for the German Emperor--Frederick
II. and the Power of
Fear--German Influence in England since
Lather--Our German Kings and Allies--
Triumph of Frederick the Great.


CHAPTER III

THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO

How we helped Napoleon--The Revolution
and the Two Germanics--Religious
Resistance of Austria and Russia--Irreligious
Resistance of Prussia and England--Negative
Irreligion of England--its Idealism
in Snobbishness--Positive Irreligion of
Prussia; no Idealism in Anything--Allegory
and the French Revolution--The Dual
Personality of England; the Double Battle--Triumph
of Blucher.


CHAPTER IV

THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES

The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury--Ireland
and Heligoland--The Young Men of
Ireland--The Dirty Work--The Use of
German Mercenaries--The Unholy Alliance--Triumph
of the German Mercenaries.


CHAPTER V

THE LOST ENGLAND

Truth about England and Ireland--Murder
and the Two Travellers--Real Defence
of England--The Lost Revolution--Story
of Cobbett and the Germans--Historical
Accuracy of Cobbett--Violence of the English
Language--Exaggerated Truths versus
Exaggerated Lies--Defeat of the People--Triumph
of the German Mercenaries.


CHAPTER VI

HAMLET AND THE DANES

Degeneration of Grimm's Fairy Tales--From
Tales of Terror to Tales of Terrorism--German
Mistake of being Deep--The
Germanisation of Shakespeare--Carlyle and
the Spoilt Child--The Test of Teutonism--
Hell or Hans Andersen--Causes of English
Inaction--Barbarism and Splendid Isolation--
The Peace of the Plutocrats--Hamlet
the Englishman--The Triumph of Bismarck.


CHAPTER VII

THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE

The Two Napoleons--Their Ultimate
Success--The Interlude of Sedan--The
Meaning of an Emperor--The Triumph of
Versailles--The True Innocence of England--
Triumph of the Kaiser.


CHAPTER VIII

THE WRONG HORSE

Lord Salisbury Again--The Influence of
1870--The Fairy Tale of Teutonism--The
Adoration of the Crescent--The Reign of
the Cynics--Last Words to Professor
Whirlwind.


CHAPTER IX

THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND

The March of Montenegro--The Anti-Servile
State--The Prussian Preparation--The
Sleep of England--The Awakening of
England.


CHAPTER X

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

The Hour of Peril--The Human Deluge--The
English at the Marne.


THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND



I--_Some Words to Professor Whirlwind_


DEAR PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND,

Your name in the original German is too much for me; and this is the
nearest I propose to get to it: but under the majestic image of pure
wind marching in a movement wholly circular I seem to see, as in a
vision, something of your mind. But the grand isolation of your thoughts
leads you to express them in such words as are gratifying to yourself,
and have an inconspicuous or even an unfortunate effect upon others. If
anything were really to be made of your moral campaign against the
English nation, it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were only
an Englishman, should show you how to leave off professing philosophy
and begin to practise it. I have therefore sold myself into the Prussian
service, and in return for a cast-off suit of the Emperor's clothes (the
uniform of an English midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for poison
gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented
to instruct you in the rudiments of international controversy. Of this
part of my task I have here little to say that is not covered by a
general adjuration to you to observe certain elementary rules. They are,
roughly speaking, as follows:--

First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman, with whom your social
relations are slight, should chance to find you toying with the coppers
in his till, you may possibly explain that you are interested in
Numismatics and are a Collector of Coins; and he may possibly believe
you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being
overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing
them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far
from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)
actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet
another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad
pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution
for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a
police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration
of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the
_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,
apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a
merchant-ship unlawfully carrying munitions for the soldiers in France;
(iii) that, as the passengers on the ship had been warned in an
advertisement, Germany was justified in blowing them to the moon; (iv)
that there were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed because the
English captain was just going to fire them off; (v) that the English or
American authorities, by throwing the _Lusitania_ at the heads of the
German commanders, subjected them to an insupportable temptation; which
was apparently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the fact that the
ship came up to schedule time, there being some mysterious principle by
which having tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the
ship was not sunk by the Germans at all but by the English, the English
captain having deliberately tried to drown himself and some thousand of
his own countrymen in order to cause an exchange of stiff notes between
Mr. Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true, I can only
say that such frantic and suicidal devotion to the most remote interests
of his country almost earns the captain pardon for the crime. But do you
not see, my dear Professor, that the very richness and variety of your
inventive genius throws a doubt upon each explanation when considered in
itself? We who read you in England reach a condition of mind in which it
no longer very much matters what explanation you offer, or whether you
offer any at all. We are prepared to hear that you sank the _Lusitania_
because the sea-born sons of England would live more happily as deep-sea
fishes, or that every person on board was coming home to be hanged. You
have explained yourself so completely, in this clear way, to the
Italians that they have declared war on you, and if you go on explaining
yourself so clearly to the Americans they may quite possibly do the
same.

Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your
international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the
truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the
negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent.
Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then,
turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is
green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the
Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are
hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against
both of them. There are probably still Russians who believe that every
English gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck and sells her in
Smithfield. There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every
Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and whips her every
day. But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit
to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact
that they are not _true_, and that there necessarily exists a group of
persons who know they are not true. It is so with matters of fact about
which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of
opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress; but it is not. I happen to
know it is not. Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally admired in
England; but he is not universally admired in England. Tell the Russians
that he is by all means; but do not tell us. We have seen him; we have
also seen Scarborough. You should think of this before you speak.

Third, don't perpetually boast that you are cultured in language which
proves that you are not. You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody on
the ground that you are stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have enough for
the whole world. But people who have wit enough for the whole world,
have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph. And you can seldom get
through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant,
or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If
you have something to teach us, teach it to us now. If you propose to
convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you
have conquered us? As it is, we cannot believe what you say about your
superior education because of the way in which you say it. If an
Englishman says, "I don't make no mistakes in English, not me," we can
understand his remark; but we cannot endorse it. To say, "Je parler le
Frenche language, non demi," is comprehensible, but not convincing. And
when you say, as you did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the
Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of "red fluid" in defence
of their culture, we point out to you that cultured people do not employ
such a literary style. Or when you say that the Belgians were so
ignorant as to think they were being butchered when they weren't, we
only wonder whether _you_ are so ignorant as to think you are being
believed when you aren't. Thus, for instance, when you brag about
burning Venice to express your contempt for "tourists," we cannot think
much of the culture, as culture, which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing
for tourists instead of historians. This, however, would be the least
part of our unfavourable judgment. That judgment is complete when we
have read such a paragraph as this, prominently displayed in a paper in
which you specially spread yourself: "That the Italians have a perfect
knowledge of the fact that this city of antiquities and tourists is
subject, and rightly subject, to attack and bombardment, is proved by
the measures they took at the beginning of the war to remove some of
their greatest art treasures." Now culture may or may not include the
power to admire antiquities, and to restrain oneself from the pleasure
of breaking them like toys. But culture does, presumably, include the
power to think. For less laborious intellects than your own it is
generally sufficient to think once. But if you will think twice or
twenty times, it cannot but dawn on you that there is something wrong in
the reasoning by which the placing of diamonds in a safe proves that
they are "rightly subject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion of such
things can do little to spread your superior culture; and if you say
them too often people may even begin to doubt whether you have any
superior culture after all. The earnest friend now advising you cannot
but grieve at such incautious garrulity. If you confined yourself to
single words, uttered at intervals of about a month or so, no one could
possibly raise any rational objection, or subject them to any rational
criticism. In time you might come to use whole sentences without
revealing the real state of things.

Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor, every one of your
attacks upon England has gone wide. In pure fact they have not touched
the spot, which the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable
spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name
you parade but apparently cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have
referred he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think he and
Bernhardi are the same man. But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's
statement instead of misquoting his name, you would find that his
criticism of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and naturally,
for it is a rational criticism. He does not blame England for being
against Germany. He does most definitely blame England for not being
sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of Russia. He is not
such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli
plotting against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable
aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of
war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like
this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such
verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact
that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open
to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded
or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any man
who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living
thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may
be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,
plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and
if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting
for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who
knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or
the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and
in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until
Germany, by her own act, became indefensible. If they said nothing in
support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is
simply because there was nothing to be said.

You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first
people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is
domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not
Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not
one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own
not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer
the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,
or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first
delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth
our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The
case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British
army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I
should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the
most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical
condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,
my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this
moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army. It is a
volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your
calling it an amateur army. There is no compulsion, and there is next to
no pay. It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community,
and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money
in their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would
if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men
unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which
that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather
unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and
purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been
the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and
sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even
if you don't think so. By all means say that Germany is unconquerable
and that we cannot really kill you. But if you say that we do not really
want to kill you, you do us an injustice. You do indeed.

I need not consider the yet crazier things that some of you have said;
as that the English intend to keep Calais and fight France as well as
Germany for the privilege of purchasing a frontier and the need to keep
a conscript army. That, also, is out of books, and pretty mouldy old
books at that. It was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among the
French, and is therefore not my immediate business, as they are
eminently capable of looking after themselves. I merely drop one word in
passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect on such projects. The
English may some day forgive you; the French never will. You Teutons are
too light and fickle to understand the Latin seriousness. My only
concern is to point out that about England, at least, you are invariably
and miraculously wrong.

Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it will not do. It could be
easy to fence with you for ever and parry every point you attempt to
make, until English people began to think there was nothing wrong with
England at all. But I refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a
very great deal that is really wrong with England, and it ought not to
be forgotten even in the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I
cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual
pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep
collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous
spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate
them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who
rendered the phrase in an English advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack
you to death," was in error; but to say that many such advertisements
are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are
harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,
though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in
shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much
attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you
quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than
one you forget what is meant by idiom.

I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of
the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle
which cannot fail to interest and please you. On many occasions we have
been very wrong indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we took part in
preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of
Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the
triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's
sullen savages. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful
King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named
Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and
silence the French provinces which they could neither govern nor
persuade. We were very wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry
adventurers a position so important as Heligoland. We were very wrong
indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the
soulless Prussian laws. Knowing that you will mingle your tears with
mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and
I remain,

Yours reverently,

G. K. CHESTERTON



II--_The Protestant Hero_


A question is current in our looser English journalism touching what
should be done with the German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.
Our more feminine advisers incline to the view that he should be shot.
This is to make a mistake about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.
Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would be entitled to say to
his amiable Crown Prince what Charles II. said when his brother warned
him of the plots of assassins: "They will never kill me to make you
king." Others, of greater monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he
should be sent to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his
historical importance goes, he might as well be sent to Mount Calvary.
What we have to deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent
person who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to do him justice,
does think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred caste than of his own
particular place in it. In such families the old boast and motto of
hereditary kingship has a horrible and degenerate truth. The king never
dies; he only decays for ever.

If it were a matter of the smallest importance what happened to the
Emperor William when once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy
my fancy with another picture of his declining years; a conclusion that
would be peaceful, humane, harmonious, and forgiving.

In various parts of the lanes and villages of South England the
pedestrian will come upon an old and quiet public-house, decorated with
a dark and faded portrait in a cocked hat and the singular inscription,
"The King of Prussia." These inn signs probably commemorate the visit of
the Allies after 1815, though a great part of the English middle classes
may well have connected them with the time when Frederick II. was
earning his title of the Great, along with a number of other territorial
titles to which he had considerably less claim. Sincere and
simple-hearted Dissenting ministers would dismount before that sign (for
in those days Dissenters drank beer like Christians, and indeed
manufactured most of it) and would pledge the old valour and the old
victory of him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We should be using
every word with literal exactitude if we said that he was really
something devilish like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero or not
can be decided best by those who have read the correspondence of a
writer calling himself Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's
utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little Dissenter drank his
beer in all innocence and rode on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam
would have laughed had he known; it was a jest after his own heart. Such
was the jest he made when he called upon the emperors to come to
communion, and partake of the eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been
such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might
haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might
have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that
he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body of God.

Whether the placing of the present German Emperor in charge of one of
these wayside public-houses would be a jest after _his_ own heart
possibly remains to be seen. But it would be much more melodious and
fitting an end than any of the sublime euthanasias which his enemies
provide for him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat on the bench
outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine memory of the
real greatness of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack stars and
garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern knighthood has
departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled from it can
easily be tested by the mere suggestion that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us
say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his
armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and
receiving of the Garter among despots and diplomatists is now only part
of that sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the peace in an
insecure and insincere state of society. But that old blackened wooden
sign is at least and after all the sign of something; the sign of the
time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields and
cities, but did truly set on fire the minds of men, even though it were
fire from hell.

Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an
appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with
an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage
who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out
every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have
been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it
was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When
his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to
be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory
after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is
not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his
childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and
ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and
premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the
triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than
ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at
least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that
was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all
that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of
Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early
days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we
might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he
was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have
been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his
dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from
the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one
broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as
a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already
befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the
destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had
surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only
repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers
surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls
of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as
he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out.
He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands
alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a
mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him
the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.

Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.
It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.
George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new
diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away
from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He
achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave
to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected
whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or
inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection
upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end
of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out
of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland,
like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but
it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live
again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition
confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very
true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered
the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a
long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and
perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European
peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could
understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of
pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared
all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.

The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of
England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,
to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.
He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and
nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless
glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the Erastian Whigs,
sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad
enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was
ultimately a religious war. He had not a shade of irony in his whole
being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather
brilliant schoolboy.

But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones. The
true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two traditions
which had long been struggling in England. And it is pathetic to record
that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the ablest men
of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was really the
old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest men that
mankind ever tolerated in any age, George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was
the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling the fine if
fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in
"The Patriot King." It was bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds
back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George
III. It might have arrested the advancing corruption of Parliaments and
enclosure of country-sides, by turning men's minds from the foreign
glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its
first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately,
whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the
imagination of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic in Potsdam was already
established at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-handed
taste in the arts, and the strange northern blend of boorishness with
etiquette. If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by a spirited person,
by a Stuart, for example, or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real
spirit along with her extraordinary vulgarity), the national soul might
have broken free from its new northern chains. But it was the irony of
the situation that the King to whom Tories appealed as a refuge from
Germanism was himself a German.

We have thus to refer the origins of the German influence in England
back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to
the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at Naseby;
and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval
council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the
matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther.
Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German
monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic; and the two
wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely consisting of terms
of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both sides. But Luther was
not a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up of Catholicism; but he was
not a builder of Protestantism. The countries which became corporately
and democratically Protestant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland,
followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was a Frenchman; an
unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that French capacity
for creating official entities which can really act, and have a kind of
impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or the Terror.
Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a dreamer. He made that which is,
perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining manifestation of
failure; he made a name. Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting
thing, called the Kirk. There is something expressive of him in the fact
that he called even his work of abstract theology "The Institutes."

In England, however, there were elements of chaos more akin to Luther
than to Calvin. And we may thus explain many things which appear rather
puzzling in our history, notably the victory of Cromwell not only over
the English Royalists but over the Scotch Covenanters. It was the
victory of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, which had in
it much of aristocracy but much also of liberty, over that logical
ambition of the Kirk which would have made Protestantism, if possible,
as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might be called the victory
of Individualist Puritanism over Socialist Puritanism. It was what
Milton meant when he said that the new presbyter was an exaggeration of
the old priest; it was his _office_ that acted, and acted very harshly.
The enemies of the Presbyterians were not without a meaning when they
called themselves Independents. To this day no one can understand
Scotland who does not realise that it retains much of its mediæval
sympathy with France, the French equality, the French pronunciation of
Latin, and, strange as it may sound, is in nothing so French as in its
Presbyterianism.

In this loose and negative sense only it may be said that the great
modern mistakes of England can be traced to Luther. It is true only in
this, that both in Germany and England a Protestantism softer and less
abstract than Calvinism was found useful to the compromises of courtiers
and aristocrats; for every abstract creed does something for human
equality. Lutheranism in Germany rapidly became what it is to-day--a
religion of court chaplains. The reformed church in England became
something better; it became a profession for the younger sons of
squires. But these parallel tendencies, in all their strength and
weakness, reached, as it were, symbolic culmination when the mediæval
monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires gave to what was
little more than a German squire the damaged and diminished crown.

It must be remembered that the Germanics were at that time used as a
sort of breeding-ground for princes. There is a strange process in
history by which things that decay turn into the very opposite of
themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds,
but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently
soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his
best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to
stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great
militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An
inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany. Out of the
country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings
small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one
great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth. But the old
German kingdoms preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the good
things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music,
etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and so on. They were small enough to be
universal. Their outlook could afford to be in some degree broad and
many-sided. They had the impartiality of impotence. All this has been
utterly reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a Germany whose
powers are the widest and whose outlook is the narrowest in the world.

It is true, of course, that the English squires put themselves over the
new German prince rather than under him. They put the crown on him as an
extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the new-comer, though royal,
should be almost rustic. Hanover must be one of England's possessions
and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the court became a
German court prepared the soil, so to speak; English politics were
already subconsciously committed to two centuries of the belittlement of
France and the gross exaggeration of Germany. The period can be
symbolically marked out by Carteret, proud of talking German at the
beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud of talking German at
the end of it. Culture is already almost beginning to be spelt with a k.
But all such pacific and only slowly growing Teutonism was brought to a
crisis and a decision when the voice of Pitt called us, like a trumpet,
to the rescue of the Protestant Hero.

Among all the monarchs of that faithless age, the nearest to a man was a
woman. Maria Theresa of Austria was a German of the more generous sort,
limited in a domestic rather than a national sense, firm in the ancient
faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a
young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything German and
everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness
which adds something almost superhuman to the mysterious vileness of his
character, how he calculated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack
of friends as proof that she could be despoiled with safety. He invaded
Silesia in advance of his own declaration of war (as if he had run on
ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with
the corruptibility of nearly all the other courts, left him after the
two Silesian wars in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa
had refused to submit to the immorality of nine points of the law. By
appeals and concessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she
contrived to create something which, against the atheist innovator even
in that atheist age, stood up for an instant like a spectre of the
Crusades. Had that Crusade been universal and whole-hearted, the great
new precedent of mere force and fraud would have been broken; and the
whole appalling judgment which is fallen upon Christendom would have
passed us by. But the other Crusaders were only half in earnest for
Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest for Prussia; and he sought for
allies, by whose aid this weak revival of good might be stamped out, and
his adamantine impudence endure for ever. The allies he found were the
English. It is not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write the
words.

This was the first act of the tragedy, and with it we may leave
Frederick, for we are done with the fellow though not with his work. It
is enough to add that if we call all his after actions satanic, it is
not a term of abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter. He dragged the
other kings to "partake of the body of Poland," and learn the meaning of
the Black Mass. Poland lay prostrate before three giants in armour, and
her name passed into a synonym for failure. The Prussians, with their
fine magnanimity, gave lectures on the hereditary maladies of the man
they had murdered. They could not conceive of life in those limbs; and
the time was far off when they should be undeceived. In that day five
nations were to partake not of the body, but of the spirit of Poland;
and the trumpet of the resurrection of the peoples should be blown from
Warsaw to the western isles.



III--_The Enigma of Waterloo_


That great Englishman Charles Fox, who was as national as Nelson, went
to his death with the firm conviction that England had made Napoleon. He
did not mean, of course, that any other Italian gunner would have done
just as well; but he did mean that by forcing the French back on their
guns, as it were, we had made their chief gunner necessarily their chief
citizen. Had the French Republic been left alone, it would probably have
followed the example of most other ideal experiments; and praised peace
along with progress and equality. It would almost certainly have eyed
with the coldest suspicion any adventurer who appeared likely to
substitute his personality for the pure impersonality of the Sovereign
People; and would have considered it the very flower of republican
chastity to provide a Brutus for such a Caesar. But if it was
undesirable that equality should be threatened by a citizen, it was
intolerable that it should be simply forbidden by a foreigner. If
France could not put up with French soldiers she would very soon have to
put up with Austrian soldiers; and it would be absurd if, having decided
to rely on soldiering, she had hampered the best French soldier even on the
ground that he was not French. So that whether we regard Napoleon as a
hero rushing to the country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the
country's extremity, it is equally clear that those who made the war
made the war-lord; and those who tried to destroy the Republic were
those who created the Empire. So, at least, Fox argued against that much
less English prig who would have called him unpatriotic; and he threw
the blame upon Pitt's Government for having joined the anti-French
alliance, and so tipped up the scale in favour of a military France. But
whether he was right or no, he would have been the readiest to admit
that England was not the first to fly at the throat of the young
Republic. Something in Europe much vaster and vaguer had from the first
stirred against it. What was it then that first made war--and made
Napoleon? There is only one possible answer: the Germans. This is the
second act of our drama of the degradation of England to the level of
Germany. And it has this very important development; that Germany means
by this time _all_ the Germans, just as it does to-day. The savagery of
Prussia and the stupidity of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness and
muddleheadedness are met together; unrighteousness and unreasonableness
have kissed each other; and the tempter and the tempted are agreed. The
great and good Maria Theresa was already old. She had a son who was a
philosopher of the school of Frederick; also a daughter who was more
fortunate, for she was guillotined. It was natural, no doubt, that her
brother and relatives should disapprove of the incident; but it occurred
long after the whole Germanic power had been hurled against the new
Republic. Louis XVI. himself was still alive and nominally ruling when
the first pressure came from Prussia and Austria, demanding that the
trend of the French emancipation should be reversed. It is impossible to
deny, therefore, that what the united Germanics were resolved to destroy
was the reform and not even the Revolution. The part which Joseph of
Austria played in the matter is symbolic. For he was what is called an
enlightened despot, which is the worst kind of despot. He was as
irreligious as Frederick the Great, but not so disgusting or amusing.
The old and kindly Austrian family, of which Maria Theresa was the
affectionate mother, and Marie Antoinette the rather uneducated
daughter, was already superseded and summed up by a rather dried-up
young man self-schooled to a Prussian efficiency. The needle is already
veering northward. Prussia is already beginning to be the captain of the
Germanics "in shining armour." Austria is already becoming a loyal
_sekundant_.

But there still remains one great difference between Austria and Prussia
which developed more and more as the energy of the young Napoleon was
driven like a wedge between them. The difference can be most shortly
stated by saying that Austria did, in some blundering and barbaric way,
care for Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but Prussia. Austria is
not a nation; you cannot really find Austria on the map. But Austria is
a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman Empire that never came, an expanding and
contracting-dream. It does feel itself, in a vague patriarchal way, the
leader, not of a nation, but of nations. It is like some dying Emperor
of Rome in the decline; who should admit that the legions had been
withdrawn from Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as
fundamentally natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily or
Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged Francis Joseph imagines
that he is Emperor of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he
retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it
would not be more incongruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and
the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of shadow of
responsibility for Christendom. And it was this that made the difference
between its proceedings and those of the purely selfish adventurer from
the north, the wild dog of Pomerania.

It may be believed, as Fox himself came at last to believe, that
Napoleon in his latest years was really an enemy to freedom, in the
sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of
freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for
instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,
belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people.
It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great
difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history
that he who had turned the mob into an army, in defence of its rights
against the princes, should at last have his army worn down, not by
princes but by mobs. It is equally certain that at the other end of
Europe, in burning Moscow and on the bridge of the Beresina, he had
found the common soul, even as he had found the common sky, his enemy.
But all this does not affect the first great lines of the quarrel, which
had begun before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited vainly upon the
road to Varennes or had failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill of
Valmy. And that duel, on which depended all that our Europe has since
become, had great Russia and gallant Spain and our own glorious island
only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever,
was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that is, between the
citizen and the barbarian.

It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not
necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from
criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time
had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and
Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic
and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as
the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats.
What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are
all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane
aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that
common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men
can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with
any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made
nonsense of this civic common-sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to
leave a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers seem to leave a
man no household to rule. But these things have not established
themselves either in France or anywhere else. What has been established
is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Freedom; and it is nowhere so
patriotic or so domestic as in the country from which it came. The poor
men of France have not loved the land less because they have shared it.
Even the patricians are patriots; and if some honest Royalists or
aristocrats are still saying that democracy cannot organise and cannot
obey, they are none the less organised by it and obeying it, nobly
living or splendidly dead for it, along the line from Switzerland to the
sea.

But for Austria, and even more for Russia, there was this to be said;
that the French Republican ideal was incomplete, and that they
possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often popular sense, what
was needed to complete it. The Czar was not democratic, but he was
humanitarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is something of the
Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the
White Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly softness as of
snow. Her ideas are often innocent and even childish; like the idea of
Peace. The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful truth for the Czar,
though only a blasphemous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich and
Castlereagh. Austria, though she had lately fallen to a somewhat
treasonable toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey and Prussia,
still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul.
Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which
even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary
political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they
darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of
sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread,
the stones were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If
justice counted on their shameful gibbets hundreds of the innocent dead,
they could still say that for them death was more hopeful than life for
the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there
had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of
Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists
showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth
not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even
earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
And in, a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.

It may be held, therefore, that there must in any case have come a
conflict between the old world and the new; if only because the old are
often broad, while the young are always narrow. The Church had learnt,
not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral
of God is always a premature burial. If the bugles of Bonaparte raised
the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more
revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.
But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic
on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,
there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and
from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.
Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them
had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had
any real moral reason for being in the war at all. The first was
England, and the second was Prussia.

It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep
her influence on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally
arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French
Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the
same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no
necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental
tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was
indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the
middle classes were those which had already made America, and were
remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the
liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,
as in Russia or La Vendée. The parson was no longer a priest, and had
long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had
made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich
men into a mythology. The effect can be well summed up in that decorous
abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they
once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw." We have dropped the comparatively
democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun. South England is
still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind
where grow the plants called "lords and ladies."

We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we
stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship. We never thought of
Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish
name we managed to pronounce wrong. But even if we regard the first
attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains
true. It only changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a tragedy of
chance. And the tragedy was that, for a second time, we were at one with
the Germans.

But if England had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had
nothing to fight for but a negation. She was and is, in the supreme
sense, the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she was fighting
against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against
religion in Maria Theresa. What she was fighting for she would have
found it quite impossible to tell you. At the best, it was for Prussia;
if it was anything else, it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon when he
beat her, and only joined in the chase when braver people had beaten
him. She professed to restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while
she was restoring them. For her own hand she would have wrecked the
Restoration with the Revolution. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she
had not the star of one solitary ideal to light the night of her
nihilism.

The French Revolution has a quality which all men feel; and which may be
called a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.
When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.
It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of
Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed
eternal as a group of statuary. One almost thought of its most strenuous
figures as naked. It is always with a shock of comicality that we
remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable
and top-hats beginning to be tried. And it is a curious fact, giving a
kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that
happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also
its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary
character, were in a manner vain. It began with the taking of the old
and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it
as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution did not
come till some time after. And it ended when Wellington and Blucher met
in 1815; and we always think of it as the end of Napoleon; though
Napoleon had really fallen before. And the popular imagery is right, as
it generally is in such things: for the mob is an artist, though not a
man of science. The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver
prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside.
Napoleon when he returned was indeed a _revenant_, that is, a ghost. But
Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection
and a second death. And in this second case there were other elements
that were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and double battle
before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It
corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect
Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of
sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally
sympathise with Wellington against Ney. We do not sympathise, and even
then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.
Germany has complained that we passed over lightly the presence of
Prussians at the decisive action. And well we might. Even at the time
our sentiment was not solely jealousy, but very largely shame.
Wellington, the grimmest and even the most unamiable of Tories, with no
French sympathies and not enough human ones, has recorded his opinion of
his Prussian allies in terms of curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and
most snobbish Tory that ever praised "our gallant Allies" in a frigid
official speech, could not contain himself about the conduct of
Blucher's men. Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with
the picture of the "Meeting of Wellington and Blucher." They should
have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands. Then,
after that meeting amid the ashes of Hougomont, where they dreamed they
had trodden out the embers of all democracy, the Prussians rode on
before, doing after their kind. After them went that ironical aristocrat
out of embittered Ireland, with what thoughts we know; and Blucher, with
what thoughts we care not; and his soldiers entered Paris, and stole the
sword of Joan of Arc.



IV--_The Coming of the Janissaries_


The late Lord Salisbury, a sad and humorous man, made many public and
serious remarks that have been proved false and perilous, and many
private and frivolous remarks which were valuable and ought to be
immortal. He struck dead the stiff and false psychology of "social
reform," with its suggestion that the number of public-houses made
people drunk, by saying that there were a number of bedrooms at
Hatfield, but they never made him sleepy. Because of this it is possible
to forgive him for having talked about "living and dying nations":
though it is of such sayings that living nations die. In the same spirit
he included the nation of Ireland in the "Celtic fringe" upon the west
of England. It seems sufficient to remark that the fringe is
considerably broader than the garment. But the fearful satire of time
has very sufficiently avenged the Irish nation upon him, largely by the
instrumentality of another fragment of the British robe which he cast
away almost contemptuously in the North Sea. The name of it is
Heligoland; and he gave it to the Germans.

The subsequent history of the two islands on either side of England has
been sufficiently ironical. If Lord Salisbury had foreseen exactly what
would happen to Heligoland, as well as to Ireland, he might well have
found no sleep at Hatfield in one bedroom or a hundred. In the eastern
isle he was strengthening a fortress that would one day be called upon
to destroy us. In the western isle he was weakening a fortress that
would one day be called upon to save us. In that day his trusted ally,
William Hohenzollern, was to batter our ships and boats from the Bight
of Heligoland; and in that day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John
Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English jeopardy, and be thanked in
thunder for the free offer of the Irish sword. All that Robert Cecil
thought valueless has been our loss, and all that he thought feeble our
stay. Among those of his political class or creed who accepted and
welcomed the Irish leader's alliance, there were some who knew the real
past relations between England and Ireland, and some who first felt
them in that hour. All knew that England could no longer be a mere
mistress; many knew that she was now in some sense a suppliant. Some
knew that she deserved to be a suppliant. These were they who knew a
little of the thing called history; and if they thought at all of such
dead catchwords as the "Celtic fringe" for a description of Ireland, it
was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment. If
there be still any Englishman who thinks such language extravagant, this
chapter is written to enlighten him.

In the last two chapters I have sketched in outline the way in which
England, partly by historical accident, but partly also by false
philosophy, was drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of whose
circle was already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the causes at all
fully here. Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby
for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag
towards the north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in a sense
the beginning of the business. It is well represented in two facts; the
barbaric refusal of the new astronomical calendar merely because it was
invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if
it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new
language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and
accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less
interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but
not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life
into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the
Hanoverians was actively German; so German that he actually gloried in
the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America.
It is notable that all those eminent among the real Britons, who spelt
it right, respected and would parley with the American Revolution,
however jingo or legitimist they were; the romantic conservative Burke,
the earth-devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot
Tory North. The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover more than
in the King of England; in the narrow and petty German prince who was
bored by Shakespeare and approximately inspired by Handel. What really
clinched the unlucky companionship of England and Germany was the first
and second alliance with Prussia; the first in which we prevented the
hardening tradition of Frederick the Great being broken up by the Seven
Years' War; the second in which we prevented it being broken up by the
French Revolution and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prussia to escape
like a young brigand; in the second we helped the brigand to adjudicate
as a respectable magistrate. Having aided his lawlessness, we defended
his legitimacy. We helped to give the Bourbon prince his crown, though
our allies the Prussians (in their cheery way) tried to pick a few
jewels out of it before he got it. Through the whole of that period, so
important in history, it must be said that we were to be reckoned on for
the support of unreformed laws and the rule of unwilling subjects. There
is, as it were, an ugly echo even to the name of Nelson in the name of
Naples. But whatever is to be said of the cause, the work which we did
in it, with steel and gold, was so able and strenuous that an Englishman
can still be proud of it. We never performed a greater task than that
in which we, in a sense, saved Germany, save that in which a hundred
years later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy her. History tends to
be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not
specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama
of their own day. To these it may well seem that it matters little
whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the
figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked
hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but
dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary
as the Wars of the Roses. It was not so: we fought for something real
when we fought for the old world against the new. If we want to know
painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and
very awful door, on a scene which was called Ireland, but which then
might well have been called hell.

Having chosen our part and made war upon the new world, we were soon
made to understand what such spiritual infanticide involved; and were
committed to a kind of Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the young
world was represented by young men, who shared the democratic dream of
the Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot of Pitt; who was
working a huge machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland
into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England. There was present every
coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere
abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-conscious figure of Pitt has
remained standing incongruously purse in hand; while his manlier rivals
were stretching out their hands for the sword, the only possible resort
of men who cannot be bought and refuse to be sold. A rebellion broke out
and was repressed; and the government that repressed it was ten times
more lawless than the rebellion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a
situation in plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy of
appalling platitudes. The heroes were really heroes; and the villains
were nothing but villains. The common tangle of life, in which good men
do evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident, seemed suspended for
us as for a judgment. We had to do things that not only were vile, but
felt vile. We had to destroy men who not only were noble, but looked
noble. They were men like Wolfe Tone, a statesman in the grand style who
was not suffered to found a state; and Robert Emmet, lover of his land
and of a woman, in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle
grace of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than the young Napoleon;
for he has remained young. He was hanged; not before he had uttered one
of those phrases that are the hinges of history. He made an epitaph of
the refusal of an epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his tomb in
heaven like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen we could only
produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to
have been made famous solely that they might be infamous. He sold his
own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and
has saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed
metaphor called the Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of
sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell
and Charles I.: there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out
for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even
the incidental resemblances between the two sides only served to sharpen
the contrast and the complete superiority of the nationalists. Thus,
Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were both aristocrats. But
Castlereagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court, Fitzgerald the
generous gentleman upon the land; some portion of whose blood, along
with some portion of his spirit, descended to that great gentleman,
who--in the midst of the emetic immoralism of our modern politics--gave
back that land to the Irish peasantry. Thus again, all such
eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost anywhere) stood
apart from the popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they were
theoretically Protestants, but practically pagans. But Tone was the type
of pagan who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt was the type of
pagan who consents to persecute; and his place is with Pilate. He was an
intolerant indifferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but more
ready to massacre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans, Tone and
Castlereagh, found a pagan end in suicide. But the circumstances were
such that any man, of any party, felt that Tone had died like Cato and
Castlereagh had died like Judas.

The march of Pitt's policy went on; and the chasm between light and
darkness deepened. Order was restored; and wherever order spread, there
spread an anarchy more awful than the sun has ever looked on. Torture
came out of the crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sunlight of
the streets and fields. A village vicar was slain with inconceivable
stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted
priest. Rape became a mode of government. The violation of virgins
became a standing order of police. Stamped still with the same terrible
symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers
seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and
daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of
a religion which makes of innocence the Mother of God. In its bodily
aspects it became like a war of devils upon angels; as if England could
produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs. Such
was a part of the price paid by the Irish body and the English soul, for
the privilege of patching up a Prussian after the sabre-stroke of Jena.

But Germany was not merely present in the spirit: Germany was present in
the flesh. Without any desire to underrate the exploits of the English
or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest touches were added by
soldiers trained in a tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty
Years' War, and of what the old ballad called "the cruel wars of High
Germanie." An Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and who has
relatives in many distinguished posts of the British army, told me that
in his childhood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 was so
frightfully alive that his own mother would not have the word "soldier"
spoken in her house. Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find
that the hateful soldier means especially the German soldier. When the
Irish say, as some of them do say, that the German mercenary was worse
than the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth can utter. Beyond
that there is nothing but the curse of God, which shall be uttered in
an unknown tongue.

The practice of using German soldiers, and even whole German regiments,
in the make-up of the British army, came in with our German princes, and
reappeared on many important occasions in our eighteenth-century
history. They were probably among those who encamped triumphantly upon
Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among
those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. When that very
typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and
coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited,
not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England,
German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the
Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in
that woodland march that failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces
beheld our downfall. Their presence had long had its effect in various
ways. In one way, curiously enough, their very militarism helped England
to be less military; and especially to be more mercantile. It began to
be felt, faintly of course and never consciously, that fighting was a
thing that foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased the prestige of
the Germans as the military people, to the disadvantage of the French,
whom it was the interest of our vanity to underrate. The mere mixture of
their uniforms with ours made a background of pageantry in which it
seemed more and more natural that English and German potentates should
salute each other like cousins, and, in a sense, live in each other's
countries. Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was already regarded as
something of a menace by the English politicians, and as nothing but a
madman by the English people. Yet it did not seem in any way disgusting
or dangerous that Edward VII. should appear upon occasion in a Prussian
uniform. Edward VII. was himself a friend to France, and worked for the
French Alliance. Yet his appearance in the red trousers of a French
soldier would have struck many people as funny; as funny as if he had
dressed up as a Chinaman.

But the German hirelings or allies had another character which (by that
same strain of evil coincidence which we are tracing in this book)
encouraged all that was worst in the English conservatism and
inequality, while discouraging all that was best in it. It is true that
the ideal Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is just to add
that the ideal squire was a good squire. The best squire I know in
fiction is Duke Theseus in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," who is kind to
his people and proud of his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if
he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to both of them in the
same way. But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with
the warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South England; it never had
any place among the harsh and thrifty squires in the plains of East
Prussia, the land of the East Wind. They were peevish as well as proud,
and everything they created, but especially their army, was made
coherent by sheer brutality. Discipline was cruel enough in all the
eighteenth-century armies, created long after the decay of any faith or
hope that could hold men together. But the state that was first in
Germany was first in ferocity. Frederick the Great had to forbid his
English admirers to follow his regiments during the campaign, lest they
should discover that the most enlightened of kings had only excluded
torture from law to impose it without law. This influence, as we have
seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which will never be effaced.
English rule in Ireland had been bad before; but in the broadening light
of the revolutionary century I doubt whether it could have continued as
bad, if we had not taken a side that forced us to flatter barbarian
tyranny in Europe. We should hardly have seen such a nightmare as the
Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already seen the Germanising of
England. But even in England it was not without its effects; and one of
its effects was to rouse a man who is, perhaps, the best English witness
to the effect on the England of that time of the Alliance with Germany.
With that man I shall deal in the chapter that follows.



V--_The Lost England_


Telling the truth about Ireland is not very pleasant to a patriotic
Englishman; but it is very patriotic. It is the truth and nothing but
the truth which I have but touched on in the last chapter. Several
times, and especially at the beginning of this war, we narrowly escaped
ruin because we neglected that truth, and would insist on treating our
crimes of the '98 and after as very distant; while in Irish feeling, and
in fact, they are very near. Repentance of this remote sort is not at
all appropriate to the case, and will not do. It may be a good thing to
forget and forgive; but it is altogether too easy a trick to forget and
be forgiven.

The truth about Ireland is simply this: that the relations between
England and Ireland are the relations between two men who have to travel
together, one of whom tried to stab the other at the last stopping-place
or to poison the other at the last inn. Conversation may be courteous,
but it will be occasionally forced. The topic of attempted murder, its
examples in history and fiction, may be tactfully avoided in the
sallies; but it will be occasionally present in the thoughts. Silences,
not devoid of strain, will fall from time to time. The partially
murdered person may even think an assault unlikely to recur; but it is
asking too much, perhaps, to expect him to find it impossible to
imagine. And even if, as God grant, the predominant partner is really
sorry for his former manner of predominating, and proves it in some
unmistakable manner--as by saving the other from robbers at great
personal risk--the victim may still be unable to repress an abstract
psychological wonder about when his companion first began to feel like
that. Now this is not in the least an exaggerated parable of the
position of England towards Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from
the treason that broke the Treaty of Limerick and far onwards through
the Great Famine and after. The conduct of the English towards the Irish
after the Rebellion was quite simply the conduct of one man who traps
and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife. The
conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man
if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a
chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death. The
British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of
English ships. The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine,
by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved
ones. The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated wretch
was "Wilful murder by Lord John Russell": and that verdict was not only
the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But
there were those in influential positions in England who were not
content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the
motive. The _Times_, which had then a national authority and
respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern
journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind
of Irishman native to Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the
Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan." It seems
sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one
European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had
occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there
were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian
Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing
first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned
Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the country were
trained with the tomahawk and half the best journalism of the capital
written in picture-writing, if later, by general consent, the Chief
known as Pine in the Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief
Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that were realised, the
English critic probably would not say anything scornful of red men;
or certainly would be sorry he said it. But the extraordinary avowal
does mark what was most peculiar in the position. This has not been the
common case of misgovernment. It is not merely that the institutions we
set up were indefensible; though the curious mark of them is that they
were literally indefensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the Irish Church
Establishment. There can be no more excuse for the method used by Pitt
than for the method used by Pigott. But it differs further from
ordinary misrule in the vital matter of its object. The coercion was not
imposed that the people might live quietly, but that the people might
die quietly. And then we sit in an owlish innocence of our sin, and
debate whether the Irish might conceivably succeed in saving Ireland.
We, as a matter of fact, have not even failed to save Ireland. We have
simply failed to destroy her.

It is not possible to reverse this judgment or to take away a single
count from it. Is there, then, anything whatever to be said for the
English in the matter? There is: though the English never by any chance
say it. Nor do the Irish say it; though it is in a sense a weakness as
well as a defence. One would think the Irish had reason to say anything
that can be said against the English ruling class, but they have not
said, indeed they have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact--that it
rules England. They are right in asking that the Irish should have a say
in the Irish government, but they are quite wrong in supposing that the
English have any particular say in English government. And I seriously
believe I am not deceived by any national bias, when I say that the
common Englishman would be quite incapable of the cruelties that were
committed in his name. But, most important of all, it is the historical
fact that there was another England, an England consisting of common
Englishmen, which not only certainly would have done better, but
actually did make some considerable attempt to do better. If anyone asks
for the evidence, the answer is that the evidence has been destroyed, or
at least deliberately boycotted: but can be found in the unfashionable
corners of literature; and, when found, is final. If anyone asks for the
great men of such a potential democratic England, the answer is that the
great men are labelled small men, or not labelled at all; have been
successfully belittled as the emancipation of which they dreamed has
dwindled. The greatest of them is now little more than a name; he is
criticised to be underrated and not to be understood; but he presented
all that alternative and more liberal Englishry; and was enormously
popular because he presented it. In taking him as the type of it we may
tell most shortly the whole of this forgotten tale. And, even when I
begin to tell it, I find myself in the presence of that ubiquitous evil
which is the subject of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is not a
coincidence, that in standing for a moment where this Englishman stood,
I again find myself confronted by the German soldier.

The son of a small Surrey farmer, a respectable Tory and churchman,
ventured to plead against certain extraordinary cruelties being
inflicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by the whips of German
superiors; who were then parading in English fields their stiff foreign
uniforms and their sanguinary foreign discipline. In the countries from
which they came, of course, such torments were the one monotonous means
of driving men on to perish in the dead dynastic quarrels of the north;
but to poor Will Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing little but
the low hills and hedges around the little church where he now lies
buried, the incident seemed odd--nay, unpleasing. He knew, of course,
that there was then flogging in the British army also; but the German
standard was notoriously severe in such things, and was something of an
acquired taste. Added to which he had all sorts of old grandmotherly
prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of
that sort. He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print. He
was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of
the High Dutch militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries
were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and
beggared by a fine of £1000. That small incident is a small transparent
picture of the Holy Alliance; of what was really meant by a country,
once half liberalised, taking up the cause of the foreign kings. This,
and not "The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher," should be engraved as
the great scene of the war. From this intemperate Fenians should learn
that the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves solely to
torturing Irishmen. They were equally ready to torture Englishmen: for
mercenaries are mostly unprejudiced. To Cobbett's eye we were suffering
from allies exactly as we should suffer from invaders. Boney was a
bogey; but the German was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting on top
of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant the ruin of anything and
everything Irish, from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere colour
green. But in England also it meant the ruin of anything and everything
English, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cobbett.

After this affair of the scourging, he wielded his pen like a scourge
until he died. This terrible pamphleteer was one of those men who exist
to prove the distinction between a biography and a life. From his
biographies you will learn that he was a Radical who had once been a
Tory. From his life, if there were one, you would learn that he was
always a Radical because he was always a Tory. Few men changed less; it
was round him that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed, like
fakirs dancing round a sacred rock. His secret is buried with him; it is
that he really cared about the English people. He was conservative
because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their
future. But he was much more than this. He had two forms of moral
manhood very rare in our time: he was ready to uproot ancient successes,
and he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke said that few are the
partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer
still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly
was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the
French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property
of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw)
the English Revolution, which began with the sack of convents, and ended
with the fencing in of enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly and
systematically destroyed the property of the poor. While rhetorically
putting the Englishman in a castle, politically he would not allow him
on a common. Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the beginning
of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and deplored it; he saw the triumph
of Capitalism in the industrial cities and defied it. The paradox he was
maintaining really amounted to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is
rather more national than Welbeck Abbey. The same paradox would have led
him to maintain that a Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud of
Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham. He would no more have thought of
looking for England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in
Belfast.

The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary style has survived the
persecution of his equally excellent opinions. But that style also is
underrated through the loss of the real English tradition. More cautious
schools have missed the fact that the very genius of the English tongue
tends not only to vigour, but specially to violence. The Englishman of
the leading articles is calm, moderate, and restrained; but then the
Englishman of the leading articles is a Prussian. The mere English
consonants are full of Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of letters
when he said "stinks," not when he said "putrefaction." Take some common
phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note not only the extravagance
of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in
the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same.
Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most
spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and
continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to
which I am much attached) had a chorus--

  "O wind from the South
  Blow mud in the mouth
  Of Jane, Jane, Jane."

Note, again, not only the tremendous vision of clinging soils carried
skywards in the tornado, but also the suitability of the mere sounds.
Say "bone" and "bouche" for mud and mouth and it is not the same.
Cobbett was a wind from the South; and if he occasionally seemed to stop
his enemies' mouths with mud, it was the real soil of South England.

And as his seemingly mad language is very literary, so his seemingly mad
meaning is very historical. Modern people do not understand him because
they do not understand the difference between exaggerating a truth and
exaggerating a lie. He did exaggerate, but what he knew, not what he did
not know. He only appears paradoxical because he upheld tradition
against fashion. A paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once: a
fashion is a more fantastic thing that is said a sufficient number of
times. I could give numberless examples in Cobbett's case, but I will
give only one. Anyone who finds himself full in the central path of
Cobbett's fury sometimes has something like a physical shock. No one who
has read "The History of the Reformation" will ever forget the passage
(I forget the precise words) in which he says the mere thought of such a
person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and, for an instant, doubt the
goodness of God; but that peace and faith flow back into the soul when
we remember that he was burned alive. Now this is extravagant. It takes
the breath away; and it was meant to. But what I wish to point out is
that a much more extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cobbett's day, the
accepted view of Cranmer; not as a momentary image, but as an immovable
historical monument. Thousands of parsons and penmen dutifully set down
Cranmer among the saints and martyrs; and there are many respectable
people who would do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, but an
established lie. Cranmer was not such a monstrosity of meanness as
Cobbett implies; but he was mean. But there is no question of his being
less saintly than the parsonages believed; he was not a saint at all;
and not very attractive even as a sinner. He was no more a martyr for
being burned than Crippen for being hanged.

Cobbett was defeated because the English people was defeated. After the
frame-breaking riots, men, as men, were beaten: and machines, as
machines, had beaten them. Peterloo was as much the defeat of the
English as Waterloo was the defeat of the French. Ireland did not get
Home Rule because England did not get it. Cobbett would not forcibly
incorporate Ireland, least of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his
defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his "Register" was what the
serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,
inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed
writing "gas and gaiters" more than any two other words in his works.
But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but
because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind
the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single
matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a
hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and
farming a small estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed as antiquated
as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way
the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as
St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other yeoman in
the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would
have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of
truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that
sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more
and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull
detail of truth. That crisis was _not_ the foundling of a strong Tudor
monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it _was_ the
founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it
holds them to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to
bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of "St. George for Merry England," for
though he pointed to the other and uglier side of the Waterloo medal,
he was patriotic; and his premonitions were rather against Blucher than
Wellington. But if we take that old war-cry as his final word (and he
would have accepted it) we must note how every term in it points away
from what the modern plutocrats call either progress or empire. It
involves the invocation of saints, the most popular and the most
forbidden form of mediævalism. The modern Imperialist no more thinks of
St. George in England than he thinks of St. John in St. John's Wood. It
is nationalist in the narrowest sense; and no one knows the beauty and
simplicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen St. George's Cross
separate, as it was at Creçy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer a
flag it is than the Union Jack. And the word "merry" bears witness to an
England famous for its music and dancing before the coming of the
Puritans, the last traces of which have been stamped out by a social
discipline utterly un-English. Not for two years, but for ten decades
Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the "efficient" foreigner,
has walked about in the sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men. I
do not think that even the Prussians ever boasted about "Merry Prussia."



VI--_Hamlet and the Danes_


In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of
Germany--I do not mean "Faust," but Grimm's Fairy Tales--there is a
gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences
without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was
sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney
and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down
and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very
charming, and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly
what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home. But it
also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on
England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and
gradually turned to bad. It began as a literary influence, in the lurid
tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sintram," and so on; the revisualising
of the dark background of forest behind our European cities. That old
German darkness was immeasurably livelier than the new German light. The
devils of Germany were much better than the angels. Look at the Teutonic
pictures of "The Three Huntsmen" and observe that while the wicked
huntsman is effective in his own way, the good huntsman is weak in every
way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is
more in these first forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier
stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does _not_
shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may
fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent;
and though individuals like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it with worse
things (such as opium), they kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole.
But the one disadvantage of a forest is that one may lose one's way in
it. And the one danger is not that we may meet devils, but that we may
worship them. In other words, the danger is one always associated, by
the instinct of folk-lore, with forests; it is _enchantment_, or the
fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity or spiritual
servitude. And in the evolution of Germanism, from Hoffmann to
Hauptmann, we do see this growing tendency to take horror seriously,
which is diabolism. The German begins to have an eerie abstract sympathy
with the force and fear he describes, as distinct from their objective.
The German is no longer sympathising with the boy against the goblin,
but rather with the goblin against the boy. There goes with it, as
always goes with idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness; the men of the
forest are already building upon a mountain the empty throne of the
Superman. Now it is just at this point that I for one, and most men who
love truth as well as tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for "going
out into the world to seek my fortune," but I do not want to find
it--and find it is only being chained for ever among the frozen figures
of the Sieges Allees. I do not want to be an idolator, still less an
idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all for coming
back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetised, either by
mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist
German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if
there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew what
it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful boots) to fall
down the chimney and walk about my room. But when he procures a head and
begins to talk, I feel a little bored. The Germans cannot really be deep
because they will not consent to be superficial. They are bewitched by
art, and stare at it, and cannot see round it. They will not believe
that art is a light and slight thing--a feather, even if it be from an
angelic wing. Only the slime is at the bottom of a pool; the sky is on
the surface. We see this in that very typical process, the Germanising
of Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Germans forgetting that
Shakespeare was an Englishman. I complain of their forgetting that
Shakespeare was a man; that he had moods, that he made mistakes, and,
above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of
deity. That is what is the matter with the Germans; they cannot "ring
fancy's knell"; their knells have no gaiety. The phrase of Hamlet about
"holding the mirror up to nature" is always quoted by such earnest
critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic. But it really
means (or at least its author really thought) that art is nothing if not
artificial. Realists, like other barbarians, really _believe_ the
mirror; and therefore break the mirror. Also they leave out the phrase
"as 'twere," which must be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and
especially every remark of Hamlet. What I mean by believing the mirror,
and breaking it, can be recorded in one case I remember; in which a
realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove that Hamlet had a
particular psycho-pathological abnormality, which is admittedly nowhere
mentioned in the play. The critic was bewitched; he was thinking of
Hamlet as a real man, with a background behind him three dimensions
deep--which does not exist in a looking-glass. "The best in this kind
are but shadows." No German commentator has ever made an adequate note
on that. Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; he was nowhere
more English than in his blunders; but he was nowhere more successful
than in the description of very English types of character. And if
anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said
about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as
much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave
weaknesses of both characters. The chief English fault, especially in
the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of
decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in
thought--which some call dogma. And in the politics of the last century,
this English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a great part, or rather
refused to play it.

There were, then, two elements in the German influence; a sort of pretty
playing with terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism. The first
pointed to elfland, and the second to--shall we say, Prussia. And by
that unconscious symbolism with which all this story develops, it was
soon to be dramatically tested, by a definite political query, whether
what we really respected was the Teutonic fantasy or the Teutonic fear.

The Germanisation of England, its transition and turning-point, was well
typified by the genius of Carlyle. The original charm of Germany had
been the charm of the child. The Teutons were never so great as when
they were childish; in their religious art and popular imagery the
Christ-Child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly a man. The
self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is half-redeemed by the
unconscious grace which called a school not a seed-plot of citizens, but
merely a garden of children. All the first and best forest-spirit is
infancy, its wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent fear.
Carlyle marks exactly the moment when the German child becomes the
spoilt child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism
always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but
is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into
pessimism; or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.

Carlyle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all
this by the mental interval between his "French Revolution" and his
"Frederick the Great." In both he was Germanic. Carlyle was really as
sentimental as Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental as Werther.
Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that
it was a French revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that
comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man
should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should
relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should
defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone
who does not understand that does not understand the French
Revolution--nor, for that matter, the American Revolution. "We hold
these truths to be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of truism. But
though Carlyle had no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence
for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled
most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it.
While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the
Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly
despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless force belongs, of
course, to the forests, to Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there
fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy and the English
tragedy, and, in no small degree, the German tragedy too. The real
romance of the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern Teutons,
with their castles, which are almost literally castles in the air, and
their river which is walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to
wine. But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to
prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical
than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany
was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary.
There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin. Stella said
that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle
had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who
had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who
saw what was their enemy: and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like
an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic
essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets: it is
proved by the more deadly fact that it did. The actual written poetry of
Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but
simply feeble--and French. Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier as
his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian blues; nor can there be any
wonder. His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was
the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first of men. No wonder he
looked at the rest of us with little hope.

But a stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England. Prussia,
plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and
strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had
rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the
two most important events were the Polish national revival, with which
Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably
coercionist; and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany
by the King of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered
by a free German Convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans:
she wanted to conquer the Germans. And she wanted to conquer other
people first. She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment
in Bismarck; and he began with a scheme full of brutality and not
without humour. He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of
the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of
the land of Denmark. In support of this small pretender he enlisted two
large things, the Germanic body called the Bund and the Austrian Empire.
It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed
provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of
Augustenberg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the
Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Sadowa. He was a good
husband and a good father; he did not paint in water colours; and of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the symbolic intensity of the
incident was this. The Danes expected protection from England; and if
there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism they
ought to have had it. They ought to have had it even by the pedantries
of the time, which already talked of Latin inferiority: and were never
weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the
country of Napoleon could not fight. But if it was necessary for
whosoever would be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were more Teuton than
the Prussians. If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended
from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the
Prussians were descended from mongrel Slavonic savages. If Protestantism
be progress, the Danes were Protestant; while they had attained quite
peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive
cultivation which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They had
in a quite arresting degree what was claimed for the Germanics as
against Latin revolutionism: quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple
love of fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that coincidence which
dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epoch had found their
freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the
works of a Danish man of genius, whose stories and sketches were so
popular in England as almost to have become English. Good as Grimm's
Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern
German; they were a museum of things older than any nation, of the
dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When the English romantics wanted to
find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small
country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost
comically crowded. There they found what we call an original writer, who
was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland
in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the
English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of
their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that
domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the
fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard.
His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward
allegory: it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are.
Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like
a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did
feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast
domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to
utter welcome. In the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted to
England a living bush that can still blossom into candles. And in his
tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic
militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the
nursery. He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the
dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his
smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of
larger and lower things. These things, alas, were an allegory. When
Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into
France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to
justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and
simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry
of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more
pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with
silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a
toy. Here again, it is enormously probable that England would have
struck upon the right side, if the English people had been the English
Government. Among other coincidences, the Danish princess who had
married the English heir was something very like a fairy princess to the
English crowd. The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the
sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal
figure in England. But whatever our people may have been like, our
politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity and the fear of
force to which they have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the Danish army
and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away
down the great gutter, down that colossal _cloaca_ that leads to the
vast cesspool of Berlin.

Why, as a fact, did not England interpose? There were a great many
reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one
reason; indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results, of what
we have called the Germanisation of England. First, the very insularity
on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a seat in the
central senate of the nations. What we called our splendid isolation
became a rather ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia. Next, we
were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians,
Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible descent from
King Arthur's nameless enemies and not from King Arthur. King Arthur
might not be historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist and
Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could
see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to
be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what
was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be
horsy. That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that
the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real
decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow
manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious
kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by
pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace--but they
added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the
Cobdenite's line. Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia,
to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.
But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more
infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave
the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves. Our
wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that
the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not
quite believe. An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating
the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not
without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself--am I a coward?

                      It cannot be
  But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
  To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this
  I should have fatted all the region kites
  With this slave's offal.

We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.



VII--_The Midnight of Europe_


Among the minor crimes of England may be classed the shallow criticism
and easy abandonment of Napoleon III. The Victorian English had a very
bad habit of being influenced by words and at the same time pretending
to despise them. They would build their whole historical philosophy upon
two or three titles, and then refuse to get even the titles right. The
solid Victorian Englishman, with his whiskers and his Parliamentary
vote, was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon and William of
Prussia both became Emperors--by which he meant autocrats. His whiskers
would have bristled with rage and he would have stormed at you for
hair-splitting and "lingo," if you had answered that William was German
Emperor, while Napoleon was not French Emperor, but only Emperor of the
French. What could such mere order of the words matter? Yet the same
Victorian would have been even more indignant if he had been asked to
be satisfied with an Art Master, when he had advertised for a Master of
Arts. His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised
him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during
the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken
to procure some Indian Red and had produced a Red Indian.

The Englishman would not see that if there was only a verbal difference
between the French Emperor and the Emperor of the French, so, if it came
to that, it was a verbal difference between the Emperor and the
Republic, or even between a Parliament and no Parliament. For him an
Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not yet learned that a Parliament
may mean merely oligarchy. He did not know that the English people would
soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents,
but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing
class of England did not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon
rotten representatives. Therefore he did not understand Bonapartism. He
did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not
less, when it turned all France into one constituency which elected one
member. He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic
because it was not republican, but purely senatorial. He was yet to
learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can
become. Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked
about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians--Mr. Balfour,
for instance--and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin
historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a
revival of the power of the Crown. It seems that so far from having left
Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is
not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments
may end where Louis Napoleon began.

In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words
"Emperor of the French." The type of title was deliberately chosen to
express the idea of an elective and popular origin; as against such a
phrase as "the German Emperor," which expresses an almost
transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as "King of
Prussia," which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory. To
treat the _Coup d'état_ as unpardonable is to justify riot against
despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy. Yet the idea
expressed in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead, but rather risen
from the dead. It is the idea that while a government may pretend to be
a popular government, only a person can be really popular. Indeed, the
idea is still the crown of American democracy, as it was for a time the
crown of French democracy. The very powerful official who makes the
choice of that great people for peace or war, might very well be called,
not the President of the United States, but the President of the
Americans. In Italy we have seen the King and the mob prevail over the
conservatism of the Parliament, and in Russia the new popular policy
sacramentally symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of the new
armies. But in one place, at least, the actual form of words exists; and
the actual form of words has been splendidly justified. One man among
the sons of men has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula with
awful and disastrous fidelity. Political and geographical ruin have
written one last royal title across the sky; the loss of palace and
capital and territory have but isolated and made evident the people that
has not been lost; not laws but the love of exiles, not soil but the
souls of men, still make certain that five true words shall yet be
written in the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of mankind: "The King of
the Belgians."

It is a common phrase, recurring constantly in the real if rabid
eloquence of Victor Hugo, that Napoleon III. was a mere ape of Napoleon
I. That is, that he had, as the politician says, in "L'Aiglon," "le
petit chapeau, mais pas la tête"; that he was merely a bad imitation.
This is extravagantly exaggerative; and those who say it, moreover,
often miss the two or three points of resemblance which really exist in
the exaggeration. One resemblance there certainly was. In both Napoleons
it has been suggested that the glory was not so great as it seemed; but
in both it can be emphatically added that the eclipse was not so great
as it seemed either. Both succeeded at first and failed at last. But
both succeeded at last, even after the failure. If at this moment we owe
thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of united France, we also
owe some thanks to Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united Italy. That
great movement to a freer and more chivalrous Europe which we call
to-day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerunners and first victories
before our time; and it not only won at Arcola, but also at Solferino.
Men who remembered Louis Napoleon when he mooned about the Blessington
_salon_, and was supposed to be almost mentally deficient, used to say
he deceived Europe twice; once when he made men think him an imbecile,
and once when he made them think him a statesman. But he deceived them a
third time; when he made them think he was dead; and had done nothing.

In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and the even more unbridled
prose of Kinglake, Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in
history because of the catastrophe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of
lightning on Louis Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him. Some
passages in the "Châtiments" are really caricatures carved in eternal
marble. They will always be valuable in reminding generations too vague
and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is
beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of
them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John,
or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear no
trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims, and his quite
comprehensible contempt for the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And
if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the
revolutionary element in Cæsarism, it need hardly be said that a rather
Primrose League Tory like Tennyson did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid
insistence upon the _Coup d'état_ is, I fear, only an indulgence in one
of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one
which afterwards altogether ran away with us over the Dreyfus case. It
is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people's sins.
If this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it came, of course,
still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's husband and even to
Queen Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by him. But in so
far as the sensible masses of the English nation took any interest in
the matter, it is probable that they sympathised with Palmerston, who
was as popular as the Prince Consort was unpopular. The black mark
against Louis Napoleon's name until now, has simply been Sedan; and it
is our whole purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an interlude. If it is
not an interlude, it will be the end of the world. But we have sworn to
make an end of that ending: warring on until, if only by a purgatory of
the nations and the mountainous annihilation of men, the story of the
world ends well.

There are, as it were, valleys of history quite close to us, but hidden
by the closer hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold in the soft
Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps with his still-born English
Revolution. Another is under that height called The Spy of Italy, where
a new Napoleon brought back the golden eagles against the black eagles
of Austria. Yet that French adventure in support of the Italian
insurrection was very important; we are only beginning to understand
its importance. It was a defiance to the German Reaction and 1870 was a
sort of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory was a defiance to the
German Reaction and 1914 was the attempted revenge for it. It is true
that the French liberation of Italy was incomplete, the problem of the
Papal States, for instance, being untouched by the Peace of Villafranca.
The volcanic but fruitful spirit of Italy had already produced that
wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipresent personality whose red shirt
was to be a walking flag: Garibaldi. And many English Liberals
sympathised with him and his extremists as against the peace. Palmerston
called it "the peace that passeth all understanding": but the profanity
of that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than he knew: there
were really present some of those deep things which he did not
understand. To quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with him, was an
instinct with the Bonapartes; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be
expected to understand. They knew the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is
not a Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood. And after all the
English Liberals could not get their own Government to risk what the
French Government had risked; and Napoleon III. might well have retorted
on Palmerston, his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war
was better than no fighting. Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt
before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when the
world

  "Shall ring to the roar of the lion
  Proclaiming Republican Rome."

But he might have remembered, after all, that it was not the British
lion, that a British poet should have the right to say so imperiously,
"Let him roar again. Let him roar again."

It is true that there was no clear call to England from Italy, as there
certainly was from Denmark. The great powers were not bound to help
Italy to become a nation, as they were bound to support the unquestioned
fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the great Italian patriot was to
experience both extremes of the English paradox, and, curiously enough,
in connection with both the two national and anti-German causes. For
Italy he gained the support of the English, but not the support of
England. Not a few of our countrymen followed the red shirt; but not in
the red coat. And when he came to England, not to plead the cause of
Italy but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found he was more popular
with the English than any Englishman. He made his way through a forest
of salutations, which would willingly have turned itself into a forest
of swords. But those who kept the sword kept it sheathed. For the ruling
class the valour of the Italian hero, like the beauty of the Danish
Princess, was a thing to be admired, that is enjoyed, like a novel--or a
newspaper. Palmerston was the very type of Pacifism, because he was the
very type of Jingoism. In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, he was in
practice as cautious as Cobden. England had the most prudent
aristocracy, but the most reckless democracy in the world. It was, and
is, the English contradiction, which has so much misrepresented us,
especially to the Irish. Our national captains were carpet knights; our
knights errant were among the dismounted rabble. When an Austrian
general who had flogged women in the conquered provinces appeared in
the London streets, some common draymen off a cart behaved with the
direct quixotry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad. He had beaten women and
they beat him. They regarded themselves simply as avengers of ladies in
distress, breaking the bloody whip of a German bully; just as Cobbett
had sought to break it when it was wielded over the men of England. The
boorishness was in the Germanic or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses
and spurs: the gallantry was in the gutter. English draymen had more
chivalry than Teuton aristocrats--or English ones.

I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment because it lights up
Louis Napoleon as what he really was before the eclipse, a
politician--perhaps an unscrupulous politician--but certainly a
democratic politician. A power seldom falls being wholly faultless; and
it is true that the Second Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan
spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats as Rochefort as
well as Hugo. But there was no French inefficiency that weighed a hair
in the balance compared with the huge and hostile efficiency of
Prussia; the tall machine that had struck down Denmark and Austria, and
now stood ready to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.
There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, and Bismarck adjusted it, as
with his finger, by a forgery--for he had many minor accomplishments.
France fell: and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her
stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. The crowning of the first
modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an
allegory; like an allegory on those Versailles walls. For it was at once
the lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent on the low brow
of a barbarian. Louis XI. had returned, and not Louis IX.; and Europe
was to know that sceptre on which there is no dove.

The instant evidence that Europe was in the grip of the savage was as
simple as it was sinister. The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety
and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was
signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply
were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply
carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some
prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation;
and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such
impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one
after another, and by name. Her last cry ended in a stillness like that
which had encircled Denmark.

One man answered; one who had quarrelled with the French and their
Emperor; but who knew it was not an emperor that had fallen. Garibaldi,
not always wise but to his end a hero, took his station, sword in hand,
under the darkening sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate of
France. A curious record remains, in which a German commander testifies
to the energy and effect of the last strokes of the wounded lion of
Aspromonte. But England went away sorrowful, for she had great
possessions.



VIII--_The Wrong Horse_


In another chapter I mentioned some of the late Lord Salisbury's remarks
with regret, but I trust with respect; for in certain matters he
deserved all the respect that can be given to him. His critics said that
he "thought aloud"; which is perhaps the noblest thing that can be said
of a man. He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had
not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts. And he
had one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred lapses of anarchic
cynicism. He could change his mind upon the platform: he could repent in
public. He could not only think aloud; he could "think better" aloud.
And one of the turning-points of Europe had come in the hour when he
avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into
which his dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him; and
declared that England had "put her money on the wrong horse." When he
said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a
fallacious fear of Russia. But I cannot but think that if he had lived
much longer, he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long
diplomatic support of the Turk's great ally in the North. He did not
live, as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with us, and rush on
through wilder and wilder places, until we knew that we were riding on
the nightmare.

What was this thing to which we trusted? And how may we most quickly
explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the
hair's-breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it
seems to be hurling the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and we must not
ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses
disown logic; and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion
of thought. Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in
the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism; and with this (which was what
appeared to win in 1870) we had better begin. The nature of
Pan-Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat thus:

The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to
sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he
possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself.
It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less
graceful than the cat; that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to
make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for
some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that
when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an
oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed
horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is
more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a
few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the
characteristic equine quality of caudality, or a tail"; so that cats
_are_ horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail which is the equine
banner. Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power
of song. Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore are sea-horses. And
though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to
divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature-might of the
same horse-moving energy sustained.

Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps
going too far to say that this horse is a donkey. For it is obviously
within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer, "But if a
haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me?
Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that
climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you
because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the
accomplishments of a horse--why then you are only another horse without
any accomplishments." When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings
up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and
pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.

This apologue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the
Teutonic claim. The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only
Sea-Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses. They do really say
that the nightingales of Tuscany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be
German birds or German jewels. They do maintain that the Italian
Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having
Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when
they are hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were
Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of
the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by
saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin
influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell:
if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English
prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the
black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten.
But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into
detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr.
Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they
will point out that the word "roth" is very like the word "rot." Which,
in one sense, is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content to say it
is all rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with the preposterous
Prussian history, which talks, for instance, about the "perfect
religious tolerance of the Goths"; which is like talking about the legal
impartiality of chicken-pox. He will decline to believe that the Jews
were Germans; though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews.
But deeper than any such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of
the parable. It is simply this; that if Teutonism be used for
comprehension it cannot be used for conquest. If all intelligent peoples
are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans. If
the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfort, we can only
say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who are in the
right against the Germans who are in the wrong. Thus in Alsace the
conquerors are forced into the comic posture of annexing the people for
being German and then persecuting them for being French. The French
Teutons who built Rheims must surrender it to the South German Teutons
who have partly built Cologne; and these in turn surrender Cologne to
the North German Teutons, who never built anything, except the wooden
Aunt Sally of old Hindenburg. Every Teuton must fall on his face before
an inferior Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes towards the
Baltic, the very lowest of all possible Teutons, and worship him--and
find he is a Slav. So much for Pan-Germanism.

But though Teutonism is indefinable, or at least is by the Teutons
undefined, it is not unreal. A vague but genuine soul does possess all
peoples who boast of Teutonism; and has possessed ourselves, in so far
as we have been touched by that folly. Not a race, but rather a
religion, the thing exists; and in 1870 its sun was at noon. We can most
briefly describe it under three heads.

The victory of the German arms meant before Leipzic, and means now, the
overthrow of a certain idea. That idea is the idea of the Citizen. This
is true in a quite abstract and courteous sense; and is not meant as a
loose charge of oppression. Its truth is quite compatible with a view
that the Germans are better governed than the French. In many ways the
Germans are very well governed. But they might be governed ten thousand
times better than they are, or than anybody ever can be, and still be
as far as ever from governing. The idea of the Citizen is that his
individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in
_altering_ the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as
dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen _is_ a revolution. That is, he
destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own
thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort
from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does not
criticise it. The German ruler really does feed and train the German as
carefully as a gardener waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly
began to water the gardener, he would be much surprised. So in Germany
the people really are educated; but in France the people educates. The
French not only make up the State, but make the State; not only make it,
but remake it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, always painting the
happy German like a portrait; in France the Frenchman is the artist,
always painting and repainting France like a house. No state of social
good that does not mean the Citizen _choosing_ good, as well as getting
it, has the idea of the Citizen at all. To say the Germanies are
naturally at war with this idea is merely to respect them and take them
seriously: otherwise their war on the French Revolution would be only an
ignorant feud. It is this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the
critical and creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate under United
Germany--under the undivided hoof.

Nevertheless, when the German says he has or loves freedom, what he says
is not false. He means something; and what he means is the second
principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsibility of Thought.
Within the iron framework of the fixed State, the German has not only
liberty but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or rather because,
nothing can be done. Philosophy is really free. But this practically
means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell: that
it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks
like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his
brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness
of German practice. The Germans _sterilise_ thought, making it active
with a wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.

But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root;
and depend upon one assumption. It matters little whether we call it,
with the German Socialists, "the Materialist Theory of History"; or,
with Bismarck, "blood and iron." It can be put most fairly thus: that
all _important_ events of history are biological, like a change of
pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves. Professors are still
tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders
were migrating for food like swallows; or that the French Revolutionists
were somehow only swarming like bees. This works in two ways often
accounted opposite; and explains both the German Socialist and the
Junker. For, first, it fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the
"blonde beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such
lambs as the French. The highest success of this notion in Europe is
marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and
fighting breed, but which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended
to rule; the Turk, whom some Tories called "the gentleman of Europe."
The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronise the
Cross. It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary
adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed. That English guns
helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete,
cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece--or
considering the crimes of England.

But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the
Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril
it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first,
by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"--as if _time_ could
ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected
Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the
Zeitgeist--perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is
tricked by a biological parallel, by which the chicken always comes out
of the egg "at the right time." He does not; he comes out when he comes
out. The Marxian Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes; and
the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the theory of
all history as a search for food makes the masses content with having
food and physic, but not freedom. The best working model in the matter
is the system of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total failure and
dead letter in France but has been, in the German sense, a great success
in Germany. It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower
caste, who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small
wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who
had studied its operations in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in
"social reform," was passed.

These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering, in an institution which
is not without a great historical basis and not without great modern
conveniences. And as France was the standard-bearer of citizenship in
1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this alternative solution in
1915. The institution which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or
rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have
spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them. It can give the
individual worker everything except the power to alter the State--that
is, his own status. Finality (or what certain eleutheromaniacs would
call hopelessness) of status is the soul of Slavery--and of Compulsory
Insurance. Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty
that has always been given to a slave--the liberty to think, the liberty
to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any
intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state--such as
have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of Epictetus to
the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged
by all defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a material test,
the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good
rather than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely the "model
village" of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an
old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer
indignantly that he had provided baths, playing-grounds, a theatre,
etc., for his workers. He would probably have thought it odd to hear a
planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-books,
and places suitable for the cake-walk. Yet the planter must have
provided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property. And if this
Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the
broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an
apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle
was fought in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to fight for it,
the courage to die for it and, above all, the courage to call it by its
name.

With the acceptance by England of the German Insurance Act, I bring this
sketch of the past relations of the two countries to an end. I have
written this book because I wish, once and for all, to be done with my
friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who has long despaired of really
defending his own country, and has fallen back upon abusing mine. He has
dropped, amid general derision, his attempt to call a thing right when
even the Chancellor who did it called it wrong. But he has an idea that
if he can show that somebody from England somewhere did another wrong,
the two wrongs may make a right. Against the cry of the Roman Catholic
Poles the Prussian has never done, or even pretended to do, anything but
harden his heart; but he has (such are the lovable inconsistencies of
human nature) a warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish.
He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but
he still has many wise, reproachful words to utter about the campaign in
South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will
have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our
governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed
and never in need of whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is
that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my
countrymen not to hide behind thin official excuses, which the sister
kingdoms and the subject races can easily see through. We can confess
that our crimes have been as mountains, and still not be afraid of the
present comparison. There may be, in the eyes of some, a risk in
dwelling in this dark hour on our failures in the past: I believe
profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I believe that the most
deadly danger to our arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self-praise,
any flavour of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of that impudent and
ultimate impenitence, that may make one Boer or Scot or Welshman or
Irishman or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path for a second
Prussia. I have passed the great part of my life in criticising and
condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country: I think
it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no
illusions either about our past or our present. _I_ think our whole
history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the
crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African War was
a dirty work which we did under the whips of moneylenders. I think
Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think Denshawi was a devilry.

Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the
absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of
white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of
our wickedness, in one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever
we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we
have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the
holy anger of Maria Teresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common
sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while
they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God
as we have served _their_ kings, there would not be to-day one remnant
of them in our path, either to slander or to slay us.



IX--_The Awakening of England_


In October 1912 silent and seemingly uninhabited crags and chasms in the
high western region of the Balkans echoed and re-echoed with a single
shot. It was fired by the hand of a king--real king, who sat listening
to his people in front of his own house (for it was hardly a palace),
and who, in consequence of his listening to the people, not unfrequently
imprisoned the politicians. It is said of him that his great respect for
Gladstone as the western advocate of Balkan freedom was slightly
shadowed by the fact that Gladstone did not succeed in effecting the
bodily capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch knew that if a
malefactor were the terror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects would
expect him personally to take arms and pursue the ruffian; and if he
refused to do so, would very probably experiment with another king. And
the same primitive conception of a king being kept for some kind of
purpose, led them also to expect him to lead in a foreign campaign, and
it was with his own hand that he fired the first shot of the war which
brought down into the dust the ancient empire of the Grand Turk.

His kingdom was little more than the black mountain after which it was
named: we commonly refer to it under its Italian translation of
Montenegro. It is worth while to pause for a moment upon his picturesque
and peculiar community, because it is perhaps the simplest working model
of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic social machine I
have described in the last chapter--stood in its path and was soon to be
very nearly destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the Serbian stock
which had climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie, and thence, for
many hundred years, had mocked at the predatory empire of the Turks. The
Serbians in their turn were but one branch of the peasant Slavs,
millions of whom are spread over Russia and subject on many sides to
empires with which they have less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the
broad features which are important here, are not merely Slavonic but
simply European. But a particular picture is generally more pointed and
intelligible than tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with subtler
tendencies; and of this unmixed European simplicity Montenegro is an
excellent model.

Moreover, the instance of one small Christian State will serve to
emphasise that this is not a quarrel between England and Germany, but
between Europe and Germany. It is my whole purpose in these pages not to
spare my own country where it is open to criticism; and I freely admit
that Montenegro, morally and politically speaking, is almost as much in
advance of England as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no
millionaires--and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are
no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries
of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of
priestcraft a curious thing was discovered--that if you kill every
usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false
weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every
water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or
disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without
dwelling further on this dark matter, we may say that this great gap in
the Montenegrin experience explains the other great gap--the lack of
Socialists. The Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is curiously
absent from this land. The reason (I have sometimes fancied) is that the
Proletarian is class-conscious, not because he is a Proletarian of All
Lands, but because he is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor people in
Montenegro have lands--not landlords. They have roots; for the peasant
is the root of the priest, the poet, and the warrior. And _this_, and
not a mere recrimination about acts of violence, is the ground of the
age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins
are patriotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not patriotic for Turkey.
They never heard of it, in fact. They are Bedouins, as homeless as the
desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed, only
stabled in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule vagabond people, like
the gypsies. To be ruled by them is impossible.

Nevertheless what was called the nineteenth century, and named with a
sort of transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),
was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere, and the Turk, the
great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle. The most
civilised of the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent dared to
attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as
unanswerable as Hittin. In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;
and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expending a type of praise
upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the
Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany;
Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the
appliances of that new servile machinery which was her secret; the
absolute identification of national subordination with business
employment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp.
Every other commercial traveller was pathetically proud of being both a
slave and a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken hands. The "sack"
of the boss was as silent and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And
the dream of the citizen was at an end.

It was under a sky so leaden and on a road so strewn with bones that the
little mountain democracy with its patriarchal prince went out, first
and before all its friends, on the last and seemingly the most hopeless
of the rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens
seemed other than disastrous; and even that was doubtful. For the
successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli while proving the gallantry
of the Italians (if that ever needed proving) could be taken in two
ways, and was seen by many, and probably most, sincere liberals as a
mere extension of the Imperialist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and
not as the promise of newer things. Italy, it must be remembered, was
still supposed to be the partner of Prussia and the Hapsburgs. For days
that seemed like months the microscopic state seemed to be attempting
alone what the Crusades had failed to accomplish. And for days Europe
and the great powers were thunderstruck, again and yet again, by the
news of Turkish forts falling, Turkish cohorts collapsing, the
unconquerable Crescent going down in blood. The Serbians, the
Bulgarians, the Greeks had gathered and risen from their lairs; and men
knew that these peasants had done what all the politicians had long
despaired of doing, and that the spirit of the first Christian Emperor
was already standing over the city that is named after his name.

For Germany this quite unexpected rush was a reversal of the whole tide
of the world. It was as if the Rhine itself had returned from the ocean
and retired into the Alps. For a long time past every important
political process in Europe had been produced or permitted by Prussia.
She had pulled down ministers in France and arrested reforms in Russia.
Her ruler was acclaimed by Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans like
Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age. One of the most famous and
brilliant of our journalists called him "the Lord Chief Justice of
Europe." He was the strongest man in Christendom; and he had confirmed
and consecrated the Crescent. And when he had consecrated it a few hill
tribes had risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other things
about the same time, less important in themselves, struck in the
Prussian's ear the same new note of warning and doubt. He sought to
obtain a small advantage on the north-west coast of Africa; and England
seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in insisting on its
abandonment. In the councils over Morocco, England agreed with France
with what did not seem altogether an accidental agreement. But we shall
not be wrong if we put the crucial point of the German surprise and
anger at the attack from the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not
only did it menace the key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of German
commerce; not only did it offer the picture of one army trained by
France and victorious, and another army trained by Germany and beaten.
There was more than the material victory of the Creusot over the Krupp
gun. It was also the victory of the peasant's field over the Krupp
factory. By this time there was in the North German brain an awful
inversion of all the legends and heroic lives that the human race has
loved. Prussia _hated_ romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neglected;
it was a thing that tormented her as any bully is tormented by an
unanswered challenge. That weird process was completed of which I have
spoken on an earlier page, whereby the soul of this strange people was
everywhere on the side of the dragon against the knight, of the giant
against the hero. Anything unexpected--the forlorn hopes, the
eleventh-hour inspirations, by which the weak can elude the strong, and
which take the hearts of happier men like trumpets--filled the Prussian
with a cold fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian felt as a
Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs not only refused to pass
through his machine, but turned into romantic wild boars, raging and
rending, calling for the old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests
of kings.

The Prussian saw these things and his mind was made up. He was silent;
but he laboured: laboured for three long years without intermission at
the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for
ever such romantic accident or random adventure; a machine that should
cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings. That
he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him,
anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is now, even in the
documents he has himself published, a fact of common sense. Suppose a
man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well; suppose
in the division of the effects of an old friend he particularly asks for
his razors; suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends back the
trunk, but keeps the cord. And then suppose we hear that a rival of his
has been lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, apparently with a
razor, and his body hidden in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes
to project a preliminary suspicion about the guilty party. In the
discussions held by the Prussian Government with Lord Haldane and Sir
Edward Grey we can now see quite as plainly the meaning of the things
that were granted and the things that were withheld, the things that
would have satisfied the Prussian plotter and the things that did not
satisfy him. The German Chancellor refused an English promise not to be
aggressive and asked instead for an English promise to be neutral. There
is no meaning in the distinction, except in the mind of an aggressor.
Germany proposed a pacific arrangement which forbade England to form a
fighting alliance with France, but permitted Germany to retain her old
fighting alliance with Austria. When the hour of war came she used
Austria, used the old fighting alliance and tried to use the new idea of
English neutrality. That is to say, she used the rope, the razor, and
the well.

But it was either by accident or by individual diplomatic skill that
England at the end of the three years even had her own hands free to
help in frustrating the German plot. The mass of the English people had
no notion of such a plot; and indeed regarded the occasional suggestion
of it as absurd. Nor did even the people who knew best know very much
better. Thanks and even apologies are doubtless due to those who in the
deepest lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a
partner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart
Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made.
Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical
exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with
Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages,
not occupied with England at all. Even the Anti-Germans were too
insular. Even those who saw most of Germany's plan saw too much of
England's part in it. They saw it almost wholly as a commercial and
colonial quarrel; and saw its issue under the image of an invasion of
England, which is even now not very probable. This fear of Germany was
indeed a very German fear of Germany. This also conceived the English as
Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as at war with something like
itself--practical, prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to
cut us up in battle as she cut us out in business. The time of our
larger vision was not yet, when we should realise that Germany was more
deeply at war with things quite unlike herself, things from which we
also had sadly strayed. Then we should remember what we were and see
whence we also had come; and far and high upon that mountain from which
the Crescent was cast down, behold what was everywhere the real enemy of
the Iron Cross--the peasant's cross, which is of wood.

Even our very slight ripples of panic, therefore, were provincial, and
even shallow; and for the most part we were possessed and convinced of
peace. That peace was not a noble one. We had indeed reached one of the
lowest and flattest levels of all our undulating history; and it must be
admitted that the contemptuous calculation with which Germany counted on
our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it
was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alliances against
freedom had come. The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools
had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a
German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had
already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the
populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the
charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two great parties had long
slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence
was still made that no pact: existed beyond a common patriotism. But the
pretence failed altogether; for it was evident that the leaders on
either side, so far from leading in divergent directions, were much
closer to each other than to their own followers. The power of these
leaders had enormously increased; but the distance between them had
diminished, or, rather, disappeared. It was said about 1800, in derision
of the Foxite rump, that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in a
four-wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and
the Tory Party came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It was not a case of
two towers rising into different roofs or spires, but founded in the
same soil. It was rather the case of an arch, of which the
foundation-stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings;
but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one. This
"two-handed engine" still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other
part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so. We
were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our
heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for saying they didn't. The
libel law was now used, not to crush lies about private life, but to
crush truths about public life. Representation had become mere
misrepresentation; a maze of loopholes. This was mainly due to the
monstrous presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone many men
could win the ruinous elections of the age, and which were contributed
and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the
lowest trade or club. Only one or two people attacked these funds;
nobody defended them. Through them the great capitalists had the handle
of politics, as of everything else. The poor were struggling hopelessly
against rising prices; and their attempts at collective bargaining, by
the collective refusal of badly-paid work, were discussed in the press,
Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State. And so they were; upon the
Servile State.

Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last
armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and
solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a
crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself
forbidden--marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every
step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as
indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. Instantly the whole
invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the
watching nations white who had never known the Prussian. The statistics
of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the
imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by
the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament
patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a
rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to
pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of
the name of the Spirit that had passed.

And then a strange thing happened. England, that had not in the modern
sense any army at all, was justified of all her children. Respected
institutions and reputations did indeed waver and collapse on many
sides: though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from
the foreign bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild and
weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention. One was set to restrain
the journalists, and had to be restrained himself, for being more
sensational than any of them. Another scolded the working-classes in the
style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. But England was saved by a
forgotten thing--the English. Simple men with simple motives, the chief
one a hate of injustice which grows simpler the longer we stare at it,
came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields
and their suburbs and their factories and their rookeries, and asked for
the arms of men. In a throng that was at last three million men, the
islanders went forth from their island, as simply as the mountaineers
had gone forth from their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.



X--_The Battle of the Marne_


The impression produced by the first week of war was that the British
contingent had come just in time for the end of the world. Or rather,
for any sensitive and civilised man, touched by the modern doubt but by
the equally modern mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short
of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a day of judgment in
which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but
another.

The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the allied
line in the north. The other end rested on the secure city and fortress
of Namur; their end rested upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental
fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that
loose end in a strange land, with only the sad fields of Northern France
between them and the sea. For it was really round that loose end that
the foe would probably fling the lasso of his charge; it was here that
death might soon be present upon every side. It must be remembered that
many critics, including many Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not
eaten into this as into other parts of the national life, feared that
England had too long neglected both the ethic and the technique of war,
and would prove a weak link in the chain. The enemy was absolutely
certain that it was so. To these men, standing disconsolately amid the
hedgeless plains and poplars, came the news that Namur was gone, which
was to their captains one of the four corners of the earth. The two
armies had touched; and instantly the weaker took an electric shock
which told of electric energy, deep into deep Germany, battery behind
battery of abysmal force. In the instant it was discovered that the
enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed. He was actually more
numerous even than they discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled as
in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon striving without speech in a
nightmare of numbers. Then all the allied forces at the front were
overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons; and began that black retreat,
in which so many of our young men knew war first and at its worst in
this terrible world; and so many never returned.

In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our
blood. Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries
of the Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was
certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more
difficult to dissipate into the daylight. But one curious fact remains
about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate
works of art. Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and
stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are
covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic
influence had expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were there
perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors. Nobody saw
Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil
Rhodes. Things were either seen or said among the British which linked
them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke
of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who
dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west. They
were the visions or the inventions of a mediæval army; and a prose poet
was in line with many popular rumours when he told of ghostly archers
crying "Array, Array," as in that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I
have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow. Other tales, true or only
symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor
of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off
martyrologies--St. George. One soldier is asserted to have claimed to
identify the saint because he was "on every quid." On the coins, St.
George is a Roman soldier.

But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly
flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death. That
which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something
that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.
Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to
repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of
the first German strides. It seemed as if the forces of the ancient
valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth
granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania
moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all
things and survive them. In her train moved, like moving mountains,
Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled
cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if
threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the
new and abnormal armaments; for the soul of Germany was really expressed
in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were more symbolic than
her flags. Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted
that the German superiority has been in a certain thing and of a certain
kind. It is _not_ unity; it is not, in the moral sense, discipline.
Nothing can be more united in a moral sense than a French, British, or
Russian regiment. Nothing, for that matter, could be more united than a
Highland clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in the
Soudan. What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant
was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and
more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming
larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities
growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities;
they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed
repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born
would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat
his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to
surrender to the Kaiser; they were to surrender to Krupp, his master and
theirs; the French, the British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp
as the Germans themselves, after a few swiftly broken strikes, had
already surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that
incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron and unending
chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist; an
artist whose hands are never idle through dreaming or drawn back in
disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure and tireless in their
touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery
of life. That artist was there in triumph; but he had no name. The
ancient world called him the Slave.

From this advancing machine of millions, the slighter array of the
Allies, and especially the British at their ultimate outpost, saved
themselves by a succession of hair's-breadth escapes and what must have
seemed to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a mouse before a cat.
Again and again Von Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and
infantry, clawed round the end of the British force, which eluded it as
by leaping back again and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to speak,
so much on top of his prey that it could not even give way to him; but
had to hit such blows as it could in the hope of checking him for the
instant needed for escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that
a small individual accident, the capture of one man, would mean the
washing out of a whole battalion. For day after day this living death
endured. And day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed,
bit by bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians, quite
possibly to the surprise of the French, and quite as possibly to the
surprise of themselves; that there was something singular about the
British soldiers. That singular thing may be expressed in a variety of
ways; but it would be almost certainly expressed insufficiently by
anyone who had not had the moral courage to face the facts about his
country in the last decades before the war. It may perhaps be best
expressed by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were dead: and
that England was not.

The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so to speak, offering a refuge for
the unresting and tormented retreat; the British Generals had refused it
and continued to fight a losing fight in the open for the sake of the
common plan. At night an enormous multitude of Germans had come
unexpectedly through the forest and caught a smaller body of the British
in Landrecies; failed to dislodge them and lost a whole battalion in
that battle of the darkness. At the extreme end of the line
Smith-Dorrien's division, who seemed to be nearly caught or cut off, had
fought with one gun against four, and so hammered the Germans that they
were forced to let go their hold; and the British were again free. When
the blowing up of a bridge announced that they had crossed the last
river, something other than that battered remnant was saved; it was the
honour of the thing by which we live.

The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of
Paris; and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed
to stand open; and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and
the last time: for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was
come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested
the last hope of the seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a
rock, in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his bulldog figure. He
had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the
invasion at Guise; he had silently digested the responsibility of
dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to the last desperate leagues
before the capital; and he stood and watched. And even as he watched the
whole huge invasion swerved.

Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris, other men in dim blue
coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von
Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a
few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him,
dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate angle, to smash it in the
centre as with a hammer. It was less desperate than it seemed; for he
counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of
the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of
him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn
leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained,
dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But
even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the
charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called
Creçy, and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the
highest moment of all the secular history of man.

But it was not now the Creçy in which English and French knights had met
in a more coloured age, in a battle that was rather a tournament. It was
a league of all knights for the remains of all knighthood, of all
brotherhood in arms or in arts, against that which is and has been
radically unknightly and radically unbrotherly from the beginning. Much
was to happen after--murder and flaming folly and madness in earth and
sea and sky; but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian
thrust had failed, and Christendom was delivered once more. The empire
of blood and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness of the
northern forests; and the great nations of the West went forward; where
side by side as after a long lover's quarrel, went the ensigns of St.
Denys and St. George.



_NOTE ON THE WORD "ENGLISH"_


_The words "England" and "English" as used here require a word of
explanation, if only to anticipate the ire of the inevitable Scot. To
begin with, the word "British" involves a similar awkwardness. I have
tried to use it in the one or two cases that referred to such things as
military glory and unity: though I am sure I have failed of full
consistency in so complex a matter. The difficulty is that this sense of
glory and unity, which should certainly cover the Scotch, should also
cover the Irish. And while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman a North
Briton (despite the just protest of Stevenson), it is very unsafe indeed
to call an Irishman a West Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I
can assure the Scot that I say "England," not because I deny Scottish
nationality, but because I affirm it. And I can say, further, that I
could not here include Scots in the thesis, simply because I could not
include them in the condemnation. This book is a study, not of a disease
but rather of a weakness, which has only been predominant in the
predominant partner. It would not be true, for instance, to say either
of Ireland or Scotland that the populace lacked a religion; but I do
think that British policy as a whole has suffered from the English lack
of one, with its inevitable result of plutocracy and class contempt_.






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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Defendant, by G.K. Chesterton

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Title: The Defendant

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: May 3, 2004 [EBook #12245]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEFENDANT ***




Produced by Robert Shimmin, Frank van Drogen and PG Distributed
Proofreaders







THE DEFENDANT

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

AUTHOR OF 'THE WILD KNIGHT' AND 'GREYBEARDS AT PLAY'

SECOND EDITION

LONDON. MDCCCCII

R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON

       *       *       *       *       *

The 'Defences' of which this volume is composed have appeared in _The
Speaker_, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by
permission of the Editor. Portions of 'The Defence of Publicity'
appeared in _The Daily News_.

_October_, 1901.

       *       *       *       *       *

CONTENTS


IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION

INTRODUCTION

A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS

A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS

A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS

A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS

A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES

A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION

A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY

A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS

A DEFENCE OF FARCE

A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY

A DEFENCE OF SLANG

A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP

A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES

A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM


       *       *       *       *       *


_IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION

The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may
seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best
excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore
may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however,
that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare
and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to
be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would
be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory
which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are.
The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a
better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had
bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb
back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium.

If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten
the existence of this book--I do not speak in modesty or in pride--I
wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect
the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current
has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write
anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the
work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too
indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of
my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat
that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything
more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of
argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title
of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor,
and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the
character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is
one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however
poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of
attempting.

Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so
considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing--firstly,
because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in
my opinion, much justice in such criticism.

But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as
having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with
capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.

I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective
attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this
book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the 'Speaker.' The
tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging
improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting
the passage in which I said that 'diamonds were to be found in the
dust-bin,' he said: 'There is no difficulty in finding good in what
humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts.
The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to
find it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part, without the
slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in
drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But
I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few
sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and
progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the
pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth
that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is
also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into
decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did,
and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an
ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some
fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the
dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a
goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for
Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the
subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not
good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are
revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These
essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet
ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be
loved first and improved afterwards.

G. K. C_.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE DEFENDANT

INTRODUCTION

In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It
is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come
together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a
prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words--words that seemed
shameful and tremendous--and the world, in terror, buried him under a
wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.

If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would be more difficult to
imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth
that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried
under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.
Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more
commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation--it is
a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of
minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that
our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we
weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what
is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he
was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang
in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has
not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the
pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope--the
telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For
the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and
as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of
human history--that men are continually tending to undervalue their
environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.
The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the
tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible
humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the
ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his
environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.
This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a
strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon,
have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location
of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only
our eyes that have changed.

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not.
Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt,
and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody,
and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives
and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other
people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that
if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto
death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons
of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of
anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could
in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great
revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have
been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the
slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is
not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers
from an unrequited attachment to things in general.

It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a
permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or
mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic
words 'good' and 'bad,' descriptive of two primal and inexplicable
sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are
bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things
that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.

Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such
as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in
itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a
bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other
knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except
on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically
planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife
which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good
thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in
the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough
for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us;
what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we
call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us.
We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not
because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair
principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic
continent does not make ivory black.

Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged
perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough
to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by
which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be
something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have
investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of
them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but
eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter
and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to
call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the
snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have
imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I
have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings
despise the world--that a counsel for the defence would not have been
out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary
and Man was rejected of men.


       *       *       *       *       *


A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS


One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is
undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which
we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant
in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is
ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the
astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual
centre of a million flaming imaginations.

In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar
literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking,
despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the
character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a
haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to
some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole
under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.

To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar
compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of
becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean
law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to
examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar
publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous
exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the
lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed,
and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the
daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the
lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.
But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must
have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which
fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and
older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of
us in childhood has constructed such an invisible _dramatis personæ_,
but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by
careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional
story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I
wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet
and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the
tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic
workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly
be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too
long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last
halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the
artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and
impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true
romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is
no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These
two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the
common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower
orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic
reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its
wholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this
reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under
discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder.' It is the
custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of
the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with
an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge
that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary
researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the
novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from
young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a
will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence
of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment
in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most
people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find
their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by
magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is
not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put
in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that
the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded,
appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial
theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls
in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole
bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with
adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any
passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It
runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the
medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy,
recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures
in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being
kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by
such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the
same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of
the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'
Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a thousand
more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.
Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in 'Ivanhoe' will lead a
boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks
that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will
set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we
recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the
young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is
different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever
other reason the errand-boy reads 'The Red Revenge,' it really is not
because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by
speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is
simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.
He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory
hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered
accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple a
classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new
disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of
man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist
is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new
way of expressing them. These common and current publications have
nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and
heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that
unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by
the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and
dazzling epigram.

If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and
warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet
they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of
the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively
criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the
high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room
tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in
Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or
suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our
luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled
in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very
time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether
morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny
Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the
proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it
(quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading
philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant
that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are
placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the
criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of
humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never
doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is
noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies
spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these
maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who
believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of
people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy
writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call
Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those
iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as
their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a
'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to
be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good
many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the
coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched
by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on
the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the
burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling
literature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple as
the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS

If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar
periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization--by kings, judges, poets, and
priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great
chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical
folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a
patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that
these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any
saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary
and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like
a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very
high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions
which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get
there.

But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved
in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as
symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not
decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is
generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men
essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious
direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not
hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments
of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad
promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same
monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which
it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning.
And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall,
unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly
sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that,
if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some
distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep
the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the
weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is
the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man
refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in
Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier
things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got
to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would
be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously
significant phrase, _another man_. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale
of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward
to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday,
Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a
nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in
which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by
declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend
the feelings of a man about to be hanged:

  'For he that lives more lives than one
  More deaths than one must die.'

And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which
descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain
itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which
imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a
play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of
the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we
know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us,
to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us--this is the
grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a
vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the
greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two
mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or
aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like
all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it
_exegi monumentum oere perennius_ was the only sentiment that would
satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see
the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together.
But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the
moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said,
that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take
from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement
of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which
our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to
assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial
composure of custom?

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on
mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently
imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a
phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two
words--'free-love'--as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him
as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the
heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one
that he wants.

In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 'The Philanderer,' we have a vivid
picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually
endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a
married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search
for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the
courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old
times--in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's heroes. When
Shakespeare's men are really celibate they praise the undoubted
advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual
change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty
when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or
miserable by the moving of someone else's eyebrow. Suckling classes love
with debt in his praise of freedom.

  'And he that's fairly out of both
  Of all the world is blest.
  He lives as in the golden age,
  When all things made were common;
  He takes his pipe, he takes his glass,
  He fears no man or woman.'

This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have
lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman?
They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the
remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of
torture. They hear a song older than Suckling's, that has survived a
hundred philosophies. 'Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair
as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?'

As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a
retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in
modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt
to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern
Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasures of conquerors
without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.'
Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: 'Let us have the
fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us
sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love the
free-lovers say: 'Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves
without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot
commit suicide an unlimited number of times.'

Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless,
for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one
thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to
the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover
who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring
self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have
satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know
that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain
would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and
snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways
and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise
from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a
man is burning his ships.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS


Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed
to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among
these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived
and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone.
They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were
a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their
gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter
and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the
fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and
that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of
destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it
_was_ winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught
the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not
to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered
themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few
people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual
foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when
it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to
an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette.
The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft
that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was
sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in
comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more
certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure
the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver
sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the
heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure
stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.

But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a
vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a
pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor
over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel
surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as
so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they
were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential
difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of
the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of
the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.

The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with
which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming
for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that
he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never
wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating
expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of
the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of
himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the
architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man
to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite
insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity
that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a
factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked
after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but
both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all
the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood
as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I
fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential
symbol of life.

The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at
all. It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking,
any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being
undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the
skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is
shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He
contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be
genteel--a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals
carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and
appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are
necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the
unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe
which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its
body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it
comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour
rather abruptly deserts him.

In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times
and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a
vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the
fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the
mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went
to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the
grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence
of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than
harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in
aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an
endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of
the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be
convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that
they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the
whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that
of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth
was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous,
they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were
taught that death was humorous.

There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what
we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful
in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one
of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most
valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and
defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise
of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a
London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse
kindliness and honesty, and the lover in 'Maud' could actually persuade
himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love's name. Has
the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig
grunting? It is a noise that does a man good--a strong, snorting,
imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through
every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth
itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest,
the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature--the value
which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as
grotesque, as solemn and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we
see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate--simple,
rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease
that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into
a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple
that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and
levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird
standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however
much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or
contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for
ever.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY


It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern
world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be
called the art of the open air. Public monuments have certainly not
improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the
fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An
interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that
are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a
singular study in that tendency which, as I have said, is always making
things out worse than they are, and necessitating a systematic attitude
of defence. Thus, for example, some dramatic critics cast contempt upon
a dramatic performance by calling it theatrical, which simply means that
it is suitable to a theatre, and is as much a compliment as calling a
poem poetical. Similarly we speak disdainfully of a certain kind of work
as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and
essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one
peddling and cowardly philosophy, and remind us of the days when
'enthusiast' was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of
unconscious eulogies nothing is more striking than the word 'pompous.'

Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous.
Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids
blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And
public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to
teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great
deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of
committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. We
have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs,
'Wisdom crieth without; her voice is heard in the streets.' In Athens
and Florence her voice was heard in the streets. They had an outdoor
life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial
civilization has never had--an outdoor art. Religious services, the most
sacred of all things, have always been held publicly; it is entirely a
new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great
many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities,
love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that
thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to
strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It
should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base
of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in
invisible letters the lines of Swinburne:

  'This thing is God:
  To be man with thy might,
  To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live
      out thy life in the light.'

If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need,
that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.

There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may
perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a
movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy
pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and
depressing object in the universe--far more hideous and depressing than
one of Mr. H.G. Wells's shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all
unlike them)--is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad,
though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English
politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical
frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking
garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light
great-coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the
disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of
being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely
from technical demerit. In every line of those leaden dolls is expressed
the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm
for beauty or dignity. They were set up mechanically, because it would
seem indecorous or stingy if they were not set up. They were even set up
sulkily, in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that
there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money. So long as
this is the dominant national sentiment, the land is barren, statues and
churches will not grow--for they have to grow, as much as trees and
flowers. But this moral disadvantage which lay so heavily upon the early
Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough,
picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of
which the statue of Darwin in the South Kensington Museum and the statue
of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples. It is not enough
for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it
must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word
sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the
stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the
longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and
follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a
biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the
fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them
commonly tone down not only all a man's vices, but all the more amusing
of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We
never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the
sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of
the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work
at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an
eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the
public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because
his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in
biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it
requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man
was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.

For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy,
there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes
an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea
of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual
movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a
private matter. The most awful secret of every man's soul, its most
lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological
relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the
soul and the last reality--this most private matter is the most public
spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church
on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker. He
stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in
the world--a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity
by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in
accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was
surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at
noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were
public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire
and conception of the victims.

The mere grammatical meaning of the word 'martyr' breaks into pieces at
a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian
martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In
our day the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all
this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His
Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could
not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a
martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational,
though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by
a lion in one's own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.

It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has
inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars
have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked
and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange
world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame,
if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves
and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at
sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds
flew, like bats, by night.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE


There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown
from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical
phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown
in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is 'the heir of all
the ages' is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally
important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is
not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good
for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling
doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding
childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and
inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of
this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all
respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be
found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of
nonsense. 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose,' at least, is original, as
the first ship and the first plough were original.

It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the
world has seen--Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne--have written
nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense.
The nonsense of these men was satiric--that is to say, symbolic; it was
a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the
difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in
the Kaiser's moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually
larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason
whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present
Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We
incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that
the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the
Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the
knave's trial in 'Alice in Wonderland' had been published in the
seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan's 'Trial of
Faithful' as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy
that if 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose' had appeared in the same
period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.

It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's
'Nonsense Rhymes.' To our mind he is both chronologically and
essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis
Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious
and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant
and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and
in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense--the
idea of _escape_, of escape into a world where things are not fixed
horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees,
and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one
life in which he would have thundered morally against any one who walked
on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would
cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very
divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the
position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by
insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of
masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might
discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and
Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is
certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of
his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic
biography as we know Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous
figure, on his own description of himself:

  'His body is perfectly spherical,
    He weareth a runcible hat.'

While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear
introduces quite another element--the element of the poetical and even
emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a
contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason
as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his
amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic
prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.

  'Far and few, far and few,
  Are the lands where the Jumblies live,'

is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in
'Jabberwocky.' Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his
whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with
more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his
own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements,
until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean.
There is a genial ring of commonsense about such lines as,

  'For his aunt Jobiska said "Every one knows
  That a Pobble is better without his toes,"'

which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the
matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning,
that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old
travellers in the 'Gromboolian Plain' as he is.

Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new
sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a
mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of
mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen
out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any
great aesthetic growth. The principle of _art for art's sake_ is a very
good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the
earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad
principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its
roots in the air. Every great literature has always been
allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad'
is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all
life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There
is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the
word 'ghosts'; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it
is summed up in the words 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Even the
vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses
something of the delight in sinister possibilities--the healthy lust for
darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a
dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the
future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world
must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be
nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very
unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the
'wonders' of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be
completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we
regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for
a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we
consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the
skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the
astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to
it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other
side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a
quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a
man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple
with only two.

This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder.
It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book
of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been
represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth
century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on
the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it.
'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple
sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant
independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions,
is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense
and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme
symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things
with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of
things, has decided that 'faith is nonsense,' does not know how truly he
speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is
faith.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS


A book has at one time come under my notice called 'Terra Firma: the
Earth not a Planet.' The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he
quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons,
of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr.
Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in
Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however,
to follow Mr. Scott's arguments in detail. On the lines of such
arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of
that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:

One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if a projectile is fired from a
moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries
according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there
is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done, in the
case of the earth 'we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative
to the motion of the earth, and a striking proof that the earth is not
a globe.'

This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It
never seems to occur to the author, among other things, that when the
firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body,
there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of
course, a shot fired at an elephant does actually often travel towards
the marksman, but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott
probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant,
properly speaking, swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears
full of a rich cosmic humour.

I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs:

'If the earth were a globe, the distance round the surface, say, at 45
degrees south latitude, could not possibly be any greater than the same
latitude north; but since it is found by navigators to be twice the
distance--to say the least of it--or double the distance it ought to be
according to the globular theory, it is a proof that the earth is not a
globe.'

This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when
a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four
legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not
have five legs I am crushed.

But, as I have indicated, it is not in the scientific aspect of this
remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with
the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in
art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing
that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon
things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small
provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of
science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the
true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to
say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.

If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the
Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a
solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in
a trance, and then realize that the whole scene is whizzing round like a
zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the
notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember
that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A
strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with
the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks
clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very
different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the
independence and divinity of man, would sound if he were seen hanging on
to the planet by his boot soles.

For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and
its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance
of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old
Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the
spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had
no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact
of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of
gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it--a sentiment of
combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which
all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou hast hanged the world upon
nothing,' said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence
wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the
preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the
hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its
most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott's flat earth would be the true
territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any
objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no
foolish ideas about the dignity of man.

It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will
ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy;
whether we shall ever speak of 'early earth-turn' instead of 'early
sunrise,' and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or
looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large
number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new
mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious,
imagination, says that according to astronomers, 'the sea is a vast
mountain of water miles high.' To have discovered that mountain of
moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like
discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again.
In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out
sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this
earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall
discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all
the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and
catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that
they are living on a star.

In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural
history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of
poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is
called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts
that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use
those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol
of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a
freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to
live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the
symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this
habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly
with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by
Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of
the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars
was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space,
clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were
a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in
our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men
still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us
that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a
solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a
fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights
of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of
natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the
planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have
had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a
cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been
proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in
the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do
yet; for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing
happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES


There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded,
for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great
enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open
to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an
enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe
as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The
conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and
shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of
Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare,
and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and
brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of
the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are
indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the
ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like
to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.

But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an
element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that
imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function
in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest
use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the
trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves.
Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the
eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with
the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our
whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In
spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of
imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make
settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make
facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since
they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book
blazes with blasphemy.

Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal.
But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This
Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like
fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as
tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to
dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil
seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance
passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem
frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray old
pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins
seem colder than our restraints.

All this may be frankly recognised: all the barren sentimentality of the
Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But when all is said and
done, something else remains.

Through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power
and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the
perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or
form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity
in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not
attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these
things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for
him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below
him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs
the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than
his triumphs, the conception that 'there remaineth a rest.'

The conception of the Ideal Shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas.
But, after all, it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was
equalized with the trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy
itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was, without doubt, very
different from the shepherd of actual fact. Where one innocently piped
to his lambs, the other innocently swore at them; and their divergence
in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference
between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real
shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference
between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colours and the real
soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements, between the ideal priest
who is everlastingly by someone's bed and the real priest who is as glad
as anyone else to get to his own. There are ideal conceptions and real
men in every calling; yet there are few who object to the ideal
conceptions, and not many, after all, who object to the real men.

The fact, then, is this: So far from resenting the existence in art and
literature of an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regret that the shepherd is
the only democratic calling that has ever been raised to the level of
the heroic callings conceived by an aristocratic age. So far from
objecting to the Ideal Shepherd, I wish there were an Ideal Postman, an
Ideal Grocer, and an Ideal Plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we
should laugh at the idea of an Ideal Postman; it is true, and it proves
that we are not genuine democrats.

Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian
manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the
delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his
assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even
reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of
the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic
feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an
ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness
from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes
that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always
operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the
Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his
trousers, or that the 'health of humanity' softens the momentary
phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o'clock in the
morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail
of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the
doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth
while as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in
the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the
existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought
and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of
patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers,
and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual
craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did
actually plumb.

When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question
whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance
of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that
the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing
that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The
modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student
further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the
chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as
its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very
moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking
heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul's
holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more
like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION


It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition
stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff
shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the
ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us,
ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and
love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling
fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with
the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so
interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of
different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it
would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous
mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated
papers, such as _Tit-Bits, Science Siftings_, and many of the
illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds
of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost
incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more
popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious
debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous
passages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It
is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother
Seigel's Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the
young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap
detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever
our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we
gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at
the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy
bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is
absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves
with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To
read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be
a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which
constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this
particular branch of popular literature.

Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must in
justice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be
allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing
visions or a child reading fairy-tales. Here, again, we find, as we so
often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can
trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among
the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this
popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater
cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those
sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of
examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the
popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of
utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very
moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain
facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the
number of cows' tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many
more people who are in love than there are people who have any
intention of counting or collecting cows' tails. It is evident to me
that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for
information's sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human
nature than those daily needs which lie so near the surface that even
social philosophers have discovered them somewhere in that profound and
eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people's business
which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon
Riots.

I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private
life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of
fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and
population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dulness. During the
shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how
many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how
many rival shops Mr. Whiteley had bought up since he opened his
business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible
entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between
indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man's brain
being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like
visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and
glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, of
broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered
that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt
that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and
unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went
along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that
the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain.
Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so
circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him
it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so
gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is
shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon
reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had
struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true,
immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they
were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid
my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which
prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the
eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be
brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When
they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested,
but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the
street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be
interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art,
though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life
for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance
with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money
at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary
fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured
picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night;
its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a
wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the
holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level,
they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man--the
taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in
hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South
Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large
masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the
miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of
something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip.
When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only
because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any
of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we
have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of
Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always
supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large
whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading
millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a
year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere
indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and
splendid disinterestedness of the reader of _Pearson's Weekly_. He still
keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of
men--the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have
just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly
sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the
details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult
and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the
giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern
representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the
werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not
interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought
that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it
had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature,
a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident
pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.

That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of
information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial,
it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along
with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it
may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly
by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which
we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering
where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The
natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is
far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which
lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of
the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics
long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from
the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer:
that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science
and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile
curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and
indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history
for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each
other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and
conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each
other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and
specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the
youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere
news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a
pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as
monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between
science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We
have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can
be contented with a planet of miracles.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY


The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the
words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a
venerable dignitary of Heralds' College, summed up his results in the
remark that 'the silly old man didn't even understand his own silly old
trade.'

Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and
aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not
commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every
shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign.
The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really
ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed
their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross--and a cross is a great
improvement on most men's names.

Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of
pictorial symbols on men's minds. All letters, we learn, were originally
pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but
the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but
little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But
as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the
constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of
those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use
the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may
be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with
names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might
waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with
the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to
believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it
merely as a naked convenience like a number or a letter; it is
impossible to believe that the Kings of Scotland would have cheerfully
accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say,
certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that
everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There
is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the
intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never
dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the
spring.

Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial
symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great
trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made
one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this
pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours,
should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a
crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as
butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the
Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling
mistake--a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady--of decreasing
the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did
not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as
good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula,
'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'

For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most
unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former
times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but
only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and
eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the
Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively,
but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was
represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person--a person
born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was
ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it
being--as, of course, it is--ridiculous for him to deliberately wear
ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic
words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and
ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty
and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty
became an extravagance, as if top-hats and umbrellas were not the real
extravagance--a landscape from the land of the goblins. Dignity became a
form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were
not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically
most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern
men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying
crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and
neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of
their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer
should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered
from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms
capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man
who carries men's souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms
symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the
cavern of a merciful witchcraft.

There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody
laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter,
to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge
wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new
religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even
when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be
the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs,
disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a
great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen
the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the
whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They
realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud
and high-coloured pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind
its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal, the world has in
this matter followed English democracy rather than French; and those who
look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we
look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and
black tempers. From the strange life the men of that time led, they
might be assisting at the funeral of liberty instead of at its
christening. The moment we really believe in democracy, it will begin to
blossom, as aristocracy blossomed, into symbolic colours and shapes. We
shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves.
For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite
certain that the effort is superfluous.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS


There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of
another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the
communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There
are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often
they are made.

But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of
Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or
discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr.
Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by
exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is
called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the
least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of
physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical
beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external
attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts
the possibilities of moral attractiveness.

The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the
Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have
wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against
the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have
long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a
stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the
Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism--an
asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish
severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men
lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees
of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve
their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two
wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the
riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police
regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the
earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.

It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters
of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The
chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have
been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie
a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels
that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big--big as some
folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for
miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the
bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm
conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the
Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural
love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every
human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to
be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an
oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did
for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living
and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked
off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And
they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most
powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and
repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful _via media_, this pitiful
sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern
civilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. The
Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put an
exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.

Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the
same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is
ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it
entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent
people differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violently
their resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of
literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the
lack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of true
oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man's face
ugly because it powerfully expresses another man's soul is like
complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only
course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with
some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.

But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering
the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has
never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show
how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and
bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real
beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and
writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek
standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers,
which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of
technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real
consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the
sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a
Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a
boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.

This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never
been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable,
since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a
gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at
the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting
and uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth,
however, the phrase 'grotesque' is a misleading description of ugliness
in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic
gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least
intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of
satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole
key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut
out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines
stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from
end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a
nose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend stand
up hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad and
clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this;
it is not a question of humour. We do not burst with amusement at the
first sight of the pines or the chasm; but we like them because they are
expressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments,
her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her
children. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty,
there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as
there are a million beautiful spirits.



       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF FARCE


I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be
marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as
'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it
'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might
equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a
story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is
not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or
'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for
all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is
one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a
detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit
for an epic.'

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification,
there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of
it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for
them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually
tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of
the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and
when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the
blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder
seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of
a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their
own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime
seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or
effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture of
irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous
vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his
wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this
is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth
except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this
article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art
had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If
people had spoken of 'sonnets' with the same accent with which they
speak of 'music-hall songs,' a sonnet would have been a thing so
fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a
rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics
were only fit for children and nursemaids, 'Paradise Lost' might have
been an average pantomime: it might have been called 'Harlequin Satan,
or How Adam 'Ad 'em.' For who would trouble to bring to perfection a
work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write
'Othello' if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, 'Mr. Shakespeare
is fit for something better than writing tragedies'?

The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is
especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art,
glorified by Aristophanes and Molière, have sunk into such contempt may
be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the
astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which
marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to
the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those
who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they
will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary
art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the
phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it
must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its
lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have
all the comedy emotions of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or 'Northanger
Abbey,' but if their actual conversation were reported, it would
possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by
his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or Père Goriot, but
if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the
fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must
consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these
emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern
insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the
dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense.
If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in
life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the
morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the
youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and
men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it
is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with
every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of
joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the
black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the
literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and
artistic ambition is the form called 'farce'--or its wilder shape in
pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house,
there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the
possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder
whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or
sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the
candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a
potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this
nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of
pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said
(with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may
be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly
symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and
architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole
affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow
apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect
would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the
harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are
in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an
actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing
different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into
the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement
of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck
into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase
of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical
art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their
houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an
aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the
doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the
staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all
the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a
trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to
regulate one's life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.

The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but
we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of
transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men
of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it
under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic
literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little
knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although
two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the 'Frogs'
as on the wisdom of the 'Republic.' It is all a mean shame of joy. When
we come out from a performance of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' we feel
as near to the stars as when we come out from 'King Lear.' For the joy
of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than
wisdom, their love is stronger than death.

The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what
abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved
for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not
even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to
exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the
bells!


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY


The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the
exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that
they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And
especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who
defends humility something inexpressibly rakish.

It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds.
Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds
the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the 'divine
glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value
our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever
may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility--in other people.

But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are
found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and
temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation,
agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack
of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.

There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of
humility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophy
of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If
it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an
integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of
clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was
ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. All
full-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility the
moment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by its
upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The
real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted
upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the
gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even
indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense the
New Testament--a covenant with God which opened to men a clear
deliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces of
pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; they
believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them
above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only
another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the secure
who are humble.

This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the
street. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied
them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, an
irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy
and self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. If
humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not
wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same
time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy.
Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same time
that they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature
has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of
self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves
as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a
curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we
think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine
emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of
anything.

The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that
humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; that
it is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue.
Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who frankly
disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and
expressing one's self. These people tend, by a perfectly natural
process, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or
moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything
that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things is
all very well, but it has one simple corollary--that from everything
that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the
wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on
us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can
reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the
door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the
beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically
the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain
knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man--the matter
awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms,
the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which
a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view,
he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he
is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school,
Nietszche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the
philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the
cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful
experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is
really _seen_ when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego
sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees
everything foreshortened or deformed.

Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see
everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different
principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal
peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is
as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without
developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if they
were the latest article of personal adornment. But if a fish is to be
approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome.
The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop
off his legs. And similarly the student of birds will eliminate his
arms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all
his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears
of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming
extent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all
its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is
rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things
as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of
mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to
feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain
times that ourselves should be like a mere window--as clear, as
luminous, and as invisible.

In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it
is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the
luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or
a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the
cosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature. That
the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own
foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off
for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting
forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as
incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like
gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on
their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.
Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible
landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a
miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the
hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not
have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in
the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage
whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming
larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller
and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the
whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to
him as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. He
rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and
forget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them.
But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are--the
gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of
strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck
of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars--all this colossal
vision shall perish with the last of the humble.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF SLANG


The aristocrats of the nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their
one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant;
but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are
depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of
variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first
experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of
'good form,' which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good
form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell.
They engage, like Mr. Gilbert's curates, in a war of mildness, a
positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth
sought above all things to be distinguished from each other; with that
object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted
preposterous colours on their shields. They wished to make it entirely
clear that a Norfolk was as different, say, from an Argyll as a white
lion from a black pig. But to-day their ideal is precisely the opposite
one, and if a Norfolk and an Argyll were dressed so much alike that they
were mistaken for each other they would both go home dancing with joy.

The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their
function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment,
and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask
whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon
sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to
certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to
omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we
must look for guidance towards liberty and light.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every
day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It
may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the
democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under
consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the
heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light,
living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata
of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and
hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this,
again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that
the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain
natural symbolism and eloquence that they had not gained from books.
When Cyrano de Bergerac, in Rostand's play, throws doubts on the reality
of Christian's dulness and lack of culture, the latter replies:

  'Bah! on trouve des mots quand on monte à l'assaut;
  Oui, j'ai un certain esprit facile et militaire;'

and these two lines sum up a truth about the old oligarchs. They could
not write three legible letters, but they could sometimes speak
literature. Douglas, when he hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him
in his last battle, cried out, 'Pass first, great heart, as thou wert
ever wont.' A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a
high-placed and notorious traitor, said: 'I will receive him in all
obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.' This is literature
without culture; it is the speech of men convinced that they have to
assert proudly the poetry of life.

Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of
a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It
is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of
life; it is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is
positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient
name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object
of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed, with rude feudal
rhetoric, that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a
lunatic; but if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of
Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be
expected from Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a
language; it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating
certain broad, well-understood states of mind. 'Bored,' 'cut up,'
'jolly,' 'rotten,' and so on, are like the words of some tribe of
savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion
wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion, his
utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string
of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor (being filled with the Muse)
would burst out into a solid literary effort: 'You're a gen'leman,
aren't yer ... yer boots is a lot brighter than yer 'ed...there's
precious little of yer, and that's clothes...that's right, put yer cigar
in yer mouth 'cos I can't see yer be'ind it...take it out again, do yer!
you're young for smokin', but I've sent for yer mother.... Goin'? oh,
don't run away: I won't 'arm yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'ave.... "Down
with croolty to animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this
mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and
almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote
metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long
allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.'

I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic
allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as
'Keep your hair on' is positively Meredithian in its perverse and
mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known
expression about 'swelled-head' as a description of self-approval, and
the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American
said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted 'to put on their
hats with a shoe-horn.' This is a monument of the true nature of slang,
which consists in getting further and further away from the original
conception, in treating it more and more as an assumption. It is rather
like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists.

The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower
orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier
times. The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words. Their
readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the
readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with
his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with
his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this
process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of
society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic
eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in
the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody
must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a
language.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a
moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every
day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many
sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social
relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we
should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of
everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature,
over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the
living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a
kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white
elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away
with them--a whole chaos of fairy tales.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP


The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,
first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in
consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is
possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools
and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of
a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the
universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a
transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this:
that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put
again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those
delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark
these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within
every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on
the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system
of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion
teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand
the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we
have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the
stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is
the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and
which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies
and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to
appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has
properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find
new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not
found--that on which we were born.

But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling
effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel
our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the
marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple
or ignorant)--we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous,
walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as
marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this
matter--that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the
child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact
is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any
words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words
and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the
philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and
our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards
our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a
considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards
children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an
unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them,
refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them
properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair,
and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the
mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy
matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.

We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of
things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with
precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the
infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle
of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his
accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and
Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering
and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise
and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life,
generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic
commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious
tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as
rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them
that they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably be
adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of
humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is
entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on
contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children
with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam
forgave the Omnipotent.

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we
feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious
reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The
very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels;
we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a
microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see
the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to
think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like
imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the
leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we
feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of
stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a
deity might feel if he had created something that he could not
understand.

But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all
the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is
more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for
all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and
lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their
fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of
the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.



       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES


In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the
popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of
many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer
bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are
bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a
book popular. Bradshaw's Railway Guide contains few gleams of
psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter
evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than
railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many
good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more
fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably
be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that
many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good
detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a
story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of
committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural
enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of
sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays.

There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective
story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good
epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate
form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent
of the public weal.

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it
is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is
expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among
mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that
they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our
descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the
mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.
Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious
the detective story is certainly the 'Iliad.' No one can have failed to
notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London
with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of
elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual
omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the
city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the
guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the
reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to
it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively
signalling the meaning of the mystery.

This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city
is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while
Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious
ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may
not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no
brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol--a message
from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The
narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention,
the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick
has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every
slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate
covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even
under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert
this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably
human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that
the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at
ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh
might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be
possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's souls
have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder
and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But
since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson)
decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the
great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must
give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of
pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or
the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested
in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the
Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers.
In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to
present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves
in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and
manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a
picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in tourist's
knickerbockers, or a performance of 'Hamlet' in which the Prince
appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his hat. But this
instinct of the age to look back, like Lot's wife, could not go on for
ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the
modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective
stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood.

There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories.
While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so
universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and
rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the
mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of
departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the
unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to
remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic
world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but
the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance
stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists
of a thieves' kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that
it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure,
while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic
conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and
wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of
man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring
of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable
police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a
successful knight-errantry.


       *       *       *       *       *

A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM


The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a
serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay
could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love
of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of
lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without
rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no
type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one
left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was
rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that
lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of
the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been
written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our
being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet
anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk,
like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun
by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not
realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of
country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something
of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his
fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a
national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that
a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only
his son. Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the
essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone
who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This
sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was
the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like
Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would
think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My
mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink
he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be
in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or
not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and
raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When
that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all
the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or
the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid
counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of
agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with
vociferous optimism round a death-bed.

We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England,
which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to
us to have none of the marks of patriotism--at least, of patriotism in
its highest form? Why has the adoration of our patriots been given
wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but
comparatively material and trivial:--trade, physical force, a skirmish
at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are
things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its
extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not
a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and
heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots? A rude
Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens
lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of
garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens.
With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the
patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat
Rafferty, who sings 'What do you think of the Irish now?' They are both
honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.

I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this
pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound
it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and
environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but
whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the
man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us
say, were brought up in ignorance of his father's fame and genius, it is
not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was
over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely
in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back
upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason.
We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our
own literature and our own history.

We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing
our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history
of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in
that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but
create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but
in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history
be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast
heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a
heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type
of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no
harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally
delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is
great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of
England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A
French boy is taught the glory of Molière as well as that of Turenne; a
German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns
the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French
patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is
often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull,
common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of
Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under
the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something;
consequently, he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a
German might tend to exalt music, or a Flamand to exalt painting,
because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It
would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up
provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of a Zulu. The
extraordinary thing is, that it is the chief boast of a people who have
Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.

The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English
nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of
our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature.
An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he
once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters
cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of
English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an
almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the
arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives
against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a
vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course
of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the
topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like
saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning
to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping
a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all
education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy
has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.

We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national
sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a
whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this
strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism
can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best
thing in their lives, we, who are--the world being judge--humane,
honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst
thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that
have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who
could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done
anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are
the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are
judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of
failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual
transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.


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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twelve Types, by G.K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Twelve Types

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: June 2, 2004 [EBook #12491]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWELVE TYPES ***




Produced by Robert Shimmin, Stephen Hope and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.





TWELVE TYPES

BY G.K. CHESTERTON

LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
1902


NOTE

These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with
the kind permission of the Editors of _The Daily News_ and _The Speaker_.

G.K.C.
KENSINGTON.




CONTENTS


CHARLOTTE BRONTË
WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
FRANCIS
ROSTAND
CHARLES II
STEVENSON
THOMAS CARLYLE
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
SAVONAROLA
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT




CHARLOTTE BRONTË


Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals
so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real
objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a
man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and
insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself
is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of
his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which
do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do
not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that
they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as
the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he
thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's
name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these
are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in
the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities
form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild
and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of
literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of
collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights
and sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are
the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the
limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old
Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation,
though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës.
For the Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme
unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been
conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte
Brontë electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and
more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,
good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great
assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as
tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masqué.' She showed that
abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a
manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of
merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte
Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her
genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the
artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural
gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt
that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the
interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the
ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens
of Dante.

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of
the Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter
less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting
to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the
officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.
It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or
been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is
conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them.
But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is
that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story
as 'Jane Eyre' is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be
excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they
ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the
insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct
of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte
in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his
usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps
reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester
dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be
found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime,
where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast
nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, 'Jane
Eyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential
truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true
to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost
always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true,
emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not
matter a single straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights.' It would not matter
if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if
Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story
would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Brontë
character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except the
essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on his
arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right place.

The great and abiding truth for which the Brontë cycle of fiction stands
is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,
the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontë
heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating
inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her
solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is
possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an
ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of
humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on
evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first
night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man
of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all
conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them
prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit
him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,
who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened
enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element
of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is
the central spirit of the Brontë novel. It is the epic of the
exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our
time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because
it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of
Charlotte Brontë, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more
commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than
a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with real
simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so
to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had
possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being
as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first
and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of pleasure.

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the
dark wild youth of the Brontës in their dark wild Yorkshire home has
been somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their
conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,
emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the
springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some
midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which
there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and
panic of 'Wuthering Heights.' Every one of us has had a day-dream of our
own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than 'Jane Eyre.' And
the truth which the Brontës came to tell us is the truth that many
waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch
or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is
built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the
wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean
religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found
any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on
working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones
one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her
name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us upon every side to-day
like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of
the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as
well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the
frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of
ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;
there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses
is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these
men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of
these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single
house of all those millions which has not seemed to some one at some
time the heart of all things and the end of travel.




WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL


It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris
should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many
men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious
hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious
problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of
workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time
has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be
described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter
instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully
conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we
should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with
the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should
have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an
ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the
nails of the Cross. The limitations of William Morris, whatever they
were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all
his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in
some degree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his
stories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic
sense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe
that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of
the unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the
unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man
was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring
consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against
the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would
be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he
were a piece of exquisitely coloured cardboard.

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of
human nature--took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the
round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere æsthete. He
perceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The
difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have
to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of
it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the
most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of
the thing. He felt that it was monstrous that the modern man, who was
pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory
beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and
the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical
bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat.
He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in
raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It
is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which
blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In
all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as
a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and
thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most
repulsive of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of
blood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no
reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of
civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of
a thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may
be sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,
figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediæval Christians had
possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole
of St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all
our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under
one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the
miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and
imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth
century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues
underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing
human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to
this pulverising portent chirpily as 'The Twopenny Tube,' they would
have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted
atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic
element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great
reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil
that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out
his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant.
Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring,
and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms
at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in
with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and
universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every
family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously
improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it is
only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human
decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier
than they were before, from the 'coiffure' of a Papuan savage to the
wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.

But great and beneficent as was the æsthetic revolution of Morris, there
was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that
his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial
explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses
of modern ladies, 'upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped
like women,' as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical
imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than
this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now,
the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at
least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would
have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the
bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an æsthetic blue,
after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that
a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners
sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to
lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the
beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the
life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and
hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic
costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or
satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress
ball. But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We may
best suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various
works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly
valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of
mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-tales
contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling
for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have
climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not
such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of
things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of
lies; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It
appears to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a
moral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the
Beast. There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture,
the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its
ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William
Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he
hated modern life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast,
big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with
a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet
can love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous
excitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre,' the vast scale of
his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and
will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvantage
was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could
not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really
develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in
the æsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that
of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these æsthetic
shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the
decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving
the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things
that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to
some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are
beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs,
beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful.
There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful
engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized
hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And
this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the
supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the
Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.

But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great
reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better
proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than
that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to
needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and
more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the
armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A
lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the
sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical
of the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State.
Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured
stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of
their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and
genuine movement of our time towards beauty--not backwards, but
forwards--does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it.
Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,
prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be
remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and
proved that this painful greenish grey of the æsthetic twilight in which
we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of
death, but the greyness of dawn.




THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron.
The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wake
in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world of
Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where men
were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and the
very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses and
nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous elegance of a
wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with
splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental
thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity
is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see
some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial
woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent
explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe
that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some
of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,
we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We
almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box,
artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great
convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an
extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything
that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning
are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies
in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself
as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron
without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself
that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of
what is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any real
pessimism could ever be.

It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably
extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has
been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,
love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,
money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life
close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained
by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise
indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in
summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after
detail.

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously
among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House
of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.
Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a
life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar
and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of
pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has
written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang
of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with
the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far
as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored
by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised
the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little
more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this
popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated
pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would
no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the
harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than
they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a
breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is
popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but
because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus
of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is
popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic
about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the
Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they
blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They
heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things
they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was
to them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and
religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical
happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order
that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the
fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was
the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was
only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the
earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were
flaming like their own firesides.

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial
life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new
pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an
affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the
avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And
it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their
sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons
we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;
his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on year
after year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the
destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep away
the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub-conscious
mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something of
a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense and
immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote 'Don
Juan' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden
shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had
really become a pessimist.

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his
metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a
hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of
horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the
most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk
in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood
alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

    'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
    When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;
    'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
    But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.'

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the
time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears
of the enemy.




POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE


The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that
it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The
classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes,
one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier
really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense,
to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have
imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham
rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be
unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is
the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:
he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits
out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may
be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical
couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great
liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of
small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but
at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's

    'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

    'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The
one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing

    'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:--

    'A creature
    Of feature
    More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
    Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
    Darkly wise as a formless fate
    And if he be great
    If he be great, then rudely great,
    Rudely great as a plough that plies,
    And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of
the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have
occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever
been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element
of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the
realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we
cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of
divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was
truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in
the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we
cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or
magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to
meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural
irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses
were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in
terms.

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of
civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come
Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.
But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques
and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea
Islander--the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art
which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one
especially he was supreme--the great and civilised art of satire. And
in this we have fallen away utterly.

We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and
hostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of
furious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them.
It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy,
though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And
yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and
social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be
worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.

It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous
enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very
accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a
man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is
necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the
merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only
another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army
we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.
England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same
simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of
battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an
idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a
people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance
of trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the
enemy; whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to
praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a
full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without
having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as
utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever
was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often
have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it
may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is
one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it
hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The
one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man
whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He
knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is
not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous
and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can
count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours
of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind
all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly
visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but
firm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the

    'daring pilot in extremity,'

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

    'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.'

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause
of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that
is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent
has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to be
told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If
we take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as Sir
William Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which all
party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William
Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is
inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and
disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we all
know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not
inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone
knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the
old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.
Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable
honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is
therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we
were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of
stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; for
a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because
it is true.

Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: if
they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need
only turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The
Henleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt
for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the
man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstone
by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr
Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have
said, go quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they would see how a great
satirist approaches a great enemy:

    'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires
    True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
    Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
    And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
    Should such a man--'

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not
such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that
Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in
Pope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so
pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He
said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and
everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary
temperament:

    'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
    View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
    And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
    And sit attentive to his own applause.
    While wits and templars every sentence raise,
    And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it
aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is
addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the
applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.

In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption
that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can
benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his
merits, we cannot even hurt him.




FRANCIS


Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to
misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of
the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the
one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined
to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts
that truth is alone satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which
asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean
asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the
speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and
essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'love
is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves,
walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any
other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:

    'A book of verse beneath the bough
    A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou
    Sitting beside me in the wilderness
    O wilderness were Paradise enow.'

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
æsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

    'From quiet home and first beginning
      Out to the undiscovered ends--
    There's nothing worth the wear of winning
      But laughter and the love of friends.'

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state
that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and
Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They
were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or
tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain
brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at
unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many
men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there.
All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an
asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained
themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is
one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not
feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one
case and only the purchase in the other.

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The
mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in
which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and
dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it
as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur
to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe
is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit
to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with
joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.
The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood
up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea
gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these
disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one
dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly
tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that
the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and
ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition
of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times
more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this
out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather
the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,
but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason
that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,
because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to
their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,
because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of
benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,
in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost
indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily
as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,
perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of
the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast
practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this
amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple--minded infant was one
of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this
bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is
their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe
in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his
success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of
this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their
common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the
Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the
larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It
was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,'
as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had
'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret
nobility.

Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan
Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the
history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in
the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan
ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of
self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But
he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the
absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason
that not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all.

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the
position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than
any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.
He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take
pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell
from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet
this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we
think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most,
property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and
poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in
these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were
blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and
not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully
here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;
we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find
that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.
So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are
only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which
sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens
itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and
lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black
curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are
young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we
who are its misers.

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear and
tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the
water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,
his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided
the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,
bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a
cleaner and more transparent life.

The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was
small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason
that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to
be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the
madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it
the features of a new friend.




ROSTAND


When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to
the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of
Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for
remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for
'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school
which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view
which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.
The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, 'par excellence,' a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter
nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,
the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken
seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with
more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such
comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour which
steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not
superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.
Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were
the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of
comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, 'A
Sentimental Comedy.' The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.

'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at
his highest moment of happiness. 'Il me faut des géants.' An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing 'bouts rimés.' In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of
youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an
unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the
moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we
have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or
artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering
attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like
Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised
or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer
each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other.
Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in love
they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the
speech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur
Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called 'Cyrano
de Bergerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends
with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual
breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual
sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts
themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy,
and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same
apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of
'L'Aiglon,' now being performed with so much success. Although the hero
is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a
personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have
been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pæan of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so
high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the
characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern
life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of
the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Où, où sont les
aigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When
an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor, he replies, 'La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the
Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, 'Et nous?' pours out
a terrible description of the life lived by the common soldier. To-day
when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion as
jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in
few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might surely come a cry from the
vast mass of common humanity from the beginning 'et nous?' It is this
potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the
function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Ado
about Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole
pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is
common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. 'Love's Labour Lost' is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our
subject since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically
as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is
to the Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious human
passion, the love of death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall ever have
in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present
to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that
comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,
that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.
Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not
shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when
the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final
word, they all cry together 'Vive l'Empereur!' Monsieur Rostand,
perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field
of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing
but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them
should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as they
are in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not
the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their
conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice
and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, 'Vive l'Empereur.'




CHARLES II


There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II.,
one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things
Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very
satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism both in its
advantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. There
is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with such
theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a
mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simply
because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as
he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round an African
idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks
that mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeed
the most profound doubts as to whether St Matthew wrote his own gospel.
But he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the tree he is
looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in
the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in
the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between
atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and
fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the
most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day
of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man
to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there
are no insects in any of the stars.

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might
not be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and
poetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous
mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as
outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly a
dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to guard himself against hell
fire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the
world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase,
the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed
themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and
sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was
consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.

The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a
moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that
some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the
saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in
these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and
the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat
more exhaustive study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood
when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is
insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the
good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire
of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,
which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that
the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that
they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that
they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans
fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,
through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never
satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson
that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always
wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the
head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily
men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do
nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the
bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and
conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the
tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human
spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved
and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,
madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were
fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which
means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in
that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a
little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality
of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a
pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed
parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be
left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely
account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and
horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts
also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a
nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the
type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of
politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in
little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the
ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts
of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those
acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which
lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said
Thackeray, with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike
George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys
strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises
strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was
the revolt of something human, if only the débris of human nature. But
more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a
recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.
That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too
far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an
almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration
infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a
collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism
was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true
order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no
effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been
widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot
compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and
almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But
the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.
seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and
poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears
inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with
the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not
only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even
for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the
pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game
of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as
arduous to write 'Paradise Lost' as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,
though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and
poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly
significant as the phrase 'killing time.' It is a tremendous and
poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on the
earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,
fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the
men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we
have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place
among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged
to those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher
epicureans who make time live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful
head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all
his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless
flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning
politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly
that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived
almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was,
as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism,
it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is
the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave.
Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them,
professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were,
like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality
broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and
problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than
their laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty.




STEVENSON[A]


A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we
suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,
from the scorn of 'Ephemera Critica' and Mr George Moore, that Stevenson
had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of being
misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto &
Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson's works, 'Robert
Louis Stevenson,' by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he
has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by
his admirers. Mr Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about
Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by
any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially 'Beau Austin,' is
remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes
far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality
which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can
number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame
with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of
the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very
things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express.

Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his
'pessimism'; surely a strange charge against the man who has done more
than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But
he complains that, in 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde,' Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was
one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised
than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and
beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space
and time. 'Whatever we are intended to do,' he said, 'we are not
intended to succeed.' That the stars in their courses fight against
virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very
spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to
all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone
stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It
is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an
old church and see none in the ruins of a man.

The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood
and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we
use Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He
(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be
better employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon might as well say that
Dr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr Clark
Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that
one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and
falsifying marriage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this
error: few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson.
Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and
gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death,
but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action
of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman
and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there
are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.
The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such
stories as 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Weir of Hermiston.' But there
is another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abrupt
and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a
blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the
standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'The
Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he
loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring
universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as
has not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well
sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch
that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones
left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with the knife that Wicks drove through
his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain
clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting
wood with an axe.

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an
object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, 'The Destroying Angel,'
in 'The Dynamiter,' that it is 'highly fantastic and putting a strain on
our credulity.' This is rather like describing the travels of Baron
Munchausen as 'unconvincing.' The whole story of 'The Dynamiter' is a
kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story 'The Destroying
Angel' is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the
moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability
is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from
hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least
comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories. He
actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel of
Bohemia, that, 'though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on
the whole rather an irritating presence.' From this we are almost driven
to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr Baildon
thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he were a
man in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite
character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we met
him in real life we should kill him.

The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and
intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional
virtue--that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great
message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters,
it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his
light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone
supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his
versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well
enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,
pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could
not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can
play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he
is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly
well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has
happened in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,' 'The Master of
Ballantrae,' 'The Child's Garden of Verses,' and 'Across the Plains' had
been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by
succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once,
he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But
the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as
that of James Watt.

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that
romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more
important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the
other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of
all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of
scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted
orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no one
has been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists
in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is
the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and a
ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that
ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adventures. To
think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this is
the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make one
story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for
the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It
is quite inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans
called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr
George Moore by 'Esther Waters.' These novels were only the two or
three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell. But he died
with a thousand stories in his heart.

[Footnote A: 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism.' By H.
Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.]




THOMAS CARLYLE


There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the
first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second
is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was
the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's alleged
gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and
as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his
'liver' is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a
'Sartor Resartus,' it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is.
Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with
the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults and
literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the
situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult
to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal
predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage
egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. 'Ruskin,' says a critic, 'did, all the same, verily
believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.' This is certainly a
distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has
not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have
believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,
because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was
not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief
in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis,
Bunyan, Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable
variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man
as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear
and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not
only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must
absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense
of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has
the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets--humour. A man
must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan
delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted
Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of
cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion
was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of
its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.
So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and
literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had
seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of
them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and
eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the
passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates
that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in the
Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick
night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through
unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more ... and we go on, if
not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones.'

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the
founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern
rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or
valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive
tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual
system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the
trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the
trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual
intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic
is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up
the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind,
and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.
When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using
words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an
extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant
is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering
from 'nerves,' which is about as sensible as talking about a man
suffering from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver' and 'digestion' when we
mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same
manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the
danger of fallacy.

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial
overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat
different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they
bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.
Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to
forget that there are two parts of a logical process--the first the
choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; and
humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound
assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational
and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as 'He did not prove the
very thing with which he started,' or 'The whole of his case rested upon
a pure assumption,' two peculiarities which may be found by the curious
in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly one
hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without
troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense,
as it were, of the real colour and character of a man's assumption. For
instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing
and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is
basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become
as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist
denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal
who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments but
assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of
the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed
directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be
true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and
more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where
his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and
beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the
age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which
assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth
century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century
according to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to
be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but
the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real
ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last
era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there
has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,
as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of
common-sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of the
dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally
demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common-sense are
alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have
no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in
breaking through formulas, old and new, to these old and silent and
ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times
over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and
woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for
the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,
it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe.
About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice
to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he
sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were
a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his
philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and
arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some
questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not
that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided
and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous
and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in
them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to
rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone
invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with
admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.
Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero
worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great
men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were
more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and
his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship of
valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of
all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact that
he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that
modern habit of what is vulgarly called 'Going the whole hog.' Often in
matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This
remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics,
and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities
to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which
existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace,
Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and
optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged
to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the
pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse
him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this
mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of the
wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It was
this species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, never
his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle's defence of
slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and in
moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passion
for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. He
blundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing in
the world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its
opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful defenders
have made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly and
firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slavery
is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It
is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors.
Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses
the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a
spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be
ruled and guided for his own good like a child--for a child who is
always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual
existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that
human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be owned
like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had no personal destiny
in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's
because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean
places into which that remarkable animal, 'the whole hog,' more than
once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an
unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic
which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for
once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately
deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.
Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though
Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle
being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,
they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and
pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to
everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it
can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at
last.




TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY


The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not
deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false
innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,
who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous
expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of
peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep
and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before
we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are
contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always
sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,
suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and
staring face.

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are
upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more
fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to
undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,
classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,
who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with
colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going
yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is
certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes
the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is
a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of
our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish
communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly
and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the
return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it
consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think
that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into
ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into
very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according
to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself
with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to
kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would
be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the
claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is
interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of
paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth
of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike
in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the
return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of
fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to
nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he
can reject.

Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some
respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own
tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and
soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but
characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is
impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if
attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in
the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real
duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature,
especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a
blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who
should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would
find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the
world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search
of nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations of
the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,
much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is
omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think
that she is heeding us least. 'Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,' said
the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a
man's back that the spirit of nature hides.

It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to
all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We
feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on
complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make
himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more
intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the
pomp and sumptuousness of the world's history was simple in the truest
sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work
of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

    'King Solomon brought merchant men
      Because of his desire
    With peacocks, apes and ivory,
      From Tarshish unto Tyre.'

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a
part of his folly--I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel,
would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at 'Solomon in
all his glory.' With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step
further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the
shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.

The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy,' translated and edited by Mr
R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this
ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that the
deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble
appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is
pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that an
artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his
landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique--all the part of his
work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by
the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his
opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the
ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the
bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real
moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral
which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably
unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently
disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all
the tales, the folklore simplicity with which 'a man or a woman' are
spoken of without further identification, the love--one might almost say
the lust--for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood,
and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient
kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man--these
influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and
tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene
purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small
sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect
to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan
and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy
has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist
who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.

It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with
Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a
man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of
humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that
dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a
man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending
emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of
their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to
believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the
earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the
landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that
which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is
difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable
insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay
the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search
after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more
natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it
would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest
kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done,
accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called,
the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.

The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It
represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense which
characterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we
cannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our
cloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vainglorious,
too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in other
words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of
Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached
to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a
sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon
on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the
way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and
self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot
turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that
we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they
have the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign
they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent
thing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which
is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every
existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more
formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only
succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with
the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the
maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are
conquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated
by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can,
conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St George did not conquer the
dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of
milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would
have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the
Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with
the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed
up in the celebrated verse of Mr Edward Lear:

    'There was an old man who said, "How
    Shall I flee from this terrible cow?
    I will sit on a stile and continue to smile,
    Till I soften the heart of this cow."'

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;
it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of
mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But
although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to
consider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some
brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a
singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come
to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our
modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion
more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.

From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered
almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It
turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially
possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty
casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this
phenomenon as it really is.

The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an
extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist
philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon
its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of
the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and
supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to
triumph over many kings, and civilise many continents. We all agree that
these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we
all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day
is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a
Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,
like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are
symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who
did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been
outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer
race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than
nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single
cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the
elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They
have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have
arraigned theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower
than they have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly
and conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national
limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like
a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this
saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals
of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this
school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts or
Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was
such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.
Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven
asunder, or the sun did stand still at mid-day. We are faced with the
phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the
ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen,
who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the
gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid
themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes
written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it
something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in
its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees
the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way
of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the
dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain
in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

This value which we have above suggested, unquestionably belongs to the
Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their
strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer
a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot
but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the
rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of
non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think,
characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its
supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary
number of statements about the New Testament, of which the accuracy is
by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must
protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time.
When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all
what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had
expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and
answer:

Q. 'How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?'

A. 'Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in
the spirit world is merciful, is perfect.'

There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said
except the abominable metaphysical modernism of 'the spirit world'; but
to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is
recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and
unadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words have
meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient
sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had
the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain
printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are
mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and
philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with
flatly denying: 'The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take
special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign
countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have
an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people,
and those who are in sympathy with us.' I should very much like to know
where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent,
unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of
regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that
there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most
improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own.
The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest
compliment He paid was, 'Behold an Israelite indeed.' The author has
simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to
have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to
speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering
nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must
be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we
love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as
sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.
Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity: He loved
men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a
gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure
to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of
humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their
own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the
teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and
ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching--its
absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern
interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except
with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous
and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it
before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced
afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any
elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle
words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the
sun was darkened at noonday.




SAVONAROLA


Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we
know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not
know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may
never understand Savonarola.

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from
calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the
ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:
the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers
saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil
compared with which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating curse
that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name, except we call it
satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;
not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from
luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous
psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name
has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and
civilisation potentially the end of man.

For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his
day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern
rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,
dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of
Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the
crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not
be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely
picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish
enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate
the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is
precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.
He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen
jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;
that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and
pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist
would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred
of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are
sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which
all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the
sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that
clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as
to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has
truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally
anti-æsthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,
and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity
are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently
the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires
a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that
leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow
old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new.
The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of
imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as
it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be
surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that
of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt
to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is
the doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is
nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as
the saying that they are all the sons of God.

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men
as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear.
We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which
awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is more sick
of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks
the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern
works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of
the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved
imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a
dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the
falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man
which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as
he is worshipped by the readers of the 'Bow Bells Novelettes,' and for
the same reason--a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to
devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike
whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all
this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest,
preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is still
between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the
licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of
silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The
supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for
whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to
whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry
spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which
are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for
what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and
sonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison a
fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and
battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar and Cromwell wept for
many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance,
the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils
into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a
cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and
burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.




THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT


Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now
dwindling, schools of severely technical and æsthetic criticism have
been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if
there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is
in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire
whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,
is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects
carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the
incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter
could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are
neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it
exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like
the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing
that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too
large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be
really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's
consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is
difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it
seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some
disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is
not because they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples.
Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not
think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on which
his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He arranged his
endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an architect
plans great gates and long approaches to a really large house. He did
not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a story. He
enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a story
like a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to taste
it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time. The
reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of
immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not
be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart
of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without
either beginning or close.

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never
be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when
Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than
any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these
days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises
from one fundamental mistake--the idea that romance is in some way a
plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the
outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have
grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but
absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a
dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like
toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege
and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)
is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow
incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.
Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering and
sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but
it does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanity
which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that
is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance
we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or
adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a
plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is,
like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and
elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul
is evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of
certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered
wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber.
In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance
as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His
finest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have
the same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal
comedies--that of seeming more human than our waking life--even while
they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the
old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the
tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of
practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only
be called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible
sunset. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie
Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the
dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that
plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of
romance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps
the most profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in
which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which
may or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely
possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a
ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous
old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes
these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that
here the wind blows strong.

It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness
that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the
contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of
romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case
by this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast
multiplication of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative.
The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of
their hands; the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the
sword is at the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be
pictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper
except in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is
employed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand,
there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as their
disposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of
Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are
described as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic
touches. In short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that
the sole essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from
incident to incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the
sentiment of 'Oh! still delay, thou art so fair'; more of a certain
patriarchal enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the side
and the wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any
means so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How
little the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and
weapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of
adventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert
island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful and
monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic
in the 'Edinburgh Review' said indignantly that he could tolerate a
somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it
came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and
yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about
that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly
imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's
sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott
valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a
dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,
as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the
profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is
this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own
inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the
wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with
Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps
the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the
only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a
character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the
matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a
menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating--it was a two-handed sword.

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in
recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is
compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature
had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal
heroes in the 'Waverley Novels' retort upon each other with a
passionate dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly
be paralleled in political eloquence except in 'Julius Cæsar.' With a
certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his
noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain
every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of
Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,
for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting
miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the
passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of
putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems
frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the
scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then
compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing
bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself,
or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion
upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just
now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating
ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom. In
politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence in
the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely
intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing
questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war
uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would
have used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions of
facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in
prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees
hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: 'Ride your ways, Laird
of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour
burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar
houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may
stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare
does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey
Bertram.'

The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott
was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just
as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object
of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls,
to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have
any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside
it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached
criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with
roars of popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting
any central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to
think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of
eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect of
greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to
call it merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality;
we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely
superficial. The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental
mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The
superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What we
really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees
and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly
remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.

Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who
approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.
We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring
melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit
that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond
all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to
simplify one's mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. 'You
do me wrong,' said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. 'Many a law, many
a commandment have I broken, but my word, never.' 'Die,' cries Balfour
of Burley to the villain in 'Old Mortality.' 'Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing--' 'And fearing nothing,' replies the other. This is
the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the
great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along
with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,
and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly
effected.

Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction
by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of
the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarily
concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper
and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which
mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.
Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of 'Candida' it is clearly a part
of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent,
but he is not eloquent, because the whole 'G.B.S.' condition of mind
renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.
Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the
way that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains. It is
the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word
artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was
never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some
motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we
think.

Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,
for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no
adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have
compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the
poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish neglected and nameless.
It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and
pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of
eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as to
most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an
institution--a toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and
King. But it is far better to consider the difference rather as a
special merit, in that he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks
of incident which are untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain
breezy bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature of
adventure. With all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the
great mass of natural manliness which must be absorbed into art unless
art is to be a mere luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be
made almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one
most reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we
have erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and
horrible perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that
strange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and as
inspiring and as healthy as he.








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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton


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Title: Orthodoxy


Author: G. K. Chesterton



Release Date: May, 1994  [eBook #130]
[Most recently updated: September 26, 2005]

Language: English

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copy scanned by Mike Perry.



ORTHODOXY

by

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON







PREFACE


     This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to
put the positive side in addition to the negative.  Many critics
complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised
current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy.
This book is an attempt to answer the challenge.  It is unavoidably
affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical.  The writer has
been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset
Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical
only in order to be sincere.  While everything else may be different
the motive in both cases is the same.  It is the purpose of the writer
to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can
be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.
The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle
and its answer.  It deals first with all the writer's own solitary
and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in
which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology.
The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed.  But if
it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

                                           Gilbert K. Chesterton.





CONTENTS


   I.  Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
  II.  The Maniac
 III.  The Suicide of Thought
  IV.  The Ethics of Elfland
   V.  The Flag of the World
  VI.  The Paradoxes of Christianity
 VII.  The Eternal Revolution
VIII.  The Romance of Orthodoxy
  IX.  Authority and the Adventurer





ORTHODOXY



I INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE


     THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer
to a challenge.  Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
When some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers,
under the name of "Heretics," several critics for whose intellect
I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G.S.Street)
said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm
his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my
precepts with example.  "I will begin to worry about my philosophy,"
said Mr. Street, "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his."
It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person
only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.
But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book,
he need not read it.  If he does read it, he will find that in
its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set
of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state
the philosophy in which I have come to believe.  I will not call it
my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it;
and it made me.

     I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
of philosophical illustration.  There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.  But if you
imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
of this tale.  His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.  What could
be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the
fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane
security of coming home again?  What could be better than to have
all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting
necessity of landing there?  What could be more glorious than to
brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize,
with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.
This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is
in a manner the main problem of this book.  How can we contrive
to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens,
with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us
at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour
of being our own town?

     To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every
standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger
book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument;
and this is the path that I here propose to follow.  I wish to set
forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need,
the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar
which Christendom has rightly named romance.  For the very word
"romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.
Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by
saying what he does not dispute.  Beyond stating what he proposes
to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.
The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take
as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this
desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full
of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always
seems to have desired.  If a man says that extinction is better
than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure,
then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking.
If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.  But nearly all
people I have ever met in this western society in which I live
would agree to the general proposition that we need this life
of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange
with something that is secure.  We need so to view the world as to
combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.  We need to be
happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.
It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in
these pages.

     But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in
a yacht, who discovered England.  For I am that man in a yacht.
I discovered England.  I do not see how this book can avoid
being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth)
how it can avoid being dull.  Dulness will, however, free me from
the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.
Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of
all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing
of which I am generally accused.  I know nothing so contemptible
as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.
If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived
upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire;
for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every
six minutes.  It is as easy as lying; because it is lying.
The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the
fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth.
I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.  I never in my life
said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course,
I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny
because I had said it.  It is one thing to describe an interview
with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist.
It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist
and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.
One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively
the more extraordinary truths.  And I offer this book with the
heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write,
and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor
clowning or a single tiresome joke.

     For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me.
I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been
discovered before.  If there is an element of farce in what follows,
the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I
was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.
It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.
No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself;
no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him:
I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from
my throne.  I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end
of the nineteenth century.  I did, like all other solemn little boys,
try to be in advance of the age.  Like them I tried to be some ten
minutes in advance of the truth.  And I found that I was eighteen
hundred years behind it.  I did strain my voice with a painfully
juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths.  And I was punished
in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths:
but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that
they were not mine.  When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from
the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
the first to find Europe.  I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.

     It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account
of this happy fiasco.  It might amuse a friend or an enemy to
read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend
or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I
might have learnt from my catechism--if I had ever learnt it.
There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I
found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I
might have found in the nearest parish church.  If any one is
entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the
phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains
of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain
conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour.
I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

     I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note
naturally should, at the beginning of the book.  These essays are
concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian
theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the
best root of energy and sound ethics.  They are not intended
to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question
of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation
of that creed.  When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means
the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself
Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic
conduct of those who held such a creed.  I have been forced by
mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed;
I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians,
of where we ourselves got it.  This is not an ecclesiastical treatise
but a sort of slovenly autobiography.  But if any one wants my
opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G.S.Street
has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.



II THE MANIAC


     Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world;
they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made
a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a
motto of the modern world.  Yet I had heard it once too often,
and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.  The publisher
said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself."
And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught
an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell."  I said to him,
"Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?
For I can tell you.  I know of men who believe in themselves more
colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.  I know where flames the fixed
star of certainty and success.  I can guide you to the thrones of
the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in
lunatic asylums."  He said mildly that there were a good many men after
all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.
"Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them.
That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from
whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly
individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself
is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.  Actors who can't
act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay.  It would
be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he
believes in himself.  Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin;
complete self-confidence is a weakness.  Believing utterly in one's
self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in
Joanna Southcote:  the man who has it has `Hanwell' written on his
face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."  And to all this
my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply,
"Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?"
After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer
to that question."  This is the book that I have written in answer
to it.

     But I think this book may well start where our argument started--
in the neighbourhood of the mad-house. Modern masters of science are
much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact.
The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with
that necessity.  They began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical
as potatoes.  Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous
waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.
But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists,
have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water,
but to deny the indisputable dirt.  Certain new theologians dispute
original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can
really be proved.  Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in
their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness,
which they cannot see even in their dreams.  But they essentially
deny human sin, which they can see in the street.  The strongest
saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the
starting-point of their argument.  If it be true (as it certainly is)
that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat,
then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions.
He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he
must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution
to deny the cat.

     In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible
(with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did,
with the fact of sin.  This very fact which was to them (and is to me)
as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially
diluted or denied.  But though moderns deny the existence of sin,
I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a
lunatic asylum.  We all agree still that there is a collapse of
the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house.  Men deny hell,
but not, as yet, Hanwell.  For the purpose of our primary argument
the one may very well stand where the other stood.  I mean that as
all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended
to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern
thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make
a man lose his wits.

     It is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity
as in itself attractive.  But a moment's thought will show that if
disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease.
A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see
the picture.  And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can
only be enjoyed by the sane.  To the insane man his insanity is
quite prosaic, because it is quite true.  A man who thinks himself
a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken.  A man who thinks
he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass.
It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which
makes him mad.  It is only because we see the irony of his idea
that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see
the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all.  In short,
oddities only strike ordinary people.  Oddities do not strike
odd people.  This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time;
while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old
fairy tales endure for ever.  The old fairy tale makes the hero
a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling;
they startle him because he is normal.  But in the modern
psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.
Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately,
and the book is monotonous.  You can make a story out of a hero
among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.  The fairy
tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.  The sober
realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will
do in a dull world.

     Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic
inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey.  Now, if we are
to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the
matter is to blot out one big and common mistake.  There is a notion
adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination,
is dangerous to man's mental balance.  Poets are commonly spoken of as
psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association
between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it.
Facts and history utterly contradict this view.  Most of the very
great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like;
and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much
the safest man to hold them.  Imagination does not breed insanity.
Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.  Poets do not go mad;
but chess-players do.  Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers;
but creative artists very seldom.  I am not, as will be seen,
in any sense attacking logic:  I only say that this danger does
lie in logic, not in imagination.  Artistic paternity is as
wholesome as physical paternity.  Moreover, it is worthy of remark
that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had
some weak spot of rationality on his brain.  Poe, for instance,
really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he
was specially analytical.  Even chess was too poetical for him;
he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles,
like a poem.  He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts,
because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.
Perhaps the strongest case of all is this:  that only one great English
poet went mad, Cowper.  And he was definitely driven mad by logic,
by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.  Poetry was not
the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.
He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his
hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and
the white flat lilies of the Ouse.  He was damned by John Calvin;
he was almost saved by John Gilpin.  Everywhere we see that men
do not go mad by dreaming.  Critics are much madder than poets.
Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him
into extravagant tatters.  Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only
some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.
And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in
his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
The general fact is simple.  Poetry is sane because it floats
easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea,
and so make it finite.  The result is mental exhaustion,
like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein.  To accept everything
is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.  The poet only
desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in.
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.  It is the logician
who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head
that splits.

     It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking
mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation.  We have
all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius
is to madness near allied."  But Dryden did not say that great genius
was to madness near allied.  Dryden was a great genius himself,
and knew better.  It would have been hard to find a man more romantic
than he, or more sensible.  What Dryden said was this, "Great wits
are oft to madness near allied"; and that is true.  It is the pure
promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown.
Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking.
He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or
George Herbert.  He was talking of a cynical man of the world,
a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician.  Such men
are indeed to madness near allied.  Their incessant calculation
of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade.
It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind.  A flippant
person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter."  A more flippant
person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure
the human head.

     And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true
that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.  When I was engaged
in a controversy with the CLARION on the matter of free will,
that able writer Mr. R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy,
because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic
would be causeless.  I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse
in determinist logic.  Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's,
can be causeless, determinism is done for.  If the chain of
causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
But my purpose is to point out something more practical.
It was natural, perhaps, that a modern Marxian Socialist should not
know anything about free will.  But it was certainly remarkable that
a modern Marxian Socialist should not know anything about lunatics.
Mr. Suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics.
The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions
are causeless.  If any human acts may loosely be called causeless,
they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks;
slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing
his hands.  It is the happy man who does the useless things;
the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.  It is exactly such
careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand;
for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause
in everything.  The madman would read a conspiratorial significance
into those empty activities.  He would think that the lopping
of the grass was an attack on private property.  He would think
that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice.
If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would
become sane.  Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people
in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their
most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting
of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will
get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker
for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb
certainties of experience.  He is the more logical for losing certain
sane affections.  Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this
respect a misleading one.  The madman is not the man who has lost
his reason.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except
his reason.

     The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often
in a purely rational sense satisfactory.  Or, to speak more strictly,
the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;
this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds
of madness.  If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy
against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men
deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators
would do.  His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.
Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no
complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad;
for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the
existing authorities to do.  Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ,
it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity;
for the world denied Christ's.

     Nevertheless he is wrong.  But if we attempt to trace his error
in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.
Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this:
that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle
is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite
as infinite, it is not so large.  In the same way the insane explanation
is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.
A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.
There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such
a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many
modern religions.  Now, speaking quite externally and empirically,
we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness
is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual
contraction.  The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things,
but it does not explain them in a large way.  I mean that if you
or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be
chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air,
to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside
the suffocation of a single argument.  Suppose, for instance,
it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were
the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him.
If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal
against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this:
"Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart,
and that many things do fit into other things as you say.  I admit
that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it
leaves out!  Are there no other stories in the world except yours;
and are all men busy with your business?  Suppose we grant the details;
perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was
only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it
was only because he knew it already.  But how much happier you would
be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you!
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller
in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity
and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their
sunny selfishness and their virile indifference!  You would begin
to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.
You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your
own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself
under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."
Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who
claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right!
Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care?
Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look
down on all the kings of the earth."  Or it might be the third case,
of the madman who called himself Christ.  If we said what we felt,
we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world:
but what a small world it must be!  What a little heaven you must inhabit,
with angels no bigger than butterflies!  How sad it must be to be God;
and an inadequate God!  Is there really no life fuller and no love
more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful
pity that all flesh must put its faith?  How much happier you would be,
how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God
could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles,
and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well
as down!"

     And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science
does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it
like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.  Neither modern
science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought.
Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous.
Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid.  For example,
some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking
about sex.  The new scientific society definitely discourages men from
thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.
And in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania,
modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing Dervish.
In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth;
he must desire health.  Nothing can save him but a blind hunger
for normality, like that of a beast.  A man cannot think himself
out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has
become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can
only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves,
it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his
logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner
Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs
the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.
Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.
Every remedy is a desperate remedy.  Every cure is a miraculous cure.
Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting
out a devil.  And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go
to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant--
as intolerant as Bloody Mary.  Their attitude is really this:
that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.
Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation.  If thy HEAD
offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter
the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile,
rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell--
or into Hanwell.

     Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner,
frequently a successful reasoner.  Doubtless he could be vanquished
in mere reason, and the case against him put logically.  But it can
be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms.
He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea:  he is
sharpened to one painful point.  He is without healthy hesitation
and healthy complexity.  Now, as I explain in the introduction,
I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much
a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view.  And I
have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason:
that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most
modern thinkers.  That unmistakable mood or note that I hear
from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats
of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors
in more senses than one.  They all have exactly that combination we
have noted:  the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason
with a contracted common sense.  They are universal only in the
sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far.
But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern.
They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved
with it, it is still white on black.  Like the lunatic, they cannot
alter their standpoint; they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly
see it black on white.

     Take first the more obvious case of materialism.  As an explanation
of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.  It has
just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense
of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance,
Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.
He understands everything, and everything does not seem
worth understanding.  His cosmos may be complete in every rivet
and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious
of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth;
it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting
peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea.
The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

     It must be understood that I am not now discussing the relation
of these creeds to truth; but, for the present, solely their relation
to health.  Later in the argument I hope to attack the question of
objective verity; here I speak only of a phenomenon of psychology.
I do not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel that materialism
is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought
he was Christ that he was labouring under an error.  I merely remark
here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness
and the same kind of incompleteness.  You can explain a man's
detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it
is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy.
The explanation does explain.  Similarly you may explain the order
in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men,
are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree--
the blind destiny of matter.  The explanation does explain,
though not, of course, so completely as the madman's. But the point
here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both,
but feels to both the same objection.  Its approximate statement
is that if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much
of a god.  And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the
real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.  The thing has shrunk.
The deity is less divine than many men; and (according to Haeckel)
the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial
than many separate aspects of it.  The parts seem greater than
the whole.


     For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether
true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion.
In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow.
They cannot be broader than themselves.  A Christian is only
restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted.
He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian;
and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be
an atheist.  But as it happens, there is a very special sense
in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism.
Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe
in determinism.  I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not
allowed to believe in fairies.  But if we examine the two vetoes we
shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine.
The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable
amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe.
But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine
the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.  Poor Mr. McCabe
is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be
hiding in a pimpernel.  The Christian admits that the universe is
manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he
is complex.  The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast,
a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen.
Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as
the madman is quite sure he is sane.  The materialist is sure
that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation,
just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that
he is simply and solely a chicken.  Materialists and madmen never
have doubts.

     Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do
materialistic denials.  Even if I believe in immortality I need not think
about it.  But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it.
In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like;
in the second the road is shut.  But the case is even stronger,
and the parallel with madness is yet more strange.  For it was our
case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that,
right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity.  Now it is the charge
against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong,
they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness,
I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.
For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it
generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense
a liberating force.  It is absurd to say that you are especially
advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.
The determinists come to bind, not to loose.  They may well call
their law the "chain" of causation.  It is the worst chain that ever
fettered a human being.  You may use the language of liberty,
if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this
is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when
applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like,
that the man is free to think himself a poached egg.  But it is
surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg
he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette.
Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist
speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will.
But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not
free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish,
to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions,
to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you"
for the mustard.

     In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer
fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way
favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or
punishments of any kind.  This is startlingly the reverse of the truth.
It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference
at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend
exhorting as before.  But obviously if it stops either of them it
stops the kind exhortation.  That the sins are inevitable does not
prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion.
Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain
to lead to cowardice.  Determinism is not inconsistent with the
cruel treatment of criminals.  What it is (perhaps) inconsistent
with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to
their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle.
The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does
believe in changing the environment.  He must not say to the sinner,
"Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it.  But he
can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.
Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic
outline of the figure of the madman.  Both take up a position
at once unanswerable and intolerable.

     Of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true.
The same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic.
There is a sceptic far more terrible than he who believes that
everything began in matter.  It is possible to meet the sceptic
who believes that everything began in himself.  He doubts not the
existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows.
For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself.
He created his own father and his own mother.  This horrible
fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat
mystical egoism of our day.  That publisher who thought that men
would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after
the Superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass,
those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead
of creating life for the world, all these people have really only
an inch between them and this awful emptiness.  Then when this
kindly world all round the man has been blackened out like a lie;
when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail;
then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone
in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto shall
be written over him in avenging irony.  The stars will be only dots
in the blackness of his own brain; his mother's face will be only
a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell.
But over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, "He believes
in himself."


     All that concerns us here, however, is to note that this
panegoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the
other extreme of materialism.  It is equally complete in theory
and equally crippling in practice.  For the sake of simplicity,
it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe
that he is always in a dream.  Now, obviously there can be no positive
proof given to him that he is not in a dream, for the simple reason
that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream.
But if the man began to burn down London and say that his housekeeper
would soon call him to breakfast, we should take him and put him
with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in
the course of this chapter.  The man who cannot believe his senses,
and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane,
but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument,
but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.  They have both
locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun
and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the
health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health
and happiness of the earth.  Their position is quite reasonable;
nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny
bit is infinitely circular.  But there is such a thing as a mean
infinity, a base and slavish eternity.  It is amusing to notice
that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken
as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol
of this ultimate nullity.  When they wish to represent eternity,
they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth.  There is
a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal.
The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the
eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists
and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented
by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

     This chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what
actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say
in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void.
The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad;
he begins to think at the wrong end.  And for the rest of these pages
we have to try and discover what is the right end.  But we may ask
in conclusion, if this be what drives men mad, what is it that keeps
them sane?  By the end of this book I hope to give a definite,
some will think a far too definite, answer.  But for the moment it
is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general
answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.
Mysticism keeps men sane.  As long as you have mystery you have health;
when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.  The ordinary man has
always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.
He has permitted the twilight.  He has always had one foot in earth
and the other in fairyland.  He has always left himself free to doubt
his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe
in them.  He has always cared more for truth than for consistency.
If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other,
he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.
His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight:
he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better
for that.  Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing
as fate, but such a thing as free will also.  Thus he believed
that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless
ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth.  He admired youth
because it was young and age because it was not.  It is exactly
this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole
buoyancy of the healthy man.  The whole secret of mysticism is this:
that man can understand everything by the help of what he does
not understand.  The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid,
and succeeds in making everything mysterious.  The mystic allows
one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear,
and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid.
The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because
of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and
crystal clearness.  He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness;
but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.
As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness,
we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and
of health.  Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal:
it breaks out.  For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature;
but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger
or smaller.  But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision
and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without
altering its shape.  Because it has a paradox in its centre it can
grow without changing.  The circle returns upon itself and is bound.
The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free
travellers.

     Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this
deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind.
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in
the light of which we look at everything.  Like the sun at noonday,
mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own
victorious invisibility.  Detached intellectualism is (in the
exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light
without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.
But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of
imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry
and the patron of healing.  Of necessary dogmas and a special creed
I shall speak later.  But that transcendentalism by which all men
live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky.
We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion;
it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and
a blur.  But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable,
as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard.
For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother
of lunatics and has given to them all her name.



III THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT


     The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle:
for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for
a definition.  Phrases like "put out" or "off colour" might have
been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision.
And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase
about a man having "his heart in the right place."  It involves the
idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist,
but it is rightly related to other functions.  Indeed, the negation
of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid
mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns.
If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character
of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly
than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart;
but not a heart in the right place.  And this is so of the typical
society of our time.

     The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern
world is far too good.  It is full of wild and wasted virtues.
When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered
at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose.
The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage.
But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander
more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.  The modern
world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues
have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other
and are wandering alone.  Thus some scientists care for truth;
and their truth is pitiless.  Thus some humanitarians only care
for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad
on one Christian virtue:  the merely mystical and almost irrational
virtue of charity.  He has a strange idea that he will make it
easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive.
Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only
early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions.
For in his case the pagan accusation is really true:  his mercy
would mean mere anarchy.  He really is the enemy of the human race--
because he is so human.  As the other extreme, we may take
the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all
human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart.
Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth.
Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.
But in Torquemada's time there was at least a system that could
to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other.
Now they do not even bow.  But a much stronger case than these two of
truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation
of humility.

     It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned.
Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance
and infinity of the appetite of man.  He was always outstripping
his mercies with his own newly invented needs.  His very power
of enjoyment destroyed half his joys.  By asking for pleasure,
he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.
Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large,
he must be always making himself small.  Even the haughty visions,
the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations
of humility.  Giants that tread down forests like grass are
the creations of humility.  Towers that vanish upwards above
the loneliest star are the creations of humility.  For towers
are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants
unless they are larger than we.  All this gigantesque imagination,
which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom
entirely humble.  It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything--
even pride.

     But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.
Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled
upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about
the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part
of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not
to assert--himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he
ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason.  Huxley preached a humility
content to learn from Nature.  But the new sceptic is so humble
that he doubts if he can even learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we
had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.
The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time;
but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility
than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was
a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot
that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man
doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.
But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make
him stop working altogether.

     At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic
and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong.  Every day one
comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not
be the right one.  Of course his view must be the right one,
or it is not his view.  We are on the road to producing a race
of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity
as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too
proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.
The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek
even to claim their inheritance.  It is exactly this intellectual
helplessness which is our second problem.

     The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:
that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from
his reason than his imagination.  It was not meant to attack the
authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it.
For it needs defence.  The whole modern world is at war with reason;
and the tower already reels.

     The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle
of religion.  But the trouble with our sages is not that they
cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.
They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical
in the playful assertion that a door is not a door.  The modern
latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion
not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never
been any reason for it.  Apart from seeing its philosophical basis,
they cannot even see its historical cause.  Religious authority
has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as
every legal system (and especially our present one) has been
callous and full of a cruel apathy.  It is rational to attack
the police; nay, it is glorious.  But the modern critics of religious
authority are like men who should attack the police without ever
having heard of burglars.  For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind:  a peril as practical as burglary.  Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.
And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier,
if our race is to avoid ruin.

     That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.
Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert
that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are
merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?
Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?
They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."
But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right
to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all."

     There is a thought that stops thought.  That is the only thought
that ought to be stopped.  That is the ultimate evil against which
all religious authority was aimed.  It only appears at the end of
decadent ages like our own:  and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its
ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called
"Doubts of the Instrument."  In this he questions the brain itself,
and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions,
past, present, and to come.  But it was against this remote ruin
that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked
and ruled.  The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the
horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said,
for the suppression of reason.  They were organized for the difficult
defence of reason.  Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once
things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.
The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define
the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify:  these were all only dark
defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable,
more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think.
We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.
For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities,
and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.
In so far as religion is gone, reason is going.  For they are both
of the same primary and authoritative kind.  They are both methods
of proof which cannot themselves be proved.  And in the act of
destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed
the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.
With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre
off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

     Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps
desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern
fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself.
Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have
some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be
very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think
about.  But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful.  In
some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is
generally called evolution.

     Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which,
if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either
an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things
came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack
upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not
destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply means that
a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive
thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox;
for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly,
especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.
But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such
thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him
to change into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing.
At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything
and anything.  This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon
the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.
You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.
Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist
reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I
cannot think."

     Then there is the opposite attack on thought:  that urged by
Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique,"
and there are no categories at all.  This also is merely destructive.
Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.
It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought
necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without
contradicting it.  Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere),
"All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement,
but a contradiction in terms.  If all chairs were quite different,
you could not call them "all chairs."

     Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains
that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.
We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age
is wrong in another."  This is quite reasonable, if it means that
there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain
times and not at other times.  If women, say, desire to be elegant,
it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and
at another time by growing thinner.  But you cannot say that they
are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish
to be oblong.  If the standard changes, how can there be improvement,
which implies a standard?  Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that
men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so,
we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.
How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction?
You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being
miserable than another succeeded in being happy.  It would be
like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig
is fat.

     It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his
object or ideal.  But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.
If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must
be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt
gaily with the ideal of monotony.  Progress itself cannot progress.
It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather
weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society,
he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
He wrote--

     "Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can
get into.

     The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought
about the past or future simply impossible.  The theory of a
complete change of standards in human history does not merely
deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives
us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

     This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our
time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism;
for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the
pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme
application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.
My meaning can be put shortly thus.  I agree with the pragmatists
that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there
is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary
to the human mind.  But I say that one of those necessities
precisely is a belief in objective truth.  The pragmatist tells
a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.
This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.  Pragmatism is
a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs
is to be something more than a pragmatist.  Extreme pragmatism
is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be
a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.
The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense
of the human sense of actual fact.

     To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most
characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania,
but a touch of suicidal mania.  The mere questioner has knocked
his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the
boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.
What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is
the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought.  It is vain
for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will
happen if wild scepticism runs its course.  It has run its course.
It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that
will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen
it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men
ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more
sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.
It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly
and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application
of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence
that modern England is Christian.  But it would have reached the
bankruptcy anyhow.  Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted;
but rather because they are an old minority than because they
are a new one.  Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.
It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker now hails
philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was
just in time to see it set.  If any frightened curate still says
that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread,
we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc,
"Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces
already in dissolution.  You have mistaken the hour of the night:
it is already morning."  We have no more questions left to ask.
We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the
wildest peaks.  We have found all the questions that can be found.
It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking
for answers.

     But one more word must be added.  At the beginning of this
preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has
been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination.  A man
does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he
may go mad by thinking it out in square inches.  Now, one school
of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing
the pagan health of the world.  They see that reason destroys;
but Will, they say, creates.  The ultimate authority, they say,
is in will, not in reason.  The supreme point is not why
a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.
I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will.
It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something
that is called egoism.  That, indeed, was simpleminded enough;
for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it.  To preach
anything is to give it away.  First, the egoist calls life a war
without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to
drill his enemies in war.  To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature.
The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers;
they are makers.  They say that choice is itself the divine thing.
Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts
are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness.
He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will.
He does not say, "Jam will make me happy," but "I want jam."
And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm.
Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited
about it that he is obliged to write prose.  He publishes a short
play with several long prefaces.  This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw,
for all his plays are prefaces:  Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man
on earth who has never written any poetry.  But that Mr. Davidson (who
can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics
in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine
of will has taken hold of men.  Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken
in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker,
but like an artist, saying, "I FEEL this curve is right," or "that
line SHALL go thus."  They are all excited; and well they may be.
For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they
can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism.  They think they
can escape.

     But they cannot escape.  This pure praise of volition ends
in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic.
Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself,
so the acceptation of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old
utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated)
and that which he propounds.  The real difference between the test
of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of
happiness is a test and the other isn't. You can discuss whether
a man's act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness;
you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.  Of course
it was.  You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated
to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul.
But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say
that is merely to say that it is an action.  By this praise of will
you cannot really choose one course as better than another.  And yet
choosing one course as better than another is the very definition
of the will you are praising.

     The worship of will is the negation of will.  To admire mere
choice is to refuse to choose.  If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and
says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind
what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in
the matter."  You cannot admire will in general, because the essence
of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John
Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore
he invokes will--will to anything.  He only wants humanity to want
something. But humanity does want something.  It wants ordinary
morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or
anything. But we have willed something.  We have willed the law
against which he rebels.

     All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson,
are really quite empty of volition.  They cannot will, they can
hardly wish.  And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found
quite easily.  It can be found in this fact:  that they always talk
of will as something that expands and breaks out.  But it is quite
the opposite.  Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To
desire action is to desire limitation.  In that sense every act
is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject
everything else.  That objection, which men of this school used
to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.
Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion.  Just as when
you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take
one course of action you give up all the other courses.  If you
become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton.
If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon.
It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that
makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little
better than nonsense.  For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us
to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious
that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries
of "I will."  "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and thou shalt
not stop me."  Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists,
and care for no laws or limits.  But it is impossible to be
an artist and not care for laws and limits.  Art is limitation;
the essence of every picture is the frame.  If you draw a giraffe,
you must draw him with a long neck.  If, in your bold creative way,
you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck,
you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.
The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world
of limits.  You can free things from alien or accidental laws,
but not from the laws of their own nature.  You may, if you like,
free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump:  you may be freeing him
from being a camel.  Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles
to break out of the prison of their three sides.  If a triangle
breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.
Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles";
I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved,
they were loved for being triangular.  This is certainly the case
with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most
decisive example of pure will.  The artist loves his limitations:
they constitute the THING he is doing.  The painter is glad
that the canvas is flat.  The sculptor is glad that the clay
is colourless.

     In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate
it.  The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing,
because the Jacobins willed something definite and limited.
They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes
of democracy.  They wished to have votes and NOT to have titles.
Republicanism had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre
as well as an expansive side in Danton or Wilkes.  Therefore they
have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square
social equality and peasant wealth of France.  But since then the
revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by
shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal.
Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.  Men have tried
to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb.
The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against,
but (what was more important) the system he would NOT rebel against,
the system he would trust.  But the new rebel is a Sceptic,
and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no loyalty; therefore he
can never be really a revolutionist.  And the fact that he doubts
everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.
For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the
modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces,
but the doctrine by which he denounces it.  Thus he writes one book
complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women,
and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he
insults it himself.  He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose
their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.
As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life,
and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.
A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant,
and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the
peasant ought to have killed himself.  A man denounces marriage
as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating
it as a lie.  He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the
oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.
The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he
complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he
takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting,
where he proves that they practically are beasts.  In short,
the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always
engaged in undermining his own mines.  In his book on politics he
attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he
attacks morality for trampling on men.  Therefore the modern man
in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.
By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel
against anything.

     It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed
in all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted
superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some
distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard
of Greek sculpture.  They are appealing to the marble Apollo.
And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is
an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle
to be fierce about.  Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm:
he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something
bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not
any mass of common morality behind it.  He is himself more preposterous
than anything he denounces.  But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very
well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence.
The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not
a physical accident.  If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility,
Nietzscheism would end in imbecility.  Thinking in isolation
and with pride ends in being an idiot.  Every man who will
not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

     This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism,
and therefore in death.  The sortie has failed.  The wild worship of
lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void.
Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately
in Tibet.  He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing
and Nirvana.  They are both helpless--one because he must not
grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything.
The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all
special actions are evil.  But the Nietzscheite's will is quite
equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good;
for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.
They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and
the other likes all the roads.  The result is--well, some things
are not hard to calculate.  They stand at the cross-roads.

     Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business
of this book--the rough review of recent thought.  After this I
begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader,
but which, at any rate, interests me.  In front of me, as I close
this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning
over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.
By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash
of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw,
as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from
a balloon.  They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.
For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach
mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.  He who
thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought;
for glass cannot think.  So he who wills to reject nothing,
wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice
of something, but the rejection of almost everything.  And as I
turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless
modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye.  It is called
"Jeanne d'Arc," by Anatole France.  I have only glanced at it,
but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan's "Vie de Jesus."
It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic.  It discredits
supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling
natural stories that have no foundation.  Because we cannot believe
in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what
he felt.  But I do not mention either book in order to criticise it,
but because the accidental combination of the names called up two
startling images of Sanity which blasted all the books before me.
Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting
all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche.
She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.  Yet Joan,
when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in
Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.
I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain
things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth,
the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back.
Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she
endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a
typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.  And then I thought
of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche,
and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time.
I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger
for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.  Well, Joan of Arc
had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not
praise fighting, but fought.  We KNOW that she was not afraid
of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.
Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant.  Nietzsche only
praised the warrior; she was the warrior.  She beat them both at
their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one,
more violent than the other.  Yet she was a perfectly practical person
who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.
It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she
and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility
that has been lost.  And with that thought came a larger one,
and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre
of my thoughts.  The same modern difficulty which darkened the
subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan.
Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity.
Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere
nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.
As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for
humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity!  Altruists, with thin,
weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.  Egoists (with
even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.
In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough.
The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant.
The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist.
There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect
the fragments.  There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped
arms and legs walking about.  They have torn the soul of Christ
into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are
equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.
They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they
have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top
throughout.



IV THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND


     When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it
is commonly in some such speech as this:  "Ah, yes, when one is young,
one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;
but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down
to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has
and getting on with the world as it is."  Thus, at least, venerable and
philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me
when I was a boy.  But since then I have grown up and have discovered
that these philanthropic old men were telling lies.  What has really
happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen.
They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the
methods of practical politicians.  Now, I have not lost my ideals
in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was.
What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.
I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon;
but I am not so much concerned about the General Election.
As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention
of it.  No; the vision is always solid and reliable.  The vision
is always a fact.  It is the reality that is often a fraud.
As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism.
But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

     I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because,
having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation,
this may be counted, I think, as the only positive bias.
I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy,
in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity.
If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause
for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I
mean it, can be stated in two propositions.  The first is this:
that the things common to all men are more important than the
things peculiar to any men.  Ordinary things are more valuable
than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.
Man is something more awful than men; something more strange.
The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid
to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization.
The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more
heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature.
Death is more tragic even than death by starvation.  Having a nose
is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

     This is the first principle of democracy:  that the essential
things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things
they hold separately.  And the second principle is merely this:
that the political instinct or desire is one of these things
which they hold in common.  Falling in love is more poetical than
dropping into poetry.  The democratic contention is that government
(helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love,
and not a thing like dropping into poetry.  It is not something
analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum,
discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop,
being Astronomer Royal, and so on.  For these things we do not wish
a man to do at all unless he does them well.  It is, on the contrary,
a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing
one's own nose.  These things we want a man to do for himself,
even if he does them badly.  I am not here arguing the truth of any
of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have
their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking,
for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses.  I merely
say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions,
and that democracy classes government among them.  In short,
the democratic faith is this:  that the most terribly important things
must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes,
the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.  This is democracy;
and in this I have always believed.

     But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been
able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people
got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.
It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to
some isolated or arbitrary record.  The man who quotes some German
historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance,
is strictly appealing to aristocracy.  He is appealing to the
superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated,
more respectfully than a book of history.  The legend is generally
made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane.
The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.
Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant
may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement
that voters in the slums are ignorant.  It will not do for us.
If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great
unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason
why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes,
our ancestors.  It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses
to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely
happen to be walking about.  All democrats object to men being
disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their
being disqualified by the accident of death.  Democracy tells us
not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom;
tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is
our father.  I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy
and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea.
We will have the dead at our councils.  The ancient Greeks voted
by stones; these shall vote by tombstones.  It is all quite regular
and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked
with a cross.

     I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was
always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition.
Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content
to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more
inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe
that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.
I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see
life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people
who see life from the outside.  I would always trust the old wives'
fables against the old maids' facts.  As long as wit is mother wit it
can be as wild as it pleases.

     Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend
to no training in such things.  I propose to do it, therefore,
by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental
ideas which I have found for myself, pretty much in the way
that I found them.  Then I shall roughly synthesise them,
summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then I
shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had
been discovered before.  It had been discovered by Christianity.
But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount in order,
the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition.
And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and
democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear.  As it is,
I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.

     My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with
unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.  I generally learnt it
from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess
at once of democracy and tradition.  The things I believed most then,
the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.
They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things.  They are
not fantasies:  compared with them other things are fantastic.
Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal,
though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.
It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth;
so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland,
but elfland that criticised the earth.  I knew the magic beanstalk
before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I
was certain of the moon.  This was at one with all popular tradition.
Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook;
but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists,
and talked about the gods of brook and bush.  That is what the moderns
mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate Nature,"
because they said that Nature was divine.  Old nurses do not
tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance
on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for
the dryads.

     But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being
fed on fairy tales.  If I were describing them in detail I could
note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them.
There is the chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants
should be killed because they are gigantic.  It is a manly mutiny
against pride as such.  For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms,
and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite.  There is the
lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat--
EXALTAVIT HUMILES.  There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast";
that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable.  There is the
terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human
creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death;
and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.  But I am
not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with
the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak,
and shall retain when I cannot write.  I am concerned with a certain
way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales,
but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

     It might be stated this way.  There are certain sequences
or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are,
in the true sense of the word, reasonable.  They are, in the true
sense of the word, necessary.  Such are mathematical and merely
logical sequences.  We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable
of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity.
For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella,
it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is
younger than the Ugly Sisters.  There is no getting out of it.
Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases:
it really must be.  If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is
the father of Jack.  Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne:
and we in fairyland submit.  If the three brothers all ride horses,
there are six animals and eighteen legs involved:  that is true
rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.  But as I put my head over
the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world,
I observed an extraordinary thing.  I observed that learned men
in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened--
dawn and death and so on--as if THEY were rational and inevitable.
They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY
as the fact that two and one trees make three.  But it is not.
There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is
the test of the imagination.  You cannot IMAGINE two and one not
making three.  But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit;
you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging
on by the tail.  These men in spectacles spoke much of a man
named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law.
But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law,
a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling.  If the apple hit
Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple.  That is a true necessity:
because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other.
But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose;
we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose,
of which it had a more definite dislike.  We have always in our fairy
tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations,
in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts,
in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions.  We believe
in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities.  We believe
that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all
confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans
make five.

     Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the
nursery tales.  The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple
will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up
to the other.  The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn,
and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it
were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many
castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason.
She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental
connection between a horn and a falling tower.  But the scientific
men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental
connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching
the ground.  They do really talk as if they had found not only
a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts.
They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically
connected them philosophically.  They feel that because one
incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible
thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing.
Two black riddles make a white answer.

     In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science
they are singularly fond of it.  Thus they will call some interesting
conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet,
Grimm's Law.  But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than
Grimm's Fairy Tales.  The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales;
while the law is not a law.  A law implies that we know the nature
of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed
some of the effects.  If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go
to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection
between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets.
And we know what the idea is.  We can say why we take liberty
from a man who takes liberties.  But we cannot say why an egg can
turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn
into a fairy prince.  As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further
off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in
itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears.
Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential
that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales,
not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws of Nature."
When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn,
we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer
if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes
fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC.
It is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula.
It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening
practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen.
It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we
count on the ordinary course of things.  We do not count on it;
we bet on it.  We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we
do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet.
We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore
an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore
an exception.  All the terms used in the science books, "law,"
"necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual,
because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess.
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the
terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment."
They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree.  Water runs downhill
because it is bewitched.  The sun shines because it is bewitched.

     I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical.
We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language
about things is simply rational and agnostic.  It is the only way
I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one
thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical
connection between flying and laying eggs.  It is the man who
talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.
Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist.
He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked
and swept away by mere associations.  He has so often seen birds
fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy,
tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none.
A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love;
so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide.
In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
them together.  A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell
of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own,
it reminded him of his boyhood.  So the materialist professor (though
he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark
association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples.  But the
cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract,
the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in
his country.

     This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived
from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy
tales is derived from this.  Just as we all like love tales because
there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because
they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.
This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children
we do not need fairy tales:  we only need tales.  Mere life is
interesting enough.  A child of seven is excited by being told that
Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.  But a child of three is excited
by being told that Tommy opened a door.  Boys like romantic tales;
but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic.
In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom
a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.
This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal
leap of interest and amazement.  These tales say that apples were
golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they
were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember,
for one wild moment, that they run with water.  I have said that this
is wholly reasonable and even agnostic.  And, indeed, on this point
I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance.
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances,
the story of the man who has forgotten his name.  This man walks
about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he
cannot remember who he is.  Well, every man is that man in the story.
Every man has forgotten who he is.  One may understand the cosmos,
but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten
our names.  We have all forgotten what we really are.  All that we
call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism
only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget
that we have forgotten.  All that we call spirit and art and
ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that
we forget.

     But though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the
streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration.
It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin.
The wonder has a positive element of praise.  This is the next
milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland.
I shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists
in their intellectual aspect, so far as they have one.  Here I am only
trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described.
And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it
was puzzling.  It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure;
it was an adventure because it was an opportunity.  The goodness
of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be
more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale.
The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
though I hardly knew to whom.  Children are grateful when Santa
Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets.  Could I
not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift
of two miraculous legs?  We thank people for birthday presents
of cigars and slippers.  Can I thank no one for the birthday present
of birth?

     There were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and
indisputable.  The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking;
existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise.  In fact,
all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck
in my brain from boyhood.  The question was, "What did the first
frog say?"  And the answer was, "Lord, how you made me jump!"
That says succinctly all that I am saying.  God made the frog jump;
but the frog prefers jumping.  But when these things are settled
there enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy.

     Any one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales"
or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang.  For the pleasure
of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy.
Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics
all virtue is in an "if."  The note of the fairy utterance always is,
"You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say
the word `cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter,
if you do not show her an onion."  The vision always hangs upon a veto.
All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small
thing withheld.  All the wild and whirling things that are let
loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden.  Mr. W.B.Yeats,
in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry, describes the elves
as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses
of the air--

     "Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,      And dance
upon the mountains like a flame."

It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B.Yeats does not
understand fairyland.  But I do say it.  He is an ironical Irishman,
full of intellectual reactions.  He is not stupid enough to
understand fairyland.  Fairies prefer people of the yokel type
like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told.
Mr. Yeats reads into elfland all the righteous insurrection of his
own race.  But the lawlessness of Ireland is a Christian lawlessness,
founded on reason and justice.  The Fenian is rebelling against
something he understands only too well; but the true citizen of
fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all.
In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an
incomprehensible condition.  A box is opened, and all evils fly out.
A word is forgotten, and cities perish.  A lamp is lit, and love
flies away.  A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.
An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

     This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not
lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny
may think it liberty by comparison.  People out of Portland
Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove
that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty.
Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers.
Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out
of nowhere, but she received a command--which might have come out
of Brixton--that she should be back by twelve.  Also, she had a
glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common
a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle,
that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror;
they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones.
For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact
that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most
easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat.  And this fairy-tale sentiment
also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world.
I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond,
but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were
compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder.
I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.

     Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to
be perishable.  Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant;
simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years.
Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth;
the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any
moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should
not do.  Now, the point here is that to ME this did not seem unjust.
If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I
must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might
fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace."
If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?"
her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there
till twelve?"  If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants
and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions
partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift.  He must not look
a winged horse in the mouth.  And it seemed to me that existence
was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain
of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did
not understand the vision they limited.  The frame was no stranger
than the picture.  The veto might well be as wild as the vision;
it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters,
as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.

     For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy)
I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they
called the general sentiment of REVOLT.  I should have resisted,
let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their
definition I shall deal in another chapter.  But I did not feel
disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious.
Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick
or the payment of a peppercorn:  I was willing to hold the huge
estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy.  It could not
well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.
At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.
I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation
against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and
unexpected as sex itself.  To be allowed, like Endymion, to make
love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own
moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's)
a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for
so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be
married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one
was talking.  It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex,
but a curious insensibility to it.  A man is a fool who complains
that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.  Polygamy is a lack
of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears
in mere absence of mind.  The aesthetes touched the last insane
limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things.  The thistledown
made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.
Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason,
that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any
sort of symbolic sacrifice.  Men (I felt) might fast forty days
for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing.  Men might go through fire
to find a cowslip.  Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep
sober for the blackbird.  They would not go through common Christian
marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip.  Surely one might
pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals.  Oscar Wilde said
that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets.
But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets.  We can pay for them
by not being Oscar Wilde.

     Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery,
and I have not found any books so sensible since.  I left the
nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found
any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative.
But the matter for important comment was here:  that when I
first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world,
I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points
to my nurse and to the nursery tales.  It has taken me a long time
to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.
The really curious thing was this:  that modern thought contradicted
this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines.
I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions;
first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might
have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second,
that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and
submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.  But I
found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both
my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden
and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which,
crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

     First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism;
saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded
without fault from the beginning.  The leaf on the tree is green
because it could never have been anything else.  Now, the fairy-tale
philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it
might have been scarlet.  He feels as if it had turned green an
instant before he looked at it.  He is pleased that snow is white
on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black.
Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden
roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood.
He feels that something has been DONE.  But the great determinists
of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native
feeling that something had happened an instant before.  In fact,
according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning
of the world.  Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened;
and even about the date of that they were not very sure.

     The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism,
for the necessity of things being as they are.  But when I came
to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable
repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated.
Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird
than more rational.  It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped
nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then
seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape.  I should have
fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society.
So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having
trunks looked like a plot.  I speak here only of an emotion,
and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle.  But the repetition
in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of
an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.
The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once;
the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood.  The sun would
make me see him if he rose a thousand times.  The recurrences of the
universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began
to see an idea.

     All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind
rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption.  It is
supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead;
a piece of clockwork.  People feel that if the universe was personal
it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance.  This is a
fallacy even in relation to known fact.  For the variation in human
affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death;
by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.
A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure
or fatigue.  He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking;
or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.  But if his life
and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington,
he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness
of death.  The sun rises every morning.  I do not rise every morning;
but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that
the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush
of life.  The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children,
when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.  A child
kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit
fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.
They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it
again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong
enough to exult in monotony.  But perhaps God is strong enough
to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning,
"Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike;
it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired
of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be
a theatrical ENCORE.  Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg.
If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead
of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not
be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose.
It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they
admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at
any instant it may stop.  Man may stand on the earth generation
after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last
appearance.

     This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish
emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely
felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful:
now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they
were WILFUL.  I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises
of some will.  In short, I had always believed that the world
involved magic:  now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.
And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious;
that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose,
there is a person.  I had always felt life first as a story:
and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

     But modern thought also hit my second human tradition.
It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions.
The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.
Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had
called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable
that nobody did.  But he was an imperialist of the lowest type.
He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar
system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.  Why should
a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to
a whale?  If mere size proves that man is not the image of God,
then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image;
what one might call an impressionist portrait.  It is quite futile
to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was
always small compared to the nearest tree.  But Herbert Spencer,
in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some
way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe.
He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent
Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals.  He turned mankind
into a small nationality.  And his evil influence can be seen even
in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors;
notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G.Wells. Many moralists
have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked.
But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift
up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

     But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this.
I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison;
in the prison of one thought.  These people seemed to think it
singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large.
The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief.
The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation
could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance,
such as forgiveness or free will.  The grandeur or infinity
of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it.  It was like
telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear
that the gaol now covered half the county.  The warder would
have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors
of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human.
So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except
more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns
and empty of all that is divine.

     In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken,
for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.
But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could
not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery.
We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.
The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither
have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them.
The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and
airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet.
This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast,
but it is not free.  One went into larger and larger windowless rooms,
rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest
window or a whisper of outer air.

     Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance;
but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance.
So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my
emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that
the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected.
According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had
one unbroken rule.  Only (they would say) while it is one thing,
it is also the only thing there is.  Why, then, should one worry
particularly to call it large?  There is nothing to compare it with.
It would be just as sensible to call it small.  A man may say,
"I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd
of varied creatures."  But if it comes to that why should not a
man say, "I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number
of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see"?
One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments.
It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth;
it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger
than it is.  A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness
of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about
its smallness?

     It happened that I had that emotion.  When one is fond of
anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant
or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge,
that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small.
If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail,
then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable.  But the
moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman.
The moment you really see an elephant you can call it "Tiny."
If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it.
These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing;
but they were not fond of the universe.  But I was frightfully fond
of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive.  I often
did so; and it never seemed to mind.  Actually and in truth I did feel
that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling
the world small than by calling it large.  For about infinity there
was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious
care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life.
They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift.
For economy is far more romantic than extravagance.  To them stars
were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun
and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and
one shilling.

     These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour
and tone of certain tales.  Thus I have said that stories of magic
alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a
kind of eccentric privilege.  I may express this other feeling of
cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes
its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry
of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence.  Crusoe is a man
on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea:
the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from
the wreck.  The greatest of poems is an inventory.  Every kitchen
tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.
It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day,
to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think
how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship
on to the solitary island.  But it is a better exercise still
to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape:
everything has been saved from a wreck.  Every man has had one
horrible adventure:  as a hidden untimely birth he had not been,
as infants that never see the light.  Men spoke much in my boyhood
of restricted or ruined men of genius:  and it was common to say
that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more
solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great
Might-Not-Have-Been.

     But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order
and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship.
That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there
were two guns and one axe.  It was poignantly urgent that none should
be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.
The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck:
and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked
in the confusion.  I felt economical about the stars as if they were
sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills.
For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant
to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is
literally true.  This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:
for there cannot be another one.

     Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the
unutterable things.  These are my ultimate attitudes towards life;
the soils for the seeds of doctrine.  These in some dark way I
thought before I could write, and felt before I could think:
that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate
them now.  I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not
explain itself.  It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation;
it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.
But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me,
will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard.
The thing is magic, true or false.  Second, I came to feel as if magic
must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it.
There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
whatever it meant it meant violently.  Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects,
such as dragons.  Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it
is some form of humility and restraint:  we should thank God
for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.  We owed,
also, an obedience to whatever made us.  And last, and strangest,
there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some
way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some
primordial ruin.  Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods:
he had saved them from a wreck.  All this I felt and the age gave me
no encouragement to feel it.  And all this time I had not even thought
of Christian theology.



V THE FLAG OF THE WORLD


     When I was a boy there were two curious men running about
who were called the optimist and the pessimist.  I constantly used
the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any
very special idea of what they meant.  The only thing which might
be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said;
for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought
this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought
it as bad as it could be.  Both these statements being obviously
raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations.
An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and
nothing wrong.  For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything
right and nothing left.  Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion
that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist,
and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious
but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl,
"An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
is a man who looks after your feet."  I am not sure that this is not
the best definition of all.  There is even a sort of allegorical truth
in it.  For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn
between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact
with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker
who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice
of road.

     But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist
and the pessimist.  The assumption of it is that a man criticises
this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown
over a new suite of apartments.  If a man came to this world from
some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss
whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage
of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance
the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view.
But no man is in that position.  A man belongs to this world before
he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it.  He has fought for
the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he
has ever enlisted.  To put shortly what seems the essential matter,
he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

     In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling
that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed
in fairy tales.  The reader may, if he likes, put down the next
stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly
comes next in the history of a boy.  We all owe much sound morality
to the penny dreadfuls.  Whatever the reason, it seemed and still
seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed
in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism
and approval.  My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism.  It is a matter of primary loyalty.
The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to
leave because it is miserable.  It is the fortress of our family,
with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it
is the less we should leave it.  The point is not that this world
is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that
when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it,
and its sadness a reason for loving it more.  All optimistic thoughts
about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike
reasons for the English patriot.  Similarly, optimism and pessimism
are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.

     Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say
Pimlico.  If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find
the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the
arbitrary.  It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in
that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor,
certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then
it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of
it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a
transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a
man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and
golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when
she is loved.  For decoration is not given to hide horrible things:
but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her
child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it.  A lover does not
give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as
mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a
year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that
this is a mere fantasy.  I answer that this is the actual history of
mankind.  This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great.  Go back to
the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round
some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well.  People first paid
honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it.  Men did not love
Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

     The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have
been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far
as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government
an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.
But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men
had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange
of interests.  Morality did not begin by one man saying to another,
"I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace
of such a transaction.  There IS a trace of both men having said,
"We must not hit each other in the holy place."  They gained their
morality by guarding their religion.  They did not cultivate courage.
They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous.
They did not cultivate cleanliness.  They purified themselves for
the altar, and found that they were clean.  The history of the Jews
is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can
be judged sufficiently from that.  The Ten Commandments which have been
found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands;
a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across
a certain desert.  Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity.
And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made
a holiday for men.

     If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing
is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact.
Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort
of universal patriotism.  What is the matter with the pessimist?
I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot.
And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated,
without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend.
And what is the matter with the candid friend?  There we strike
the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

     I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend
is simply that he is not candid.  He is keeping something back--
his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.  He has
a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help.  This is certainly,
I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to
healthy citizens.  I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism
which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses;
that is only patriotism speaking plainly.  A man who says that
no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not
worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son
should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men,
and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested:
he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry
to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all.  And he may be said,
without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge
which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people
from joining it.  Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a
military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant.
Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot)
uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away
the people from her flag.  Granted that he states only facts, it is
still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive.
It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox;
but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher
who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants
to help the men.

     The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods
and men, but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not
this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.  What is the evil
of the man commonly called an optimist?  Obviously, it is felt
that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world,
will defend the indefensible.  He is the jingo of the universe;
he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong."  He will be less inclined
to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench
official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances.
He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world.  All this
(which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really
interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained
without it.

     We say there must be a primal loyalty to life:  the only
question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty?
If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an
unreasonable loyalty?  Now, the extraordinary thing is that the
bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything)
comes in with the reasonable optimism.  Rational optimism leads
to stagnation:  it is irrational optimism that leads to reform.
Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism.
The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly
the man who loves it with a reason.  The man who will improve
the place is the man who loves it without a reason.  If a man loves
some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself
defending that feature against Pimlico itself.  But if he simply loves
Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem.
I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the
mystic patriot who reforms.  Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest
among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism.
The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England.
If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success
with which we rule the Hindoos.  But if we love it only for being
a nation, we can face all events:  for it would be a nation even
if the Hindoos ruled us.  Thus also only those will permit their
patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history.
A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose.
But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against
all facts for his fancy.  He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman)
by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest.
He may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason.  A man who
loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870.
But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army
of 1870.  This is exactly what the French have done, and France is
a good instance of the working paradox.  Nowhere else is patriotism
more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more
drastic and sweeping.  The more transcendental is your patriotism,
the more practical are your politics.

     Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case
of women; and their strange and strong loyalty.  Some stupid people
started the idea that because women obviously back up their own
people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not
see anything.  They can hardly have known any women.  The same women
who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in
their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid
about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head.
A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is:  his wife loves him
and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.  Women who are
utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism.
Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother,
who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong
as a man.  She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value.
The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely
be a sceptic.  Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is.
Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

     This at least had come to be my position about all that
was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement.  Before any
cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance.
A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested
in his views of it.  "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must
be fixed on the right thing:  the moment we have a fixed heart we
have a free hand.  I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism.
It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed
of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance.
But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective.
It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those
quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous
than the shrieks of Schopenhauer--

"Enough we live:--and if a life, With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain
of birth."

     I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes
our epoch.  For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution,
what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise,
but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.
We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a
surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle,
to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return
at evening.

     No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world:
but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength
enough to get it on.  Can he hate it enough to change it,
and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?  Can he look
up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence?
Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair?
Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist,
but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?  Is he enough of a
pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?
In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails,
the irrational optimist who succeeds.  He is ready to smash the whole
universe for the sake of itself.

     I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as
they came:  and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident
of the time.  Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument
arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self.
Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow,"
of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person,
and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.
Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there
would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill
himself for a penny.  In all this I found myself utterly hostile
to many who called themselves liberal and humane.  Not only is
suicide a sin, it is the sin.  It is the ultimate and absolute evil,
the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take
the oath of loyalty to life.  The man who kills a man, kills a man.
The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned
he wipes out the world.  His act is worse (symbolically considered)
than any rape or dynamite outrage.  For it destroys all buildings:
it insults all women.  The thief is satisfied with diamonds;
but the suicide is not:  that is his crime.  He cannot be bribed,
even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City.  The thief
compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.
But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.
He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.
There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death
is not a sneer.  When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves
might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury:
for each has received a personal affront.  Of course there may be
pathetic emotional excuses for the act.  There often are for rape,
and there almost always are for dynamite.  But if it comes to clear
ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much
more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads
and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal
automatic machines.  There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart.
The man's crime is different from other crimes--for it makes even
crimes impossible.

     About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker:
he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr.  The open
fallacy of this helped to clear the question.  Obviously a suicide
is the opposite of a martyr.  A martyr is a man who cares so much
for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.
A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him,
that he wants to see the last of everything.  One wants something
to begin:  the other wants everything to end.  In other words,
the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world
or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life;
he sets his heart outside himself:  he dies that something may live.
The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being:
he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.
And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer
fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.
For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason,
of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate
and pessimistic.  The early Christian martyrs talked of death
with a horrible happiness.  They blasphemed the beautiful duties
of the body:  they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers.
All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism.  Yet there
is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of
the pessimist.

     This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which
Christianity entered the discussion.  And there went with it a
peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note
of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.
The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is
so often affirmed in modern morals.  It was not a matter of degree.
It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the
self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer
in sadness just beyond it.  The Christian feeling evidently
was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far.
The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against
the other:  these two things that looked so much alike were at
opposite ends of heaven and hell.  One man flung away his life;
he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence.
Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would
pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right;
but why was it so fierce?

     Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were
in some beaten track.  Christianity had also felt this opposition
of the martyr to the suicide:  had it perhaps felt it for the
same reason?  Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not
(and cannot) express--this need for a first loyalty to things,
and then for a ruinous reform of things?  Then I remembered
that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it
combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine.
Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being
too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic
about the world.  The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

     An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying
that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot
be held in another.  Some dogma, we are told, was credible
in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.
You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed
on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well
say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three,
but not suitable to half-past four.  What a man can believe
depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.
If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe
in any miracle in any age.  If a man believes in a will behind law,
he can believe in any miracle in any age.  Suppose, for the sake
of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing.
A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more
than a materialist of the twentieth century.  But a Christian
Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a
Christian of the twelfth century.  It is simply a matter of a man's
theory of things.  Therefore in dealing with any historical answer,
the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it
was given in answer to our question.  And the more I thought about
when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt
that it had actually come to answer this question.

     It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay
quite indefensible compliments to Christianity.  They talk as if
there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came,
a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them.
They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness
and sincerity.  They will think me very narrow (whatever that means)
if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
was the first to preach Christianity.  Its peculiarity was that it
was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar,
but obvious ideals for all mankind.  Christianity was the answer
to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.
Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone
this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma
(as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones),
turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light.
Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world
specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would
be an exaggeration.  But it would be very much nearer to the truth.
The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people
who did believe in the Inner Light.  Their dignity, their weariness,
their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care
for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only
by that dismal illumination.  Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists,
as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done
or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make
a moral revolution.  He gets up early in the morning, just as our
own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning;
because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games
of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land.
Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types.  He is an
unselfish egoist.  An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without
the excuse of passion.  Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment
the worst is what these people call the Inner Light.  Of all horrible
religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.
Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows
any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work.
That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately
to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.  Let Jones worship the sun
or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship
cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not
the god within.  Christianity came into the world firstly in order
to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm
a divine company and a divine captain.  The only fun of being
a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light,
but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as
the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

     All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun
and moon.  If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them;
to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn
insects alive.  He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke,
he may give his neighbour measles.  He thinks that because the moon
is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad.  This ugly side
of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world.
About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the
weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had
begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism.  Nature worship
is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words,
Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan.
But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow
in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he
soon showed the cloven hoof.  The only objection to Natural Religion
is that somehow it always becomes unnatural.  A man loves Nature
in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall,
if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.
He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics,
yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot
bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.  The mere pursuit of
health always leads to something unhealthy.  Physical nature must
not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed,
not worshipped.  Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously.
If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended.
Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties.
Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.
Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination.
The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything
that was bad.

     On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented
by the old remnant of the Stoics.  Marcus Aurelius and his friends
had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked
only to the god within.  They had no hope of any virtue in nature,
and hardly any hope of any virtue in society.  They had not enough
interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it.
They did not love the city enough to set fire to it.  Thus the
ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma.  The only
people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up;
and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock
them down.  In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly
stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually
accepted as THE answer.  It was the answer then, and I think it is
the answer now.

     This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered;
it did not in any sense sentimentally unite.  Briefly, it divided
God from the cosmos.  That transcendence and distinctness of the
deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity,
was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian.
It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist
and the still more unhappy optimist.  As I am here only concerned
with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this
great metaphysical suggestion.  All descriptions of the creating
or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they
must be verbal.  Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God
in all things as if he were in a box.  Thus the evolutionist has,
in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet.
All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge.
The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can,
with such a phrase, cover a distinct IDEA about the origin of things.
I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would
not talk about evolution.  And the root phrase for all Christian
theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it
as a little thing he has "thrown off."  Even in giving it forth he
has flung it away.  This principle that all creation and procreation
is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the
evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out.  A woman
loses a child even in having a child.  All creation is separation.
Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

     It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that
this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet
from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true
description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it.
According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.
God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he
had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human
actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
I will discuss the truth of this theorem later.  Here I have only
to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma
we have discussed in this chapter.  In this way at least one could
be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self to be either
a pessimist or an optimist.  On this system one could fight all
the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence.
One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with
the world.  St. George could still fight the dragon, however big
the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the
mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills.  If he were as
big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world.
St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in
the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design.
He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything;
even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its
open jaws.

     And then followed an experience impossible to describe.
It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two
huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without
apparent connection--the world and the Christian tradition.
I had found this hole in the world:  the fact that one must
somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it;
somehow one must love the world without being worldly.  I found this
projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike,
the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world
separate from Himself.  The spike of dogma fitted exactly into
the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--
and then the strange thing began to happen.  When once these two
parts of the two machines had come together, one after another,
all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude.
I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling
into its place with a kind of click of relief.  Having got one
part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude,
as clock after clock strikes noon.  Instinct after instinct was
answered by doctrine after doctrine.  Or, to vary the metaphor,
I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take
one high fortress.  And when that fort had fallen the whole country
surrendered and turned solid behind me.  The whole land was lit up,
as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood.  All those blind
fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain
to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane.
I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice:
it was the divine choice.  I was right when I felt that I would
almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must
by necessity have been that colour:  it might verily have been
any other.  My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a
condition did mean something when all was said:  it meant the whole
doctrine of the Fall.  Even those dim and shapeless monsters of
notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides
of the creed.  The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void,
but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything
that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist;
to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to
be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--
even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for,
according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck,
the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of
the world.

     But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed
the reason for optimism.  And the instant the reversal was made it
felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket.
I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident
blasphemy of pessimism.  But all the optimism of the age had been
false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been
trying to prove that we fit in to the world.  The Christian
optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world.
I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal,
like any other which sought its meat from God.  But now I really
was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity.  I had been
right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse
and better than all things.  The optimist's pleasure was prosaic,
for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian
pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything
in the light of the supernatural.  The modern philosopher had told
me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still
felt depressed even in acquiescence.  But I had heard that I was in
the WRONG place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark
house of infancy.  I knew now why grass had always seemed to me
as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick
at home.



VI THE PARADOXES OF CHRISTIANITY


     The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an
unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one.  The commonest
kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.
It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is;
its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
its wildness lies in wait.  I give one coarse instance of what I mean.
Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon
up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing
about it was that it was duplicate.  A man is two men, he on the
right exactly resembling him on the left.  Having noted that there
was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right
and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side
the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes,
twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain.
At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart
on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other.
And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

     It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is
the uncanny element in everything.  It seems a sort of secret
treason in the universe.  An apple or an orange is round enough
to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all.
The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some
simple astronomer into calling it a globe.  A blade of grass is
called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point;
but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the
quiet and incalculable.  It escapes the rationalists, but it never
escapes till the last moment.  From the grand curve of our earth it
could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides,
he should have a heart on both sides.  Yet scientific men are still
organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are
so fond of flat country.  Scientific men are also still organizing
expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try to find it,
they generally get on the wrong side of him.

     Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it
guesses these hidden malformations or surprises.  If our mathematician
from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce
the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain.  But if he
guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should
call him something more than a mathematician.  Now, this is exactly
the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity.
Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly
becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.
It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one
may say so) exactly where the things go wrong.  Its plan suits
the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected.  It is simple
about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth.
It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all
the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts.
It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show
that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology,
we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.

     I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that
such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age.  Of course,
anything can be believed in any age.  But, oddly enough, there really
is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be
believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.
If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer
reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia.  For the more
complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence.
If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian,
it might be an accident.  But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape
of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle.
It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel
of the philosophy of Christianity.  The complication of our modern
world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of
the plain problems of the ages of faith.  It was in Notting Hill
and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true.
This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details
which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without
believing in it.  When once one believes in a creed, one is proud
of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity
of science.  It shows how rich it is in discoveries.  If it is right
at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.
A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.
But a key and a lock are both complex.  And if a key fits a lock,
you know it is the right key.

     But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult
to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth.
It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is
entirely convinced.  It is comparatively easy when he is only
partially convinced.  He is partially convinced because he has
found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it.
But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he
finds that something proves it.  He is only really convinced when he
finds that everything proves it.  And the more converging reasons he
finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked
suddenly to sum them up.  Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man,
on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?"
he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be
able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the
coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen."
The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.
It has done so many things.  But that very multiplicity of proof
which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

     There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind
of huge helplessness.  The belief is so big that it takes a long
time to get it into action.  And this hesitation chiefly arises,
oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin.
All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never
get there.  In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction
I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing
as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab.
But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear,
it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments
of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of
these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications.  All I had
hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it.
I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the
age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age
of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question.
I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity
and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity.
But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that,
even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.
I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it,
at least, that I could find written in English and lying about;
and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other
note of philosophy.  The penny dreadfuls which I also read
were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity;
but I did not know this at the time.  I never read a line of
Christian apologetics.  I read as little as I can of them now.
It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me
back to orthodox theology.  They sowed in my mind my first wild
doubts of doubt.  Our grandmothers were quite right when they said
that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind.  They do.
They unsettled mine horribly.  The rationalist made me question
whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished
Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time)
whether evolution had occurred at all.  As I laid down the last of
Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke
across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."  I was
in a desperate way.

     This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts
deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways.
I take only one.  As I read and re-read all the non-Christian
or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh,
a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically
upon my mind--the impression that Christianity must be a most
extraordinary thing.  For not only (as I understood) had Christianity
the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent
for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other.
It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.
No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far
to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it
was much too far to the west.  No sooner had my indignation died
down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up
again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give
such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction
in the sceptical attack.  I give four or five of them; there are
fifty more.

     Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack
on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought
(and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable
than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely
pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow
up St. Paul's Cathedral.  But the extraordinary thing is this.
They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction)
that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II.,
they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic.
One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men,
by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom
of Nature.  But another accusation was that it comforted men with a
fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery.
One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough,
and why it was hard to be free.  Another great agnostic objected
that Christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by
pious hands," hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that
it was impossible to be free.  One rationalist had hardly done
calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it
a fool's paradise.  This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent.
Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world,
and also the white mask on a black world.  The state of the Christian
could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling
to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.
If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another;
it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles.
I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men
of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of
the creed--

     "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown
gray with Thy breath."

But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as
in "Atalanta"), I gathered that the world was, if possible,
more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards.
The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself
was pitch dark.  And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it.
The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself
a pessimist.  I thought there must be something wrong.  And it did
for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who,
by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

     It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the
accusations were false or the accusers fools.  I simply deduced
that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder
than they made out.  A thing might have these two opposite vices;
but it must be a rather queer thing if it did.  A man might be too fat
in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape.
At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

     Here is another case of the same kind.  I felt that a strong
case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something
timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian,"
especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.
The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile.
Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
were decidedly men.  In comparison, it did seem tenable that there
was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.
The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests
never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation
that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.
I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different,
I should have gone on believing it.  But I read something very different.
I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned
up-side down.  Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for
fighting too little, but for fighting too much.  Christianity, it seemed,
was the mother of wars.  Christianity had deluged the world with blood.
I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never
was angry.  And now I was told to be angry with him because his
anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history;
because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.
The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and
non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached
it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades.  It was the
fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward
the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did.
The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic
Christian crimes.  What could it all mean?  What was this Christianity
which always forbade war and always produced wars?  What could
be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it
would not fight, and second because it was always fighting?
In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
monstrous meekness?  The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape
every instant.

     I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves
the one real objection to the faith.  The one real objection to the
Christian religion is simply that it is one religion.  The world is
a big place, full of very different kinds of people.  Christianity (it
may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people;
it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe.
I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much
drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--
I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of
all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience.
Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them.
The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages
and still find essential ethical common sense.  It might find
Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou
shalt not steal."  It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on
the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would
be "Little boys should tell the truth."  I believed this doctrine
of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense,
and I believe it still--with other things.  And I was thoroughly
annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed)
that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light
of justice and reason.  But then I found an astonishing thing.
I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church
from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality
had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong
in another.  If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we
needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed
in their universal customs and ideals.  But if I mildly pointed
out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar,
then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men
had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.
I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was
the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.
But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves
that science and progress were the discovery of one people,
and that all other peoples had died in the dark.  Their chief insult
to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves,
and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative
insistence on the two things.  When considering some pagan or agnostic,
we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering
some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd
religions some men had.  We could trust the ethics of Epictetus,
because ethics had never changed.  We must not trust the ethics
of Bossuet, because ethics had changed.  They changed in two
hundred years, but not in two thousand.

     This began to be alarming.  It looked not so much as if
Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather
as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people
were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind
contradicting themselves?  I saw the same thing on every side.
I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail;
but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three
accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others.
Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity
had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the
loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes
and their children.  But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced)
said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family
and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their
homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation.
The charge was actually reversed.  Or, again, certain phrases in the
Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians
to show contempt for woman's intellect.  But I found that the
anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman's intellect;
for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that
"only women" went to it.  Or again, Christianity was reproached
with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas.
But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp
and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold.
It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.
Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality
too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained
it too little.  It is often accused in the same breath of prim
respectability and of religious extravagance.  Between the covers
of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked
for its disunion, "One thinks one thing, and one another,"
and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of opinion
that prevents the world from going to the dogs."  In the same
conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity
for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

     I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now;
and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong.
I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very
wrong indeed.  Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing,
but that thing must be very strange and solitary.  There are men
who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare.  There are
men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare.  But if this mass
of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty,
too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously
to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge,
a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed,
then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.
For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such
exceptional corruption.  Christianity (theoretically speaking)
was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals.
THEY gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness.
Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural.
It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope.
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite
as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that
Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell.  Really, if Jesus
of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

     And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still
thunderbolt.  There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation.
Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men.  Suppose we
were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some
too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness;
some thought him too dark, and some too fair.  One explanation (as
has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape.
But there is another explanation.  He might be the right shape.
Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short.  Very short men
might feel him to be tall.  Old bucks who are growing stout might
consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing
thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance.
Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man,
while negroes considered him distinctly blonde.  Perhaps (in short)
this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least
the normal thing, the centre.  Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity
that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways.
I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any
of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation.
I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock.  For instance,
it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity
at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp.  But then
it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined
extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp.
The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.
But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before
ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes.  The modern man
found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex;
he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.
The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees.
The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.
And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it
was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe.  If there was any
insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread
and wine.

     I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far.
The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians
and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained.
It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity,
but a complication of diseases in Swinburne.  The restraints
of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist
than a healthy man should be.  The faith of Christians angered
him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be.
In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity;
not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about
Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human
about Malthusianism.

     Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity
was merely sensible and stood in the middle.  There was really
an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified
the secularists in their superficial criticism.  It might be wise,
I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not
merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable.
Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other;
still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek,
meek beyond all decency.  Now, it was just at this point of the
speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and
the suicide.  In that matter there had been this combination between
two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity.
This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already
found to be true.  This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which
sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right.
Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide,
they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long
before I dreamed of Christianity.  Then the most difficult and
interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace
this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology.
The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and
the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both
things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning.
Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics.  But I need not
remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central
in orthodox theology.  For orthodox theology has specially insisted
that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf,
nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both
things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.
Now let me trace this notion as I found it.

     All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium;
that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little.
Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and
evolution which seeks to destroy the MESON or balance of Aristotle.
They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively,
or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever.
But the great truism of the MESON remains for all thinking men,
and these people have not upset any balance except their own.
But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest
comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept.
That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve:  that was
the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very
strange way.

     Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity
declared it was in a conflict:  the collision of two passions
apparently opposite.  Of course they were not really inconsistent;
but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously.
Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide;
and take the case of courage.  No quality has ever so much addled
the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire
to live taking the form of a readiness to die.  "He that will lose
his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism
for saints and heroes.  It is a piece of everyday advice for
sailors or mountaineers.  It might be printed in an Alpine guide
or a drill book.  This paradox is the whole principle of courage;
even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage.  A man cut off by
the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

     He can only get away from death by continually stepping within
an inch of it.  A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut
his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a
strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life,
for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely
wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape.
He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it;
he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle
with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so.
But Christianity has done more:  it has marked the limits of it
in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
sake of dying.  And it has held up ever since above the European
lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry:  the Christian courage,
which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a
disdain of life.

     And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian
key to ethics everywhere.  Everywhere the creed made a moderation
out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions.  Take, for instance,
the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and
mere prostration.  The average pagan, like the average agnostic,
would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently
self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse,
that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them.
In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily
with his nose in the air.  This is a manly and rational position,
but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise
between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of Matthew Arnold.
Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour.
This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets;
you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this.  On the other hand,
this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire
and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and
searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at
the feet of the grass.  It does not make him look up and see marvels;
for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland.  Thus it
loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.
Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both
of them.

     It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both.
In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before;
in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before.
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures.  In so far
as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.  All humility that had
meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view
of his whole destiny--all that was to go.  We were to hear no more
the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over
the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest
of all the beasts of the field.  Man was a statue of God walking
about the garden.  Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes;
man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.
The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging
to it.  Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it.
Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only
be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage.
Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness
of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission,
in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.
When one came to think of ONE'S SELF, there was vista and void enough
for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth.  There the
realistic gentleman could let himself go--as long as he let himself go
at himself.  There was an open playground for the happy pessimist.
Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original
aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned
fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools
are not worth saving.  He must not say that a man, QUA man,
can be valueless.  Here, again in short, Christianity got over the
difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both,
and keeping them both furious.  The Church was positive on both points.
One can hardly think too little of one's self.  One can hardly think
too much of one's soul.

     Take another case:  the complicated question of charity,
which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy.
Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage.  Stated baldly,
charity certainly means one of two things--pardoning unpardonable acts,
or loving unlovable people.  But if we ask ourselves (as we did
in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such
a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it.
A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive,
and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at;
a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed
even after he was killed.  In so far as the act was pardonable,
the man was pardonable.  That again is rational, and even refreshing;
but it is a dilution.  It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice,
such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent.  And it leaves
no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole
fascination of the charitable.  Christianity came in here as before.
It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another.
It divided the crime from the criminal.  The criminal we must forgive
unto seventy times seven.  The crime we must not forgive at all.
It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger
and partly kindness.  We must be much more angry with theft than before,
and yet much kinder to thieves than before.  There was room for wrath
and love to run wild.  And the more I considered Christianity,
the more I found that while it had established a rule and order,
the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run
wild.

     Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look.
Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions
as do social and political liberty.  The ordinary aesthetic anarchist
who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a
paradox that prevents him feeling at all.  He breaks away from home
limits to follow poetry.  But in ceasing to feel home limits he has
ceased to feel the "Odyssey."  He is free from national prejudices
and outside patriotism.  But being outside patriotism he is outside
"Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature:
he is more of a prisoner than any bigot.  For if there is a wall
between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you
describe yourself as locked in or as locked out.  What we want
is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments;
we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments.
It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man
is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of
a city.  I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly
detained there), but I am by no means free of that building.
How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing
them in a clear space without breakage or wrong?  THIS was the
achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.
Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic,
the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism,
as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.

     St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting
optimist than Walt Whitman.  St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil,
could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer.  Both passions
were free because both were kept in their place.  The optimist could
pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march,
the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle.
But he must not call the fight needless.  The pessimist might draw
as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds.
But he must not call the fight hopeless.  So it was with all the
other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion.
By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly
inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them
to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible
only to anarchists.  Meekness grew more dramatic than madness.
Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange COUP DE THEATRE
of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are
to vice.  The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible
and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that
scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets,
to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles,
kissed the bloody head of the criminal.  Poetry could be acted as
well as composed.  This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has
entirely vanished with supernatural religion.  They, being humble,
could parade themselves:  but we are too proud to be prominent.
Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we
are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist,
go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it
is cast into the quicklime.  Our ethical teachers write mildly
against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see
Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster
Abbey.

     Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing
nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on
the faith.  It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised
celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so)
been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children.
It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white,
like the red and white upon the shield of St. George.  It has
always had a healthy hatred of pink.  It hates that combination
of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.
It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to
a dirty gray.  In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity
might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour:
not merely the absence of a colour.  All that I am urging here can
be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these
cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure.  It is not a mixture
like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot
silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

     So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges
of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter.  It IS true
that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight;
and it IS true that those who fought were like thunderbolts
and those who did not fight were like statues.  All this simply
means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use
its Tolstoyans.  There must be SOME good in the life of battle,
for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.  There must be
SOME good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem
to enjoy being Quakers.  All that the Church did (so far as that goes)
was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other.
They existed side by side.  The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples
of monks, simply became monks.  The Quakers became a club instead
of becoming a sect.  Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity
of revenge.  But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run
the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed
to run it.  The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James
Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid.  And sometimes this pure
gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture;
the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul
of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb.  But remember that
this text is too lightly interpreted.  It is constantly assured,
especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies
down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal
annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.  That is simply
the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.
The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still
retain his royal ferocity?  THAT is the problem the Church attempted;
THAT is the miracle she achieved.

     This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities
of life.  This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not
in the middle.  This is knowing not only that the earth is round,
but knowing exactly where it is flat.  Christian doctrine detected
the oddities of life.  It not only discovered the law, but it
foresaw the exceptions.  Those underrate Christianity who say that
it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy.  In fact every
one did.  But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--
THAT was to anticipate a strange need of human nature.  For no one
wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.
Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor
quite happy.  But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable
without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery
in psychology.  Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel";
and it would have been a limit.  But to say, "Here you can swagger
and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.

     This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery
of the new balance.  Paganism had been like a pillar of marble,
upright because proportioned with symmetry.  Christianity was like
a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences
exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were
all necessary.  Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
every buttress was a flying buttress.  So in Christendom apparent
accidents balanced.  Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold
and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination;
for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in
the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold.  It is at least
better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black
and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.
But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's;
the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.
Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could
be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the
orchards of England.  This is what makes Christendom at once so much
more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire;
just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than
the Parthenon.  If any one wants a modern proof of all this,
let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations.
Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing
of one emphasis against another emphasis.  The instinct of the
Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens,
and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent;
the Frenchmen less experimental and swift."  But the instinct
of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent,
that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses.  The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."

     Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains
what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history
of Christianity.  I mean the monstrous wars about small points
of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.
It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you
are balancing.  The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth
on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment
of the irregular equilibrium.  Once let one idea become less powerful
and some other idea would become too powerful.  It was no flock of sheep
the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.
Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas;
she was a lion tamer.  The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit,
of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,
or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see,
need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean,
and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten
forests of the north.  Of these theological equalisations I have
to speak afterwards.  Here it is enough to notice that if some
small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made
in human happiness.  A sentence phrased wrong about the nature
of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe.
A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither
all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs.  Doctrines had
to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might
enjoy general human liberties.  The Church had to be careful,
if only that the world might be careless.

     This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.  People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe.  There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy.  It was sanity:  and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad.  It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.  She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.  She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly.  The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.  It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.  It is easy to be
a madman:  it is easy to be a heretic.  It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands.  To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.



VII THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION


     The following propositions have been urged:  First, that some
faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some
dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order
to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content
and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious
equilibrium of the Stoic.  For mere resignation has neither the
gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain.
There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it.
The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.
Greek heroes do not grin:  but gargoyles do--because they are Christian.
And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense)
frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful.  Christ prophesied
the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and
respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs)
objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem.
He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out."
Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the
facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces
and open mouths.  The prophecy has fulfilled itself:  the very stones
cry out.

     If these things be conceded, though only for argument,
we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the
natural man, called by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity),
"The Old Man."  We can ask the next question so obviously in front
of us.  Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better.
But what do we mean by making things better?  Most modern talk on
this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that circle which we
have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism.
Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it
helps evolution.  The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise
on the elephant.

     Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle
in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human
or divine theory), there is no principle in nature.  For instance,
the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that
there is no equality in nature.  He is right, but he does not see
the logical addendum.  There is no equality in nature; also there
is no inequality in nature.  Inequality, as much as equality,
implies a standard of value.  To read aristocracy into the anarchy
of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.
Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals:  the one saying
that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.
But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say
that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.  We think the cat
superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy
to the effect that life is better than death.  But if the mouse
were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat
had beaten him at all.  He might think he had beaten the cat by
getting to the grave first.  Or he might feel that he had actually
inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.
Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence,
so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing
in the cat the torture of conscious existence.  It all depends
on the philosophy of the mouse.  You cannot even say that there
is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
about what things are superior.  You cannot even say that the cat
scores unless there is a system of scoring.  You cannot even say
that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to
be got.

     We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature,
and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will
leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision.  But the attempts of most moderns
to express it are highly vague.

     Some fall back simply on the clock:  they talk as if mere
passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man
of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human
morality is never up to date.  How can anything be up to date?--
a date has no character.  How can one say that Christmas
celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month?
What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind
his favourite minority--or in front of it.  Other vague modern
people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief
mark of vague modern people.  Not daring to define their doctrine
of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint
or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap
analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality.
Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high."
It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase
from a steeple or a weathercock.  "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas.  "Tommy lived
the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

     This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,
whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.
No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;
but he was quite the reverse of strong.  He was not at all bold.
He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,
fearless men of thought.  Nietzsche always escaped a question
by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet.  He said,
"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,
"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it
was nonsense.  So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,
"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all
these are ideas; and ideas are alarming.  He says "the upper man,"
or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker.  He does not really know
in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.
And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists,
who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

     Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission
and sitting still.  Nature is going to do something some day;
nobody knows what, and nobody knows when.  We have no reason for acting,
and no reason for not acting.  If anything happens it is right:
if anything is prevented it was wrong.  Again, some people try
to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.
Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.
Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

     Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever
it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate
aim of evolution.  And these are the only sensible people.
This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution,
to work for what you want, and to call THAT evolution.  The only
intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men,
is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make
the whole world like that vision.  If you like to put it so,
the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the
mere method and preparation for something that we have to create.
This is not a world, but rather the material for a world.
God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours
of a palette.  But he has also given us a subject, a model,
a fixed vision.  We must be clear about what we want to paint.
This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles.
We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.
We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary)
in order to have something to change it to.

     We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:
personally I prefer to call it reform.  For reform implies form.
It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image;
to make it something that we see already in our minds.  Evolution is
a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling.  Progress is a metaphor from
merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road.  But reform
is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men:  it means that we
see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape.
And we know what shape.

     Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age.
We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things.
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit
the vision.  Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing
the vision.  It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing
justice and mercy among men:  it does mean that we are very swift
in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy:  a wild page
from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it.  Progress should mean
that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem.  It does mean
that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us.  We are not
altering the real to suit the ideal.  We are altering the ideal:
it is easier.

     Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted
a particular kind of world; say, a blue world.  He would have no
cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task;
he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could
work away (in every sense) until all was blue.  He could have
heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger.
He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon.  But if he
worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own
point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it.
If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day,
he would get on slowly.  But if he altered his favourite colour
every day, he would not get on at all.  If, after reading a
fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow,
his work would be thrown away:  there would be nothing to show except
a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner.
This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker.
It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example.
But it is literally the fact of recent history.  The great and grave
changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early
nineteenth century, not to the later.  They belonged to the black
and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism,
in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution.
And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily,
without scepticism:  and there was a time when the Established
Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell.
It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent;
it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative.
But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition
in Radicalism to pull anything down.  There is a great deal of truth
in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era
of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose.
But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what
is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation
because it is an age of complete unbelief.  Let beliefs fade fast
and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same.
The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery
of matter will be left to itself.  The net result of all our
political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism,
Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy--the plain fruit of all
of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain.
The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church
of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished.
It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw
and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs,
bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

     We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the
safeguards against freedom.  Managed in a modern style the emancipation
of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation
of the slave.  Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free,
and he will not free himself.  Again, it may be said that this
instance is remote or extreme.  But, again, it is exactly true of
the men in the streets around us.  It is true that the negro slave,
being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection
of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty.  But the man we see
every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk
in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe
in freedom.  He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.
He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of
wild philosophies.  He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the
next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.
The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory.
The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind.
It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied
with sceptical literature.  And now I come to think of it, of course,
Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries.  He shows his sense.
All modern books are on his side.  As long as the vision of heaven
is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same.
No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.
The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will
always change his mind.

     This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards
which progress is directed; it must be fixed.  Whistler used to make
many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up
twenty portraits.  But it would matter if he looked up twenty times,
and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait.
So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails
to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful.
But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal;
for then all its old failures are fruitless.  The question therefore
becomes this:  How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures
while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art?
How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always
satisfied with working?  How can we make sure that the portrait
painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking
the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out
of window?

     A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary
for rebelling.  This fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any
sort of revolution.  Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas;
but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas.  If I am merely
to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic;
but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable.  This is
the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution.
They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality,
with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant.
There is only one great disadvantage in this theory.  It talks of a slow
movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement.
A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things
to be intrinsically intolerable.  To make the matter clear, it is better
to take a specific example.  Certain of the idealistic vegetarians,
such as Mr. Salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat;
by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat,
and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day
it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs.  I do not discuss here the
question of what is justice to animals.  I only say that whatever
is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice.
If an animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush to his rescue.
But how can we rush if we are, perhaps, in advance of our time?  How can
we rush to catch a train which may not arrive for a few centuries?
How can I denounce a man for skinning cats, if he is only now what I
may possibly become in drinking a glass of milk?  A splendid and insane
Russian sect ran about taking all the cattle out of all the carts.
How can I pluck up courage to take the horse out of my hansom-cab,
when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little
fast or the cabman's a little slow?  Suppose I say to a sweater,
"Slavery suited one stage of evolution."  And suppose he answers,
"And sweating suits this stage of evolution."  How can I answer if there
is no eternal test?  If sweaters can be behind the current morality,
why should not philanthropists be in front of it?  What on earth
is the current morality, except in its literal sense--the morality
that is always running away?

     Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the
innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish
the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish
the king to be promptly executed.  The guillotine has many sins,
but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it.
The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in
the axe.  The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?"
the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE:  exactly between your
head and body."  There must at any given moment be an abstract
right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something
eternal if there is to be anything sudden.  Therefore for all
intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping
things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China,
or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution,
it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision.
This is our first requirement.

     When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence
of something else in the discussion:  as a man hears a church bell
above the sound of the street.  Something seemed to be saying,
"My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations
of the world.  My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered;
for it is called Eden.  You may alter the place to which you
are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come.
To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution;
for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan.
In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven.  But in this
world heaven is rebelling against hell.  For the orthodox there
can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.
At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which
no man has seen since Adam.  No unchanging custom, no changing
evolution can make the original good any thing but good.
Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns:
still they are not a part of him if they are sinful.  Men may
have been under oppression ever since fish were under water;
still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful.  The chain may
seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does
the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not,
if they are sinful.  I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all
your history.  Your vision is not merely a fixture:  it is a fact."
I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity:  but I
passed on.

     I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress.
Some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic
and impersonal progress in the nature of things.  But it is clear
that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress
is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active,
but rather a reason for being lazy.  If we are bound to improve,
we need not trouble to improve.  The pure doctrine of progress
is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.  But it
is to none of these obvious comments that I wish primarily to
call attention.

     The only arresting point is this:  that if we suppose
improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple.  The world
might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly
towards any particular arrangement of many qualities.  To take
our original simile:  Nature by herself may be growing more blue;
that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal.  But Nature
cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours,
unless Nature is personal.  If the end of the world were mere
darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably
as dusk or dawn.  But if the end of the world is to be a piece
of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design
in it, either human or divine.  The world, through mere time,
might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat;
but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art--
then there is an artist.

     If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance.  We
constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians;

I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one
who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.
They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and
more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or
sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not,
have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice.  They say
that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not
here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical.
As a fact, anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a
primitive one.  It is much more likely that modern men will eat
human flesh out of affectation than that primitive man ever ate
it out of ignorance.  I am here only following the outlines of
their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been
progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves,
then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.  I think it wrong
to sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.
Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.
That is the drive of the argument.  And for this argument it can
be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or
inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer
things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency,
like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children.
This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.

     Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities,
but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one.  The kinship
and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for
being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy
love of animals.  On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane,
or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human.  That you
and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger.
Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger.  It is one way
to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate
the tiger.  But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat
a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding
his claws.

     If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to
the garden of Eden.  For the obstinate reminder continued to recur:
only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature.  The essence
of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really
in this proposition:  that Nature is our mother.  Unfortunately, if you
regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The
main point of Christianity was this:  that Nature is not our mother:
Nature is our sister.  We can be proud of her beauty, since we have
the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire,
but not to imitate.  This gives to the typically Christian pleasure
in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.
Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele.
Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson.
But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert.
To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister:
a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.

     This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted
it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally,
the key would fit the smallest doors.  Our main point is here,
that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature,
it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph.
One can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work
for giving us longer and longer noses.  But the question is,
do we want to have longer and longer noses?  I fancy not;
I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far,
and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed:"
we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face.
But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing
interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular
arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation
to each other.  Proportion cannot be a drift:  it is either
an accident or a design.  So with the ideal of human morality
and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians.
It is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands
off things:  not to drive horses; not to pick flowers.  We may
eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument;
not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing.  The ultimate
apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still,
nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear
of incommoding a microbe.  To so crude a consummation as that we
might perhaps unconsciously drift.  But do we want so crude
a consummation?  Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along
the opposite or Nietzschian line of development--superman crushing
superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed
up for fun.  But do we want the universe smashed up for fun?
Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular
management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount
of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery?
If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall
have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this:
that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear.
If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he
is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The
whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder,
and haughty enough to defy.  So our attitude to the giant of the world
must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt:
it must be one particular proportion of the two--which is exactly right.
We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us
to make us tread fearfully on the grass.  We must also have enough
disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion,
spit at the stars.  Yet these two things (if we are to be good
or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one
particular combination.  The perfect happiness of men on the earth
(if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the
satisfaction of animals.  It will be an exact and perilous balance;
like that of a desperate romance.  Man must have just enough faith
in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to
enjoy them.

     This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress.
First, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite.  It must not
(if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing
swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure;
it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best
proportion and relation.  I am not concerned at this moment to deny
that some such good culmination may be, by the constitution of things,
reserved for the human race.  I only point out that if this composite
happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only
a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness.
If the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it
must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning
up of the world.  But if the beatification of the world is not
a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist.
And here again my contemplation was cloven by the ancient voice
which said, "I could have told you all this a long time ago.
If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress,
the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations
where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other.
An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect
flatness or a peak of perfect height.  But only a personal God can
possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city
with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each
of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour
to the many coloured coat of Joseph."

     Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact
answer that I required.  I had said, "The ideal must be fixed,"
and the Church had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it
existed before anything else."  I said secondly, "It must be
artistically combined, like a picture"; and the Church answered,
"Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it."
Then I went on to the third thing, which, as it seemed to me,
was needed for an Utopia or goal of progress.  And of all the three it
is infinitely the hardest to express.  Perhaps it might be put thus:
that we need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from Utopia
as we fell from Eden.

     We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive
is that things naturally tend to grow better.  But the only real
reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend
to grow worse.  The corruption in things is not only the best
argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument
against being conservative.  The conservative theory would really
be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact.
But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave
things alone you leave them as they are.  But you do not.
If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.  If you
particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again;
that is, you must be always having a revolution.  Briefly, if you
want the old white post you must have a new white post.  But this
which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and
terrible sense true of all human things.  An almost unnatural vigilance
is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity
with which human institutions grow old.  It is the custom in passing
romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies.
But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies;
under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty
years before.  Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic
monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards)
went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First.
So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just
after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored.
The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.
So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical
manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people,
until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant
eating the people like bread.  So again, we have almost up to the
last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion.
Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start)
that they are obviously nothing of the kind.  They are, by the nature
of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men.  We have not any need
to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.
It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold
up the modern world.  There is no fear that a modern king will
attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he
will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take
no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will
take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he
is free from criticism and publicity.  For the king is the most
private person of our time.  It will not be necessary for any one
to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press.
We do not need a censorship of the press.  We have a censorship by
the press.

     This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn
oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory
of progress to allow.  It must always be on the look out for every
privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong.
In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists.
They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions;
they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child
of man.  The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people
becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell
the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.  Here, I say,
I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary.
And then I caught my breath again:  for I remembered that I was once
again on the side of the orthodox.

     Christianity spoke again and said:  "I have always maintained
that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its
own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings
as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud
and prosperous human beings.  This eternal revolution, this suspicion
sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the
doctrine of progress.  If you were a philosopher you would call it,
as I do, the doctrine of original sin.  You may call it the cosmic
advance as much as you like; I call it what it is--the Fall."

     I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I
confess it came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to
think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real
right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred.
I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats,
saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make
them mentally and morally degraded.  I have listened to scientific
men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy)
saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong
will disappear.  I have listened to them with a horrible attention,
with a hideous fascination.  For it was like watching a man
energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.
If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike
democracy dead.  If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may
or may not be practical to raise them.  But it is certainly quite
practical to disfranchise them.  If the man with a bad bedroom cannot
give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he
shall give no vote.  The governing class may not unreasonably say:
"It may take us some time to reform his bedroom.  But if he is the
brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country.
Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance."
It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the
earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy,
expatiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule.
It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising
for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had
recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off
his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed
from prison uniform.  At any moment, one feels, the host might say
that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all.
So it is when the ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face,
proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be
really trustworthy.  At any moment the rich may say, "Very well,
then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his face.
On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment,
the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming.  If clean homes
and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the
present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air?
If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves,
why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit
to govern them?  On the ordinary environment argument the matter is
fairly manifest.  The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard
in Utopia.

     Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have
had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides?
Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed
clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul?
As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer
is Christianity.  Only the Christian Church can offer any rational
objection to a complete confidence in the rich.  For she has maintained
from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment,
but in man.  Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a
dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the
commodious environment.  I know that the most modern manufacture has
been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle.
I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious
to discover a very small camel.  But if we diminish the camel
to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest--if,
in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least
that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this--
that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern
society to rags.  The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly
ultimatum to the world.  For the whole modern world is absolutely
based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is
tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian)
is not tenable.  You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions
about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics,
this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed.  The fact is,
of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already.
That is why he is a rich man.  The whole case for Christianity is that
a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man,
spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt.
There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints
have said with a sort of savage monotony.  They have said simply
that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators
of definable justice.  It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown
the rich as convenient rulers of society.  It is not certainly
un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich.
But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard
the rich as more morally safe than the poor.  A Christian may
consistently say, "I respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes."
But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch
and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes."
For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may
take bribes.  It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by
a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history.
When people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible,
there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion.  Was Lord
Bacon a bootblack?  Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper?
In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man
in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position
at this moment.

     Much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out
to the effect that Christianity is akin to democracy, and most
of it is scarcely strong or clear enough to refute the fact that
the two things have often quarrelled.  The real ground upon which
Christianity and democracy are one is very much deeper.  The one
specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle--
the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule.
Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.  If our faith comments
on government at all, its comment must be this--that the man should
rule who does NOT think that he can rule.  Carlyle's hero may say,
"I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say "Nolo episcopari."
If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it means this--
that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry
places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man
who feels himself unfit to wear it.  Carlyle was quite wrong;
we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule.
Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he
can't.

     Now, this is one of the two or three vital defences of
working democracy.  The mere machinery of voting is not democracy,
though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method.
But even the machinery of voting is profoundly Christian in this
practical sense--that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those
who would be too modest to offer it.  It is a mystical adventure;
it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves.
That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom.  There is nothing
really humble about the abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindoo
is mild, but he is not meek.  But there is something psychologically
Christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure
rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion
of the prominent.  To say that voting is particularly Christian may
seem somewhat curious.  To say that canvassing is Christian may seem
quite crazy.  But canvassing is very Christian in its primary idea.
It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man,
"Friend, go up higher."  Or if there is some slight defect
in canvassing, that is in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only
because it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser.

     Aristocracy is not an institution:  aristocracy is a sin;
generally a very venial one.  It is merely the drift or slide
of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful,
which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world.

     It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion
of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are
also the most fragile or full of sensibility.  The swiftest things
are the softest things.  A bird is active, because a bird is soft.
A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard.  The stone must
by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.
The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force.
In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can
maintain itself in the air.  Modern investigators of miraculous
history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great
saints is their power of "levitation."  They might go further;
a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity.
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially
the instinct of Christian art.  Remember how Fra Angelico represented
all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies.
Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light
and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet.  It was
the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate
in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover
the deep levity of the Middle Ages.  In the old Christian pictures
the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute.
Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens.
The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed
plumes of the angels.  But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud
in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards,
for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.  Pride is the downward
drag of all things into an easy solemnity.  One "settles down"
into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay
self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up
at a blue sky.  Seriousness is not a virtue.  It would be a heresy,
but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice.
It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely,
because it is the easiest thing to do.  It is much easier to
write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH.
For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap.
It is easy to be heavy:  hard to be light.  Satan fell by the force of
gravity.

     Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe since it has been Christian
that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart
treated aristocracy as a weakness--generally as a weakness that must
be allowed for.  If any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him
go outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere.
Let him, for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes
of India.  There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far
more intellectual.  It is seriously felt that the scale of classes
is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the
butcher in an invisible and sacred sense.  But no Christianity,
not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet
was better than a butcher in that sacred sense.  No Christianity,
however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would
not be damned.  In pagan society there may have been (I do not know)
some such serious division between the free man and the slave.
But in Christian society we have always thought the gentleman
a sort of joke, though I admit that in some great crusades
and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke.
But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took
aristocracy seriously.  It is only an occasional non-European
alien (such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite)
who can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously.
It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it
seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type,
but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all
the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects.  It is casual,
it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one
great merit that overlaps even these.  The great and very obvious
merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take
it seriously.

     In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for
an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity
had been there before me.  The whole history of my Utopia has the
same amusing sadness.  I was always rushing out of my architectural
study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there
in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old.  For me, in the
ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer,
"Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings."  Without vanity, I really
think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage
vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered,
with a sigh, that it had been invented already.  But, since it would
be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch,
my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem,
I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating
the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.

     When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about
impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss
an important distinction.  In modern ideal conceptions of society
there are some desires that are possibly not attainable:  but there
are some desires that are not desirable.  That all men should live
in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained.
But that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not
a dream at all; it is a nightmare.  That a man should love all old
women is an ideal that may not be attainable.  But that a man should
regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only
an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained.
I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples;
but I will add the example which has always affected me most.
I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me
the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself.
Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have
any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible
to have any fun.  To take an obvious instance, it would not be
worth while to bet if a bet were not binding.  The dissolution
of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport.
Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted
shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance,
of which much has been said in these pages.  And the perils, rewards,
punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or
the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare.  If I bet
I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting.  If I challenge
I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging.
If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful,
or there is no fun in vowing.  You could not even make a fairy tale
from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale,
might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he
was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo.
For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real;
results must be irrevocable.  Christian marriage is the great
example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it
is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing.
And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask,
and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept
to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously;
I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.

     All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully,
for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties.
But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond
the world.  "You will have real obligations, and therefore real
adventures when you get to my Utopia.  But the hardest obligation
and the steepest adventure is to get there."



VIII THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY


     It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness
of our epoch.  But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is
a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real
laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.  Take one quite
external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars;
but this is not due to human activity but to human repose.
There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people
were simply walking about.  Our world would be more silent if it
were more strenuous.  And this which is true of the apparent physical
bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery;
and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods
to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains.  We know they
are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk
and think for themselves.  It is a good exercise to try for once
in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.
If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is
recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological
evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,"
you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement
of the gray matter inside your skull.  But if you begin "I wish
Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,"
you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged
to think.  The long words are not the hard words, it is the short
words that are hard.  There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the
word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

     But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil
of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially
ruinous and confusing.  This difficulty occurs when the same long word
is used in different connections to mean quite different things.
Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has
one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece
of moral rhetoric.  In the same way the scientific materialists
have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist"
as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt.
So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives"
in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.

     A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection
with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied
to politics and society.  It is often suggested that all Liberals
ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that
is free.  You might just as well say that all idealists ought to be
High Churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high.
You might as well say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass,
or that Broad Churchmen ought to like broad jokes.  The thing is
a mere accident of words.  In actual modern Europe a freethinker
does not mean a man who thinks for himself.  It means a man who,
having thought for himself, has come to one particular class
of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility
of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on.
And none of these ideas are particularly liberal.  Nay, indeed almost
all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose
of this chapter to show.

     In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly
as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly
insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social
practice would be definitely illiberal.  Almost every contemporary
proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal
to bring tyranny into the world.  For freeing the church now
does not even mean freeing it in all directions.  It means
freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific,
dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity.
And every one of these (and we will take them one by one)
can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.  In fact, it is
a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one
comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression.
There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point
in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy.  I may,
it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant.
But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.

     Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes
of the new theology or the modernist church.  We concluded the last
chapter with the discovery of one of them.  The very doctrine which
is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard
of the new democracies of the earth.  The doctrine seemingly
most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people.
In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy
was in the affirmation of original sin.  So it is, I maintain,
in all the other cases.

     I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles.
For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it
is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe
in them.  Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me.
For some inconceivable cause a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always
means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles;
it never means a man who wishes to increase that number.  It always
means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave;
it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came
out of her grave.  It is common to find trouble in a parish because
the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water;
yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman
says that his father walked on the Serpentine?  And this is not
because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort)
miracles cannot be believed in our experience.  It is not because
"miracles do not happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited
with simple faith.  More supernatural things are ALLEGED to have
happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago.
Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did:
the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit
are always being unveiled in modern psychology.  Things that the old
science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly
being asserted by the new science.  The only thing which is still
old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology.
But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has
nothing to do with the evidence for or against them.  It is a lifeless
verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not
in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism.
The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the
Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it.
He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow
him to believe it.  Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man,
uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he
said that there was faith in their honest doubt.  There was indeed.
Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.  In their
doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate;
a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.
The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.

     Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will
speak afterwards.  Here we are only concerned with this clear point;
that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be
on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously
on the side of miracles.  Reform or (in the only tolerable sense)
progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind.
A miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind.  If you
wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously
in the wilderness is impossible--but you cannot think it illiberal.
If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot
think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons;
you can only think it unlikely.  A holiday, like Liberalism, only means
the liberty of man.  A miracle only means the liberty of God.
You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call
your denial a triumph of the liberal idea.  The Catholic Church
believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom.
Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God.
Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up
God as the Apocalypse chained the devil.  It leaves nothing free
in the universe.  And those who assist this process are called the
"liberal theologians."

     This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case.
The assumption that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin
to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth.
If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter;
he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable
and logical, which are much better things.  But if he can believe
in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so;
because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly,
its control over the tyranny of circumstance.  Sometimes this truth
is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men.
For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned
contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach
of faith on the part of nature:  he seems strangely unconscious
that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree,
the doctrine of the omnipotence of will.  Just in the same way he calls
the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he
has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness.
How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet
mean to wish to make it immortal?  No, if it is desirable that man
should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom, then miracles
are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards whether they
are possible.

     But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error;
the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps
the liberation of the world.  The second example of it can be found
in the question of pantheism--or rather of a certain modern attitude
which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism.
But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it
with rather more preparation.

     The things said most confidently by advanced persons to
crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact;
it is actually our truisms that are untrue.  Here is a case.
There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again
at ethical societies and parliaments of religion:  "the religions
of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in
what they teach."  It is false; it is the opposite of the fact.
The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms;
they do greatly differ in what they teach.  It is as if a man
were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the CHURCH TIMES
and the FREETHINKER look utterly different, that one is painted
on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular
and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say
the same thing."  The truth is, of course, that they are alike in
everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing.
An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian
stockbroker in Wimbledon.  You may walk round and round them
and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without
seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly
godless in the umbrella.  It is exactly in their souls that they
are divided.  So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds
of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim:  that they agree
in meaning, but differ in machinery.  It is exactly the opposite.
They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works
with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars,
sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.  They agree in the mode
of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught.
Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples,
just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers.  Creeds that
exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies
that exist to destroy each other both have guns.

     The great example of this alleged identity of all human religions
is the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity.
Those who adopt this theory generally avoid the ethics of most
other creeds, except, indeed, Confucianism, which they like
because it is not a creed.  But they are cautious in their praises
of Mahommedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing
its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes.
They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view of marriage (for which
there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish
worshippers their attitude may even be called cold.  But in the
case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.

     Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always
insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike,
especially Buddhism.  This is generally believed, and I believed
it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.
The reasons were of two kinds:  resemblances that meant nothing
because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which
were not resemblances at all.  The author solemnly explained that
the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike,
or else he described them as alike in some point in which they
are quite obviously different.  Thus, as a case of the first class,
he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice
coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice
to come out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely urged
that these two Eastern teachers, by a singular coincidence, both had
to do with the washing of feet.  You might as well say that it was
a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.  And the
other class of similarities were those which simply were not similar.
Thus this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention
to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama
is rent in pieces out of respect, and the remnants highly valued.
But this is the reverse of a resemblance, for the garments of Christ
were not rent in pieces out of respect, but out of derision;
and the remnants were not highly valued except for what they would
fetch in the rag shops.  It is rather like alluding to the obvious
connection between the two ceremonies of the sword:  when it taps
a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head.  It is not at all
similar for the man.  These scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed
matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical
resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much
or not proving anything.  That Buddhism approves of mercy or of
self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like Christianity;
it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence.
Buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all
sane human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess.
But to say that Buddhism and Christianity give the same philosophy
of these things is simply false.  All humanity does agree that we are
in a net of sin.  Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out.
But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two
institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly
as Buddhism and Christianity.

     Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though
unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike,
there was one thing about them that always perplexed me;
I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art.
I do not mean in its technical style of representation,
but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent.
No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint
in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple.
The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest
statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut,
while the Christian saint always has them very wide open.
The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes
are heavy and sealed with sleep.  The mediaeval saint's body is
wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive.
There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that
produced symbols so different as that.  Granted that both images
are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be
a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances.
The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards.
The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.  If we
follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.

     A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay,
announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all
faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was
quite prepared to say what it was.  According to Mrs. Besant this
universal Church is simply the universal self.  It is the doctrine
that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of
individuality between man and man.  If I may put it so, she does not
tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours.
That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of
the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement.
And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more
violently disagree.  I want to love my neighbour not because he is I,
but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world,
not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self,
but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different.
If souls are separate love is possible.  If souls are united love
is obviously impossible.  A man may be said loosely to love himself,
but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must
be a monotonous courtship.  If the world is full of real selves,
they can be really unselfish selves.  But upon Mrs. Besant's principle
the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.

     It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism
and immanence.  And it is just here that Christianity is on the
side of humanity and liberty and love.  Love desires personality;
therefore love desires division.  It is the instinct of Christianity
to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces,
because they are living pieces.  It is her instinct to say "little
children love one another" rather than to tell one large person
to love himself.  This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism
and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality
is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God,
the whole point of his cosmic idea.  The world-soul of the Theosophists
asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it.
But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it
in order that he might love it.  The oriental deity is like a giant
who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it;
but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange
generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its
own accord shake hands with him.  We come back to the same tireless
note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies
are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which
separates and sets free.  No other philosophy makes God actually
rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.
But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God
and man is sacred, because this is eternal.  That a man may love God
it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved,
but a man to love him.  All those vague theosophical minds for whom
the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which
shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels,
which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a
sundering sword.  The saying rings entirely true even considered
as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real
love is bound to beget hate.  It is as true of democratic fraternity
as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy;
but real love has always ended in bloodshed.  Yet there is another
and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance
of our Lord.  According to Himself the Son was a sword separating
brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other.
But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning
separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other
at last.

     This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the
eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture.  This is the meaning
of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image.  The Christian
saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world;
he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment.
But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things?--
since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can
hardly be astonished at itself.  There have been many pantheist poems
suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones.  The pantheist
cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really
distinct from himself.  Our immediate business here, however, is with
the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards,
towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general
need for ethical activity and social reform.  And surely its
effect is sufficiently obvious.  There is no real possibility
of getting out of pantheism, any special impulse to moral action.
For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good
as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing
is greatly preferable to another.  Swinburne in the high summer
of his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty.
In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the inspiration of Garibaldi
and the revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the
purer God which should wither up all the priests of the world:

"What doest thou now      Looking Godward to cry      I am I,
thou art thou,      I am low, thou art high,      I am thou that thou
seekest to find him, find thou but thyself, thou art I."

     Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants
are as much the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba
of Naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself"
is identical with the ultimate good in all things.  The truth is
that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly
due to the western theology that says "I am I, thou art thou."
The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in
the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples.  The worshippers
of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba.  The worshippers of Swinburne's god
have covered Asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant.
The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is
looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and It.
It is a rational occupation:  but it is not true in theory and not
true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon.
That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity
(the command that we should WATCH and pray) has expressed itself
both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics:
but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different
from ourselves, a deity that disappears.  Certainly the most sagacious
creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper
rings of the labyrinth of our own ego.  But only we of Christendom
have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains:
and we have killed all monsters in the chase.

     Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value
democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much
more likely to find them in the old theology than the new.
If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy:  especially in this
matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R.J.Campbell),
the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection,
self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--Tibet.  By insisting
specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity,
moral and political adventure, righteous indignation--Christendom.
Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself.
By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.

     If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned
we shall find the case the same.  It is the same, for instance,
in the deep matter of the Trinity.  Unitarians (a sect never to be
mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual
dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the
accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude.
But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in
the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity.  The complex
God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect;
but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty
of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet.  The god
who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.
The HEART of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly
much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather
round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy
pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty
and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world.
For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not
well for man to be alone."  The social instinct asserted itself
everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled
by the Western idea of monks.  So even asceticism became brotherly;
and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent.
If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly
healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian.
For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence)--to us God
Himself is a society.  It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology,
and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would
not be relevant to do so here.  Suffice it to say here that this triple
enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside;
that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart:
but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns,
come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who
with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world.  For it is not well
for God to be alone.

     Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger
of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds.  To hope
for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their
salvation is inevitable.  It is tenable, but it is not specially
favourable to activity or progress.  Our fighting and creative society
ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact
that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.
To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark:
but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet.  Europe ought rather
to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it.
Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances.
To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science
or a plan, which must end up in a certain way.  But to a Christian
existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way.  In a thrilling
novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten
by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill
that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals.  The hero must (so to speak)
be an eatable hero.  So Christian morals have always said to the man,
not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he
didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man
"damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call
him damnable.

     All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads.
The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug,
all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments.
The true philosophy is concerned with the instant.  Will a man
take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about,
if you enjoy thinking.  The aeons are easy enough to think about,
any one can think about them.  The instant is really awful:
and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant,
that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology
dealt much with hell.  It is full of DANGER, like a boy's book:
it is at an immortal crisis.  There is a great deal of real similarity
between popular fiction and the religion of the western people.
If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say
what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the
Catholic churches.  Life (according to the faith) is very like a
serial story in a magazine:  life ends with the promise (or menace)
"to be continued in our next."  Also, with a noble vulgarity,
life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment.
For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

     But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it
so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will.
You cannot finish a sum how you like.  But you can finish a story
how you like.  When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus
there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover.
But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to
Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined.  And Christendom has
excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted
on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much
to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this
is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating
crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment
like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice whereas disease is not.  If you say that you are going to cure
a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is,
"Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want
to be profligates."  A man may lie still and be cured of a malady.
But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin;
on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.
The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word
which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood;
"sinner" is in the active.  If a man is to be saved from influenza,
he may be a patient.  But if he is to be saved from forging,
he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT.  He must be personally
impatient with forgery.  All moral reform must start in the active
not the passive will.

     Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion.  In so far
as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions
which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage
the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it.
If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right
things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right.
But if we particularly want to MAKE them go right, we must insist
that they may go wrong.

     Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common
modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ.
The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end.
But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary.
That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we
knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast
for all insurgents for ever.  Christianity is the only religion
on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.
Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God,
must have been a rebel as well as a king.  Alone of all creeds,
Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean
that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break.
In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it
is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my
phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the
greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional
suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way)
went not only through agony, but through doubt.  It is written,
"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God."  No; but the Lord thy God may
tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.
In a garden Satan tempted man:  and in a garden God tempted God.
He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror
of pessimism.  When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven,
it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross:
the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.  And now let
the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all
the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable
recurrence and of unalterable power.  They will not find another god
who has himself been in revolt.  Nay, (the matter grows too difficult
for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god.
They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation;
only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be
an atheist.

     These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy,
of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of
revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it
is obviously only an abstract assertion.  Its main advantage
is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies.
Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology.  It can always
be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air.
But it is not so high in the air but that great archers spend their
whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and their last arrows;
there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization
if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale.  This is the last
and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will
use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers,
and the firebrands that burn their own homes.  Men who begin to fight
the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging
away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.
This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it.
Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove
that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to
maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants,
from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity.
I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no
personal existence after death that he falls back on the position
that he has no personal existence now.  He invokes Buddhism and says
that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he
cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool.
I have known people who protested against religious education with
arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must
grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.  I have known
people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing
that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes.
They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed
their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with,
though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this
world for love of the other.  But what are we to say of the fanatic
who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other?  He sacrifices
the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God.
He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert
the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.
He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live,
for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived
at all.

     And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt.  Its opponents
only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear.
They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political
and common courage sense.  They do not prove that Adam was not
responsible to God; how could they prove it?  They only prove
(from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia.
They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God;
they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men.
With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain
that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make
certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here.
With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong
they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make
it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove.
Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes
are the fathers of all worldly confusion.  The secularists have not
wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things,
if that is any comfort to them.  The Titans did not scale heaven;
but they laid waste the world.



IX AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER


     The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that
orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of
morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty,
innovation and advance.  If we wish to pull down the prosperous
oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility;
we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.  If we want
to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot
do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can
do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.
If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and
tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting
on the Immanent God and the Inner Light:  for these are at best
reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the
transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means
divine discontent.  If we wish particularly to assert the idea
of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we
shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian.  If we
desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall
insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is
ultimately unreal.  And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified,
we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified,
rather than a mere sage or hero.  Above all, if we wish to protect
the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas.
The RULES of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member.
The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

     And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes
the whole matter.  A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree
with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found
a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well.
You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely
asserted in Original Sin; all right.  You have found a truth in
the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you.  You are convinced that
worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive;
I congratulate them.  But even supposing that those doctrines
do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave
the doctrines?  Granted that all modern society is trusting
the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness;
granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because
(believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot
you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall?
If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents
a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea
of danger and leave the idea of damnation?  If you see clearly
the kernel of common-sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy,
why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?
Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I,
as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using)
why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can
define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest,
all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?"
This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a
pleasure to try to answer it.

     The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist.
I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.
If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual
convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd
psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise
of freewill if I believe that he has got it.  But I am in this matter
yet more definitely a rationalist.  I do not propose to turn this
book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad
to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more
obvious arena.  Here I am only giving an account of my own growth
in spiritual certainty.  But I may pause to remark that the more I
saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology
the less I thought of them.  I mean that having found the moral
atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked
at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation
and found them to be common nonsense.  In case the argument should
be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I
will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions
on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.

     If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe
in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an
intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity."  I believe in it
quite rationally upon the evidence.  But the evidence in my case,
as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that
alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small
but unanimous facts.  The secularist is not to be blamed because
his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy;
it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind.
I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy
from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape,
and one old friend.  The very fact that the things are of different
kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point
to one conclusion.  Now, the non-Christianity of the average
educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up
of these loose but living experiences.  I can only say that my
evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind
as his evidences against it.  For when I look at these various
anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true.
I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows
the other way.  Let us take cases.  Many a sensible modern man
must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such
converging convictions as these:  first, that men, with their shape,
structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts,
a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion
arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies
with bitterness and gloom.  Those three anti-Christian arguments
are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate;
and they all converge.  The only objection to them (I discover)
is that they are all untrue.  If you leave off looking at books
about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then
(if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic
or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not
how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is.  It is the
monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.
That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being
so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock
and the enigma.  That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the
philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing
with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve
marble or carve mutton.  People talk of barbaric architecture and
debased art.  But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory
even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures,
though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes.
Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior
to ours.  They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth
only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization.  Who ever
found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?
Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens
of old?  No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have
a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.  We talk of wild animals;
but man is the only wild animal.  It is man that has broken out.
All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability
of the tribe or type.  All other animals are domestic animals;
man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.
So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything,
a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that
all religion begins.

     It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance
rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine
began in some darkness and terror.  When I did attempt to examine
the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there
were none.  Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man;
for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors
choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once
innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is
no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence
is very much the other way.  In the earliest legends we have,
such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice
is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new;
as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods.
History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder
in its earliest time.  There is no tradition of progress; but the whole
human race has a tradition of the Fall.  Amusingly enough, indeed,
the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity.
Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot
be true because every race of mankind remembers it.  I cannot keep
pace with these paradoxes.

     And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same;
the view that priests darken and embitter the world.  I look at the
world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe
which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries
where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art
in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls;
but they are the walls of a playground.  Christianity is the only
frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.  We might fancy
some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island
in the sea.  So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge
they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the
place the noisiest of nurseries.  But the walls were knocked down,
leaving the naked peril of the precipice.  They did not fall over;
but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in
terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

     Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make
an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round.  I am left saying,
"Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man
among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some
ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan
joy in the countries of the Catholic Church."  One explanation,
at any rate, covers all three:  the theory that twice was the natural
order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people
now call "psychic."  Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power
or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of Nature;
and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting)
Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man.
This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards;
and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is
the little continent where Christ has His Church.  I know it will
be said that Japan has become progressive.  But how can this be an
answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really
only mean, "Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much
to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark.
I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being
guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something;
only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed
to something else.

     I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian
arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur
of the moment another.  These are the kind of thoughts which in
combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak
and diseased.  First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature,
sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second,
that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance,
and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people
still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people
as the Irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.
I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing:  that when I
looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions
were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I
looked at the New Testament.  There I found an account, not in the
least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands
clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder
and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils,
passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a
sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--
and always like a god.  Christ had even a literary style of his own,
not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious
use of the A FORTIORI.  His "how much more" is piled one upon
another like castle upon castle in the clouds.  The diction used
ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive.
But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque;
it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled
into the sea.  Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself
a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their
coats for them.  That he used other even wilder words on the side
of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also,
if anything, rather increases the violence.  We cannot even explain
it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one
consistent channel.  The maniac is generally a monomaniac.  Here we
must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given;
Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions
may blaze beside each other.  The one explanation of the Gospel
language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one
who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

     I take in order the next instance offered:  the idea that
Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages.  Here I did not satisfy myself
with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history.
And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the
Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.
It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.
If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery
the answer is simple:  it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean
civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire.  The world
was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun,
when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.  It is perfectly true
that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that
the ship came up again:  repainted and glittering, with the cross
still at the top.  This is the amazing thing the religion did:
it turned a sunken ship into a submarine.  The ark lived under the load
of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans,
we arose and remembered Rome.  If our faith had been a mere fad
of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight,
and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have
never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.
But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and
was also the first life of the new.  She took the people who were
forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch.  In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said
of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it.  How can
we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?
The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

     I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance
taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened
or made stagnant by superstition.  I only added it because this
is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be
a statement of falsehood.  It is constantly said of the Irish that
they are impractical.  But if we refrain for a moment from looking
at what is said about them and look at what is DONE about them,
we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite
painfully successful.  The poverty of their country, the minority
of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked
to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much
with such conditions.  The Nationalists were the only minority
that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply
out of its path.  The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these
islands who have forced their masters to disgorge.  These people,
whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be
squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character,
the case was the same.  Irishmen are best at the specially
HARD professions--the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.
In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion:
the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not
looked at the facts.  The sceptic is too credulous; he believes
in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.  Again the three questions
left me with three very antagonistic questions.  The average sceptic
wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel,
the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political
impracticability of the Celtic Christians.  But I wanted to ask,
and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this
incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth
like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying
civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead;
this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry
with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask,
while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island
of the Empire can actually help itself?"

     There is an answer:  it is an answer to say that the energy
is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least
one of the results of a real psychical disturbance.  The highest
gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such
as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese.  Nevertheless it is
no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited
incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest
intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume.
All other societies die finally and with dignity.  We die daily.
We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic
Christendom a sort of unnatural life:  it could be explained as a
supernatural life.  It could be explained as an awful galvanic life
working in what would have been a corpse.  For our civilization OUGHT
to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability,
in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome.  That is the weird inspiration
of our estate:  you and I have no business to be here at all.  We are
all REVENANTS; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about.
Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria
and Babylon, something entered into its body.  And Europe has had
a strange life--it is not too much to say that it has had the JUMPS--
ever since.

     I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order
to convey the main contention--that my own case for Christianity is
rational; but it is not simple.  It is an accumulation of varied
facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary
agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a
multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons.  He doubts because
the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is
demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they
do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because
nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because
Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly
bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving
away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the
supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.

     But among these million facts all flowing one way there is,
of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be
treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence
of the supernatural.  In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy
of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it
is orderly.  A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing
as a disorderly thing.  But my own positive conviction that personal
creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit,
in a sense, undiscussable.  I will not call it a faith or an intuition,
for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly
an intellectual conviction; but it is a PRIMARY intellectual
conviction like the certainty of self of the good of living.
Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical;
the phrase is not worth fighting about.  But my belief that miracles
have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe
in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.
Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires
to be stated and cleared up.  Somehow or other an extraordinary
idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them
coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only
in connection with some dogma.  The fact is quite the other way.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they
have evidence for them.  The disbelievers in miracles deny them
(rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman
when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old
apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.  The plain,
popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost
exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord.
Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy
agnosticism about both.  Still you could fill the British Museum with
evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.
If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human
testimony in favour of the supernatural.  If you reject it, you can
only mean one of two things.  You reject the peasant's story about
the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story
is a ghost story.  That is, you either deny the main principle
of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism--
the abstract impossibility of miracle.  You have a perfect right
to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.  It is we
Christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you rationalists
who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.
But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking
impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times,
I have come to the conclusion that they occurred.  All argument
against these plain facts is always argument in a circle.  If I say,
"Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest
certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious";
if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only
ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.  If I say "a
peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous."
If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is--that they see ghosts.
Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it;
and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the
unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself
generally forgets to use it.

     He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories
a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance:  in short,
that the miracle could only come to him who believed in it.
It may be so, and if it is so how are we to test it?  If we are
inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless
to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith.
If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a
most healthy right to laugh.  But they have no right to judge.
Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk;
still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards,
it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk.
Suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red
mist before their eyes.  Suppose sixty excellent householders swore
that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud:  surely it would
be absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time."
They might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "How the blazes
could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?"
So the saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "Suppose that the
question is whether believers can see visions--even then, if you
are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers."
You are still arguing in a circle--in that old mad circle with which this
book began.

     The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of
common sense and of ordinary historical imagination:  not of any final
physical experiment.  One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless
piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions"
in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena.  If we are asking
whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous
to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living
souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other.
The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence
of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the
existence of love.  If you choose to say, "I will believe that Miss
Brown called her fiance a periwinkle or, any other endearing term,
if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists,"
then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions,
you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it."
It is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised
that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies
do not arise.  It is as if I said that I could not tell if there
was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted
on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.

     As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come
about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must
in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen.
I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts:  the fact that the men who
encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers,
but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious;
the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents
but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits
such things more and more every day.  Science will even admit
the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit
the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.
I suggest the Regalvanisation.  But the strongest of all is
the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are
never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of
materialist dogmatism--I may say materialist mysticism.  The sceptic
always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need
not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed.
For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted
in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or
trick miracles.  That is not an argument at all, good or bad.
A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as
a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England--
if anything, it proves its existence.

     Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur
(my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide
with one of the worst mental evils of the age.  The greatest
disaster of the nineteenth century was this:  that men began
to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good."
They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was
to grow in virtue.  When scientific evolution was announced,
some feared that it would encourage mere animality.  It did worse:
it encouraged mere spirituality.  It taught men to think that so long
as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.
But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.  A man of genius,
very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly.
Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of
the angels.  He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels.
He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality;
but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes
of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery,
and contempt of all obvious good.  Between this sunken pride
and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose,
spirits of shapes and sizes.  Man, in encountering them,
must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering
any other varied types in any other distant continent.  It must
be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate.
If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly,
that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary
closed carriage.  He would suppose that the coachman on the box
was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and
imprisoned captive.  So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time,
we may mistake who is uppermost.  It is not enough to find the gods;
they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods.
We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena--
in order to discover which are really natural.  In this light I
find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
quite practical and clear.  It does not trouble me to be told
that the Hebrew god was one among many.  I know he was, without any
research to tell me so.  Jehovah and Baal looked equally important,
just as the sun and the moon looked the same size.  It is only
slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master,
and the small moon only our satellite.  Believing that there
is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world
of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good.
Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at
the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the
land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water,
and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity,
where I am literally at home.  And there is only one such place to
be found.

     I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such
an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena
of apologetics, a ground of belief.  In pure records of experiment (if
these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is
evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler
miracles belong to our tradition.  But I will not pretend that this curt
discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking
the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.

     I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting
to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it
as a scheme.  And that is this:  that the Christian Church in its
practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one.
It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly
teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape
of the mitre.  One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed;
some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven.  Plato has
told you a truth; but Plato is dead.  Shakespeare has startled you
with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more.
But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living,
to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow,
or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a
single song.  The man who lives in contact with what he believes
to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato
and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.  He is always expecting
to see some truth that he has never seen before.  There is one
only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel
of the life in which we all began.  When your father told you,
walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet,
you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy.  When the
bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence.
When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude,
barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep
delicate truths that flowers smell."  No: you believed your father,
because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing
that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth
to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father,
it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine,
to whom this book is dedicated.  Now, when society is in a rather
futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much
every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact
that they alone rule education until education becomes futile:
for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late
to teach him anything.  The real thing has been done already,
and thank God it is nearly always done by women.  Every man
is womanised, merely by being born.  They talk of the masculine woman;
but every man is a feminised man.  And if ever men walk to Westminster
to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join
their procession.

     For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact;
that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority,
I was most full of flame and adventure.  Exactly because when my
mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did
come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me
a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in
some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true.  I went
out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me,
precisely because I had a clue to it:  if I had held no clue it would
not have been terrible, but tame.  A mere unmeaning wilderness is
not even impressive.  But the garden of childhood was fascinating,
exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found
out in its turn.  Inch by inch I might discover what was the object
of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture
as to why my parents kept a cat.

     So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not
merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world
once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic
shapes of cat and rake; I look at everything with the old elvish
ignorance and expectancy.  This or that rite or doctrine may look
as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience
that such things end somehow in grass and flowers.  A clergyman may
be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating,
for there must be some strange reason for his existence.  I give
one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive
kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has
certainly been a note of historic Christianity.  But when I look
not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm
is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note
of high human nature in many spheres.  The Greeks felt virginity
when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals,
the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to
the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world.
Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence)
has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence--
the great modern worship of children.  For any man who loves children
will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.
With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority,
I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather
that I am defective, while the church is universal.  It takes
all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate.
But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates,
I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music.  The best
human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach.
Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have
not been told the sweet or terrible name.  But I may be told it
any day.

     This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting
the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out
of the religion.  I do it because the thing has not merely told this
truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.
All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true;
only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does
not seem to be true, but is true.  Alone of all creeds it is
convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right,
like my father in the garden.  Theosophists for instance will preach
an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait
for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the
cruelty of caste.  For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins,
people will tend to despise the beggar.  But Christianity preaches
an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we
wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder
of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity
the beggar and distrust the king.  Men of science offer us health,
an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover
that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only
afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise
highly beneficial to our health.  It is only afterwards that we
realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance.
The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness.
The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be
the very props of the people.  The outer ring of Christianity
is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests;
but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life
dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity
is the only frame for pagan freedom.  But in the modern philosophy
the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously
artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

     And its despair is this, that it does not really believe
that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot
hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots.  A man
cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy.  But a man can
expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land
of authority.  One can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism;
but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through
a forest of doctrine and design.  Here everything has a story tied
to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house;
for it is my father's house.  I end where I began--at the right end.
I have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy.  I have come
into my second childhood.

     But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has
one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole
matter I will attempt to express it.  All the real argument about
religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside
down can tell when he comes right way up.  The primary paradox of
Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane
or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.  In Sir Oliver Lodge's
interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were:
"What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?"
I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions;
but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.
To the question, "What are you?"  I could only answer, "God knows."
And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?"  I could answer
with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself."
This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have
never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves,
but even more natural to us than ourselves.  And there is really
no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these
pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door.  It is only
since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation.
But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea
of joy.

     It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity
of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure
sorrow and Christianity pure joy.  Such conflicts mean nothing and
lead nowhere.  Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow;
the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things
are balanced or divided.  And the really interesting thing is this,
that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached
the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.
The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus
or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten
by a grateful humanity.  But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life,
not about its origin.  To the pagan the small things are as sweet
as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things
are as bitter as the sea.  When the pagan looks at the very core of the
cosmos he is struck cold.  Behind the gods, who are merely despotic,
sit the fates, who are deadly.  Nay, the fates are worse than deadly;
they are dead.  And when rationalists say that the ancient world
was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view
they are right.  For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened
with incurable despair.  It is profoundly true that the ancient world
was more modern than the Christian.  The common bond is in the fact
that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence,
about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least.
I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable
about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else.
I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at
peace about everything--they were at war about everything else.
But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos,
then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody
streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden
of Epicurus.  Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides,
but he lived in a gayer universe.

     The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things,
but sad about the big ones.  Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma
defiantly) it is not native to man to be so.  Man is more himself,
man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him,
and grief the superficial.  Melancholy should be an innocent interlude,
a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent
pulsation of the soul.  Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday;
joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.  Yet, according to
the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic,
this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled.
Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted,
it must cling to one corner of the world.  Grief ought to be
a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread
through an unthinkable eternity.  This is what I call being born
upside down.  The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy;
for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain
is in the abyss.  To the modern man the heavens are actually below
the earth.  The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head;
which is a very weak pedestal to stand on.  But when he has found
his feet again he knows it.  Christianity satisfies suddenly
and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up;
satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes
something gigantic and sadness something special and small.
The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot;
the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.
Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like
the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy
as a sort of merciful comedy:  because the frantic energy of divine
things would knock us down like a drunken farce.  We can take our
own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities
of the angels.  So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence,
while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

     Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic
secret of the Christian.  And as I close this chaotic volume I open
again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I
am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.  The tremendous figure
which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other,
above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.  His pathos
was natural, almost casual.  The Stoics, ancient and modern,
were proud of concealing their tears.  He never concealed His tears;
He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as
the far sight of His native city.  Yet He concealed something.
Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining
their anger.  He never restrained His anger.  He flung furniture
down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected
to escape the damnation of Hell.  Yet He restrained something.
I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality
a thread that must be called shyness.  There was something that He hid
from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.  There was something
that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.
There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when
He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was
His mirth.



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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Browning, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Robert Browning

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: August 31, 2004 [EBook #13342]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BROWNING ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG Distributed
Proofreaders







         ROBERT BROWNING


               BY

         G.K. CHESTERTON




          CONTENTS

          CHAPTER I
BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE               1

          CHAPTER II
EARLY WORKS                         34

          CHAPTER III
BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE           55

          CHAPTER IV
BROWNING IN ITALY                   81

          CHAPTER V
BROWNING IN LATER LIFE             105

          CHAPTER VI
BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST      133

          CHAPTER VII
"THE RING AND THE BOOK"            160

          CHAPTER VIII
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING         177

INDEX                              203





ROBERT BROWNING




CHAPTER I

BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE


On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said
and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of
facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public
and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of
character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and
publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more
difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His
work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much
greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to
understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand
it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was
never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we
may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly
hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to
understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of
his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation,
and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man
like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about
the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things
growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote,
probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to
Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and
received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people
knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows
what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely
false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a
keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and
he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does,
in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's
attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man
had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he
could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked
him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he
could have given an account of the man and an account of his father
and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of
himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he
would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.

This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of
the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly
in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The
same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs.
Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a
mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally
remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of
the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of
the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any
secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be
inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality
of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of
his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map
of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some
particular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go
on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert
Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple
temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not
decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative.

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and
grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole
family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle
class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in
them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity.

This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some
tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of
all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant
ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given
them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main
matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his
name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond
a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with
a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely
because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring
anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages.
Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view
which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the
last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact,
there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his
contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt,
specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This
suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other
way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or
indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman
to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other
intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to
every people in which he was interested, he must have been of
extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more
sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the
negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in
reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a
Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly
dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does
not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this,
except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked
exceedingly unlike a negro.

There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as
there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them,
be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in
history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are
misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether
he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether
the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or
black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a
different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind
of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the
sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for
a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not
be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish
king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction,
about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three
generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is
also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family
from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to
catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of
all things--social tone.

It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we
could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we
looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers
that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic
carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic
carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all
the three races above named could be connected with Browning's
personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a
race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got
his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line
in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the
fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory
about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a
crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out
how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we
should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of
the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of
colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure

      "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,"

as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for there
really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic
scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid
our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely
fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested,
here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble
temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily
see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities.
But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his
heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any
three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen,
should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he
inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets?
If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the
old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable
travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have
said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the
Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This
over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret
hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men
sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and,
like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the
storms and the falling stars.

A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer
if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr.
Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been
conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the
beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of
Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there
seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's
descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the
main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin,
they were so much the more like the great majority of English
middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be
spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that
admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest
in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that
aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other
people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only
within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in
their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they
exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in
the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the
suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of
Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a
crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the
Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more
cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of
every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found
similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell
that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations
back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell
family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be
better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story,
Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is
treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common
sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she
was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and
therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was
brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern
politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough
an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods."

It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear
account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much
more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central
and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to
veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman
of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien
blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more
characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may
not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was,
without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class.
Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything
but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual
tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and
the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an
Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the
earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's
Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he
remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he
came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was
lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any
opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and
her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city
merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and
hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands
and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon
bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled
up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the
planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always
the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with
a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his
class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.

It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can
speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate
forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert
Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance
of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have
of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is
the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness,
is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert
Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father
of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important
commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position
however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery.
Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only
disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of
humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent
him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that
he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about
religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by
joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of
the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom
duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a
continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while
he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the
seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century,
he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture.
Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and
painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many
kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was
absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century.
He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased
adjuring him to model himself upon Pope.

He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the
eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in
moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral
practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order
to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later
economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy
their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men
of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind
of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold
ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous
Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of
man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive
fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of
mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth;
but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they
did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in
our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility.

Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a
German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One
of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union
of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it
is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical
danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother
unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very
strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle
called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a
very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of
Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections
of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines
two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of
this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear
to look at places where she had walked.

Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum.
In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which,
according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave
because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he
undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which
again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did
not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took
place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and
most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream
fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we
test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities,
Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English
literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we
shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived;
that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he
has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used
to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy.
Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of
knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the
Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle
Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and
important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such
knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child,
taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he
lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or
wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence,
when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no
reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game.
His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else,
left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.

Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind
of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married
two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would
be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of
the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_.
A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only
sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her
also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to
have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he
emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made
his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid.
Browning began to live in the life of his own age.

As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this
there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual
circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were
moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary
area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound
change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as
that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend
constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their
characters practically formed in a period long previous to their
appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan,
and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the
full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden
and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create
the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his
first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that
Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as
the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on
Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he
passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic
Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for
some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in
short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.

The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It
may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive;
but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by
its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that
period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is
the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity,
liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping
him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great
Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation
of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as
for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful
emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to
creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes
of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the
middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete
and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which
has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The
Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he
thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict
republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal
against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a
wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was
rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race
of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle
class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this
obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical
ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of
furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they
kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre
garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great
men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time
living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly
visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a
blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a
poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of
the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all
sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle
classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic
lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired
office-boys.

Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in
the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new
poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this,
because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim
moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of
Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was
first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and
invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that
has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often
fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding
which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo
called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a
buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew
better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out
to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the
Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was
not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a
philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in
order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to
disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry
above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and
stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.

The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the
quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not
find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by
learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel
if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume
called _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much
splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were
indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances
in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the
actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than
any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas
Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by
his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a
strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or
apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at
this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of
physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him
says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair
falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in
connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely
romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for
example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across
country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the
Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express
itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the
spirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Such
other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding
across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting
aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood
to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that
suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he
was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best
of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly
irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At the
end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of
gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing
against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since
become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was
intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised
himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these
two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a
Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who
really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most
typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to
find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so
vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood.
With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made
intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as
the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early
days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth
was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in
great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a
young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now
except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception
of Camberwell."

Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that
there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning
and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of
things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of
course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an
optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the
elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all
to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert
Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless
couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the
world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that
he cannot understand.

The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to
this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appeared
anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile
poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.
Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an
old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's
Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find
anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a
boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral
waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else
has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about
confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest
hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that
particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and
beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome
reading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies
in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of
all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of
letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a
morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a
contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual
measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be
quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the
story as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter
and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one
grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin.
The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards
all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later
that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant
explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was
one of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in after
years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity
of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed
of it. "This," he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple that
remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would
be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_
was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain
circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world.
He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was
ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian
Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is
spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language,
Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his
manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid
world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its
endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend
destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to
an older generation and a statelier school of manners and
scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and
occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible
uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the
courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for
himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of
his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised
that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then
old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was
not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men.

Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all
directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de
Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed
energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of
philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write
a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection,
indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history
of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible
deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic
enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he
himself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows an
enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of
Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a
peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life,
an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years
afterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in
their Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader
of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic
of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in
their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same
eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote
_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find
any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the
favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy
and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about
Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or
Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects
that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he
wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some
extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme
of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not
put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of
mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of
Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his
that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the
disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select
any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose
investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world.
He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire
and pity, the _à priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the
academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to
imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the
ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild
investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown
and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful
misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who
understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was
right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the
spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character
of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and
disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the
intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a
perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in
the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even
painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had
chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the
critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon
the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he
had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been
possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with
truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society.
But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval
magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not
satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it
uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us
barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign
civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared
for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the
researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially
fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his
roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that
the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is
quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages
was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and
reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden
of modern progress is a kitchen garden.

It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a
better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus.
Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect;
Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of
over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important
deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usual
accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that
he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual
disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking
knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method
he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the
element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to
have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one
answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play
designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the
age of twenty-three.

_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the
literary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before he
had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the
minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his
standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated John
Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended
its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works.
John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested
himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among
other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant
Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary
stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man
for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust.
Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got
on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little
things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good
humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most
other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment
to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining
with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic
impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all
companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion;
"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter
beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle
domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she
was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he
once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy,
put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity
that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural
explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was
characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on
that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on
the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its
friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning
was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled
Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never
to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would
have been four miserable people instead of two.

Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun
to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than
that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living
from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man
feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction
towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and
in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a
great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and
prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as
Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play,
and selected for his subject "Strafford."

In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a
trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very
earliest of the really important works in English literature which
are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time
of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the
opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so
lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the
friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two
men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the
same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt
the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak
judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger
and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both
parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is
in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and
Puritan historical outlook.

For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of
all literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved once
at least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_, and something like
it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been
done excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a play
are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the
principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols,
arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It
is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob
upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a
floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician
has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but
of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his
own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the
faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this
sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible.
That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos
and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots,
the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a
stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their
enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example
than the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possibly
tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford,
politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest
men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English
official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something
which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in
reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it
would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been
born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to
reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all
know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that
Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while
crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and
character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon
his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is
unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of
the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political
problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for
example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It
would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five
acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as
that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age
of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest
commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be
satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr.
Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming
personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's
action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some
injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr.
Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that
suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the
writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one.
Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much
the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public
grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the
case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I.
may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is
a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In
Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit,
and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of
despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders
of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts
at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public
spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility.
It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people,
when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of
humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything
themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with
mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in
personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost
faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we
could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost
without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not
public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does
not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too
little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great
despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even
Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter
into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of
going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not
grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends
either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men
Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat
narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making
him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great
public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed,
when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the
friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because
Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such
palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics
altogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_,
which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic
instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_,
again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic
aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed
it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in
the world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and
as rapid as the Derby.

One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long
controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the
question of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, were
successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what
constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their
quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as
_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is
to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it
was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are
hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many
excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the
definite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ from
the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite
enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position.
As a classical and established personality he did not come into his
kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was
near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric
personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts
of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time.

Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally
apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She
describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her
father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt
politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very
characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's
social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very
handsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to
lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion
and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success,
eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to
achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the
Browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious
young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure
romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans
and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent
vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed
itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such
as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all
things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which
follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising
foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet
impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he
walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European
literature and offered to sing.




CHAPTER II

EARLY WORKS


In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majority
of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a
reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history,
a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best
expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read
_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello
was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story
of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem--

    "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,"

and the last line--

    "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,"

were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were
lies.

Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends
is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an
illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a
little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed
and began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly
pale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health
is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive
lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently
gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem;
and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he
heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether
accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception
accorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears no
resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation
that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been
authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom
it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ enters
into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author
whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.

Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be
found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question
very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by
_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as
hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason
of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity
is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged
in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are
at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In
the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all
the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and
very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man
who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way.
He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and
even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a
certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism,
his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough
that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity,
his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his
prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But
everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of
thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of
conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial,
talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative
quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him
found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One
lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd
and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day
with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore
disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant
financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they
all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk
cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He
talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to
give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost
invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental
superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was
mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole
epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the
literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have
therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that
Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and
contempt of his readers.

There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary
theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of
fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement
that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later
poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the
indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached,
was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his
works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the
second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It
was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and
publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this
horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any
knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the
conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite
origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not
unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was
humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but
because to him they were obvious.

A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself
incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the
difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he
talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet
was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid?
But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does
not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think
that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming
with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like
himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of
this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment
that has ever been paid to the average man.

In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author
a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not
speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads
him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one
understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she
believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his
own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his
own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories
unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example.
Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea
that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a
kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that
churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed
in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in
the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general
idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very
silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its
theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became
instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under
the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but
quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You
will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one
in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest
notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example,
for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did
not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for
a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as
obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down
some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest
volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the
meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the
idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have
appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything
valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us
which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall
paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the
thinker that it becomes startling to the world.

It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground
of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about
him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different,
and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he
was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the
eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For
his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived
upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his
followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself.
"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a
Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at
every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who
would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and
abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in
himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But
his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He
conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great
fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain
occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted
as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His
virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words
and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the
æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more
objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with
literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He
was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.

The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as
a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public,
but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially
humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from
each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning
with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause
lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat,
and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of
_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part
of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that
before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of
Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with
an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all
human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in
mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that
impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a
student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning
in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play
cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first
person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra
with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it
talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of
_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant
advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented
by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_
stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent
phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All
three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament
finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject
of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant.
This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in
ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out
in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute
mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed
by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are
looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early
impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always
slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own
conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon.
So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to
write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood
poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul.

_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive
load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon
Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into
a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying
in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses
better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no
one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is
indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only
the letters and to lose the man.

When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new
voice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among
Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his
spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which
a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared,
and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the
discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man
does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson
Crusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the
exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of
the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and
pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be
professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints
of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love
of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a
fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously
upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The
love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as
the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life
is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the
richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And
this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt
keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire
after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world
scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind
should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a
criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded
Christ. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty
and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has
written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing
through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies
of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless
artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he
dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of
anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a
lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these
mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping
upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct
which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good
work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she
is.

There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth a
moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the
understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance,
scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary
artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a
disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers
regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of
maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed
to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of
thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will
take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form
very seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminently
remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected
but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one
figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the
laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had
credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a
poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should
also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary
mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and,
as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an
artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole
beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in
the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The
whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is
utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and
transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of
them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in
its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having
done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be
her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly
married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic
power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But
its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike
remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate
intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and
neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's
poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in
_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a
picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the
two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most
commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers,
passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new
modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in
fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a
wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators.
But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and
almost unexpectedly otherwise.

Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of
Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic
Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called
"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that
there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item
is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in
perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned
indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What
theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often
exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem
after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that
it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then
comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam
of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden
Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a
woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis
that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot
extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in
Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing
except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a
perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first
eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious
characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of
anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they
contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems
that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote
these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to
hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.

It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the
arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he
had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious
plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the
intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of
unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal;
mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type
and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal,
but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and
sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised
violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern
times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after
all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery
Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what
happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first
the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as
with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life
was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _Dramatic
Lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better
than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely
original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre
of that field he had found himself.

The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little
difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless
and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime
emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are
love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of
youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets
of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid
survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws,
garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork,
fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed
the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one
wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet
of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could
scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element
than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing
so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the
intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and
generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be
called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for
the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and
mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed
up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications
of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex.
Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment
must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows'
homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's
love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does
not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about
window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with
abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not
speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that
immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the
power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any
millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man
does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is,
first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic
philosopher except Whitman.

The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of
the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely
and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would
call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding
spirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have the
singing girl saying to her old lover--

    "No harm! It was not my fault
      If you never turned your eye's tail up
    As I shook upon E _in alt_,
      Or ran the chromatic scale up."

This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between
those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the
great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details
which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow
through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is
treated in "A Lover's Quarrel."

    "See, how she looks now, dressed
    In a sledging cap and vest!
        'Tis a huge fur cloak--
        Like a reindeer's yoke
    Falls the lappet along the breast:
    Sleeves for her arms to rest,
    Or to hang, as my Love likes best."

That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore
poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power
have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I
question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a
miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if
realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if
any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning
did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most
truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant
justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and
immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a
piano, an old door.

In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a
work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in
an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in
_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his
interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying
sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal
luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be
an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of
that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to
pursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only
the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _Pippa
Passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of
humanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time the
task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the
task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental
impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly
subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of
Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he
is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity.
He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is
the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men,
on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative
wealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_.

With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he
enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the
defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not
in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had
always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human
sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a
drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go
further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be
generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it
must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult
things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage
them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in
their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were,
a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of
cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and
accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Return
of the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for
the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see,
even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not
content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and
realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all
things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not
content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners
cast out.

Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to
grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural
tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity.
He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful
dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature
an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved
above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a
clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened,
unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his
catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which
left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great
stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a
trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite
inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best
critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all
feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a
neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation,
in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to
reach the centre.

_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. In
connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose
which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate
the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready,
who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried
by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he
shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never
occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon
Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was
only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they
were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely
with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own
hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap
upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that
Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a
desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his
ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly
ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was
as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect
sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a
quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a
virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of
vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be
said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He
was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no
snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for
the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them:
he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore
the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the
Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an
everlasting opposite.




CHAPTER III

BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE


Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those
faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a
certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was
strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life,
and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years
before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was
the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly
worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study
one most striking and determining element in the question--Browning's
simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was
one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain
peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson,
Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very
strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness
and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain
almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other
influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without
the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very
interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure
in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very
deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of
Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names
is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in
which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in
one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley,"
who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by
making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised
Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:--

    "There was a bad poet named Clough,
    Whom his friends all united to puff.
    But the public, though dull,
    Has not quite such a skull
    As belongs to believers in Clough."

The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's
life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who
sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled
against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled
interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of
great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak
of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no
justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to
envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain
spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He
admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring
leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in
that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or
greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the
literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it
rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had
already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had
been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady
poet, Miss Barrett.

That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was
thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very
weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was
open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When
she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a
straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a
certain element which had not been present in it since the last days
of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human
passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain
love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and
of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct
from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries
of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find
it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of
Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:--

    "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth,
    But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
    And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted,
    But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth
    Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified
    The image of the freedom he denied."

Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the
peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the
Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime.
Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then
urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life
or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness.
Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very
nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a
difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light
shades of the same colour.

Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private
life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who
was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for
establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively
short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy
godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to
her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents.
And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long
before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of
Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique
kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West
Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part
in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt
and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though
little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was
a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation
and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his
conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a
certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and
responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But
selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was
eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of
all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole
atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as
oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad
ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of
egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand
in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that
nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must
be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten
or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the
family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had
known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again
until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general
popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost
moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and
sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good
horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years
afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her
spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be
only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years,
and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto
been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole
Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time
went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner
compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not
permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to
her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy
glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She
was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all
atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere
has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A
man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health,
and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional
and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household
was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a
human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally
and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his
daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes,
explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat
for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he
would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty
of the sentimentalist.

It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid
and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable
tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course,
suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be
dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and
quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and
she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of
life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of
loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a
spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own
with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience,
"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of
books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It
is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the
achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all
the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.

Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her
demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her.
In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off,
she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that
minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open
parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her
death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire."

She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and
the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous
sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments
almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they
coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which
she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek
scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind
friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her
death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public
questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but
it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery
artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt
an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the
personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains.
In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former
occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the
sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous
illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it
is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained
inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external
appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with
charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely
self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else
to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual
companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of
her life if their relations had always remained a learned and
delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of
Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy
and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond
of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive,
and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling
people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him
slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond
of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun
when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the
Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on
any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and
doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her
health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest
heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh
at east winds yet as I do."

Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has
within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is
a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many
profound questions.

It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these
remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two
spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at
least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and
the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of
the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by
one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not
prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the
world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty
and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they
should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every
conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a
cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the
ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any
similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men
partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine
nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it
was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in
the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation
by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all
such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can
make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he
chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions
which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom
they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance
when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of
sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world
too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things
in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to
the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no
reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My
dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as
any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been
expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of
the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that,
in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the
Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.

Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a
selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude
anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs.
Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of
each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More"
or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been
married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church
does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and
tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too
sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should
have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed
to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little
actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously
unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English
Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language
dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the
bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were
to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt
Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a
lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the
Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those
Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and
unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed
in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to
those we love.

There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends
to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any
other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary
sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine
interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them,
because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make
head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the
most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only
two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if
a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the
second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence
you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to
watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and
secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come
upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to
wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you,
before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you
are to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on ...
[Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind
with what dislocated ankles."

What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it
is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which
appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that
Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and
of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises.
Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of
Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central
idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening
passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter
following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean
to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic
contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the
difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the
fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too
overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however
incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask
impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it
was.

With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively
natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most
roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would
often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible
to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its
object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the
theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be
somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the
pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation
of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of
his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words
"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a
conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an
animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of
Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who
flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his
head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical
utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling
the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian
secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an
olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational
interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the
story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been
incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour
of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life
upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of
his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than
the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have
written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his
publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it
is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond
all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not
easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under
the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional
wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems,
and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning.
Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort
which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters
may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They
write to each other in a language of their own, an almost
exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting
of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes
of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their
eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always
used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett
have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else
would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a
marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in
their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory
to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his
otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness,"
retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with
mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and
beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each
other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the
world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him
was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing
after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most
splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in
his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to
be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is
something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling,
not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability,
but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability.
Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in
Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of
superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the
fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man
may actually be great, yet not in the least able.

Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as
has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was
the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth
seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be
permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor
to hear in me.--I never learned to talk as you do in London; although
I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and
others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of
me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my
colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and
dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will
call at two on Tuesday."

They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in
love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the
domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have
been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she
writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of
lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket
of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the
other!--'Why, even _then_,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not
_do_.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right."

This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state
of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very
best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she
could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human
mind.

Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character
to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was
not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her
family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did
seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say
nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a
sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one
to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost
alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous
view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better,"
he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions
was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like
this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be
stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth
Barrett was still living under the great family convention which
provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move,
forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest
the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy,
as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper,
toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning,
riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible
volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible
that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have
lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for
the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such
exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning
lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than
she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not
very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been
in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that
strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the
absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all
diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was
known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett
suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least
of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered
air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of
which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would
have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis
which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange
possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who
surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew
nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they
did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of
ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to
his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and
personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost
without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion,
he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to
the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about
hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew
that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any
human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has
really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing
which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average
man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right
nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in
military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known
to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a
Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and
are entirely correct.

But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter,
while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of
all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new
development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to
weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of
Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was
absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may,
without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last
great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not
originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in
practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a
self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and
dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the
universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his
side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the
authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his
permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he
refused.

He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and
somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked
a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that
is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her
singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but
that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons
with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man
who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays
on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have
discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the
fine verse of Swinburne:--

    "The racks of the earth and the rods
    Are weak as the foam on the sands;
    The heart is the prey for the gods,
    Who crucify hearts, not hands."

He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women,
was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign.
When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he
proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey
together.

Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active
in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary
of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett,
the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct
with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly
amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs.
Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately
stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus
removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to
have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and
magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind,
and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At
length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's
consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe
alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she
received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is
rather a picturesque thing to think about.

The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course,
the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated,
as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that
an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand
to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary
that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily
candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really
exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will
rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the
courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the
greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect
cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with
an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were
undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the
most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it.

It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's
character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett
of his attitude towards the approaching _coup de théâtre_. In one
place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least
trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as
a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into
the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received
with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the
matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with
his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position,
destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of
the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people
as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly
aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted
in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation
with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything
between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a
surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he
had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the
house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the
logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some
Meredithian comedy.

The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and
necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his
credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in
all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one
act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not
ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it,
and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the
sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was
breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against
social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter,
that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting
of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are
somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power
of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without
meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and
end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking
things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this
thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave
it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the
rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the
least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme
crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and
died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more
thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed
it to affect him.

Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost
monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the only
possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did
something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs
almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion
to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The
most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground
that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On
the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject
Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the
amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this
she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and
stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at
the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home,
and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she
ever produced.

Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of
prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September
1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became
Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home
again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed
some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a
poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of
things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the
truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired,
therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising
effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth
mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It
has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one
of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth
the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt
the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had
held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual
marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he
would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have
been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a
lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a
terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a
moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a
maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man
for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a
certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to
describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and
more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of
other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that
in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the
action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt
inclined to do it ourselves.

At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs.
Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's
house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just
successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all
probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled
with Browning to Italy.

They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to
them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do
not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a
reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her
father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps,
even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she
had grown up in the house of a madman.




CHAPTER IV

BROWNING IN ITALY


The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to
Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps
to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said
in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the
one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before
her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy.
A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant
friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they
experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at
all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous
intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the
country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of
the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque
figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books
and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning
was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how
he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn
brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of
which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of
interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere.
The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death
of Browning's mother in 1849.

It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted
country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name
of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular
character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood.
There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in
it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who
hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they
are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is
a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There
are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to
think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a
hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of
beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was
intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a
nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not
have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on
earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such
length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in
things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life
in Italian politics.

Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this
matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably
fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in
Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for
the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies
was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian
cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless
lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all
the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about
them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their
diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very
suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes
herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to
write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband
was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as
fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest
in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable
interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable
poems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and
"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with
technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a
mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious
to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I
once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he
worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a
dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment
of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting;
they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not
what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing
accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops
continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was
interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There
is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but
Browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop
with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to
be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be
more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and
done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate
art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate
organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And
these were the things that Browning knew.

He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur
has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of
tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is
this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual
characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and
reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it
without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any
hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more
than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this
strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course
of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for
a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd
little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures
by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit
of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a
technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a
technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so
bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in
letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian
town. Indeed, his own _Ring and the Book_ is merely a sublime
detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was
precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success,
of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the
fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny
gaff, but not quite."

The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an
antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same
phenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence and
individuality of the country itself.

Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that
sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those
cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and
admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and
centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and
flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they
lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--the
making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that
they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with
every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of
the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of
Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They
lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of
art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become
politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the
politicians have to be poets.

Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental
and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere
detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of
the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the
Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the
poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative
Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His
mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and
energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central
Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit
beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest
convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his
way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later
years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this
philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had
found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings,
can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A
Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by
waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers
of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal
in this sense.

And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French
Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human
beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It
attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same
wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems
attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same;
no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one
could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or
must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous
tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive
the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the
personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all
other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals
international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that
friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But
in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system,
as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as
Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as
Browning in love with Italy.

And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of
energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find
it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a
great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism,
a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost
entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old
_régime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue
of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great
virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is
not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how
astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid
of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which
survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against
the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a
rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis,
but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediæval Church it
might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic
about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the
devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main
thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it
was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on
the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the
inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the
cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same
was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia
at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers
who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the
typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to
avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine,
dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was,
there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the
Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he
was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the
pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not
need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of
the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their
colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and
Austria driven into battle with a cane.

Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of
one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold
in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and
wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had
established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief
would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to
imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost
of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic
princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of
astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world,
but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In
an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and
philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human
types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the
world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act
symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red
shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort
calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a
shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of
humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of
the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or
a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and
picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age
of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them,
as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type
precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon
was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes.

When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been
sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of
his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible
for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a
small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the
obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him;
that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital
moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on
something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the
worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men
not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in
which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to
accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational
systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient
system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a
post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a
strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world
who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a
city like a mediæval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to
smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly
a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion
for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and
muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if
extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the
massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious
triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were
ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the
time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--struggles
about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of
a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt
that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind
to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the
Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed
the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its
spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was
extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions
under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took
delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting
people of their time--Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton.
Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of
them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by
the bedside of a third.

It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever
separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism.
That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if
it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an
_Act of Parliament_ good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr.
Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new.
Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a
matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage
constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between
two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a
great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning
regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the
deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal
principles could never pardon for the _Coup d'État_. If they differed
on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason
must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in
both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in
her excellent _Life of Browning_, states that the difficulty arose
from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's
absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer
who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs.
Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion
to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the
tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been
repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with
Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be
intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had
friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the
French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of
Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies.
It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to
a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and
the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the
first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many
people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a
superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually
speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant
and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version
of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for
that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to
the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It
arose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromising
dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly
cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit
dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all
irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that
Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the
_Memoirs_ of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom
Browning came in contact. These _Memoirs_ constitute a more thorough
and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever
wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are
infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part
of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and
intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating
perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs.
Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's
actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in
this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of
Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The
second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should
cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted
on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George
Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same
aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he
afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was
"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship
George Sand, _à genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva."
When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or
Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early
occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly
right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a
social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably
Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his
responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is
quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will
scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has
its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid
healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife.

David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning
undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour
at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length
forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had
attended one _séance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event
occurred, which is described in Home's _Memoirs_ with a gravity even
more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a
wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being
lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering
for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight
upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her
husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her.
One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a
man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment,
genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was
generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that
the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its
disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and
malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional
and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a
wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine
gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be
fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it
would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and
said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head.

Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the
previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of
excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he
and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What
actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the
account in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches
made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to
a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention.
But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was
that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can
be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably
even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical
mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. He knew
his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even
posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to
the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a
great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like
many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a
borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not
interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended
in an asylum.

The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the
real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some
extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr.
Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon
spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see
when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of
it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a
dislike of Home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in
spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious
belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning,
but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted
the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous
as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in
possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious
to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few
conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose
and nameless energies of the universe.

Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all
probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable
intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or
theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of
Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he
would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have
adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a
man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons
and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific.
It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine
feelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deep
that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger,
there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be
mentioned for many years.

Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man.
There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether
regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a
convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional
element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do
not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming
together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an
emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a
convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an
agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections
shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to
realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that
ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise
the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who
runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time
behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing
these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken
clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of
strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human
imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a
black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in
precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be
conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share
with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an
original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with
the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more
time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his
feelings.

Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for
bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for
immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal
with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat
bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving
to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him.
If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a
fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only
express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of
original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new,
but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that
it deals with origins.

All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far,
that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art.
Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a
general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in
matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of
revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry
of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of
civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the
audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the
painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an
agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great
figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the
gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real
pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He
delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. Being
by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being
by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient
scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was
with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an
Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man.

This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of
Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it
pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and
after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have
forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He
showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a
responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and
entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live
on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing
poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head
day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw
himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every
kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton
Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a
post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with
that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes
it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this
matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have
any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read
for the Bar, and probably began doing so. But all this vigorous and
very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth
Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her
husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry.
Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which
every man would desire to have made.

One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the
fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction
about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in
relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is
vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored
health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness,
"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody
how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a
wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy
said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the
day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a
Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile
degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential
manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities.
Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men
everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated.
Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly
conceited of their defects.

One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the
Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him
living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous
and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the
condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings.
He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and
stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like an
old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of
America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him,
combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those
above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and
bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one
of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be
described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he
always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of
savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who
could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter
taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was
fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary
business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond
of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many
people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle
of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent
for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved
by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different
type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something
genuine about him, and something far more important than anything
intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius,
least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general
truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous
beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in
by all the women who live there.

Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by
Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of
very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his
trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose
quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded
of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero.
It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not
share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and
expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear,
darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A
most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very
affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he
has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say
to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it?
Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet
on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics
against his wife and Louis Napoleon."

One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian
Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife
died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a
characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone in the
room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been
said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him,
closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again
but only a splendid surface.




CHAPTER V

BROWNING IN LATER LIFE


Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his
wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life,
indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of
these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later
years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed
away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which
number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his
bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left
Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near
Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in
Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly
lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of
Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an
indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the
chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of
the intellectual.

Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women,
Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personæ_ had successively glorified his
Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more
famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the
incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest
achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of
material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the
fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them,
he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every
variety of utility and uselessness:--

                                  "picture frames
    White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,
    Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,
    (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
    Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
    Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
    Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
    In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)
    A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web
    When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
    Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet
    (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).
           *       *       *       *       *
    Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,
    'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,
    Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'--
    With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,
    And 'Stall,' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine."

This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _débris_, and comes
nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and
picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought
for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin
record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the
murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is
scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring
and the Book_.

Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during
his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the
dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at
last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his
_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then came
the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something
sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain
going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing,"
he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the
scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a
degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible
scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the
world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary
and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to
its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak
subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has
more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that
few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the
extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the
poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which
constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing,
properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death;
and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien
symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth
about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this
sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of
having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the
reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi,
preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and
honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of
men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility
seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness
of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness
of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he
seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would
never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and
evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds
that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning
of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest
poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who
is worthy to live.

As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be
in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils
of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act
has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be
justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she
had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the
bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me,
please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and
casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained
upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after
years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and
had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted
indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of
Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour,
enters, of course, into many poems besides _The Ring and the Book_,
and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a
whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The
Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a
great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised
morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an
elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The
lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less
comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from
the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but
die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act
thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly
answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is
not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is
that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by
cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same
idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art,"
where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with
their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.

    "Each life unfulfilled, you see;
    It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
    We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
    Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."

And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in
Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal
drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been
insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that
Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic,
that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet,
good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.

The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied
Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in
the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder
brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time,
and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the
final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame.
The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing
of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish
activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless
and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began
that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of
him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more
sentimental type would have professed to find the life of
dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and
especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than
another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the
entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one
great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The life
of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who
object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of
all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its
interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as
its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves,
is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as
incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.

A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even
disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these
literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in
humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low
tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable
people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic
type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look
for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of
a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in
thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But
humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers,
do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men
the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own
families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in
his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited
to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend
that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life
he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an
unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so
much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were
invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may
be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this
long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second
youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do
that.

Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age
of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized,
well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as
almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard,
the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an
indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she
said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods.
His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time
must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait
in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many
testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of
character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in
which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility,
tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the
brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too
scholarly to live a completely healthy life.

His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that
of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual
eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all
like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion,
talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who
monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound
of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the
sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter
class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his
voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong
humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people
down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a
violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and
even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he
never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a
boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of
what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.

One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On
the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he
was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as
we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly
prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question
stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home
was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to
conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may
have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think
that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious
character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his
purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces
again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a
subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full
comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than
might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative
tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the
artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he
hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything,
from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose
white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their
own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all
things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right
attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence
on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige."

Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy
order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It
never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows
nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something
about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of
resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly
dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to
be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter
or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can
think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair
way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great
intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word,
"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that
remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias
was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But
almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he
had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great
universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended
existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship
with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who
praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have
lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world
good because he had found so many things that were good in
it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not,
like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found
so many things in it that were bad.

As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and
dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of
these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the
better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted
in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to
loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his
rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far
removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only
be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or
presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of
Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any
one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work.
Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs.
Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a
_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning
would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he
did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must
have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these
black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes:
"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those
of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop
the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually
resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except
that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him
to silence, probably from stupefaction.

The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to
any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number
of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more
or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is
truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross
word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral
license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has
been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine.
But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is
this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and
contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems
to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only
speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps
undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same
brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people
who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the
Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart
of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner
rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially
base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that
the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne.
Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the
average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque
hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many
people suppose.

Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the
full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began
to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about
this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the
other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always
felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his
life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began
to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent
made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is
unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the
great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death,
despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord
Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep
and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in
1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the
University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities,
was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age
of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if
he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let
him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge
in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these
honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the
undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly
on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant
intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but
Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You
are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless
drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly
appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was
to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all
human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied
metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of
Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he
must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even
in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a
symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The
young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the
representatives of the "Filius Terrae."

But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late
laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the
years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a
man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man
who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning
owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability
mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella
Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone
with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat
stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a
dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting
in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and
Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom _Sordello_ was dedicated, died
in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like
among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated
that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore
traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a
greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing
continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in
the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual
output.

In 1871 he produced _Balaustion's Adventure_, a work exhibiting not
only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more
exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life,
immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation
of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _Balaustion's
Adventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English
version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of
Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic
admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never
revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming
the poetry of others; and _Balaustion's Adventure_ is a monument of
this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate
desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the
time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the
songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself
into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an
excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the
tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most
feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than
in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in
Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued
in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem
on the drama of Hellas. _Aristophanes' Apology_ came out in 1875, and
_The Agamemnon of Æschylus_, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three
poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the
writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He
is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their
frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but
Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity.
In fact, a page of _Aristophanes' Apology_ is like a page of
Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's
treatise, with its load of jokes.

In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of
Society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's
apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon
III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it.
The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe
twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he
made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was
never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took
him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the
general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and
unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster,
there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the
man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a
political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly
open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat
inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but
there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves.
We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there
is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in
the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to
interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged
the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not
precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a
_régime_. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be
able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able
to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very
plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime
would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he
thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could
do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus
selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most
prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence
of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose
mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the
generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for
parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of
the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He
went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.

How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the
man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from
the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the
Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second
Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms
it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.
It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for
himself."

In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not
absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of
the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the
poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy
coast, and discovered what he called

    "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,
    Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"

Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond
measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton
Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which
Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable
attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked
about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing
that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_. Some
time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of
profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in
the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is
worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive
the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is
commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be
undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From _The Ring and the Book_
to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might be
called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and
its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make
ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the
revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity
which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in
_The Ring and the Book_. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning
had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable
philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human
story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a
mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact
word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the
bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility
against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes
more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and
evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the
more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what
a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end.
This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It
says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country
of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country.'"

Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_,
which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising
admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be
to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning
would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card.
But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any
propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that
condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and
arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things
genuine reliability. _Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic
soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully
to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards
actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given
many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the
poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular
connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even
in a sensual fool.

After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purely
narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place
one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and
interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after
the _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously
individual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in
Distemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it
is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief
characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has
nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal
energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever,
and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by
romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning
malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously
good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself
clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing
in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less
benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths
which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of
thing, and it goes on for pages:--

    "Long after the last of your number
    Has ceased my front-court to encumber
    While, treading down rose and ranunculus,
    You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us!
    Troop, all of you man or homunculus,
    Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,
    If once on your pates she a souse made
    With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_,
    First comes to her hand--things were more amiss!
    I would not for worlds be your place in--
    Recipient of slops from the basin!
    You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness
    Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"

You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the
brute-force of language.

In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its
title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses
that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he
was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what
is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and
Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an
absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax--

                     "Hush, I pray you!
    What if this friend happen to be--God."

It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary
quality, Sensationalism.

The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of
the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to
publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."

In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to
come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his
great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that
delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _The Two Poets
of Croisic_. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had
not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of
humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of
_Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides"
and "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series
of _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the
two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling.
Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity,
but never in quality. _Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. It
contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in
the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the
most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over
seventy. In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, which
exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of
his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than
anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense
of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more
enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience
are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle
flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this
spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among
all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same
philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual.
But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a
deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also
Apple Eating."

Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in
his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in
their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious,
reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the
vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their
lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles
Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a
thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was
unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from
every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich
as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems
are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly
characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so
characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had
published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned
with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things
in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that
he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with
glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself
the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the
verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty
years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these
which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond
the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth
Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius
was the least important thing about him.

During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and
regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in
London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never
failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the
same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than
he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr.
Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society."
He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the
"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he
accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When
he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he
was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still
attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded
prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is
nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already
a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity
and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style,
he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole
literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have
proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his
health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular,
and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense
a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement
prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel
more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live
at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and
drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and
poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats,
"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry
Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two
or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained
always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of
poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief
that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching
more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless
popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of
them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that
I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English,
and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of
death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon
us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well
as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is
none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence.
Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change,
for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.
Never say of me that I am dead."

On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his
innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to have
fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at
nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning
would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it
escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could
be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and
whistling for the lizards.

This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into
death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far
below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished
Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which
Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald,"
and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter
and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter
and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to
reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a
certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old
barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid
out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved
itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its
forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that
great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the old
man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as
if she had died yesterday."

Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He
took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads
that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he
maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted
vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through,
talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the
talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of
placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end,
Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board
ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian
marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the
choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the
day that he died _Asolando_ was published.




CHAPTER VI

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST


Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks of
another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of
thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden
conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."

This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which
Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes
a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read
them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a
remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his
philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical,
and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not
logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is
first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then
denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he
is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a
garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground,
and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of
rockeries and flower-beds.

As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act
satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a
logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to
see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to
what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this
seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It
is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his
processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis.
They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a
good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as
"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are
not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of
Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of
what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific
analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one
supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic
method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement
means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an
artistic statement means something entirely different, according to
the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let
us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces
go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing,
whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end,
whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if
we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a
sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the
matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a
short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the
last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some
peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great
monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short
story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising
from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos,"
a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive
nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them.
Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and
obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the
comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and
ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing
his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the
manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things.
Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the
profane speculator falls flat upon his face--

    "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
    'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
    Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
    One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"

Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this
thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had
occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean
the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from
this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that
consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their
precision and analysis."

No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the
poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the
fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate
artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so;
that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a
man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite
another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did
not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel.
Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does
not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment
expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply
the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far
nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other
English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and
inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems
it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as
many different metres as there are different poems.

The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form
than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were
content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had
new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than
he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were
really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked
without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy.
Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a
perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a
perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study
Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really
created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic
forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were.
_The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in
literary method--the method of telling the same story several times
and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several
different and equally interesting stories. _Pippa Passes_, to take
another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached
dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated
figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing
of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or
the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create
himself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past
enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and
horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely
original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses,
mocking echoes indeed--

    "And dipt of his wings in Paris square,
       They bring him now to lie burned alive.

       _[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,
           ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_--

       We bring John now to be burned alive."

A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on
his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly
original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such
odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural
and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as
"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus
Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of
"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams."

The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not
enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have
studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things
of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in
clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a
good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and
there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which
perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it
would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that
one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with
bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his
opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one
to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be
better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning
was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is
precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old
Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion.
The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical
beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to
which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.

There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and
unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author,
particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms
of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something
which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing
to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us
say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain
beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that
really boisterous will to live which may be found in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_. The right thing to say about _Cyrano de Bergerac_ is that
it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really
throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway.
It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of
the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors
falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless.
Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence,
upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not
only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what
they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we
can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally
pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written
_In Memoriam_ if he had tried.

Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from
his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the
matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is
ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of
necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel
and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called
ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a
quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For
reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical
use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style
was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and
metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood
if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque
of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short
distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in
which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the
whole poem, and a very good poem too--

    "Up jumped Tokay on our table,
    Like a pigmy castle-warder,
    Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
    Arms and accoutrements all in order;
    And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South
    Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
    Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
    Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
    Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
    Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
    And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
    Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
    For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:
    And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
    And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
    Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"

I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think
that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance
question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic
movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently
apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous
knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these
preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of
this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised
about Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to
remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and
indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the
badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of
the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style,
and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this
point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by
the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast
majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad
poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost
alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a
certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.

Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should
not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but
treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as

    "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that
Tennyson's

    "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this
proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and
metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form;
they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference
to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this
failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the
exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a
mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original
poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are
subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations
of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest
classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts
from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he
wrote the couplet--

    "From the lilies and languors of virtue
    To the raptures and roses of vice,"

wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation
which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of
proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial
letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line--

    "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,"

was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit
of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the
self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of
us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personæ_
and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this
temptation to be a great deal too like himself.

    "Will I widen thee out till thou turnest
    From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,
    To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest."

This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in
Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in
Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital
æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the
question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about
lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but
whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian
to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential
issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with
Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote
bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could
have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such
incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer
must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole
justification of Browning as an artist.

The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his
functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic
originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the
grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious
use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the
eternal and fundamental elements in life?

One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic
criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are
intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an
æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear
the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round
such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage
scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite
white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality
in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in
others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly
used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in
fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most
distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for
example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in
striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be
rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or
that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue
depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that
ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some
poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When
we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say
that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When
we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine
although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it
is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that
it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after
strength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered,
are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a
rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged.
Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that
in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of
the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only
to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the
monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of
the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love
the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical
and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For
example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being
beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such
a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old
ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck
by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse--

    "He is either himsell a devil frae hell,
    Or else his mother a witch maun be;
    I wadna have ridden that wan water
    For a' the gowd in Christentie,"

is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as

    "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,
    And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,"

is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular
kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of
melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no
melody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a
satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be
impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the
essential point has been suggested.

    "They were purple of raiment and golden,
    Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,
    Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,
    In marvellous chambers of thine,"

is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language.
This, for instance, has also a tune in it--

    "I--'next poet.' No, my hearties,
    I nor am, nor fain would be!
    Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,
    Not one soul revolt to me!
           *       *       *       *       *
    Which of you did I enable
    Once to slip inside my breast,
    There to catalogue and label
    What I like least, what love best,
    Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,
    Seek and shun, respect, deride,
    Who has right to make a rout of
    Rarities he found inside?"

This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music,
and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of
soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember
about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical
method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in
the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which
can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for
instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as--

    "Thou art the highest, and most human too"
and
    "We needs must love the highest when we see it"

would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It
would probably become

    "High's human; man loves best, best visible,"

and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness.
But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment
of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist
in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"--

    "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
    Down it dips, gone like a rocket.
    What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
    Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
    And find a poor devil has ended his cares
    At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?
    Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"

--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes
ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and
spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and
ran--

    "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find
    Disjected bones adrift upon the stair
    Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I
    Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?"

Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent
poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was
good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the
preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how
unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in
Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in _The Princess_, though
often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble
because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and
the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If
Browning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_,
descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park,
he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the
shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He
would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have
changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel
and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done,
as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the
impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the
father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We
should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of
which Mr. Henley writes--

    "Praise the generous gods for giving,
    In this world of sin and strife,
    With some little time for living,
    Unto each the joy of life,"

the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday
crowd at Margate.

To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most
would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great
deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to
suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art
generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea
into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and
that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the
country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are
commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things
top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of
man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures,
burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of
Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the
sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all
this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too
often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who
live in the country; they are men who go to the country for
inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go
to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature,
farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and
creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of
Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of
the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which
takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far
as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in
the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees,
dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is
top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of
classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the
uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of
a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a
philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from
"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was
most Browning, regarded physical nature.

    "And pitch down his basket before us,
    All trembling alive
    With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;
    You touch the strange lumps,
    And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
    Of horns and of humps,
    Which only the fisher looks grave at."

Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but
to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities
and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things
meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts
and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in
one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a
supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled
with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the
image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.

    "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
    The simplest of creations, just a sac
    That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives
    And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
    If simplified still further one degree."

                                          (SLUDGE.)

These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which
the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in
the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the
Everlasting.

There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but
which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all
poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend
to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the
intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is
difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without
becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's
Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the
moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done
all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now
it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make
the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a
man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we
ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that
man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a
moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in
his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the
huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of
Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of
wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a
bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable
passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is
curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.

But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the
fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we
understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter
might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there
yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a
fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in
his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at
all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only
just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only
one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in
details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are
fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself
on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself
on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on
re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be
presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided
himself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:--

    "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey,
    By piping advice in one key--
    That his pipe should play a prelude
    To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued,
    Something not harsh but docile,
    Man-liquid, not man-fossil."

This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of
joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has
nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the
grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from
"Holy Cross Day":--

    "Give your first groan--compunction's at work;
    And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.
    Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin
    He was four times already converted in!"

This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and
philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the
rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the
poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can
only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for
example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are
generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of
assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children,
and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which
it is physically impossible for any one to say:--

    "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice,
    If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"

This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented
ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a
thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as
a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect
artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little
below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him
perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and
simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made
exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood
with a knot in it.

The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under
discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more
of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in
their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded
language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and
almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so
thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that
when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense,
he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be
tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which
they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity
had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and
the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of
Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting
of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists
and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real
hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused.

In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is
somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning
to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly
less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was
profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but
as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each
other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of
the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is
temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was
expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a
person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's
style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:--

    "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats.
      Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup.
    Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats--
      Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
    What porridge had John Keats?"

The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must
indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be
conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the
matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not
abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and
straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious
fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if
we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a
sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The
poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature,
and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by
merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural
comment:--

    "... Who fished the murex up?
    What porridge had John Keats?"

So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but
is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem.
Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any
more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is
both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in
a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's
physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps.
Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a
writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so
often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George
Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean.
They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious
certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat
curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of
these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost
all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and
popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing
strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate
rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue,
with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly,
Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so
great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes
eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the
love of sanity.

If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act,
they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely
different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic
and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man
to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to
something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could
not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of
the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the
object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in
veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his
brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air
accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other
words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental
experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material
incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description
would run:--

    "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs
    Takes bump from back."

This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning
is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of
the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is
only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly
that he leaves out about half the story.

Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic
quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that
obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic
quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more
cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind of
fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a
matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting
uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a
poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the
deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will
suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping
meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered
something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a
prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain
poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed
the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but
in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange
and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying
experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating
metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he
triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of
which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But
whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce
hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last
book he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People of
Importance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than
_Paracelsus_. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an
artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by
his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable
example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of
poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth
itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens
and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of
rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this.
He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense
of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been
conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.

    "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
       Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
       Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
    In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
    All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
       Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."

This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon
us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some
half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean
street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the
first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about
which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked,
which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science
instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The
only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the
earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles
mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If
it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything
means nothing.




CHAPTER VII

_THE RING AND THE BOOK_


When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _The
Ring and the Book_, the studying of a single matter from nine
different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice
what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as
voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the
ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr.
Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two
advocates in _The Ring and the Book_ will scarcely be very interesting
to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt
that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the
mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that
anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on
thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and
the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central
pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem,
Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a
fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are
partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right
side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing
arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does
exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official
partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by
entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that
can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for
the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent,
ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris
Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men
brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own
cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic
strokes in _The Ring and the Book_.

We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose
that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and
found in some _cause célèbre_ of our day, such as the Parnell
Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _The
Ring and the Book_. The first monologue, which would be called
"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and
sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the
Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic.
The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated
and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was
one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and
stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached
intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism,
possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning
monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors
in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of
Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without
another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion
of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two
cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and
incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party
journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact
that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman
Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the
theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or
had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the
world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we
must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a
simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value,
let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote
anything that did not mean a great deal.

It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little
cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let
fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which
reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination
the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in
the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have
intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is
studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his
diplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the true
Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's
critics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_. That criticism
was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at
dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed
for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not
know what _The Ring and the Book_ means. We feel about it as we should
feel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was not
well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not
look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that
_Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a
kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has
not read _Tristram Shandy_ at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti
pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to
their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his
huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality
missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence
of _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of the
nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous
importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides _The
Ring and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length and
largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about
affairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ is
about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show
you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great
legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all
mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The
author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between
man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out
of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to
heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the
founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will
show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very
machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have
heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you
the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of
all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the
first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations
of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of
criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most
completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in
_The Ring and the Book_ all criticism is misleading.

In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time.
The characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is the
apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry
which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and
waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something
indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint
of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken
still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out
of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical
significance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of his
appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of
the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class
ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's
tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling
three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these
men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they
have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to
be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap
upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly
impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of
small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole
difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that
fights with microbes.

This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily
around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise
that if there was one man in English literary history who might with
justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert
Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of
the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention
trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially;
Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally.
Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which
may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a
demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have
driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was
sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with
a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in
his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came
forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if
ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would
have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at
a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each
began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of
philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to send
up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a
conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow
the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a
scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read
Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of
speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures
common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how
often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude
which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for
instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological
meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing
them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of
talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to
connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example
is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental
restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of
man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after
doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at
a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in
that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless
from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the
spiritual sea.

It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very
essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous
multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism
to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the
whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good
and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is
realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the
work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque
account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of
which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on
its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed
Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text
appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains
again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the
forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was
really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced
large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _The
Ring and the Book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so
far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness
of life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the
highest of all possible compliments--the great compliment which
monarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almost
at random.

But this is only the first half of the claim of _The Ring and the
Book_ to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that
claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all
modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _The
Ring and the Book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detective
story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it
seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre
of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting
quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it
is. But the element which is important, and which now requires
pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt
and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In
order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is
necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some
little way in literary history.

I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever
noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement
of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_. However
that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed
side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution
in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's
almost too well known

    "When lovely woman stoops to folly,
    And finds too late that men betray,
    What charm can soothe her melancholy?
    What art can wash her guilt away?"

Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of
note, the voice of Burns:--

    "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,
      How can ye bloom sae fair?
    How can ye chant, ye little birds,
      And I sae fu' of care?

    Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird,
      That sings upon the bough,
    Thou minds me of the happy days
      When my fause Love was true."

A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening
to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the
subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole
difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice
of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that
Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's
words are spoken in that situation.

In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a
vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change
of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a
manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination.

Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old
historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was the
supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the
human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the
same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as
the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he
gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon
it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the
outside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has no
sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry
out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things
which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the
general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of
the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of
the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break
my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in
Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the
_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by
this new method of what may be called the songs of experience.

Now Browning, as he appears in _The Ring and the Book_, represents the
attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states
it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional
experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith,
seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by
endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith
stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes
them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case
like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not
touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it,
but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a
soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its
language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama;
some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a
passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love,
lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should
be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us
say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon
developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position
of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which
he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All these
characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own
emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his
ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave
men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he
gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the
functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the
beginning of the world have starved more than for bread.

Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and the
Book_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age,
because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said,
of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without
possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little
more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely
to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the
application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic
epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and
moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had
written the _Odyssey_ on the principle of _The Ring and the Book_, how
disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from
the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material
fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so
change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were
dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope
would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face
changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish
woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between
the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful
appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man
prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the
conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an
instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the
story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred,
it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the
twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the
efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of
high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately
discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there
was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and
priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole
artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It
might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would
ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really
right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was
really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and
difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one
man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its
conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical
and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of
Mordred.

One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world
is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and
social, which is represented by _The Ring and the Book_. It is the
step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and
disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the
poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who
has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics,
to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere
chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson
that humanity has ever been set to learn. _The Ring and the Book_ is
the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the
epic of free speech.

Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a
truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago
that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new
truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of
man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes
the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city
street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas
it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to
that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget
where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in
relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and
we forget that free speech is a paradox.

It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an
institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not
natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which
you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or
obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half
a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so
much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it
is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is
a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but
which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is
really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once
admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but
philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry.

Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to
poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human
drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the
villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the
truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and
disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves
to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the
custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond
all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry.
Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable
in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate
source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view
is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of
view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is
emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know
something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man.
Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the
moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen
goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the
value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a
chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary
to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of
it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that
justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a
delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in
a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent
doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the
nature of things wrong.

Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed
than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went
to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that
an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was
ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In
the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to
the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon
its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have
said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs
from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important
point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very
little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there
all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an
elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly
believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape
indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without
experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and
not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of
Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for
them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the
modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing
for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not
blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent.
We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and
serpents without reason and without result.




CHAPTER VIII

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING


The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the
fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie
in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of
Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now
Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for
Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more
than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella,
if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For
example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated,
certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the
intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking
and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind.
His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two
comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the
hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of
"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the
idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other
words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature,
there is something about his appearance which indicates that he
should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably
that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon
a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be
greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully
justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger
scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world
is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream,
the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other
words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself,
that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted.
And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness
implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the
first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in
the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines
requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as
the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that
Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of
man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and
obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have
provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God
has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous
superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning
reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been
crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched
fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this
point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be
referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines
or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly
as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in
the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by
a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of
faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about
them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something
to be added.

Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an
optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies
a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His
theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies
God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good
argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest
and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his
optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a
strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he
conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the
incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these
doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin.
It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no
one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded
on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was
the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has
said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his
possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all
remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny
and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of
Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater
care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that
faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his
digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all
about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of
the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which
delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I
cannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a good
body--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the
first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity
throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many
things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We
should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his
boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a
man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack
of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves
when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's
nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate,
he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous,
which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new
pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous
manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong,
as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence
itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good
thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his
inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning
or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life
innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every
man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of
things.

Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat
inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for
some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or
disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for
eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of
experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would
climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples.
Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense
that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones,
but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and
stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity
of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in
which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it
in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at
revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army a man's experiences mean
his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was
much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with
experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with
what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love.

And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is
also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate
and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and
sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to
Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do
you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what
his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the
influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he
would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its
manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence
is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been
influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have
said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness,"
or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness."
But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted
opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question
"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in
his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools
in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his
mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him.
To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope
was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to
something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and
wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was
rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere
abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete
experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and
speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the
real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems.

One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual
secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting
book _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_. He, in contradistinction
to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was the
real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that
having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He
describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry of
barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and
indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards his
passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them
either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal
goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian,
it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might,
perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are
generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put
a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few
feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we
have grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to
realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that
sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day
has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become
more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and
chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing,
and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in
the dark.

Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning
critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is
that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which
none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has
discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have
discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr.
Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest
upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so
does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with
those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate
despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our
emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any
argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision,
poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will
persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of
sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry
will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to
say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And
here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is
perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible
sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon
a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the
actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is
the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some
parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present
themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is
beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding
of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood.
Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of
happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this,
that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond
the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions
arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy
notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is
happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds
of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with
the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is
the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of
depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether
the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or
the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.

Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we
have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than
all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with
existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth
run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if
possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for
precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his
happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is
something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more
religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man.

This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own
way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in
which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters
in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a
considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?"
a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for
human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and
soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the
essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they
escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted
again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The
speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and
exalted by the waggonette.

To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be
found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a
deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of
them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by
any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of
eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other
countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference
was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all
human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of
him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His
sense of the difference between one man and another would have made
the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply
loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four
hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it
would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived
upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of
God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had
a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of
that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our
boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less
fragmentary and inadequate expressions.

In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles
Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting
anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted
very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John
Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own
adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half
jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any
the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with
some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should suppose
him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost
simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had
just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and
self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal
Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for
Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing
hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of
what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning
wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their
subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them.
They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can
be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in
this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own
characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of
Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so
many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and
failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the
world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most
practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and
the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human
being, because that justification would involve the admission of
things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and
make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old
fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country,
acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we
are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he
disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with
pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the
history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if
we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not
merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to
praise him.

Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this
first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and
gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to
humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of
Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will
become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler,
the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men
will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves
before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as
Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so
stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God.

It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with
Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by
such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character,
and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive,
unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great
many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a
soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first
charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning,
as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two
of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly
clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he
worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him,
and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of
themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end
would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the
man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is
worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in
connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.

When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with
the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he
gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied
in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly
in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is
the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course
merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has
suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The
man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H.
Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more
than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest
reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any
particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But
without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of the
view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his
acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of
spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem,
appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just
become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great
deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The
spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they
depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed
the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life,
but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of
his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with
delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the
poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of
magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of
attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary
to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and
none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr.
Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a
great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it
a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's
method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's
method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the
Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the
face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes.
But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be
found to be.

The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an
attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made
a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite
openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation,
detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard
this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start
of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved
more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a
speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths
by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise
and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as
a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of
"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so
fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed
the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge
the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery,
a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or
palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is
therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly
frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to
tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his
dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the
trickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth and
fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a
perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist.
There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that
there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain
from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus
of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the
existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently
think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be
remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually
supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is
the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that
casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This
tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards
establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which
has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold
and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know
what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or
bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather
to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the
remotest desert and the darkest incognito.

This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood
raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult
to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state
a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To
think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like
thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in
the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we
come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is
permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance,
is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and
benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into
heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he
lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in
walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the
church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people
would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a
person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any
exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of
this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling
of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to
tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play
the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be
drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit
that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like
Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the
boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance
and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny
his right to be heard.

We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the
Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general
excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of
telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and
believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it.
So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed
find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of
how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive
circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of
indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on
to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this
principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a
certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in.
He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of
personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial
slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses.

    "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do
    Before I found the useful book that knows."

It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently
confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints
of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome
personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud,
but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even
than fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when
the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing
left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect
bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot
and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in
deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final
infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you
in a patent and open villainy which has something of the
disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you
with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe
that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand
conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that
there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other
man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind,
but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for
that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It
would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and
presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his
faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more
impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had
lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge
testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his
honour.

It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should
have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is
the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed
clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:--

    "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?
    You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay
    A single word: I cheated when I could,
    Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,
    Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.
    Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,
    And all the rest; believe that: believe this,
    By the same token, though it seem to set
    The crooked straight again, unsay the said,
    Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that,
    It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.
    This trade of mine--I don't know, can't be sure
    But there was something in it, tricks and all!"

It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack
on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence
in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _Othello_ into the
middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means
nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter
is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that some
real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and
that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual.

One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that
Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because
after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall,
he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical
boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely
this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man
driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a
certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out
all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be
forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has
devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in
which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight
thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he
cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the
most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man
might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone,
take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade,
and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in
the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that
part of himself which exists in every man--that part which does
believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in
his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in
giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given
before--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint.
But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not
mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer,
like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger
was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having
betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an
indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in
such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own
shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what
he had done, say something like this:--

    "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp!
    I only wish I dared burn down the house
    And spoil your sniggering!"

and so on, and so on.

He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in
Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about
spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second
outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that
a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely?
The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and
coarse speaking will seldom do it.

When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have
grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical
monologues--_Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology_, and
several of the monologues in _The Ring and the Book_. They are all,
without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain
reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind,
and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the
greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be
found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance.

    "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke."

Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems
is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to
tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual
motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some
point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that
we require to know.

If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of
this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to
notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a
whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even
brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere
else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many
other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly
appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy
egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and
weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a
language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But
the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that
every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are
like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some
of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in
the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and
Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's
Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works.
It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician
grossness of a grand dinner-party _à deux_. It has many touches of an
almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible
name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for
conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a
condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the
religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material
theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty
continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish
ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself
is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts.
Then comes the passage:--

    "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
    A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
    A chorus ending from Euripides,--
    And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
    As old and new at once as Nature's self,
    To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
    Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
    Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
    The grand Perhaps!"

Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the
mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the
mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice
over the comfortable wine and the cigars.

Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be
reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism.
These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and
vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure,
their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those
who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of
every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the
indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life
of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle
obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by
God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken
and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method
that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is
certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has
been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of
God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in
all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To
many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But,
in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less
dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe,
amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament
have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe
that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be
given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own
soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the
human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this
mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil
wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil
who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes
of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we
have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and
may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish
and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features,
his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to
change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole
face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes
forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy.




INDEX


A

_Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The_, 120.

Alliance, The Holy, 89.

"Andrea del Sarto," 83.

_Aristophanes' Apology_, 120, 199.

Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56.

_Asolando_, 132.

Asolo (Italy), 42, 131.

"At the Mermaid," 117.

Austria, 88, 89.


B

"Bad Dreams," 138.

_Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120.

Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119.

Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 _seq._, 70, 73, 74, 76, 79.

Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149.

_Bells and Pomegranates_, 105.

"Ben Ezra," 23, 201.

Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160.

"Bishop Blougram," 51, 189.

_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, 188, 189, 199, 200.

_Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A_, 53.

Boyd, Mr., 62.

Browning, Robert: birth and family history, 3;
  theories as to his descent, 4-8;
  a typical Englishman of the middle class, 9;
  his immediate ancestors, 10 _seq._;
  education, 12;
  boyhood and youth, 17;
  first poems, _Incondita_, 17;
  romantic spirit, 18;
  publication of _Pauline_, 20;
  friendship with literary men, 21;
  _Paracelsus_, 22;
  introduction to literary world, 25;
  his earliest admirers, 26;
  friendship with Carlyle, 26;
  _Strafford_, 27;
  _Sordello_, 34;
  _Pippa Passes_, 43;
  _Dramatic Lyrics_, 45;
  _The Return of the Druses_, 51;
  _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, 53;
  correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, 62 _seq._;
  their first meeting, 70;
  marriage and elopement, 78, 79;
  life in Italy, 81 _seq._;
  love of Italy, 82, 85 _seq._;
  sympathy with Italian Revolution, 90;
  attitude towards spiritualism, 91 _seq._, 113, 190-199;
  death of his wife, 103;
  returns to England, 105;
  _The Ring and the Book_, 110;
  culmination of his literary fame, 110, 117;
  life in society, 110;
  elected Fellow of Balliol, 117;
  honoured by the great Universities, 118;
  _Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120;
  _Aristophanes' Apology_, 120;
  _The Agamemnon of Aeschylus_, 120;
  _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121;
  _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122;
  _Fifine at the Fair_, 124;
  _The Inn Album_, 125;
  _Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125;
  _La Saisiaz_, 127;
  _The Two Poets of Croisic_, 127;
  _Dramatic Idylls_, 127;
  _Jocoseria_, 127;
  _Ferishtah's Fancies_, 127;
  _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, 128;
  accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, 129;
  goes to Llangollen with his sister, 130;
  last journey to Italy, 130;
  death at Venice, 132;
  publication of _Asolando_, 132;
  his conversation, 36;
  vanity, 33, 36;
  faults and virtues, 40, 55;
  his interest in Art, 82 _seq._;
  his varied accomplishments, 84-85;
  personality and presence, 18, 33, 112 _seq._;
  his prejudices, 113-116;
  his occasional coarseness, 116;
  politics, 86 _seq._;
  Browning as a father, 105;
  as dramatist, 52;
  as a literary artist, 133 _seq._;
  his use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 148 _seq._;
  his failures, 141;
  artistic originality, 136, 143, 158;
  keen sense of melody and rhythm, 145 _seq._;
  ingenuity in rhyming, 152;
  his buffoonery, 154;
  obscurity, 154 _seq._;
  his conception of the Universe, 175;
  philosophy, 177 _seq._;
  optimism, 179 _seq._;
  his love poetry, 49;
  his knaves, 51, 201-202;
  the key to his casuistical monologues, 199.

_Browning, Life of_ (Mrs. Orr), 92.

Browning, Robert (father of the poet), 10, 119.

Browning, Mrs., _née_ Wiedermann (mother), 11, 82.

Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife),
57 _seq._, 91-99, 101, 103, 116, 119,
129, 131.

Browning Society, 129.

Burns, Robert, 169-170.

Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143.

Byronism, 19, 117.


C

"Caliban," 9, 120.

"Caliban upon Setebos," 93, 135, 138.

Camberwell, 3, 8, 19.

"Caponsacchi," 108.

Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 56, 87, 115.

Carlyle, Mrs., 26.

"Cavalier Tunes," 46.

Cavour, 86, 90, 103.

Charles I., 28, 29.

Chaucer, 117.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," 159.

_Christmas Eve_, 105.

Church in Italy, The, 88.

"Clive," 127.

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56.

_Colombe's Birthday_, 32.

Corelli, Miss Marie, 38.

Cromwell, Oliver, 73.


D

Darwin, 23, 39.

Dickens, 16.

"Djabal," 51, 52.

Domett, Alfred, 21.

"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," 161.

_Dramatic Idylls_, 127.

_Dramatic Lyrics_, 45-50.

_Dramatis Personæ_, 105.

Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188.


E

_Edinburgh Review_, 122.

"Englishman in Italy, The," 150.


F

"Fears and Scruples," 126, 138.

"Ferishtah's Fancies," 138.

_Fifine at the Fair_, 9, 13, 51, 124, 199.

Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131.

_Flight of the Duchess, The_, 18.

Florence, 81, 94.

Forster, John, 26.

Foster, John, 187, 188.

Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20.

Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33.

"Fra Lippo,", 51.

_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 83, 199.

French Revolution, 87.

Furnivall, Dr., 7, 129.


G

"Garden Fancies," 46.

Garibaldi, 86, 89.

Gilbert, W.S., 144.

Gissing, Mr. George, 165.

Gladstone, 117.

_Golden Treasury_ (Palgrave), 168.

Goldsmith, 169, 170.

Gordon, General, 90.

"Guido Franceschini," 106, 120, 200.


H

Henley, Mr., 148.

"Heretic's Tragedy, The," 137.

Hickey, Miss E.H., 129.

"Holy Cross Day," 153.

Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 113, 190, 191.

Home, David, _Memoirs_ of, 93 _seq._

Horne, 26.

Houghton, Lord, 129.

"House," 138.

"Householder, The," 138.

"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," 46.

_Hudibras_ (Butler), 57.

Hugo, Victor, 17.

Hunt, Leigh, 26.


I

_Incondita_, 17.

_Inn Album, The_, 125.

_Instans Tyrannus_, 9.

Italy, 85 _seq._

Italian Revolution, 88 _seq._

"Ivàn Ivànovitch," 127.


J

Jameson, Mrs., 75.

Jerrold, Douglas, 34.

_Jocoseria_, 127.

Jowett, Dr., 118.

_Julius Cæsar_ (Shakespeare), 28.

"Juris Doctor Bottinius," 161.


K

Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142.

Kenyon, Mr., 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76.

_King Victor and King Charles_, 32.

Kipling, Rudyard, 142.

Kirkup, Seymour, 103.


L

_L'Aiglon_, 28.

"Laboratory, The," 47, 143.

Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103.

_La Saisiaz_, 127.

_Letters, The Browning_, 63.

Liberalism, 86.

"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," 131.

Llangollen, 130.

Lockhart, 112.

"Lost Leader, The," 46.

"Lover's Quarrel, A," 50.

"Luigi," 45.

Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91.


M

Macready, 17, 27, 53.

Maeterlinck, 164, 184.

Manning, Cardinal, 91.

Mary Queen of Scots, 29.

"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," 147.

"May and Death." 21.

Mazzini, 89.

_Men and Women_, 105.

Meredith, George, 156, 165.
Mill, John Stuart, 26, 56.

Milsand, 119.

Milton, 137.

Monckton-Milnes, 26, 100.

_Mr. Sludge the Medium_, 82, 96, 120, 190-199.

"Muléykeh," 127.

"My Star," 138.


N

"Nationality in Drinks," 46, 138.

Napoleon, 42, 89.

Napoleon III., 56, 92, 121.

"Never the Time and the Place," 127.

Newman, Cardinal, 193.

Norwood, 18.


O

"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 136.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 137.

"Old Masters in Florence," 177.

"One Word More," 65.

Orr, Mrs., 72.


P

_Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125, 126, 152.

_Paracelsus_, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158.

"Paracelsus," 24, 25.

Painting, Poems on, 83.

Palgrave, Francis, 117.

Paris, 94.

_Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day_, 22, 128, 158.

_Pauline_, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51.

"Pheidippides," 127.

Phelps (actor), 53.

"Pictor Ignotus," 83.

"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," 153.

"Pippa," 45, 120.

_Pippa Passes_, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137.

Pisa, 81.

Pius IX., Church under, 88.

Plato, 21, 23.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 144.

Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130.

"Pompilia," 201.

Pope, 11, 20, 57.

"Portrait, A," 138.

_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121-122.

_Princess, The_ (Tennyson), 148.

"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), 137.

Prussia, 88, 89.

Puritans, 30.

Pym, 28, 30.


R

"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 201.

_Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122-124.

_Return of the Druses, The_, 51-53.

Revolution,
  The French, 15;
  Italian, 90.

_Ring and the Book, The_, 85, 106, 109, 123, 137, 160-176.

Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93.

Roman Church, 114, 187, 188.

Rossetti, 163.

Royalists, 30.

Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115.

Russia, 88.


S

Sand, George, 9, 94.

Santayana's, Mr., _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, 183-186.

"Sebald," 45.

Shakespeare, 17, 57.

Shakespeare Society, 129.

Sharp, Mr. William, 133.

Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165.

Shelley, 15, 16, 17,19, 56, 136, 141, 143.

"Shop," 138.

"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 138.

Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 21.

"Sludge," 51, 52, 150, 189, 200.

Smith, Elder (publishers), 110.

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," 47.

"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 65.

_Sordello_, 23, 34, 42.

Speech, Free, 173.

Spenser, 142.

Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190.

"Statue and the Bust, The," 109.

Sterne, 117.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114.

_Straford_, 27 _seq._, 37.

"Stafford," 28, 29, 30.

Swinburne, 56, 116, 142,143.


T


_Tait's Magazine_, 20.

Talfourd, Sergeant, 26.

Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 143, 148.

Thackeray, Miss, 123.

"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," 46.

_Time's Revenges_, 9, 93.

Tolstoi, 115.

_Tristram Shandy_ (Sterne), 163.

_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, 127.


U


University College, 14.

"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), 140.


V


Venice, 131.

Victor of Sardinia, King, 23.

Vogler, Abt, 23.


W


_Water Babies_ (Kingsley), 8.

Watts, Mr. G.F., 112.

Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 165, 184.

"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 86.

Wiedermann, William, 12.

Wiseman, Cardinal, 188.

Wimbledon Common, 18.

Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143.

Wordsworth Society, 129.


Y

"Youth and Art," 50, 109.


Z

Zola, 164.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The New Jerusalem, by G. K. Chesterton


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net





Title: The New Jerusalem

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: September 15, 2004  [eBook #13468]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW JERUSALEM***


E-text prepared by Joe Moretti



THE NEW JERUSALEM

by

G. K. CHESTERTON







PREFACE

This book is only an uncomfortably large note-book; and it has
the disadvantages, whether or no it has the advantages, of notes that were
taken on the spot.  Owing to the unexpected distraction of other duties,
the notes were published in a newspaper as they were made on the spot;
and are now reproduced in a book as they were published in the newspaper.
The only exception refers to the last chapter on Zionism; and even
there the book only reverts to the original note-book. A difference
of opinion, which divided the writer of the book from the politics
of the newspaper, prevented the complete publication of that chapter
in that place.  I recognise that any expurgated form of it would
have falsified the proportions of my attempt to do justice in a very
difficult problem; but on re-reading even my own attempt in extenso,
I am far from satisfied that the proper proportions are kept.
I wrote these first impressions in Palestine, where everybody
recognises the Jew as something quite distinct from the Englishman
or the European; and where his unpopularity even moved me in the
direction of his defence.  But I admit it was something of a shock
to return to a conventional atmosphere, in which that unpopularity
is still actually denied or described as mere persecution.
It was more of a shock to realise that this most obscurantist of all types
of obscurantism is still sometimes regarded as a sort of liberalism.
To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as the
oppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonable
help for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords,
and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all.
Moreover, the Jews in the West do not seem so much concerned to ask,
as I have done however tentatively here, whether a larger and less
local colonial development might really transfer the bulk of Israel
to a more independent basis, as simply to demand that Jews shall
continue to control other nations as well as their own.  It might be
worth while for England to take risks to settle the Jewish problem;
but not to take risks merely to unsettle the Arab problem,
and leave the Jewish problem unsolved.

For the rest, there must under the circumstances be only too
many mistakes; the historical conjectures, for they can be no more,
are founded on authorities sufficiently recognised for me to be permitted
to trust them; but I have never pretended to the knowledge necessary
to check them.  I am aware that there are many disputed points;
as for instance the connection of Gerard, the fiery Templar,
with the English town of Bideford.  I am also aware that some are
sensitive about the spelling of words; and the very proof-readers
will sometimes revolt and turn Mahomet into Mohammed.
Upon this point, however, I am unrepentant; for I never could see
the point of altering a form with historic and even heroic fame in our
own language, for the sake of reproducing by an arrangement of our
letters something that is really written in quite different letters,
and probably pronounced with quite a different accent.  In speaking
of the great prophet I am therefore resolved to call him Mahomet;
and am prepared, on further provocation, to call him Mahound.

G. K. C.




CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I      THE WAY OF THE CITIES
 CHAPTER II     THE WAY OF THE DESERT
 CHAPTER III    THE GATES OF THE CITY
 CHAPTER IV     THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING
 CHAPTER V      THE STREETS OF THE CITY
 CHAPTER VI     THE GROUPS OF THE CITY
 CHAPTER VII    THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM
 CHAPTER VIII   THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT
 CHAPTER IX     THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON
 CHAPTER X      THE ENDLESS EMPIRE
 CHAPTER XI     THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE
 CHAPTER XII    THE FALL OF CHIVALRY
 CHAPTER XIII   THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM
 CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I

THE WAY OF THE CITIES

It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden
in that "field of the beeches" between the Chilterns and the Thames,
and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which
Christmas came.  For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man
on the wrong road goes back to a sign-post to find the right road.
The modern man is more like a traveller who has forgotten the name
of his destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find out
where he is going.  That the world has lost its way few will now deny;
and it did seem to me that I found at last a sort of sign-post,
of a singular and significant shape, and saw for a moment in my mind
the true map of the modern wanderings; but whether I shall be able
to say anything of what I saw, this story must show.

I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limited
number of legs; and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey.
The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship
went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge
of wit.  The dog is rather like a donkey, or a small caricature of one,
with a large black head and long black ears; but in the mood of the
moment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel.
For the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I was
leaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year.
For one thing, he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guest
of Mr. Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union
of domesticity with exuberance.  He jumped about me, barking like
a small battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk;
but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine.
Incidentally, he would have been out of place; for dogs have not
their due honour in the East; and this seemed to sharpen my sense
of my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West.
On the other hand, the East is full of donkeys, often very
dignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention to the other
grotesque quadruped, with an even larger head and even longer ears,
he seemed to take on a deep shade of oriental mystery.
I know not why these two absurd creatures tangled themselves up
so much in my train of thought, like dragons in an illuminated text;
or ramped like gargoyles on either side of the gateway of my adventure.
But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and the East
after all.  The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance
of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day,
at going out for a walk down the same road.  The modern world
is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally
accompanied with human sacrifice.  Yet we hear strangely little of
the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence
of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin.
I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise;
and the need of seeing the old road as a new road.  But I cannot
claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends,
I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness;
or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces.  It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things
that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation.
And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation.
His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret.
He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk,
but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture.
My own beast of burden supports the authority of Scripture
by being a very wild ass.  I have given him the name of Trotsky,
because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands still.
He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him,
and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him.
He also breaks fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions;
between delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor man
in a day.  I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging
whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys.
But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty
is all the other way.  He kicks the people who try to catch him;
and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel.  For it seems to me
that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty
to animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals;
more patience, I fear, than many of us have with human beings.
Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a field
every morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way
of beginning the day's work; I wonder whether that day's work
would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened.
Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations
would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back
of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting.
All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a
Dickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficult
to take a donkey seriously, it ought to be easiest, at least,
for a man who is going to Jerusalem.

There was a cloud of Christmas weather on the great grey beech-woods
and the silver cross of the cross-roads. For the four roads that meet
in the market-place of my little town make one of the largest and
simplest of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as it
shines on that wooded chart always affects me in a singular fashion.
The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross.
For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination
of liberty and limitation which we call choice.  A man is entirely
free to choose between right and left, or between right and wrong.
As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud,
I knew that our civilisation had indeed come to the cross-roads.
As the paths grew fainter, fading under the gathering shadow,
I felt rather as if it had lost its way in a forest.

It was at the time when people were talking about some menace
of the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical;
and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might
have fitted in with such a fancy.  It faded, however, as I left
the place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet,
was comparatively clear.  It was almost as if Beaconsfield had
a domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world all to itself.
In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the world, for its
four corners are named "ends" after the four nearest towns.
But I was concerned only with the one called London End;
and the very name of it was like a vision of some vain thing at
once ultimate and infinite.  The very title of London End sounds
like the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere.
It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End?  As I
came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London
as a shapeless and endless muddle that chiefly filled my mind.
I seemed still to carry the cloud with me; and when I looked up,
I almost expected to see the chimney-pots as tangled as the trees.

And in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amount
of mental and moral fog.  The whole industrial world symbolised
by London had reached a curious complication and confusion,
not easy to parallel in human history.  It is not a question
of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went
by Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics,
with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demand
for Nationalisation.  And quite apart from the merits of the case,
it struck me that after all the direct action is very indirect,
and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired.
It is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cut
across each other.  The employers talk about "private enterprise,"
as if there were anything private about modern enterprise.
Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised
in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy.
Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to "nationalise" the mines
or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy
to nationalise the Government, or even to nationalise the nation.
The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly;
the Socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and
state officials; which is logically a strike against strikes.
I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency,
and for no controversial purpose.  My own sympathies are
with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be
said for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism.
But the point is that when there is something to be said for one thing,
it is now commonly said in support of the opposite thing.
Never since the mob called out, "Less bread!  More taxes!"
in the nonsense story, has there been so truly nonsensical
a situation as that in which the strikers demand Government
control and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy.
The mob howls before the palace gates, "Hateful tyrant, we demand that you
assume more despotic powers"; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony,
"Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?"
There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere.

In truth everything I saw told me that there was a large
misunderstanding everywhere; a misunderstanding amounting to a mess.
And as this was the last impression that London left on me, so it
was the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problem
of Western civilisation, as a riddle to be read or a knot to be untied.
To untie it it is necessary to get hold of the right end of it,
and especially the other end of it.  We must begin at the beginning;
we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return
to our first principles in philosophy.  We must consider how we
came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say.
As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or something
more than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves.
This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides
in that Labour controversy, which I merely took in passing,
because it was the current controversy in London when I left.
The Capitalists say Bolshevism as one might say Boojum.
It is merely a mystical and imaginative word suggesting horror.
But it might mean many things; including some just and rational things.
On the other hand, there could never be any meaning at
all in the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat."
It is like saying, "the omnipotence of omnibus-conductors."
It is fairly obvious that if an omnibus-conductor were omnipotent,
he would probably prefer to conduct something else besides an omnibus.
Whatever its exponents mean, it is clearly something different
from what they say; and even this verbal inconsistency, this mere
welter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought.
It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limbo
of lost words, and possibly of lost wits.  And it is here we find
the value of what I have called walking backwards through history.

It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that it
enables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession.
The stages of my own progress were the chief cities of
separate countries; and though more is lost in missing the countries,
something is gained in so sharply contrasting the capitals.
And again it was one of the advantages of my own progress that it
was a progress backwards; that it happened, as I have said,
to retrace the course of history to older and older things;
to Paris and to Rome and to Egypt, and almost, as it were, to Eden.
And finally it is one of the advantages of such a return that it
did really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notions
in modern society.  I first became conscious of this when I
went out of the Gare de Lyon and walked along a row of cafes,
until I saw again a distant column crowned with a dancing figure;
the freedom that danced over the fall of the Bastille.
Here at least, I thought, is an origin and a standard,
such as I missed in the mere muddle of industrial opportunism.
The modern industrial world is not in the least democratic; but it is
supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic.
The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly
in the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with pirates
and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy.  But sanctity
was the only ideal those barbarians had, when they had any at all.
And democracy is the only ideal the industrial millions have,
when they have any at all.  Sanctity was the light of the Dark Ages,
or if you will the dream of the Dark Ages.  And democracy is the dream
of the dark age of industrialism; if it be very much of a dream.
It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend
to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes
only desire to desire.  In a word, an equal citizenship is quite
the reverse of the reality in the modern world; but it is still
the ideal in the modern world.  At any rate it has no other ideal.
If the figure that has alighted on the column in the Place de la
Bastille be indeed the spirit of liberty, it must see a million growths
in a modern city to make it wish to fly back again into heaven.
But our secular society would not know what goddess to put on
the pillar in its place.

As I looked at that sculptured goddess on that classical column,
my mind went back another historic stage, and I asked myself
where this classic and republican ideal came from, and the answer
was equally clear.  The place from which it had come was the place
to which I was going; Rome.  And it was not until I had reached Rome
that I adequately realised the next great reality that simplified
the whole story, and even this particular part of the story.
I know nothing more abruptly arresting than that sudden steepness,
as of streets scaling the sky, where stands, now cased in tile and brick
and stone, that small rock that rose and overshadowed the whole earth;
the Capitol.  Here in the grey dawn of our history sat the strong
Republic that set her foot upon the necks of kings; and it was from
here assuredly that the spirit of the Republic flew like an eagle
to alight on that far-off pillar in the country of the Gauls.
For it ought to be remembered (and it is too often forgotten)
that if Paris inherited what may be called the authority of Rome,
it is equally true that Rome anticipated all that is sometimes
called the anarchy of Paris.  The expansion of the Roman Empire
was accompanied by a sort of permanent Roman Revolution, fully as
furious as the French Revolution.  So long as the Roman system was
really strong, it was full of riots and mobs and democratic divisions;
and any number of Bastilles fell as the temple of the victories rose.
But though I had but a hurried glance at such things, there were
among them some that further aided the solution of the problem.
I saw the larger achievements of the later Romans; and the lesson
that was still lacking was plainly there.  I saw the Coliseum,
a monument of that love of looking on at athletic sports,
which is noted as a sign of decadence in the Roman Empire and
of energy in the British Empire.  I saw the Baths of Caracalla,
witnessing to a cult of cleanliness, adduced also to prove the luxury
of Ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons. All it
really proves either way is a love of washing on a large scale;
which might merely indicate that Caracalla, like other Emperors,
was a lunatic.  But indeed what such things do indicate,
if only indirectly, is something which is here much more important.
They indicate not only a sincerity in the public spirit,
but a certain smoothness in the public services.  In a word,
while there were many revolutions, there were no strikes.
The citizens were often rebels; but there were men who were not rebels,
because they were not citizens.  The ancient world forced a number
of people to do the work of the world first, before it allowed
more privileged people to fight about the government of the world.
The truth is trite enough, of course; it is in the single word Slavery,
which is not the name of a crime like Simony, but rather of a scheme
like Socialism.  Sometimes very like Socialism.

Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one of
those broken arches, I suddenly saw the Labour problem of London,
as I could not see it in London.  I do not mean that I saw which side
was right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan points
or repartees, or any practical details about practical difficulties.
I mean that I saw what it was; the thing itself and the whole thing.
The Labour problem of to-day stood up quite simply, like a
peak at which a man looks back and sees single and solid,
though when he was walking over it it was a wilderness of rocks.
The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris
without the slavery of Rome.  Between the Roman Republic and the
French Republic something had happened.  Whatever else it was, it was
the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery;
the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation
of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal.
When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found
that world changed by a much more mysterious version of equality.
So that London, handing on the lamp from Paris as well as Rome,
is faced with a new problem touching the old practice of getting
the work of the world done somehow.  We have now to assume not
only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens.
Capitalism attempted it by combining political equality with
economic inequality; it assumed the rich could always hire the poor.
But Capitalism seems to me to have collapsed; to be not only
a discredited ethic but a bankrupt business.  Whether we shall
return to pagan slavery, or to small property, or by guilds
or otherwise get to work in a new way, is not the question here.
The question here was the one I asked myself standing on that green
mound beside the yellow river; and the answer to it lay ahead of me,
along the road that ran towards the rising sun.

What made the difference?  What was it that had happened
between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the
French Republic?  Why did the equal citizens of the first take it
for granted that there would be slaves?  Why did the equal citizens
of the second take it for granted that there would not be slaves?
How had this immemorial institution disappeared in the interval,
so that nobody even dreamed of it or suggested it?  How was it that
when equality returned, it was no longer the equality of citizens,
and had to be the equality of men?  The answer is that this equality
of men is in more senses than one a mystery.  It is a mystery which I
pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome.
It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any one else
had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows across
a great landscape grey with olives and still dark against the dawn.
The dawn itself looked rather like a row of wonderful windows;
a line of low casements unshuttered and shining under the eaves
of cloud.  There was a curious clarity about the sunrise;
as if its sun might be made of glass rather than gold.
It was the first time I had seen so closely and covering such
a landscape the grey convolutions and hoary foliage of the olive;
and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in a dream.
The rocking railway-train and the vanishing railway-line seemed to be
going due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noise
of the train there was no sound in all that grey and silver solitude;
not even the sound of a bird.  Yet the plantations were mostly marked
out in private plots and bore every trace of the care of private owners.
It is seldom, I confess, that I so catch the world asleep,
nor do I know why my answer should have come to me thus when I was
myself only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some new
signal or landmark; but in my experience it is rather the things
already grown familiar that suddenly grow strange and significant.
A million olives must have flashed by before I saw the first olive;
the first, so to speak, which really waved the olive branch.
For I remembered at last to what land I was going; and I knew the name
of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves,
and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour
and liberty.  It was as if I already saw against the clouds
of daybreak that mountain which takes its title from the olive:
and standing half visible upon it, a figure at which I did not look.
_Ex oriente lux_; and I knew what dawn had broken over the ruins of Rome.

I have taken but this one text or label, out of a hundred such,
the matter of labour and liberty; and thought it worth
while to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellow
poster in the London streets to its high places in history.
But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand things
grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther and
farther from them, and drew near the central origins of civilisation.
I do not say that I saw the solution; but I saw the problem.
In the litter of journalism and the chatter of politics, it is too
much of a puzzle even to be a problem.  For instance, a friend
of mine described his book, _The Path to Rome_, as a journey through
all Europe that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describe
my own journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved.
The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfully
apparent everywhere; the plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop
up on every side like growing things; and the first French villages
through which I passed had heard in the distance, day and night,
the guns of the long battle-line, like the breaking of an endless
exterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world.
I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so near
the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night
of terror just before the turning of the tide.  For the truth which
thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor
of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world.
Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something
as solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land,
against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as
_strong_ as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood.
It was the resistance of form to formlessness; that version or
vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on.
It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stood
the broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in the
Paris square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domestic
enclosures of my own dog and donkey.  All had the same design,
the marking out of a square for the experiment of liberty;
of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty.
I knew, to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the West
had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient.
For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they
are the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill
against the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought
brigands out of the wilds of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium.
And as in the other case, what I saw was something simpler and
larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace.
A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution
of the artificial German Empire into smaller states should have
actually been prevented by its enemies, when it was already accepted
in despair by its friends.  For we are now trying hard to hold
the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal
years to burst it asunder.  Or he may think exactly the opposite;
it makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind.
A man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we should
clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople.
For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage
and pasturage, and giving up to them our own European and Christian city;
it is as if the Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome.
But he may think exactly the opposite; and the larger and simpler
truth will still be there.  It was that the weeds and wild
things had been everywhere breaking into our boundaries,
climbing over the northern wall or crawling through the eastern gate,
so that the city would soon have been swallowed in the jungle.
And whether the lines had been redrawn logically or loosely,
or particular things cleared with consistency or caprice, a line
has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow.
The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at least
capable of containing citizens.  I felt this in the chance relics
of the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics
which even the war had never touched at all; I felt the change
as much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West.
I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look
at a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crape
and such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plain
pedestal nothing now is left but the single word "Strasbourg."
I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall
in a poor street in Brindisi; _Italia vittoriosa_.  But I felt it
as much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote;
in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down
upon all modern things.  For these things were more than a trophy
that had been raised, they were a palladium that had been rescued.
These were the things that had again been saved from chaos,
as they were saved at Salamis and Lepanto; and I knew what had
saved them or at least in what formation they had been saved.
I knew that these scattered splendours of antiquity would hardly
have descended to us at all, to be endangered or delivered,
if all that pagan world had not crystallised into Christendom.

Crossing seas as smooth as pavements inlaid with turquoise
and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear
and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had
been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism;
but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted
the inevitable night.  The historical moral was the same whether
these marble outlines were merely "the isles" seen afar off like
sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were felt indeed as Hellas,
the great archipelago of arts and arms praised by the Greek poets;
the historic heritage of both descended only to the Greek Fathers.
In those wild times and places, the thing that preserved both was
the only thing that would have permanently preserved either.
It was but part of the same story when we passed the hoary
hills that held the primeval culture of Crete, and remembered
that it may well have been the first home of the Philistines.
It mattered the less by now whether the pagans were best
represented by Poseidon the deity or by Dagon the demon.
It mattered the less what gods had blessed the Greeks in their youth
and liberty; for I knew what god had blessed them in their despair.
I knew by what sign they had survived the long slavery under
Ottoman orientalism; and upon what name they had called in the darkness,
when there was no light but the horned moon of Mahound.
If the glory of Greece has survived in some sense, I knew why it
had ever survived in any sense.  Nor did this feeling of our fixed
formation fail me when I came to the very gates of Asia and of Africa;
when there rose out of the same blue seas the great harbour of Alexandria;
where had shone the Pharos like the star of Hellas, and where men
had heard from the lips of Hypatia the last words of Plato.
I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces; but they did not tear
Plato in pieces.  The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab would
have thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces.
For it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it is
capable sooner or later of tearing anything and everything in pieces;
it has no instinct of preservation or of the permanent needs of men.
Where it has passed the ruins remain ruins and are not renewed;
where it has been resisted and rolled back, the links of our long
history are never lost.  As I went forward the vision of our
own civilisation, in the form in which it finally found unity,
grew clearer and clearer; nor did I ever know it more certainly
than when I had left it behind.

For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing among
shapeless things; and it was a shape I knew.  The imagination was forced
to rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy with distance,
as if into the cold colours of primeval dawns, or into the upper
strata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon.
But the character of that central clearance still became clearer
and clearer.  And my memory turned again homewards; and I thought it
was like the vision of a man flying from Northolt, over that little
market-place beside my own door; who can see nothing below him
but a waste as of grey forests, and the pale pattern of a cross.



CHAPTER II

THE WAY OF THE DESERT

It may truly be said, touching the type of culture at least,
that Egypt has an Egyptian lower class, a French middle class and an
English governing class.  Anyhow it is true that the civilisations
are stratified in this formation, or superimposed in this order.
It is the first impression produced by the darkness and density
of the bazaars, the line of the lighted cafes and the blaze
of the big hotels.  But it contains a much deeper truth in all
three cases, and especially in the case of the French influence.
It is indeed one of the first examples of what I mean by the divisions
of the West becoming clearer in the ancient centres of the East.
It is often said that we can only appreciate the work of England in a
place like India.  In so far as this is true, it is quite equally true
that we can only appreciate the work of France in a place like Egypt.
But this work is of a peculiar and even paradoxical kind.
It is too practical to be prominent, and so universal that
it is unnoticed.

The French view of the Rights of Man is called visionary;
but in practice it is very solid and even prosaic.
The French have a unique and successful trick by which French
things are not accepted as French.  They are accepted as human.
However many foreigners played football, they would still consider
football an English thing.  But they do not consider fencing
a French thing, though all the terms of it are still French.
If a Frenchman were to label his hostelry an inn or a public house
(probably written publicouse) we should think him a victim of rather
advanced Anglomania.  But when an Englishman calls it an hotel,
we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigner
or a dangerous lunatic.  We need not recognise less readily
the value of this because our own distinction is different;
especially as our own distinction is being more distinguished.
The spirit of the English is adventure; and it is the essence of adventure
that the adventurer does remain different from the strange tribes
or strange cities, which he studies because of their strangeness.
He does not become like them, as did some of the Germans,
or persuade them to become like him, as do most of the French.
But whether we like or dislike this French capacity, or merely
appreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubt
about the cause of that capacity.  The cause is in the spirit
that is so often regarded as wildly Utopian and unreal.
The cause is in the abstract creed of equality and citizenship;
in the possession of a political philosophy that appeals to all men.
In truth men have never looked low enough for the success
of the French Revolution.  They have assumed that it claims
to be a sort of divine and distant thing, and therefore have
not noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things.
They have watched its wavering in the senate and never seen it
walking in the streets; though it can be seen in the streets of Cairo
as in the streets of Paris.

In Cairo a man thinks it English to go into a tea-shop;
but he does not think it French to go into a cafe. And the people
who go to the tea-shop, the English officers and officials,
are stamped as English and also stamped as official.
They are generally genial, they are generally generous, but they
have the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison.
They cannot be mistaken for human beings.  The people going to a cafe
are simply human beings going to it because it is a human place.
They have forgotten how much is French and how much Egyptian
in their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation.
Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped because
it is the clue to many things in the mystery of the modern East.
I call it an old culture because as a matter of fact it runs back
to the Roman culture.  In this respect the Gauls really continue
the work of the Romans, in making something official which comes
at last to be regarded as ordinary.  And the great fundamental fact
which is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered,
about these cities and provinces of the near East, is that they
were once as Roman as Gaul.

There is a frivolous and fanciful debate I have often had with a friend,
about whether it is better to find one's way or to lose it, to remember
the road or to forget it.  I am so constituted as to be capable
of losing my way in my own village and almost in my own house.
And I am prepared to maintain the privilege to be a poetic one.
In truth I am prepared to maintain that both attitudes are valuable,
and should exist side by side.  And so my friend and I walk side by side
along the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment,
because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since
his childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale,
because I have forgotten all about it.  The lamp-post which moves
him to a tear of reminiscence wrings from me a cry of astonishment;
and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to me
as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade.  Now in this,
I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the difference
is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French.
But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing
where they are, and knowing it is where they have been before.
It is in the Roman Empire.

The position of the English in Egypt or even in Palestine is something
of a paradox.  The real English claim is never heard in England and never
uttered by Englishmen.  We do indeed hear a number of false English
claims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false.
We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which so
often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality.
We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere
a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it.
We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English
have after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spirited
and stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romance
in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands.
But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not
that of extending the British Empire in strange lands.
Rather it is restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands.
It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the search
for something non-European. It would be much truer to call
it putting Europe together again after it had been broken.
It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the most
western of Europeans, that they have so completely forgotten
their own history that they have forgotten even their own rights.
At any rate they have forgotten the claims that could reasonably be
made for them, but which they never think of making for themselves.
They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of years
ago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English king
was fighting in Palestine.  They merely have a vague idea that George
of Cappadocia was naturalised much in the same way as George of Hanover.
They almost certainly suppose that Coeur de Lion in his wanderings
happened to meet the King of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happen
to meet the King of the Cannibal Islands.  To understand the past
connection of England with the near East, it is necessary to understand
something that lies behind Europe and even behind the Roman Empire;
something that can only be conveyed by the name of the Mediterranean.
When people talk, for instance, as if the Crusades were nothing
more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget
in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive
raid against the old and ordered civilisation in these parts.
I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; as will be
apparent later, I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it;
but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom
that was the thing invaded.  An Arabian gentleman found riding
on the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardly
complain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert.
The conqueror of Sicily and Spain cannot reasonably express surprise at
being an object of morbid curiosity to the people of Italy and France.
In the city of Cairo the stranger feels many of the Moslem merits,
but he certainly feels the militaristic character of the Moslem glories.
The crown of the city is the citadel, built by the great Saladin
but of the spoils of ancient Egyptian architecture; and that fact
is in its turn very symbolical.  The man was a great conqueror,
but he certainly behaved like an invader; he spoiled the Egyptians.
He broke the old temples and tombs and built his own out of fragments.
Nor is this the only respect in which the citadel of Cairo is set
high like a sign in heaven.  The sign is also significant because
from this superb height the traveller first beholds the desert,
out of which the great conquest came.

Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloud
in triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a stranger
experience to see the earth afar off.  And few of us, strictly speaking,
have ever seen the earth at all.  In cultivated countries it
is always clad, as it were, in green garments.  The first sight
of the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance.
The image is all the more natural because of the particular formation
which it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt,
and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo.  Those who have seen
the desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat.
But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a line
of wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse,
of bald women.  For it is impossible not to think of such repulsive
images, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination.
There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the first
appearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea.
Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and there
in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara
or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take
the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background;
a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange
as the colours of the sea.  But when it is first seen abutting,
and as it were, advancing, upon the fields and gardens of humanity,
then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies;
like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted.
It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet make
itself into something like a mountain range; and the traveller
remembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyes
to those accursed hills, from whence no help can come.

But this is only a first glimpse from a city set among green fields;
and is concerned rather with what the desert has been in its relation
to men than with what the desert is in itself.  When the mind has
grown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which I
have never seen noted or explained by the students of mental science.
It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty.
But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinary
word such as "moon" or "man" about fifty times, he will find
that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition.
A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu;
and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf. Something
of this magic of monotony is effected by the monotony of deserts;
and the traveller feels as if he had entered into a secret,
and was looking at everything from another side.  Something of this
simplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert,
especially in the religion of Islam.  It explains something of the
super-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future;
it explains something also about their barbarous indifference
to the past.

We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sense
they are unnaturally new.  They are unused, and perhaps unusable.
They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so raw
as to be rejected.  It is not easy to define this quality of
something primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful.
Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that is
as much crude as archaic.  A palm-tree is very like a tree drawn
by a child--or by a very futurist artist.  Even a pyramid is like
a mathematical figure drawn by a schoolmaster teaching children;
and its very impressiveness is that of an ultimate Platonic abstraction.
There is something curiously simple about the shape in which
these colossal crystals of the ancient sands have been cast.
It is only when we have felt something of this element,
not only of simplicity, but of crudity, and even in a sense
of novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensity
and the insufficiency of that power that came out of the desert,
the great religion of Mahomet.

In the red circle of the desert, in the dark and secret place,
the prophet discovers the obvious things.  I do not say it
merely as a sneer, for obvious things are very easily forgotten;
and indeed every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things.
But it is true that in such a solitude men tend to take very simple
ideas as if they were entirely new ideas.  There is a love of
concentration which comes from the lack of comparison.  The lonely
man looking at the lonely palm-tree does see the elementary truths
about the palm-tree; and the elementary truths are very essential.
Thus he does see that though the palm-tree may be a very simple design,
it was not he who designed it.  It may look like a tree drawn
by a child, but he is not the child who could draw it.  He has not
command of that magic slate on which the pictures can come to life,
or of that magic green chalk of which the green lines can grow.
He sees at once that a power is at work in whose presence
he and the palm-tree are alike little children.  In other words,
he is intelligent enough to believe in God; and the Moslem,
the man of the desert, is intelligent enough to believe in God.
But his belief is lacking in that humane complexity that comes
from comparison.  The man looking at the palm-tree does realise
the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at
the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred
sophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself.  But the man
in the desert cannot compare the palm-tree with the lamp-post,
or even with all the other trees which may be better worth looking
at than the lamp-post. Hence his religion, though true as far
as it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churches
that were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards.
I speak here of the Moslem type of religion and not of the oriental type
of ornament, which is much older than the Moslem type of religion.
But even the oriental type of ornament, admirable as it often is,
is to the ornament of a gothic cathedral what a fossil forest is
to a forest full of birds.  In short, the man of the desert tends
to simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth.
And as it is with religion so it is with morality.  He who believes
in the existence of God believes in the equality of man.  And it has
been one of the merits of the Moslem faith that it felt men as men,
and was not incapable of welcoming men of many different races.
But here again it was so hard and crude that its very equality was
like a desert rather than a field.  Its very humanity was inhuman.

But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary it is very real.
When a man in the desert meets another man, he is really
a man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers.
He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-tree
or the pyramid.  The discoverer does not pause to consider
through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel.
When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does
not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education,
or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celtic
or Iberian.  A man is a man; and a man is a very important thing.
One thing redeems the Moslem morality which can be set over against
a mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense.
And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men.
There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerous
potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be
said later.  Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense;
yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing.
The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does
take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our more
transcendental sense.  When he does take up a mystical idea he takes
it as he takes the man or the palm-tree; that is, quite literally.
When he does distinguish somebody not as a man but as a Moslem,
then he divides the Moslem from the non-Moslem exactly as he divides
the man from the camel.  But even then he recognises the equality of men
in the sense of the equality of Moslems.  He does not, for instance,
complicate his conscience with any sham science about races.
In this he has something like an intellectual advantage over
the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior;
and even in some ways his spiritual superior.  The Jew has far more
moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul.
For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life;
but if they did believe in a future life, it would be something
more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza.  The Moslem Paradise
is a very Earthly Paradise.  But with all their fine apprehensions,
the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being a Chosen Race.
It is the vice of any patriotism or religion depending on race
that the individual is himself the thing to be worshipped;
the individual is his own ideal, and even his own idol.
This fancy was fatal to the Germans; it is fatal to the Anglo-Saxons,
whenever any of them forswear the glorious name of Englishmen
and Americans to fall into that forlorn description.
This is not so when the nation is felt as a noble abstraction,
of which the individual is proud in the abstract.
A Frenchman is proud of France, and therefore may think himself
unworthy of France.  But a German is proud of being a German;
and he cannot be too unworthy to be a German when he is a German.
In short, mere family pride flatters every member of the family;
it produced the arrogance of the Germans, and it is capable of producing
a much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews.  From this particular
sort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free.
If he is not considering somebody as a Moslem, he will consider
him as a man.  At the price of something like barbarism, he has
at least been saved from ethnology.

But here again the obvious is a limit as well as a light to him.
It does not permit, for instance, anything fine or subtle in
the sentiment of sex.  Islam asserts admirably the equality of men;
but it is the equality of males.  No one can deny that a noble
dignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arabs
coming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt.
No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their backs can
bear themselves in a way befitting kings or prophets in the great
stories of Scripture.  No one can be surprised that so many fine
artists have delighted to draw such models on the spot, and to make
realistic studies for illustrations to the Old and New Testaments.
On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups exactly like that
of the Holy Family in the pictures of the Flight into Egypt;
with only one difference.  The man is riding on the ass.

In the East it is the male who is dignified and even ceremonial.
Possibly that is why he wears skirts.  I pointed out long ago
that petticoats, which some regard as a garb of humiliation for women
are really regarded as the only garb of magnificence for men,
when they wish to be something more than men.  They are worn by kings,
by priests, and by judges.  The male Moslem, especially in his
own family, is the king and the priest and the judge.  I do not mean
merely that he is the master, as many would say of the male in many
Western societies, especially simple and self-governing societies.
I mean something more; I mean that he has not only the kingdom
and the power but the glory, and even as it were the glamour.
I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often give
to the man, but the special sort of social beauty and stateliness
that we generally expect only of the woman.  What we mean when we
say that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the head
of the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expects
to see a fine man at the head of the house.  Even in the street
he is the peacock, coloured much more splendidly than the peahen.
Even when clad in comparatively sober and partly European costume,
as outside the cafes of Cairo and the great cities, he exhibits
this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp.
It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkish
attire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonly
called in England a fez.  The fez is not a sort of smoking cap.
It is a tower of scarlet often tall enough to be the head-dress
of a priest.  And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady.

This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and oriental
life generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it back
to the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantage
of the philosophy of the desert.  Chivalry is not an obvious idea.
It is not as plain as a pike-staff or as a palm-tree. It is a delicate
balance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetic
kind of pleasure to those who can strike it.  But it is not
self-evident to a savage merely because he is also a sane man.
It often seems to him as much a part of his own coarse common sense
that all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is stronger
and less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parents
rather than the children.  Pity for weakness he can understand;
and the Moslem is quite capable of giving royal alms to a cripple
or an orphan.  But reverence for weakness is to him simply meaningless.
It is a mystical idea that is to him no more than a mystery.
But the same is true touching what may be called the lighter side of
the more civilised sentiment.  This hard and literal view of life gives
no place for that slight element of a magnanimous sort of play-acting,
which has run through all our tales of true lovers in the West.
Wherever there is chivalry there is courtesy; and wherever there
is courtesy there is comedy.  There is no comedy in the desert.

Another quite logical and consistent element, in the very logical
and consistent creed we call Mahometanism, is the element
that we call Vandalism.  Since such few and obvious things alone
are vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian affection
is not one of these things, and cannot be called obvious,
it is largely left out.  It is very difficult to say in a few
well-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the Pyramids.
Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply stripped
the Pyramids to build a military fortress on the heights of Cairo.
It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man's duty to
the Sphinx; and therefore the Mamelukes used it entirely as a target.
There was little in them of that double feeling, full of pathos and irony,
which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence of
the great pagan literature and art.  This is not concerned with brutal
outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous
caprices of toleration, which may also be found on both sides;
it is concerned with the inmost mentality of the two religions,
which must be understood in order to do justice to either.
The Moslem mind never tended to that mystical mode of "loving yet leaving"
with which Augustine cried aloud upon the ancient beauty, or Dante
said farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans.
The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggest
the image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her.
We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is not
a compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms;
as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying
the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence
imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods.
This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam.  Islam, as I
have said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to play
with anything.  And the cause of the contrast is the historical
cause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind.
The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea of
reconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation.
It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the old
balance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to lose
its balance any more than they.  It differed because the old system
was one of many religions under one government, while the new
was one of many governments under one religion.  But the idea
of variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed.
A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard
to find a place for everything in the system, however much might
be denied to the individual.  Christians might lose everything,
but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything.  The very
nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this.
Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore
ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome.
Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked
at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter's might have looked
at the Parthenon.  Islam began at the beginning; it was content with
the idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth.
It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth.

Islam was a movement; that is why it has ceased to move.
For a movement can only be a mood.  It may be a very necessary movement
arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its
level in a larger philosophy, and be balanced against other things.
Islam was a reaction towards simplicity; it was a violent simplification,
which turned out to be an over-simplification. Stevenson has somewhere
one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man;
that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits
for a train.  The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one;
the greatness of God which levels all men.  But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another.
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire.
The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.

An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there were
a great many things in the creed for which he had no use.
He might just as well have said that there were a great many
things in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ for which he had no use.
It would probably have occurred to him that the work in question
was meant for humanity and not for him.  But even in the case
of the _Encyclopedia_, it will often be found a stimulating
exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects
and note where they touch.  In fact there is really a great deal
to be said for the man in _Pickwick_ who read first about China
and then about metaphysics and combined his information.
But however this may be in the famous case of Chinese metaphysics,
it is this which is chiefly lacking in Arabian metaphysics.
They suffer, as I have said of the palm-tree in the desert,
from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity,
and of the complexity that comes from comparison.  They suffer
from having been in a single movement in a single direction;
from having begun as a mood and ended rather as a mode,
that is a mere custom or fashion.  But any modern Christian thus
criticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himself
and his world at the same time.  For in truth most modern things
are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement.
They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggerated
because it has been neglected.  They are at worst mere monomanias,
in which everything is neglected that one thing may be exaggerated.
Good or bad, they are alike movements which in their nature can only
move for a certain distance and then stop.  Feminism, for instance,
is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere.
But the Suffragettes no more established a philosophy of the sexes
by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman
can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem;
but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for
anybody or anything.  Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion
a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against
the crude cruelty of Capitalism.  But when we find the Bolshevists
making a rule that the drama "must encourage the proletarian spirit,"
it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but,
what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs.  Imagine having
to apply that principle, let us say, to "Charley's Aunt."
None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy
such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle.  The only two modern men
who attempted it were Comte and Herbert Spencer.  Spencer, I think,
was too small a man to do it at all; and Comte was a great enough
man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times.
None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not
discovered where to rest.

And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves
and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless
races of the industrial city.  Men who have been in the Manchester
movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer
at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years.
And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums
cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert.
Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there
runs through it all the note of the nomad.  The Moslem takes literally,
as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city.
He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism,
the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly,
when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God.
He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Western
sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home.
Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible
and touching.  There is one house that the Moslem does build
like a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door;
as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort.  And that is his grave.
A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village.  It is a village,
as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.
There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street
of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.
But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly
pathetic and human.  Here indeed is the sailor home from sea,
in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last
the nomad confesses the common need of men.  But even about this
there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.
He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.

The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again.
It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progress
and Catholics call development.  There is death and hell
in the desert when it does begin over again.  There is always
the possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth;
will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious.
But it will always be the same secret, for which thousands
of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die.
The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology.
The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like the
repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies.  The very phrase is like
an everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word;
and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificent
of all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptions
had the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness.
The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegant
and so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the egg
and dart pattern or the Greek key.  It is as if we could make
a heraldry of handwriting, or cover a wall-paper with signatures.
But the literary style is as recurrent as the decorative style;
perhaps that is why it can be used as a decorative style.
Phrases are repeated again and again like ornamental stars or flowers.
Many modern people, for example, imagine that the Athanasian Creed
is full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazy
to listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it.  The same
terms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid.
But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in a
proposition of Euclid.  But in the inscriptions of the Mosque whole
sentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but rather
like the chorus of a song.  This is the impression everywhere produced
by this spirit of the sandy wastes; this is the voice of the desert,
though the muezzin cries from the high turrets of the city.
Indeed one is driven to repeating oneself about the repetition,
so overpowering is the impression of the tall horizons of those
tremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weight
of the self-evident.

There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancient
and momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only deal
with its effect on this great religion of simplicity.  For it is
through the atmosphere of that religion that a man makes his way,
as so many pilgrims have done, to the goal of this pilgrimage.
Also this particular aspect remained the more sharply in my memory
because of the suddenness with which I escaped from it.  I had not
expected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences.
I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look
of a large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps,
for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George.
At the moment, however, there was nothing rousing or romantic
about its appearance.  It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy
rain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easier
to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools.
A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform;
I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I
was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling
stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there.
And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that
the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land.
The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare;
and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream.

I know it will seem fanciful; but for a moment I really felt as if I
had come home; or rather to that home behind home for which we
are all homesick.  The lost memory of it is the life at once
of faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind
hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really looked
like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides.
On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen
before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in them
rather than the sun on them.  Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones
were of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but rather
in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr.
Only in a wild Eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or
traveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thought
of the oldest tale of all and the garden from which we came.
But there was something in it yet more subtle; which there must
be in the impression of any earthly paradise.  It is vital to such
a dream that things familiar should be mixed with things fantastic;
as when an actual dream is filled with the faces of old friends.
Sparrows, which seem to be the same all over the world, were darting
hither and thither among the flowers; and I had the fancy that they
were the souls of the town-sparrows of London and the smoky cities,
and now gone wherever the good sparrows go.  And a little way
up the road before me, on the hill between the cactus hedges,
I saw a grey donkey trotting; and I could almost have sworn that it
was the donkey I had left at home.

He was trotting on ahead of me, and the outline of his erect
and elfish ears was dark against the sky.  He was evidently
going somewhere with great determination; and I thought I knew
to what appropriate place he was going, and that it was my fate
to follow him like a moving omen.  I lost sight of him later,
for I had to complete the journey by train; but the train followed
the same direction, which was up steeper and steeper hills.
I began to realise more clearly where I was; and to know that
the garden in the desert that had bloomed so suddenly about me
had borne for many desert wanderers the name of the promised land.
As the rocks rose higher and higher on every side, and hung
over us like terrible and tangible clouds, I saw in the dim grass
of the slopes below them something I had never seen before.
It was a rainbow fallen upon the earth, with no part of it
against the sky, but only the grasses and the flowers shining
through its fine shades of fiery colour.  I thought this also was
like an omen; and in such a mood of idle mysticism there fell
on me another accident which I was content to count for a third.
For when the train stopped at last in the rain, and there was no other
vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer,
an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon; and it was
under the shield of the red cross that I entered Jerusalem.

For suddenly, between a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud
I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens
of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy,
the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid.



CHAPTER III

THE GATES OF THE CITY

The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of
contradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradicted
them all.  Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine;
but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it
points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem.  I need not say
I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a city
of charity and peace, any more than a city of chrysolite and pearl.
I might more reasonably have expected an austere and ascetic place,
oppressed with the weight of its destiny, with no inns except monasteries,
and these sealed with the terrible silence of the Trappists;
an awful city where men speak by signs in the street.
I did not need the numberless jokes about Jerusalem to-day,
to warn me against expecting this; anyhow I did not expect it,
and certainly I did not find it.  But neither did I find what I
was much more inclined to expect; something at the other extreme.
Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town,
that is a truly conquered town.  I looked for a place like Cairo,
containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every side
to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created
for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts.
There may be more of this in the place than pleases those
who would idealise it.  But I fancy there is much less of it
than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal.
It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty
guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American
cocktails as a protest against Christian wine.  The town is quite
inconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims.
Or a stranger might have imagined a place even less Western than Cairo,
one of those villages of Palestine described in dusty old books
of Biblical research.  He might remember drawings like diagrams
representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak,
and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine.  These hard
colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even
to give it the colour of the East would not do justice to Jerusalem.
If I had anticipated the Bagdad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaars
glowing with gorgeous wares, I should have been wrong again.
There is quite enough of this vivid and varied colour in Jerusalem,
but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention,
and certainly not the first that arrested mine.  I give my own first
impression as a fact, for what it is worth and exactly as it came.
I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it.
As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I had
an overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye,
where it looks across the flat sea-meadows towards Winchelsea.

As I tried to explain this eccentric sentiment to myself, I was
conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it.
It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory
of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of
Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas.  The first part
of the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stony
streets between the walls, feels that he is inside a fortress.
But it is the paradox of such a place that, while he feels in a sense
that he is in a prison, he also feels that he is on a precipice.
The sense of being uplifted, and set on a high place, comes to him
through the smallest cranny, or most accidental crack in rock
or stone; it comes to him especially through those long narrow
windows in the walls of the old fortifications; those slits
in the stone through which the medieval archers used their bows
and the medieval artists used their eyes, with even greater success.
Those green glimpses of fields far below or of flats far away,
which delight us and yet make us dizzy (by being both near and far)
when seen through the windows of Memling, can often be seen from
the walls of Jerusalem.  Then I remembered that in the same strips
of medieval landscape could be seen always, here and there, a steep
hill crowned with a city of towers.  And I knew I had the mystical
and double pleasure of seeing such a hill and standing on it.
A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; but it is more
strange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizen
in the city.

Then indeed I knew that what I saw was Jerusalem of the Crusaders;
or at least Jerusalem of the Crusades.  It was a medieval town, with walls
and gates and a citadel, and built upon a hill to be defended by bowmen.
The greater part of the actual walls now standing were built by Moslems
late in the Middle Ages; but they are almost exactly like the walls
that were being built by the Christians at or before that time.
The Crusader Edward, afterwards Edward the First, reared such
battlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales.  I do not know
what elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic.
The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other while
they combated each other; indeed it is a fact always to be found
in such combats.  It is one of the arguments against war that are
really human, and therefore are never used by humanitarians.
The curse of war is that it does lead to more international imitation;
while in peace and freedom men can afford to have national variety.
But some things in this country were certainly copied from
the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they
are in many ways strangely European.  The wall and gates which
now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them,
carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon
that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so
perilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin;
and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangely
of the hill of Rye and of home.

I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers
are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many
buried cities.  I do not forget that such buildings have foundations
that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some
other geological epoch.  Something may be said later of those lost
empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters.
From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten
idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David's javelin-men
scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his
coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man.
Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain
and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying
the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea
from which their worship came.  Those who worshipped on this hill
had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon;
small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole
pageant of the old pagan world.  All its strange shapes and strong
almost cruel colours remain in the records of their prophets;
whose lightest phrase seems heavier than the pyramids of Egypt;
and whose very words are like winged bulls walking.  All this historic or
pre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealing
here with the historic secrets unearthed by the study of the place,
but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it.
The traveller is in the position of that famous fantastic who tied
his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it
dangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city.
But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire;
but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome,--
where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument;
for fear it should walk.  I entirely sympathise with their sentiment;
and I shall try to suggest later why I think that symbol
the logical culmination of heathen as well as Christian things.
The traveller in the traveller's tale looked up at last and saw,
from the streets far below, the spire and cross dominating a Gothic city.
If I looked up in a vision and saw it dominating a Babylonian city,
that blocked the heavens with monstrous palaces and temples,
I should still think it natural that it should dominate.
But the point here is that what I saw above ground was rather the Gothic
town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially
of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.

Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the place
since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far
more interesting centuries that passed before they were built.
But any one taking exception to the description on that ground
may well realise, on consideration, that it is an exception
that proves the rule.  There is something very negative about
Turkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect.
Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople
remained in a state of suspended animation like something frozen
rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead.
It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princes
and princesses into marble statues in the _Arabian Nights_.
All that part of the history of the place is a kind of sleep;
and that of a sleeper who hardly knows if he has slept an hour or a
hundred years.  When I first found myself in the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem,
my eye happened to fall on something that might be seen anywhere,
but which seemed somehow to have a curious significance there.
Most people are conscious of some common object which still
strikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketch
in the sketch-book of nature.  I myself can never overcome the sense
of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings.
There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could
grow hair.  When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of
the citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins,
it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at once
of chaos and of sleep.  It is said that the grass will not grow
where the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the same
truth to say that it would grow anywhere but where it ought to grow.
And though in this case it was but an accident and a symbol,
it was a very true symbol.  We talk of the green banner of the Turk
having been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly it
was so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory.
But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities
in the end.

Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was
not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and
what came after that medieval period.  It remained primarily
a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world
does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world.
There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do
not like it are fond of describing as dogma.  A wall is like rule;
and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule.
The man making it has to decide where his rule will run
and where his exception shall stand.  He cannot have a city
that is all gates any more than a house that is all windows;
nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties.
The ancient races and religions that contended for this city agreed
with each other in this, when they differed about everything else.
It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city they
built a citadel.  That is, whatever strange thing they may have made,
they regarded it as something to be defined and to be defended.

And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city;
it had no suburbs.  That is to say, there are all sorts
of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall.
Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it
is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great
industrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly,
like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth.
This indefinite expansion is controlled neither by the soul of the city
from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about.  It destroys
at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside.
The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet they
never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions
of agriculture.  The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem
is like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty.
Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it
is a precipice.

Again, Jerusalem might be called a city of staircases.
Many streets are steep and most actually cut into steps.
It is, I believe, an element in the controversy about the cave
at Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativity
that the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden could
have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps.
And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpool
it may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder.
But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalem
could not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere.
However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding another
touch to that angular profile which is the impression involved here.
Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impression
even in the labyrinth of mountains through which the road winds
its way to the city.  The hills round Jerusalem are themselves
often hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway.  This is mostly
for the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards;
and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisation
has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine.
But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain
of Purgatory that Dante saw in his vision, lifted in terraces,
like titanic steps up to God.  And indeed this shape also is symbolic;
as symbolic as the pointed profile of the Holy City.
For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope.
A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope;
a miry slope where it is very easy to slide down again.

Such is something like the sharp and even abrupt impression produced
by this mountain city; and especially by its wall with gates
like a house with windows.  A gate, like a window, is primarily
a picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are
indeed very various and sometimes very alien.  Within this frame-work
are indeed to be found things entirely Asiatic, or entirely Moslem,
or even entirely nomadic.  But Jerusalem itself is not nomadic.
Nothing could be less like a mere camp of tents pitched by Arabs.
Nothing could be less like the mere chaos of colour in a temporary
and tawdry bazaar.  The Arabs are there and the colours are there,
and they make a glorious picture; but the picture is in a Gothic frame,
and is seen so to speak through a Gothic window.  And the meaning of all
this is the meaning of all windows, and especially of Gothic windows.
It is that even light itself is most divine within limits;
and that even the shining one is most shining, when he takes upon
himself a shape.

Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rude
and primitive, is really very rationalistic.  It turns the town,
as it were, into a plan of itself, and even into a guide to itself.
This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment,
regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it.
But anyhow, a man must decide which way he will leave the city;
he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern
cities through a litter of slums.  And there is no better way to get
a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates
in the memory.  Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south
with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem.
This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western
impression first because it is here that he has the strongest
sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle;
but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-western
hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom.
I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin
conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously
the sacred hill.  Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills,
but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill where
stood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the western
where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it.
I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance to
the notion that has crossed my own mind, and which I only mention
in passing, for I have no doubt there are a hundred objections to it.
But it is known that Zion or Sion was the old name of the place
before it was stormed by David; and even afterwards the Jebusites
remained on this western hill, and some compromise seems to have
been made with them.  Is it conceivable, I wonder, that even in
the twelfth century there lingered some local memory of what had
once been a way of distinguishing Sion of the Jebusites from Salem
of the Jews?  The Zion Gate, however, is only a starting-point here;
if we go south-eastward from it we descend a steep and rocky path,
from which can be caught the first and finest vision of what stands
on the other hill to the east.  The great Mosque of Omar stands
up like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumes
of blue and green.

Scholars, I may say here, object to calling it the Mosque of Omar;
on the petty and pedantic ground that it is not a mosque and was
not built by Omar.  But it is my fixed intention to call it
the Mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continue
calling it the Mosque of Omar.  I possess a special permit from
the Grand Mufti to call it the Mosque of Omar.  He is the head
of the whole Moslem religion, and if he does not know, who does?
He told me, in the beautiful French which matches his beautiful manners,
that it really is not so ridiculous after all to call the place
the Mosque of Omar, since the great Caliph desired and even designed
such a building, though he did not build it.  I suppose it is
rather as if Solomon's Temple had been called David's Temple.
Omar was a great man and the Mosque was a great work, and the two were
telescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition.
There could not be a better example of that great truth for
all travellers; that popular tradition is never so right as when it
is wrong; and that pedantry is never so wrong as when it is right.
And as for the other objection, that the Dome of the Rock
(to give it its other name) is not actually used as a Mosque, I
answer that Westminster Abbey is not used as an Abbey.
But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to it
as Westminster Church; to say nothing of the many modern Englishmen
for whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum.
And for whatever purposes the Moslems may actually use their
great and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowed
it to become the private house of a particular rich man.
And that is what we have suffered to happen, if not to Westminster Abbey,
at least to Welbeck Abbey.

The Mosque of Omar (I repeat firmly) stands on the great eastern
plateau in place of the Temple; and the wall that runs round
to it on the south side of the city contains only the Dung Gate,
on which the fancy need not linger.  All along outside this
wall the ground falls away into the southern valley; and upon
the dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Acaldama.
Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the great
temple platform, and confronting the eastern wall, across the ravine,
is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives.  On this side there
are several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous,
the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimony
to the fallen warriors of the cross.  For there is a strange
Moslem legend that through this gate, so solemnly sealed up,
shall ride the Christian King who shall again rule in Jerusalem.
In the middle of the square enclosure rises the great dark Dome
of the Rock; and standing near it, a man may see for the first time
in the distance, another dome.  It lies away to the west, but a little
to the north; and it is surmounted, not by a crescent but a cross.
Many heroes and holy kings have desired to see this thing,
and have not seen it.

It is very characteristic of the city, with its medieval medley and huddle
of houses, that a man may first see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
which is in the west, by going as far as possible to the east.
All the sights are glimpses; and things far can be visible and things
near invisible.  The traveller comes on the Moslem dome round a corner;
and he finds the Christian dome, as it were, behind his own back.
But if he goes on round the wall to the north-east corner of the Court
of the Temple, he will find the next entrance; the Gate of St. Stephen.
On the slope outside, by a strange and suitable coincidence,
the loose stones which lie on every side of the mountain city
seemed to be heaped higher; and across the valley on the skirts
of the Mount of Olives is the great grey olive of Gethsemane.

On the northern side the valley turns to an artificial trench,
for the ground here is higher; and the next or northern gate bears
the name of Herod; though it might well bear the name either
of Godfrey or Saladin.  For just outside it stands a pine-tree,
and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these great
captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem.  Then the wall runs
on till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know not
why with great roses in a style wholly heraldic and occidental,
and in no way likely to remind us of the rich roses of Damascus;
though their name has passed into our own English tongue and tradition,
along with another word for the delicate decoration of the sword.
But at the first glance, at any rate, it is hard to believe that
the roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster,
or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords
of England or of France.  Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memory
ought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks down
the great highway; as if one could see, hung over it in the sky for ever,
the cloud concealing the sunburst that broods upon the road to Damascus.
But I am here only confessing the facts or fancies of my first impression;
and again the fancy that came to me first was not of any such
alien or awful things.  I did not think of damask or damascene
or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul.
I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge
of the country town where it stands is called Aylesbury End,
merely because it is the corner nearest to Aylesbury.
That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are more
rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity.
When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk
living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope
of finding the road lead him to Pretoria.  But the man leaving
Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man
going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus.
And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances,
the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw something
else as well.

I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous
shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense
all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind.
Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway
will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure
with a strange sentiment of privilege.  It adds to the grace
of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift.
Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways
of a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world;
and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber.
But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come
suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake.
It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;
an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour.  Immediately at
the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap
in the wall, with a wide road running through it.  There is something
of unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason.
It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the Wise Men
of Gotham.  It suggests the old joke about the man who made
a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat.
Everybody has read about it by this time; but the immediate impression
of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning.
It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant.
But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system,
in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride.

What is true has a way of sounding trite; and what is trite has
a way of sounding false.  We shall now probably weary the world
with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied
the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific.
But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times.  And any one who
wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate
that fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it.
The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast;
as of a front door standing by itself in an open field.
It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing.
There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice
of the permanent to the temporary.  When the walls of the Holy City
were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly
even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and
the temptation of great men.  It was for the glory of a single day.
It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything
that could be even in the most vainglorious sense a heritage.
It did not in the ordinary sense make a monument, or even a trophy.
It destroyed a monument to make a procession.  We might almost say
that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph.  There is the true
barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a
century after, or a year after, or even the day after.  It is this
which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory from
the civilised army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny.
Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussian
adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic.
The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems
made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific
culture made at the end of the great century of science.
It made an enormous hole.  The only positive contribution of
the nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock,
at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to
be ornamental.  It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign
of Abdul Hamid; and it seems perfectly adapted to its purpose,
like one of Sir William Watson's sonnets on the same subject.
But this object only adds a touch of triviality to the much more
tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate.  That remains a parable
as well as a puzzle, under all the changing skies of day and night;
with the shadows that gather tinder the narrow Gate of Humility;
and beside it, blank as daybreak and abrupt as an abyss, the broad
road that has led already to destruction.

The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but it
only strengthens by contrast the general sense of their continuity.
Save this one angle where the nineteenth century has entered,
the vague impression of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather
deepens than dies away.  It is supported more than many would suppose
even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in procession
under the walls.  The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans
would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom
of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are
less easily imagined in the West.  Thus as I look down the street,
I see coming out from under an archway a woman wearing a high white
head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures
of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage
or the Court of Louis XI.  She is as white as a woman of the North;
and it is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certain
freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different
at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women.
She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims
as a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin knights of the cross.
This is, of course, but one aspect of the city; but it is one
which may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected.
As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem,
but I had not expected this.  I had expected to be disappointed
with it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission.
I had expected to be awed by it; indeed I had expected to be frightened
of it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission.
But I had never fancied that it would be possible to be fond of it;
as one might be fond of a little walled town among the orchards
of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.

And just then there happened a coincidence that was also something
like a catastrophe.  I was idly watching, as it moved down
the narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress,
like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian woman
from the place where Christ was born.  After she had disappeared
into the darkness of the porch I continued to look vaguely
at the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a small
Gothic gate in some old corner of Rouen, or even Canterbury.
In twenty such places in the town one may see the details that
appeal to the same associations, so different and so distant.
One may see that angular dogtooth ornament that makes the round
Norman gateways look like the gaping mouths of sharks.
One may see the pointed niches in the walls, shaped like windows
and serving somewhat the purpose of brackets, on which were
to stand sacred images possibly removed by the Moslems.
One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental trees
with some monument in the centre, which makes the precise impression
of something in a small French town.  There are no Gothic spires,
but there are numberless Gothic doors and windows; and he who
first strikes the place at this angle, as it were, may well feel
the Northern element as native and the Eastern element as intrusive.
While I was thinking all these things, something happened which in
that place was almost a portent.

It was very cold; and there were curious colours in the sky.
There had been chilly rains from time to time; and the whole
air seemed to have taken on something sharper than a chill.
It was as if a door had been opened in the northern corner of the heavens;
letting in something that changed all the face of the earth.
Great grey clouds with haloes of lurid pearl and pale-green were coming
up from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city.
In the middle of the moving mass of grey vapours was a splash
of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more
ominous than gloom.  It went over the high citadel like a white
wild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell.

It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Eastern
city was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland.
It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned
in it like a sea of solid foam.  And the people of the place told
me there had been no such thing seen in it in all recent records,
or perhaps in the records of all its four thousand years.

All this came later; but for me at the moment, looking at the scene
in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion
to my dream.  It was but an accident confirming what was but an aspect.
But it confirmed it with a strange and almost supernatural completeness.
The white light out of the window in the north lay on all the roofs
and turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in which
snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light.
As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywhere
those fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in with
the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and which
make an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle.
It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to make
medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow.
Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornament
on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab.
Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleys
between us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City lifted
her head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dress
like a daughter of the Crusaders.



CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING

Various cultivated critics told me that I should find
Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I
am not disappointed.  Of the city as a city I shall try to say
something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have
especially in mind are at once more general and more internal.
They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines
and those who use them.  Now the mistake of critics is not that they
criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves.
They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same
time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify
themselves with the ideal.  I have met a tourist who had seen
the great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small.
Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller.  There is indeed another
type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense,
who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece
of realism about his own sensations.  In that case he generally suffers
from the defect of most realists; that of not being realistic enough.
He does not really think out his own impressions thoroughly;
or he would generally find they are not so disappointing after all.
A humorous soldier told me that he came from Derbyshire, and that
he did not think much of the Pyramid because it was not so tall
as the Peak.  I pointed out to him that he was really offering
the tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing it
to a mountain; even if he thought it was a rather small mountain.
I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone.  I appealed
to those with whom I debated in that district, as to whether they
would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during
their quiet rambles in a country churchyard.  I asked whether
each one of them, if he had such a tombstone in the family,
would not feel it natural, if hardly necessary, to point it out;
and that with a certain pride.  The same principle of the higher realism
applies to those who are disappointed with the sight of the Sphinx.
The Sphinx really exceeds expectations because it escapes expectations.
Monuments commonly look impressive when they are high and often
when they are distant.  The Sphinx is really unexpected,
because it is found suddenly in a hollow, and unnaturally near.
Its face is turned away; and the effect is as creepy as coming into a room
apparently empty, and finding somebody as still as the furniture.
Or it is as if one found a lion couchant in that hole in the sand;
as indeed the buried part of the monster is in the form of a
couchant lion.  If it was a real lion it would hardly be less
arresting merely because it was near; nor could the first emotion
of the traveller be adequately described as disappointment.
In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monument
a second time, or even at our own sensations a second time.
So I reasoned, striving with wild critics in the wilderness;
but the only part of the debate which is relevant here can
be expressed in the statement that I do think the Pyramid big,
for the deep and simple reason that it is bigger than I am.
I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx
that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them.
The Sphinx has seen Julius Caesar; it has very probably seen St. Francis,
when he brought his flaming charity to Egypt; it has certainly looked,
in the first high days of the revolutionary victories, on the face
of the young Napoleon.  Is it not barely possible, I hinted
to my friends and fellow-tourists, that after these experiences,
it might be a little depressed at the sight of you and me?
But as I say, I only reintroduce my remarks in connection with a
greater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connection
with a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber,
and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddle
but an answer.

Before I go on to deeper defences of any such cult or culture,
I wish first to note a sort of test for the first impressions
of an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really full
of an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that really
deals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted.
In short I would put myself in the position of the educated
Englishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impression
of idolatry.  Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educated
Englishman who is the idolater.  It is he who only reverences
the place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place.
It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere object
is old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt.
In other words, it is he who values the visible things rather
than the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible things
are vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines.

In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world out
of its course, girt about with crowds who will die or do murder
for a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindness
bows down to wood and stone.  For the only thing wrong about that
admirable man is that he is blind about himself.

No man will really attempt to describe his feelings, when he first
stood at the gateway of the grave of Christ.  The only record relevant
here is that I did not feel the reaction, not to say repulsion,
that many seem to have felt about its formal surroundings.

Either I was particularly fortunate or others are
particularly fastidious.  The guide who showed me the Sepulchre
was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary;
he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man
who might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. He
was a small, solemn, owlish old man, a Roman Catholic in religion;
but so far from deserving the charge of not knowing the Bible,
he deserved rather a gentle remonstrance against his assumption
that nobody else knew it.  If there was anything to smile at,
in associations so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity with
which he told the first facts of the Gospel story, as if he were
evangelising a savage.  Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jack
at a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school.
He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case
any one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in his
narrative to repeat that the hero of these events was Jesus Christ,
lest we should fancy it was Nebuchadnezzar or the Duke of Wellington.
I do not in the least mind being amused at this; but I have no reason
whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. I
gave him what I should have given a similar guide in my own country;
I parted from him as politely as from one of my own countrymen.
I also, of course, gave money, as is the custom, to the various monastic
custodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that.
I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic
brotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by this
time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all.  There was only one
class of men whose consistent concern was to watch these things,
from the age of heathens and heresies to the age of Turks and tourists;
and I am certainly not going to sneer at them for doing no practical work,
and then refuse to pay them for the practical work they do.
For the rest, even the architectural defacement is overstated,
the church was burned down and rebuilt in a bad and modern period;
but the older parts, especially the Crusaders' porch, are as
grand as the men who made them.  The incongruities there are,
are those of local colour.  In connection, by the way, with what I
said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases
to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre.  When I got
to the top I found myself in the placid presence of two camels.
It would be curious to meet two cows on the roof of a village church.
Nevertheless it is the only moral of the chapter interpolated here,
that we can meet things quite as curious in our own country.

When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing he generally
means that the popular worship there is weak and degraded,
and especially that the religious art is gaudy and grotesque.
In so far as there is any kind of truth in this, it is
still true that the critic seldom sees the whole truth.
What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself.
He does not honestly compare what is weak, in this particular world
of ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas.  I will take
an example from my own experience, and in a manner at my own expense.
If I have a native heath it is certainly Kensington High Street,
off which stands the house of my childhood.  I grew up in that
thorough-fare which Mr. Max Beerbohm, with his usual easy exactitude
of phrase, has described as "dapper, with a leaning to the fine arts."
Dapper was never perhaps a descriptive term for myself;
but it is quite true that I owe a certain taste for the arts
to the sort of people among whom I was brought up.  It is also true
that such a taste, in various forms and degrees, was fairly common
in the world which may be symbolised as Kensington High Street.
And whether or no it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that most
people with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have been
very much shocked, in their sense of propriety, if they had seen
the popular shrines of Jerusalem; the sham gold, the garish colours,
the fantastic tales and the feverish tumult.  But what I want such
people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round.
I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking down
David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russian
pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens.
I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracy
that would really surprise such a Christian peasant; especially that
curse of an irreligious society (unknown in religious societies,
Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignity
to the poor.  I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things;
of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship.
Well, my imaginary pilgrim would walk past Kensington Gardens till
his sight was blasted by a prodigy.  He would either fall on his
knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege.
He would have seen the Albert Memorial.  There is nothing so conspicuous
in Jerusalem.  There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem.
Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large
a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style.
My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to
cry aloud, "To what superhuman God was this enormous temple erected?
I hope it is Christ; but I fear it is Antichrist."  Such, he would think,
might well be the great and golden image of the Prince of the World,
set up in this great open space to receive the heathen prayers
and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity.  I fancy he would feel
a desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion.
I really cannot imagine _what_ he would feel, if he were told
that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty
German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into
the tools of Prussia.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens
as something quite natural.  I feel it so because I have been
brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven
images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names;
and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved,
on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert.
I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of
the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was,
to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden.
So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly
a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace,
besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim.
But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might
think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about
the Albert Memorial.  They are quite unconscious of how strange
a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it.
The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their
coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still
feel rather more of the meaning of the colours.  It may be said that
they retain their childish illusion about _their_ Albert Memorial.
I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a
special curse was laid on those who can become like little children.
And I never could understand why such critics who agree
that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it
to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like;
a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel.
But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place;
the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much
surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place
in theirs.  If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify
great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in
Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things.
And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily,
they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.

There are countless other examples of course of this principle
of self-criticism, as the necessary condition of all criticism.
It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaint
which my Kensington friend would make after the complaint about
paltry ornament; the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh.
Here again there is really something to complain of; though much of
the fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York.
The worst superstition of Jerusalem, like the worst profligacy
of Paris, is a thing so much invented for Anglo-Saxons that it might
be called an Anglo-Saxon institution.  But here again the critic
could only really judge fairly if he realised with what abuses
at home he ought really to compare this particular abuse abroad.
He ought to imagine, for example, the feelings of a religious
Russian peasant if he really understood all the highly-coloured
advertisements covering High Street Kensington Station.
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money
as to see the rich asking for more money.  And advertisement is
the rich asking for more money.  A man would be annoyed if he found
himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats
for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, "Give me money."
Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout
would assault the ear.  "Budge's Boots are the Best" simply means
"Give me money"; "Use Seraphic Soap" simply means "Give me money."
It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our
towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements.
Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy
gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably
very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes.
They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
To see such men crowding and clamouring for more wealth would
really be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides;
yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudy
advertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time.
Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisement
fades into a background, just as the gaudy oriental patterns
fade into a background for those oriental priests and pilgrims.
Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unaware
that his black top hat is relieved against a background,
or encircled as by a halo, of a yellow hoarding about mustard,
so is the poor guide sometimes unaware that his small doings are
dark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are traced
only the humbler haloes of the Twelve Apostles.

But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations and
introductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding.
It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophy
of the position; that is the whole of the story and the whole
moral of the story.  The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalem
emphatically manages to miss the point.  The lesson he ought to
learn from it is one which the Western and modern man needs most,
and does not even know that he needs.  It is the lesson of constancy.
These people may decorate their temples with gold or with tinsel;
but their tinsel has lasted longer than our gold.
They may build things as costly and ugly as the Albert Memorial;
but the thing remains a memorial, a thing of immortal memory.
They do not build it for a passing fashion and then forget it,
or try hard to forget it.  They may paint a picture of a saint as gaudy
as any advertisement of a soap; but one saint does not drive out another
saint as one soap drives out another soap.  They do not forget their
recent idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to forget
their very recent idolatry of everything German.  These Christian
bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years.
Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after
the First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time.
At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towards
Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism.
No man living in the West can form the faintest conception
of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East
through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power.
A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a man
in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire.  The imperial power
of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to
the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China.
It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those
who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ.
What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in
all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same
condition should even have the courage to agree with ourselves.
It is not a question of how much of their religion is superstition,
but of how much of our religion is convention; how much is custom
and how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facile
by the security of our own society or the success of our own state.
These are powerful supports; and the enlightened Englishman,
from a cathedral town or a suburban chapel, walks these wild
Eastern places with a certain sense of assurance and stability.
Even after centuries of Turkish supremacy, such a man feels,
he would not have descended to such a credulity.  He would
not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars
in the Holy Sepulchre.  He would not be hanging fantastic
lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into
the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts.
He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid.
He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed.
He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards
a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official
open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar
proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet.

That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should learn;
the lesson about himself.  That is the test that should really be put
to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded.
After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London
fashionable preacher would not be degraded.  It would be destroyed.
It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist
out of a _train de luxe_.  It is worth while to pause upon the point;
for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious
ideals as the ideal of tenacity.  Fashion is called progress.
Every new fashion is called a new faith.  Every faith is a faith
which offers everything except faithfulness.  It was never so necessary
to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world,
including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they
had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily.
The ideal was out of date almost from the first day;
that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed.
As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress
and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.
Some think that this would be an improvement in itself.  We have come
to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper.
But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be
burned on the appearance of the evening editions.  Well, a thousand
years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who
no longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums.
They and the Chinese (that much more dignified and democratic people)
seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yet
ruled Jerusalem.  But though we may think the Christian chapels
as thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian;
though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns,
they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world.

But besides this need of making strange cults the test not of
themselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustrate
the other suggestion about the philosophy of sight-seeing. It is true,
as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am;
and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlier
than I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am.
But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned,
that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do not
notice the small things about it.  They do not even discover
what is interesting about their own disappointment.  And similarly
even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions
of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover
what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating.
For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion,
and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual
and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages.
But if they would really note the details of their surroundings,
or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious fact
about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
as may really be counted unworthy of them.  They would realise
that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does
not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition.
There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures;
they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence.
There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not
the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much
more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel.
In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it
has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything
by the Age of Reason.  It is the enlightened eighteenth century,
which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural culture
and common sense, that has really though indirectly laid its
disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple.
I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters I
do not think taste is the test.  But if taste is to be made the test,
there is matter for momentary reflection in this fact; for it
is another example of the weakness of what may be called fashion.
Voltaire, I believe, erected a sort of temple to God in his own garden;
and we may be sure that it was in the most exquisite taste of the time.
Nothing would have surprised him more than to learn that,
fifty years after the success of the French Revolution, almost every
freethinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far less
artistically admirable than the nearest gargoyle on Notre Dame.
Thus it is progress that must be blamed for most of these things:
and we ought not to turn away in contempt from something antiquated,
but rather recognise with respect and even alarm a sort of permanent
man-trap in the idea of being modern.  So that the moral of this
matter is the same as that of the other; that these things should
raise in us, not merely the question of whether we like them,
but of whether there is anything very infallible or imperishable
about what we like.  At least the essentials of these things endure;
and if they seem to have remained fixed as effigies, at least they
have not faded like fashion-plates.

It has seemed worth while to insert here this note on the philosophy
of sight-seeing, however dilatory or disproportionate it may seem.
For I am particularly and positively convinced that unless these things
can somehow or other be seen in the right historical perspective
and philosophical proportion, they are not worth seeing at all.
And let me say in conclusion that I can not only respect the sincerity,
but understand the sentiments, of a man who says they are not
worth seeing at all.  Sight-seeing is a far more difficult and
disputable matter than many seem to suppose; and a man refusing it
altogether might be a man of sense and even a man of imagination.
It was the great Wordsworth who refused to revisit Yarrow;
it was only the small Wordsworth who revisited it after all.
I remember the first great sight in my own entrance to the Near East,
when I looked by accident out of the train going to Cairo, and saw far
away across the luminous flats a faint triangular shape; the Pyramids.
I could understand a man who had seen it turning his back and retracing
his whole journey to his own country and his own home, saying, "I will go
no further; for I have seen afar off the last houses of the kings."
I can understand a man who had only seen in the distance Jerusalem
sitting on the hill going no further and keeping that vision for ever.
It would, of course, be said that it was absurd to come at all,
and to see so little.  To which I answer that in that sense
it is absurd to come at all.  It is no more fantastic to turn
back for such a fancy than it was to come for a similar fancy.
A man cannot eat the Pyramids; he cannot buy or sell the Holy City;
there can be no practical aspect either of his coming or going.
If he has not come for a poetic mood he has come for nothing; if he has
come for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood.  The way
to be really a fool is to try to be practical about unpractical things.
It is to try to collect clouds or preserve moonshine like money.
Now there is much to be said for the view that to search for a mood
is in its nature moonshine.  It may be said that this is especially
true in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which most
sight-seeing has to be done.  It may be said that thirty tourists
going together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirty
poets going together to write poems about the nightingale.
There would be something rather depressing about a crowd
of travellers, walking over hill and dale after the celebrated
cloud of Wordsworth; especially if the crowd is like the cloud,
and moveth all together if it move at all.  A vast mob assembled
on Salisbury Plain to listen to Shelley's skylark would probably
(after an hour or two) consider it a rather subdued sort of skylarking.
It may be argued that it is just as illogical to hope to fix beforehand
the elusive effects of the works of man as of the works of nature.
It may be called a contradiction in terms to expect the unexpected.
It may be counted mere madness to anticipate astonishment, or go
in search of a surprise.  To all of which there is only one answer;
that such anticipation is absurd, and such realisation will
be disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idols
will seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of such
a habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter.
No great works will seem great, and no wonders of the world
will seem wonderful, unless the angle from which they are seen
is that of historical humility.

One more word may be added of a more practical sort.  The place where
the most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is not
one where it will always be wise, even from a political standpoint,
to air our plutocratic patronage and our sceptical superiority.
Strange scenes have already been enacted round that fane where the
Holy Fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen; and whether
or no we think the thing holy there is no doubt about it being fiery.
Whether or no the superior person is right to expect the unexpected,
it is possible that something may be revealed to him that he really
does not expect.  And whatever he may think about the philosophy
of sight-seeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights.



CHAPTER V

THE STREETS OF THE CITY

When Jerusalem had been half buried in snow for two or three days,
I remarked to a friend that I was prepared henceforward to justify
all the Christmas cards.  The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frost
are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies.
At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which made
the shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset.
In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truer
than most history.  But even in the cruder and more concrete sense the
tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested.
It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture
the Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londoners
to picture him in a London fog.  There can be snow in Jerusalem,
and there might be snow in Bethlehem; and when we penetrate to the idea
behind the image, we find it is not only possible but probable.
In Palestine, at least in these mountainous parts of Palestine,
men have the same general sentiment about the seasons as in the West
or the North.  Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality.
Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human
purpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winter
would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham.
Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean
by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer
sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its
vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated.
But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating
the correction.  It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem
is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without
being modernised.  Anyhow, it was medievalised before it was modernised.
And in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalem
is a Southern town, in the sense of being normally out of the way
of snowstorms, but the truth can be suggested by saying that it
has always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity.
And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would have
been something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent.
And yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing would
be to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by more
different kinds of people than any town upon the globe; that it has
been besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks
and Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen;
but perhaps never before in all its agony of ages has it ever really
been besieged by winter.  In this case it was not only snowed on,
it was snowed up.

For some days the city was really in a state of siege.
If the snow had held for a sufficient number of days it might have
been in a state of famine.  The railway failed between Jerusalem
and the nearest station.  The roads were impassable between
Jerusalem and the nearest village, or even the nearest suburb.
In some places the snow drifted deep enough to bury a man,
and in some places, alas, it did actually bury little children;
poor little Arabs whose bodies were stiff where they had fallen.
Many mules were overwhelmed as if by floods, and countless trees struck
down as if by lightning.  Even when the snow began at last to melt it
only threatened to turn the besieged fortress into a sort of island.
A river that men could not ford flowed between Jerusalem and the Mount
of Olives.  Even a man walking about the ordinary streets could easily
step up to his knees or up to his waist.  Snow stood about like a new
system of natural barricades reared in some new type of revolution.
I have already remarked that what struck me most about the city was
the city wall; but now a new white wall stood all round the city;
and one that neither friend nor foe could pass.

But a state of siege, whatever its inconveniences,
is exceedingly convenient for a critic and observer of the town.
It concentrated all that impression of being something compact and what,
with less tragic attendant circumstances, one might call cosy.
It fixed the whole picture in a frame even more absolute than
the city wall; and it turned the eyes of all spectators inwards.
Above all, by its very abnormality it accentuated the normal
divisions and differences of the place; and made it more possible
to distinguish and describe them like _dramatis personae_.
The parts they played in the crisis of the snow were very like
the parts they played in the general crisis of the state.
And the very cut and colour of the figures, turban and tarbouch,
khaki and burnous and gabardine, seemed to stand out more sharply
against that blank background of white.

The first fact of course was a fact of contrast.  When I said that
the city struck me in its historic aspect as being at least as much
a memory of the Crusaders as of the Saracens, I did not of course mean
to deny the incidental contrasts between this Southern civilisation
and the civilisation of Europe, especially northern Europe.
The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold and
the gaudy vegetation of so comparatively Asiatic a city were struck
by this strange blast out of the North.  It was a queer spectacle
to see a great green palm bowed down under a white load of snow;
and it was a stranger and sadder spectacle to see the people accustomed
to live under such palm-trees bowed down under such unearthly storms.
Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first fact
to be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problem
of Jerusalem.  Odd as it may sound you can see that the true Orientals
are not familiar with snow by the very fact that they accept it.
They accept it as we should accept being swallowed by an earthquake;
because we do not know the answer to an earthquake.  The men from the
desert do not know the answer to the snow, it seems to them unanswerable.
But Christians fight with snow in a double sense; they fight with
snow as they fight with snowballs.  A Moslem left to himself would
no more play with a snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt.
And this is really a type of the true problem that was raised
by the very presence of the English soldier in the street,
even if he was only shovelling away the snow.

It would be far from a bad thing, I fancy, if the rights and wrongs
of these Bible countries could occasionally be translated into
Bible language.  And I suggest this here, not in the least because it
is a religious language, but merely because it is a simple language.
It may be a good thing, and in many ways it certainly is a good thing,
that the races native to the Near East, to Egypt or Arabia,
should come in contact with Western culture; but it will be
unfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Western
pedantry and even Western hypocrisy.  As it is there is only too
much danger that the local complaints against the government may be
exactly like the official explanations of the government; that is,
mere strings of long words with very little meaning involved.
In short, if people are to learn to talk English it will be a refreshing
finishing touch to their culture if they learn to talk plain English.
Of this it would be hard to find a better working model than what may be
called scriptural English.  It would be a very good thing for everybody
concerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were described
only in terms taken from the denunciations of Jezebel and Herod.
It would especially be a good thing for the official.  If it were true
it would be appropriate, and if it were untrue it would be absurd.
When people are really oppressed, their condition can generally
be described in very plain terms connected with very plain things;
with bread, with land, with taxes and children and churches.
If imperialists and capitalists do thus oppress them, as they
most certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerful
persons can also be described in few and simple words; such as
crime and sin and death and hell.  But when complaints are made,
as they are sometimes in Palestine and still more in Egypt,
in the elaborate and long-winded style of a leading article,
the sympathetic European is apt to remember how very little confidence
he has ever felt in his own leading articles.  If an Arab comes
to me and says, "The stranger from across the sea has taxed me,
and taken the corn-sheaves from the field of my fathers," I do really
feel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilisation
with a terrible appeal to eternal things.  I feel he is a figure
more enduring than a statue, like the figure of Naboth or of Nathan.
But when that simple son of the desert opens his mouth and says,
"The self-determination of proletarian class-conscious solidarity
as it functions for international reconstruction," and so on,
why then I must confess to the weakness of feeling my sympathies
instantly and strangely chilled.  I merely feel inclined to tell him
that I can talk that sort of pidgin English better than he can.
If he modelled himself on the great rebels and revolutionists
of the Bible, it would at least be a considerable improvement
in his literary style.  But as a matter of fact something much
more solid is involved than literary style.  There is a logic
and justice in the distinction, even in the world of ideas.
That most people with much more education than the Arab, and therefore
much less excuse than the Arab, entirely ignore that distinction,
is merely a result of their ignoring ideas, and being satisfied
with long words.  They like democracy because it is a long word;
that is the only thing they do like about it.

People are entitled to self-government; that is, to such
government as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitled
to a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made.
It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also their
duty to think of it for themselves.  Self-government of a simple
kind has existed in numberless simple societies, and I shall
always think it a horrible responsibility to interfere with it.
But representative government, or theoretically representative government,
of an exceedingly complicated kind, may exist in certain complicated
societies without their being bound to transfer it to others,
or even to admire it for themselves.  At any rate, for good or evil,
they have invented it themselves.  And there is a moral distinction,
which is perfectly rational and democratic, between such inventions
and the self-evident rights which no man can claim to have invented.
If the Arab says to me, "I don't care a curse for Europe; I demand bread,"
the reproach is to me both true and terrible.  But if he says,
"I don't care a curse for Europe; I demand French cookery,
Italian confectionery, English audit ale," and so on, I think he is
rather an unreasonable Arab.  After all, we invented these things;
in _auctore auctoritas_.

And of this problem there is a sort of working model in the presence
of the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverb
about the impossibility of snow in Egypt.  Palestine is wilder,
less wealthy and modernised, more religious and therefore more realistic.
The issue between the things only a European can do, and the things
no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer
than the confusions of verbosity.  On the one hand the things
the English can do are more real things, like clearing away the snow;
for the very reason that the English are not here, so to speak,
building on a French pavement but on the bare rocks of the Eastern wilds,
the contact with Islam and Israel is more simple and direct.
And on the other side the discontents and revolts are more real.
So far from intending to suggest that the Egyptians have no complaints,
I am very far from meaning that they have no wrongs.  But curiously
enough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints.
The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long ago
by Randolph Churchill, when he denounced "a bondholder's war"; it is
in the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance.
But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance,
and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism.
When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land they mean
the land they dig; an old actuality and not a new abstraction.
Their revolt may be right or wrong, but it is real;
and what applies to their revolt applies to their religion.
There may well be doubts about whether Egypt is a nation, but there
is no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have come
to its light.

The problem of the snow proved indeed the text for a tale touching
the practical politics of the city.  The English soldiers cleared
the snow away; the Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical with
the snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs.
But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clear
away the snow in front of them, and then demanded a handsome
salary for having recovered the use of their own front doors.
The story is not quite fair; and yet it is not so unfair as it seems.
Any rational Anti-Semite will agree that such tales, even when they
are true, do not always signify an avaricious tradition in Semitism,
but sometimes the healthier and more human suggestion of Bolshevism.
The Jews do demand high wages, but it is not always because they
are in the old sense money-grabbers, but rather in the new
sense money-grabbers (as an enemy would put it) men sincerely
and bitterly convinced of their right to the surplus of capitalism.
There is the same problem in the Jewish colonies in the country districts;
in the Jewish explanation of the employment of Arab and Syrian labour.
The Jews argue that this occurs, not because they wish to remain
idle capitalists, but because they insist on being properly
paid proletarians.  With all this I shall deal, however, when I
treat of the Jewish problem itself.  The point for the moment
is that the episode of the snow did in a superficial way suggest
the parts played by the three parties and the tales told about them.
To begin with, it is right to say that the English do a great many things,
as they clear away the snow, simply because nobody else would do them.
They did save the oriental inhabitants from some of the worst
consequences of the calamity.  Probably they sometimes save
the inhabitants from something which the inhabitants do not
regard as a calamity.  It is the danger of all such foreign
efficiency that it often saves men who do not want to be saved.
But they do in many cases do things from which Moslems profit,
but which Moslems by themselves would not propose, let alone perform.
And this has a general significance even in our first survey, for it
suggests a truth easy to abuse, but I think impossible to ignore.
I mean that there is something non-political about Moslem morality.
Perverse as it may appear, I suspect that most of their
political movements result from their non-political morality.
They become politicians because they know they are not political;
and feel their simple and more or less healthy life is at a disadvantage,
in face of the political supremacy of the English and the political
subtlety of the Jews.

For instance, the tradition of Turkish rule is simply a joke.
All the stories about it are jokes, and often very good jokes.
My own favourite incident is that which is still commemorated
in the English cathedral by an enormous hole in the floor.
The Turks dug up the pavement looking for concealed English artillery;
because they had been told that the bishop had given his blessing
to two canons.  The bishop had indeed recently appointed two canons
to the service of the Church, but he had not secreted them under
the floor of the chancel.  There was another agreeable incident when
the Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration,
sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers, and told him
to take his choice in a heap of corpses of all creeds and colours.
But at once the most curious and the most common touch of comedy
is the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizens
who have been nearly hanged by the Turks.  The fortunate gentleman
seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin.
If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight
from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just
vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity
about the whole story.  If a friend introduced somebody, saying,
"My friend Robinson; his sentence has been commuted to penal servitude,"
or "My Uncle William, just come from Dartmoor Prison," your mind
and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables "What for?"
But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was like
being knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody.
This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with the
superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow.
But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical
carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its
tragic as well as its comic side.  It was by no means everybody that
escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate
at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight.
It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree
of Man's Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet called
the fruit tree in the orchard of the king.  It was the gibbet;
and lives have dropped from it like leaves from a tree in autumn.
Yet even on the sterner side, we can trace the truth about
the Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality.
There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree
was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps
the Moslem over a great part of the earth.  There is nothing
more strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomy
magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself.
It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend
or prophecy about their own ultimate failure.  De Quincey mentions
one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium.
It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entry
of a Christian king of Jerusalem through the Golden Gate.
Perhaps that is why they have blocked up the fatal gate;
but in any case they dealt in that fashion with the fatal tree.
They elaborately bound and riveted it with iron, as if accepting
the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood
the Turkish Empire would stand.  It was as if the wicked man
of Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make sure
that it should flourish.

In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background
of the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windows
which seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups against
the neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensified
when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow.
In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch
some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is
hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter
of the picturesque.  Indeed it is hard to be sufficiently superficial;
for in the East nearly every external is a symbol.
The greater part of it is the gorgeous rag-heap of Arabian humanity,
and even about that one could lecture on almost every coloured rag.
We hear much of the gaudy colours of the East; but the most
striking thing about them is that they are delicate colours.
It is rare to see a red that is merely like a pillar-box, or a blue
that is Reckitt's blue; the red is sure to have the enrichment
of tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea.
In short these people are artistic in the sense that used to be
called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves
these nameless tints.  Like all such instincts, it can be
blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children,
these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can
therefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst.
But there are other elements emerging from the coloured crowd,
which are more significant, and therefore more stubborn.
A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel something
like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures
of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces.
It is as if in that world every woman were a widow.  When he realised
that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral,
but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing
veils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter.
He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be, a dull life,
not only for the women but the men; and that a man might well want
five wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them.
But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy,
for the complete veiling of the Moslem women of Jerusalem,
though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian woman
of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more
coquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo.
It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed;
and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will
soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial
cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate
and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city.
Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for
nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions.
When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could
not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops
that could not be opened, within a stone's throw of the Sepulchre.
This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism
or formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities.
There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem,
especially those from the ghettoes of eastern Europe.
They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn
on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers.
Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo
burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman.
Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil;
and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often
made to match.  But though they may be ugly, or even horrible,
they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behind
them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties,
along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronze
or purple velvet.  They often wear on their heads that odd
turban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt.
And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth
at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture
of a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent.
For Rembrandt the Rabbi was, in a special and double sense,
a distinguished figure.  He was something distinct from the world
of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin.  But Sargent
had to treat his sitters as solid citizens of England or America;
and consequently his pictures are direct provocations to a pogrom.
But the light that Rembrandt loved falls not irreverently on
the strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven heads
of the Jews of Jerusalem.  And I should be sorry for any pogrom
that brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrow
to the grave.

The whole scene indeed, seriousness apart, might be regarded as a
fantasia for barbers; for the different ways of dressing the hair
would alone serve as symbols of different races and religions.
Thus the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church, bearded and robed
in black with black towers upon their heads, have for some
strange reason their hair bound up behind like a woman's. In
any case they have in their pomp a touch of the bearded bulls
of Assyrian sculpture; and this strange fashion of curling if not
oiling the Assyrian bull gives the newcomer an indescribable and
illogical impression of the unnatural sublimity of archaic art.
In the Apocalypse somewhere there is an inspiringly unintelligible
allusion to men coming on the earth, whose hair is like the hair
of women and their teeth like the teeth of lions.  I have never been
bitten by an Orthodox clergyman, and cannot say whether his teeth
are at all leonine; though I have seen seven of them together
enjoying their lunch at an hotel with decorum and dispatch.
But the twisting of the hair in the womanish fashion does for us
touch that note of the abnormal which the mystic meant to convey
in his poetry, and which others feel rather as a recoil into humour.
The best and last touch to this topsy-turvydom was given when a lady,
observing one of these reverend gentlemen who for some reason did
not carry this curious coiffure, exclaimed, in a tone of heartrending
surprise and distress, "Oh, he's bobbed his hair!"

Here again of course even a superficial glance at the pageant
of the street should not be content with its comedy.  There is
an intellectual interest in the external pomp and air of placid
power in these ordinary Orthodox parish priests; especially if we
compare them with the comparatively prosaic and jog-trot good nature
of the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins.  Mingling in
the same crowd with these black-robed pontiffs can be seen shaven men
in brown habits who seem in comparison to be both busy and obscure.
These are the sons of St. Francis, who came to the East with a grand
simplicity and thought to finish the Crusades with a smile.
The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikes
the eye with an impartial intellectual interest; it has nothing
to do with personal character, of course, and many Greek priests
are as simple in their tastes as they are charming in their manners;
while any Roman priests can find as much ritual as they may happen
to want in other aspects of their own religion.  But it is broadly
true that Roman and Greek Catholicism are contrasted in this way
in this country; and the contrast is the flat contrary to all our
customary associations in the West.  In the East it is Roman Catholicism
that stands for much that we associate with Protestantism.
It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practical
and scornful of superstition and concerned for social work.
It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeous
with ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritance
of imperial tradition.  In the cant of our own society, we may say
it is the Roman who rationalises and the Greek who Romanises.
It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian and
Greek childishness, and perpetually appealing for common sense.
It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faith
and would rebuke such common sense as common scepticism.  I do not
speak of the theological tenets or even the deeper emotions involved,
but only, as I have said, of contrasts visible even in the street.
And the whole difference is sufficiently suggested in two phrases
I heard within a few days.  A distinguished Anglo-Catholic,
who has himself much sympathy with the Greek Orthodox traditions,
said to me, "After all, the Romans were the first Puritans."
And I heard that a Franciscan, being told that this Englishman
and perhaps the English generally were disposed to make an alliance
with the Greek Church, had only said by way of comment, "And a good
thing too, the Greeks might do something at last."

Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeous
in black than the Roman in colours.  But the Greek of course
can also appear in colours, especially in those eternal
forms of frozen yet fiery colours which we call jewels.
I have seen the Greek Patriarch, that magnificent old gentleman,
walking down the street like an emperor in the _Arabian Nights_,
hung all over with historic jewels as thick as beads or buttons,
with a gigantic cross of solid emeralds that might have been given him
by the green genii of the sea, if any of the genii are Christians.
These things are toys, but I am entirely in favour of toys;
and rubies and emeralds are almost as intoxicating as that sort
of lustrous coloured paper they put inside Christmas crackers.
This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the glory
of coloured glass; and I have seen great Gothic windows
in which one could really believe that the robes of martyrs
were giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire.
But the colours of the West are transparent, the colours
of the East opaque.  I have spoken of the _Arabian Nights_,
and there is really a touch of them even in the Christian churches,
perhaps increased with a tradition of early Christian secrecy.
There are glimpses of gorgeously tiled walls, of blue curtains and green
doors and golden inner chambers, that are just like the entrance
to an Eastern tale.  The Orthodox are at least more oriental
in the sense of being more ornamental; more flat and decorative.
The Romans are more Western, I might even say more modern,
in the sense of having more realism even in their ritualism.
The Greek cross is a cross; the Roman cross is a crucifix.

But these are deeper matters; I am only trying to suggest a sort
of silhouette of the crowd like the similar silhouette of the city,
a profile or outline of the heads and hats, like the profile of
the towers and spires.  The tower that makes the Greek priest look
like a walking catafalque is by no means alone among the horns thus
fantastically exalted.  There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest,
for instance; the stately survival of that strange Monophysite
heresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly through
the sublime accident of the Crusades.  That black cone also rises
above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid;
and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry
by which these places live that some say it is a surviving memory
of Ararat and the Ark.

Again the high white headgear of the Bethlehem women,
or to speak more strictly of the Bethlehem wives, has already
been noted in another connection; but it is well to remark it
again among the colours of the crowd, because this at least has
a significance essential to all criticism of such a crowd.
Most travellers from the West regard such an Eastern city far too
much as a Moslem city, like the lady whom Mr. Maurice Baring met who
travelled all over Russia, and thought all the churches were mosques.
But in truth it is very hard to generalise about Jerusalem, precisely
because it contains everything, and its contrasts are real contrasts.
And anybody who doubts that its Christianity is Christian, a thing
fighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia,
need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehem
and their costume.  There is no need to sneer in any unsympathetic
fashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam; the sexes are
never quite so stupid as some feminists represent; and I dare say
a woman often has her own way in a harem as well as in a household.
But the broad difference does remain.  And if there be one thing,
I think, that can safely be said about all Asia and all oriental tribes,
it is this; that if a married woman wears any distinctive mark,
it is always meant to prevent her from receiving the admiration or even
the notice of strange men.  Often it is only made to disguise her;
sometimes it is made to disfigure her.  It may be the masking
of the face as among the Moslems; it may be the shaving of the head
as among the Jews; it may, I believe, be the blackening of the teeth
and other queer expedients among the people of the Far East.
But is never meant to make her look magnificent in public;
and the Bethlehem wife is made to look magnificent in public.  She not
only shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful.
She also wears a towering erection which is as unmistakably
meant to give her consequence as the triple tiara of the Pope.
A woman wearing such a crown, and wearing it without a veil, does stand,
and can only conceivably stand, for what we call the Western view
of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women.
This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come from
some vague memory of chivalry.  The woman may or may not be,
as the legend says, a lineal descendant of a Crusader.
But whether or no she is his daughter, she is certainly his heiress.

She may be put last among the local figures I have here described,
for the special reason that her case has this rather deeper significance.
For it is not possible to remain content with the fact that the crowd
offers such varied shapes and colours to the eye, when it also offers
much deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence.
The black dress of the Moslem woman and the white dress of the
Christian woman are in sober truth as different as black and white.
They stand for real principles in a real opposition; and the black and
white will not easily disappear in the dull grey of our own compromises.
The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty, and the other
what it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of our
paltry political appetites.  Nor do I see how we can deny such a right
of defence, even in the case we consider the less enlightened.
It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who consider
themselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also consider
themselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights.
Whatever view we take of the Moslem Arab, we must at least admit
that the greater includes the less.  It is manifestly absurd to say
we have no right to interfere in his country, but have a right
to interfere in his home.

It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus be
two universes in the same street.  Indeed there are ten rather
than two; and it is a proverb that the fight is not only between
Christian and Moslem, but between Christian and Christian.
At this moment, it must be admitted, it is almost entirely a fight
of Christian and Moslem allied against Jew.  But of that I shall have
to speak later; the point for the moment is that the varied colours
of the streets are a true symbol of the varied colours of the souls.
It is perhaps the only modern place where the war waged between ideas
has such a visible and vivid heraldry.

And that fact alone may well leave the spectator with one
final reflection; for it is a matter in which the modern world
may well have to learn something from the motley rabble of this
remote Eastern town.

It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Street
or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions.
It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or
an extravaganza.  Every good and innocent mind would be gratified
with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome
of St. Paul's, and surmounted with a little ball and cross,
symbolising the loyalty of some Anglican to his mother church.
It might even be pleasing to see the street dominated
with a more graceful top-hat modelled on the Eiffel Tower,
and signifying the wearer's faith in scientific enterprise,
or perhaps in its frequent concomitant of political corruption.
These would be fair Western parallels to the head-dresses of Jerusalem;
modelled on Mount Ararat or Solomon's Temple, and some may insinuate
that we are not very likely ever to meet them in the Strand.
A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sort
of excuse or authority for wearing whiskers, as the Jew can
for wearing ringlets; and though the Anglican clergyman may indeed
be very loyal to his mother church, there might be considerable
hesitation if his mother bade him bind his hair.  Nevertheless a more
historical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds will show as far
from impossible to domesticate such symbols; that some day a lady's
jewels might mean something like the sacred jewels of the Patriarch,
or a lady's furs mean something like the furred turban of the Rabbi.
History indeed will show us that we are not so much superior to them
as inferior to ourselves.

When the Crusaders came to Palestine, and came riding up that road
from Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they came
with motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed.
There may have been different theories among the Crusaders; there are
certainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders.
Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic.  But whatever else
they were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque.
They were not drawn from a drab civilisation by that mere thirst for
colour that draws so many modern artists to the bazaars of the East.
In those days there were colours in the West as well as in the East;
and a glow in the sunset as well as in the sunrise.  Many of the men
who rode up that road were dressed to match the most glorious
orange garden and to rival the most magnificent oriental king.
King Richard cannot have been considered dowdy, even by comparison,
when he rode on that high red saddle graven with golden lions,
with his great scarlet hat and his vest of silver crescents.
That squire of the comparatively unobtrusive household
of Joinville, who was clad in scarlet striped with yellow,
must surely have been capable (if I may be allowed the expression)
of knocking them in the most magnificent Asiatic bazaar.
Nor were these external symbols less significant, but rather more
significant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilisation.
It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwards
degenerated into a science.  But even in being a science it had
to possess a significance; and the Western colours were often
allegorical where the Eastern were only accidental.  To a certain
extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated;
and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions
which even the Saracens carved over the gate of St. Stephen.
But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not
imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated.
King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not
overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet
thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery.
The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with
the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them;
and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they
imitated the stripes of the squire.  It is a curious and perhaps
melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness
and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high
moment of our morning.

Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that it
becomes an infection.  Possibly it is only when it becomes a very
virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic.  Possibly again
that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism.
Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains did
not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very
mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun.
When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not
copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources.
Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze
of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint
Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas.  But many a savage king
has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased
as to add to it a pair of trousers.  Explosive bullets and the brutal
factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess.
And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure
of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back
my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine,
on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely
at the back both of the just and of the unjust objections to Zionism.
It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood,
will send not its best but its worst.  The artisan way of putting it,
from the point of view of the Arab, is that it will mean not
so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shall
write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they
really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious
and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox.
He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular
in the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western.
He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy,
and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce.  I have said _a propos_
of the Arab that the dignity of the oriental is in his long robe;
the merely mercantile Jew is the oriental who has lost his long robe,
which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs.  He bustles
and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity
even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness.
But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the
better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence.
The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory
chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce
but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling
that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged
but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured,
as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they
were shivering as I watched them.  There seemed a sort of sinister
omen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them;
in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had only
scattered on them this silver dust of death.

It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that
pale landscape and those impassable ways.  I do not dislike snow;
on the contrary I delight in it; and if it had drifted as deep in my
own country against my own door I should have thought it the triumph
of Christmas, and a thing as comic as my own dog and donkey.
But the people in the coloured rags did dislike it; and the effects of it
were not comic but tragic.  The news that came in seemed in that little
lonely town like the news of a great war, or even of a great defeat.
Men fell to regarding it, as they have fallen too much to regarding
the war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery was
really unmixed.  As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it,
homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads
only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills.
It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders
in the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for men
but the weary rebuilding of ruins and the numbering of the dead.

Only as I went out of the Jaffa Gate, a man told me that the tree
of the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphate
of the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow.



CHAPTER VI

THE GROUPS OF THE CITY

Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape
on the eye.  It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills
and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly
but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow.
The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process
of this is simple enough.  The stripes are the strata of the rock,
only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has
to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character
to be seen in the vineyards and the staircase streets of the town.
But though the cause is in a sense in the ruinous strength of the rain,
the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin.  What earth there is is commonly
a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would
be easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made.
What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but is
literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have
called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory.
And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary
and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City
which is built from the quarries of these hills.  For the old
stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones
of the New Jerusalem; and at certain moments of morning or of sunset,
every pebble might be a pearl.

And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they might
be skies rather than slopes.  It is as if we looked up at a frozen sunset;
or a daybreak fixed for ever with its fleeting bars of cloud.
And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness.
This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forget
that recurrent things are eternal things.  We tend to forget that
subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens,
were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us;
and the strong and simple words in which they describe them
do not prove that they did not realise them.  When Wordsworth
speaks of "the clouds that gather round the setting sun,"
we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every
curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says "He hath made
the clouds his chariot"; we do not always realise that he was
full of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights.
We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times.
We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawn
was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.

But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured
clay and stone.  Palestine is in every sense a stratified country.
It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has
fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills.  It is true
in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate,
and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray.
The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture,
politics and theology are like its divisions in geology.
The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical.  The frontier
does not run between states but between stratified layers.
The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite;
the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not
beside the Christian but on top of the Christian.  It is not merely
a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself.
It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor,
in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged
from below.  There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars;
and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof.
In days of what some call Bolshevism, it may be said that most states
are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room.
But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political
and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine.
To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller's first
impressions more particularly in their order, and before I
return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state
the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society
still seems fragmentary.

We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between
the Christian sects.  It would be nearer the nerve of vital
truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects.
But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something
not made by Turks but made up by infidels.  The tourist visiting
the churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them;
but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all the tales,
the tale that is told against them.  He believes in a frantic fraticidal
war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem.
It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those
crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the
Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch;
just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth
and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked
in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference.
And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen
these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone
on our path, and led us round many corners with alertness and with hope.
But in bald fact religion does not involve perpetual war in the East,
any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West.
What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude;
a vigilance on the frontiers.  There is no war; but there is
an armed peace.

I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems
are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be near
the truth to say that they are prehistoric.  They attach themselves
to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they
had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched
with primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay.
Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends;
I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the need
for lies.  But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple
with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they
understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts.
Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very
opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem.  The Christianity of Jerusalem is
highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination.
And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally
record their impressions of the place.  As the educated Englishman
does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable
to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia.
He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem,
of a number of small sects squabbling about small things.
In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which include
the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church
in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece
and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa.
It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad
if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are
the large things.  The truth is that the things that meet to-day in
Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen.
If they are not important nothing on this earth is important,
and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored
by them.  But to understand them it is necessary to have something
which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston;
that sort of living history which we call tradition.

For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts
with the statement that they are all about small points of theology.
I do not admit that theological points are small points.  Theology is only
thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion
need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste.
The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single
letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world.
An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians
are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two.
But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned
about theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are not
chiefly concerned about theology.  They are concerned about history.
They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort
of history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battles
for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places,
and the faith by which the dead are alive.  It is quite true that with
this historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges,
fury and sorrow and shame.  It is also true that without it men die,
and nobody even digs their graves.

The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism than
about religion, in the sense of theology.  That is, they are just such
heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name
of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily
complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations.
We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves
as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged,
but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some
almost inconceivable convulsion.  We must imagine cities and landscapes
to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some
unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest
enemy our neighbour.  We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites,
and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another.
And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads
of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken.
We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map;
and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new.
In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope,
that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties
as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd
in Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid,
as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people.
Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truth
and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.

We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle
of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected
on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken
wings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine,
and that the wooden "Victory" is stranded, like the Ark on Ararat,
on the top of the Hill of Tara; that the pilgrims to the shrine
of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede,
and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found
in the Pantheon at Paris.  This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no
exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites
are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City.
Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally
distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk
about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours.
Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions
are evil because they exasperate us to war.  It would be far truer
to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace.
It would be far truer to say that we can always love each
other so long as we do not see each other.  But the people
of Jerusalem are doomed to have difference without division.
They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple,
while we can set city against city across the plains of the world.
While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturally
as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil
and curse the stones that stand on it.  While the land we love
is solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to see
all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day,
as incompatible and as inseparable.  Their entanglements are tragic,
but they are not trumpery or accidental.  Everything has a meaning;
they are loyal to great names as men are loyal to great nations;
they have differences about which they feel bound to dispute to the death;
but in their death they are not divided.

Jerusalem is a small town of big things; and the average modern
city is a big town full of small things.  All the most important
and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area
of a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least they
are necessarily neighbours.  This is a point of intellectual interest,
and even intensity, that is far too little realised.  It is a matter
of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian
groups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings.
It is said that they fight each other; but at least they meet each other.
In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do they
even meet each other?  In a large town men live in small cliques,
which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they
live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts.
Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they
are only conflicts.  I have heard an eminent English clergyman from
Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church,
and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling
in the same shop.  I have met the same representative of the Church
of England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews,
and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion.
Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been,
an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead.  How often
would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist?  Not once in a year.
How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian?  Not once
in a lifetime.  Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound
in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot.
Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide.
He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other
people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots.
They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible
to a larger social set in a larger social system.  They could not
be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb.
Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy,
and even irony, of their diplomatic relations.  There is something
of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great
school of manners that includes such differences in morals.

This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily
be neglected and is not easy to describe.  The normal life
there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight,
but rather because they do not fight.  Of the abnormal crisis
when they did fight, and the abnormal motives that made them fight,
I shall have something to say later on.  But it was true for a great
part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not
the war but the peace.  The sensation of being in this little town
is rather like that of being at a great international congress.
It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which
diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war.
For the religious and political parties have yet another point
in common with separate nations; that even within this narrow
space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more
or less fixed, and certainly not particularly fluctuating.
Persecution is impossible and conversion is not at all common.
The very able Anglo-Catholic leader, to whom I have already referred,
uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth.
He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sects,
not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism.
He meant their lack of any fervour and even of any hope,
of converting each other to their respective religions.
An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian Church as a Frenchman
of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an
Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman.
If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely
theological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical.
But as I say, we get much nearer to them by calling them national;
and the leaders of the great religions feel much more like
the ambassadors of great nations.  And, as I have also said,
that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony,
sometimes a rather tragic irony.  At any tea-party or talk in the street,
between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sort
of wit which consists in veiled allusion to a very open secret.
Each mail feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point,
as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier.
And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city,
when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for such
polished intercourse; including especially two men whose experience
and culture would have been remarkable in any community in the world;
the American Consul and the Military Governor of Jerusalem.

If in cataloguing the strata of the society we take first the topmost
layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient
to take these two men as representing the chief realities about it.
Dr. Glazebrook, the representative of the United States,
has the less to do with the internal issues of the country; but his
mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might
be put among the first reasons for finding the city interesting.
He is an old man now, for he actually began life as a soldier in the
Southern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail,
not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southern
and Secessionist aristocrat.

He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and served
as a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when most
men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent
out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine.
The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of British
and American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwing
a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule.
There appears in his experiences something in such rule
which we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of stately
Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something more
tyrannical even than the dull pigheadedness of Prussianism.
I mean the most atrocious of all tortures, which is called caprice.
It is the thing we feel in the Arabian tales, when no man knows
whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Vizier
a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes.  I have heard Dr. Glazebrook
describe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitives
for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four
times were brought back again to their prison.  There is something
there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia;
and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril
of those men who looked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms,
their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac.
The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentiment
for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many
Moslems feel for the minister of any religion.  Once at least
the trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him.
By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authorities
sent to him, demanding the English documents left in his custody.
He refused to give them up; and he knew what he was doing.
In standing firm he was not even standing like Nurse Cavell against
organised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe.
He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whom
had never heard of the international rules they violated.
Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and his
papers alone; but the old man had to wait many days in doubt,
not knowing what they would do, since they did not know themselves.
I do not know what were his thoughts, or whether they were far from
Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign
for ever.  But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence,
he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle
in the Wilderness.

If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression
of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back
all the problems of the present.  Here I only sketch these groups
as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered
that my present is already past.  All this was before the latest
change from military to civil government, but the mere name
of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood
in relation to that change itself.  Many of our journalists,
especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots,
wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarism
to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism.  I think this a fallacy,
and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly
very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times.
As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is
thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army.
Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in
the narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened type
of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war,
but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics
or literature.  Of course many purely professional soldiers have
liberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisers
of Palestinian victory, has a fine taste in poetry, or Colonel Popham,
then deputy Governor of Jerusalem, an admirable taste in painting.
But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it is
now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers.  I fancy
there are now few things more representative than the British Army;
certainly it is much more representative than the British Parliament.
The men I knew, and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working under
General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives,
were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if
anything the mark of quite different professions.  One was a very shrewd
and humorous lawyer employed on legal problems about enemy property,
another was a young schoolmaster, with keen and clear ideas,
or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine.
These men did not cease to be themselves because they were all
dressed in khaki; and if Colonel Storrs recurs first to the memory,
it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering,
but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally about
all these other trades and twenty more.  Incidentally, and by way
of example, he can talk about them in about ten languages.
There is a story, which whether or no it be true is very typical,
that one of the Zionist leaders made a patriotic speech in Hebrew,
and broke off short in his recollection of this partially revived
national tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finished
his Hebrew speech for him--whether to exactly the same effect
or not it would be impertinent to inquire.  He is a man rather
recalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of wit
and classical learning; one of that small group of the governing
class that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed with
the generous culture of George Wyndham.  It was a purely mechanical
distinction between the military and civil government that would
lend to such figures the stiffness of a drumhead court martial.
And even those who differed with him accused him in practice,
not of militarist lack of sympathy with any of those he ruled,
but rather with too imaginative a sympathy with some of them.
To know these things, however slightly, and then read the English
newspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentioned
the matter because there is a real danger in so crude a differentiation.
It would be a bad thing if a system military in form but representative
in fact gave place to a system representative in form but financial
in fact.  That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear;
and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum
after the official.  It must be remembered that I am not at this
stage judging these groups, but merely very rapidly sketching them,
like figures and costumes in the street.

The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists;
who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy.
Among these also I am happy to have friends; and I may venture to call
the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote
from Zionism.  Dr. Eder, the President of the Zionist Commission,
is a man for whom I conceived a respect long ago when he protested,
as a professional physician, against the subjection of the poor
to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence.
He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap
anybody else's child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness
they were themselves too feeble-minded to define.  It was defended,
very characteristically, by a combination of precedent and progress;
and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws.
That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws
to people whom no sane man would call lunatics.  It is as if they
were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from "lepers"
to "light-haired persons"; and then say blandly that the principle
was the same.  The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was
very welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and we
afterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem.
We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long before
he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism.
And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the small
group of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalist
ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it.
To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires
are for it.  But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal
in men like Dr. Eder and Dr. Weizmann, and doubtless many others.
The only defect that need be noted, as a mere detail of portraiture,
is a certain excessive vigilance and jealousy and pertinacity in
the wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular
with the English, who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them.
For though I am called an Anti-Semite, there were really periods of
official impatience when I was almost the only Pro-Semite in the company.
I went about pointing out what was really to be said for Zionism,
to people who were represented by the Arabs as the mere slaves
of the Zionists.

This group of Arab Anti-Semites may be taken next,
but very briefly; for the problem itself belongs to a later page;
and the one thing to be said of it here is very simple.
I never expected it, and even now I do not fully understand it.
But it is the fact that the native Moslems are more Anti-Semitic
than the native Christians.  Both are more or less so; and have formed
a sort of alliance out of the fact.  The banner carried by the mob
bore the Arabic inscription "Moslems and Christians are brothers."
It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracks
of the Crusades.

Of the Christian crowds in that partnership, and the Christian creeds
they are proud to inherit, I have already suggested something;
it is only as well to note that I have put them out of their strict order
in the stratification of history.  It is too often forgotten that in
these countries the Christian culture is older than the Moslem culture.
I for one regret that the old Pax Romana was broken up by the Arabs;
and hold that in the long run there was more life in that Byzantine
decline than in that Semitic revival.  And I will add what I cannot
here develop or defend; that in the long run it is best that the
Pax Romana should return; and that the suzerainty of those lands
at least will have to be Christian, and neither Moslem nor Jewish.
To defend it is to defend a philosophy; but I do hold that there is
in that philosophy, for all the talk of its persecutions in the past,
a possibility of comprehension and many-sided sympathy which is
not in the narrow intensity either of the Moslem or the Jew.
Christianity is really the right angle of that triangle,
and the other two are very acute angles.

But in the meetings that led up to the riots it is the more Moslem
part of the mixed crowds that I chiefly remember; which touches
the same truth that the Christians are the more potentially tolerant.
But many of the Moslem leaders are as dignified and human as many
of the Zionist leaders; the Grand Mufti is a man I cannot imagine
as either insulting anybody, or being conceivably the object of insult.
The Moslem Mayor of Jerusalem was another such figure, belonging also I
believe to one of the Arab aristocratic houses (the Grand Mufti is
a descendant of Mahomet) and I shall not forget his first appearance
at the first of the riotous meetings in which I found myself.
I will give it as the first of two final impressions with which I
will end this chapter, I fear on a note of almost anarchic noise,
the unearthly beating and braying of the Eastern gongs and horns
of two fierce desert faiths against each other.

I first saw from the balcony of the hotel the crowd of riotors come
rolling up the street.  In front of them went two fantastic figures
turning like teetotums in an endless dance and twirling two crooked
and naked scimitars, as the Irish were supposed to twirl shillelaghs.
I thought it a delightful way of opening a political meeting;
and I wished we could do it at home at the General Election.
I wish that instead of the wearisome business of Mr. Bonar Law
taking the chair, and Mr. Lloyd George addressing the meeting,
Mr. Law and Mr. Lloyd George would only hop and caper in front of
a procession, spinning round and round till they were dizzy, and waving
and crossing a pair of umbrellas in a thousand invisible patterns.
But this political announcement or advertisement, though more intelligent
than our own, had, as I could readily believe, another side to it.
I was told that it was often a prelude to ordinary festivals,
such as weddings; and no doubt it remains from some ancient ritual dance
of a religious character.  But I could imagine that it might sometimes
seem to a more rational taste to have too religious a character.
I could imagine that those dancing men might indeed be dancing dervishes,
with their heads going round in a more irrational sense than
their bodies.  I could imagine that at some moments it might suck
the soul into what I have called in metaphor the whirlpool of Asia,
or the whirlwind of a world whipped like a top with a raging monotony;
the cyclone of eternity.  That is not the sort of rhythm nor
the sort of religion by which I myself should hope to save the soul;
but it is intensely interesting to the mind and even the eye, and I
went downstairs and wedged myself into the thick and thronging press.
It surged through the gap by the gate, where men climbed
lamp-posts and roared out speeches, and more especially recited
national poems in rich resounding voices; a really moving effect,
at least for one who could not understand a word that was said.
Feeling had already gone as far as knocking Jews' hats off and other
popular sports, but not as yet on any universal and systematic scale;
I saw a few of the antiquated Jews with wrinkles and ringlets,
peering about here and there; some said as spies or representatives
of the Zionists, to take away the Anti-Semitic colour from the meeting.
But I think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hard
to take it away.  It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jews
were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators;
for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel
in the Ghetto about Zionism.  The old religious Jews do not
welcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardly
an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without
the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion.
Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the
instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice;
so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate
the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought.
Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctions
are swept away.

The storm was certainly rising.  Outside the Jaffa Gate the road
runs up steeply and is split in two by the wedge of a high building,
looking as narrow as a tower and projecting like the prow of a ship.
There is something almost theatrical about its position and stage
properties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sort
of pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal.
Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems and
passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly
the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre,
and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure
of the Mahometan Mayor of Jerusalem.

I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I know
when a man is calming a mob, and the mob did become calmer.
It was as if a storm swelled in the night and gradually died away
in a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm.
My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from
the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism;
and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christians
of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun.
From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Eastern
fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling.
They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab
aristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal a
volcanic substance of which only oriental creeds have been made.
One day a wild Jewish proclamation is passed from hand to hand,
denouncing disloyal Jews who refuse the teaching Hebrew; telling doctors
to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the old
unmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their children
against the stones.  Another day the city would be placarded with
posters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestine
for a national home that they should find it a national cemetery.
And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two
crooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolved
like blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob.

I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round
the whole of the Haram enclosure, the courts of the old Temple,
where the high muezzin towers now stand at every corner,
and heard the clear voices of the call to prayer.  The sky was
laden with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the time
at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are
believed to be the last stones of the Temple.  There was a movement
in my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed by
the strait limits and steep sides of that platform of the mountains;
for the sense of crisis is not only in the intensity of the ideals,
but in the very conditions of the reality, the reality with which this
chapter began.  And the burden of it is the burden of Palestine;
the narrowness of the boundaries and the stratification of the rock.
A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart,
seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs.
There is no place for the Temple of Solomon but on the ruins of
the Mosque of Omar.  There is no place for the nation of the Jews
but in the country of the Arabs.  And these whispers came to me
first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case,
of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but rather
as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious.
I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one
who has received an omen.  For two voices had met in my ears;
and within the same narrow space and in the same dark hour,
electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam crying
from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall.



CHAPTER VII

THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM

A traveller sees the hundred branches of a tree long before he is
near enough to see its single and simple root; he generally sees
the scattered or sprawling suburbs of a town long before he has looked
upon the temple or the market-place. So far I have given impressions
of the most motley things merely as they came, in chronological
and not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sort
of sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness and
the grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouette
of Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merely
Moslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders;
the mere kaleidoscope of the streets, with little more than a hint
of the heraldic meaning of the colours; a merely personal impression
of a few of the leading figures whom I happened to meet first,
and only the faintest suggestion of the groups for which they stood.
So far I have not even tidied up my own first impressions of the place;
far less advanced a plan for tidying up the place itself.

In any case, to begin with, it is easy to be in far too much
of a hurry about tidying up.  This has already been noted in
the more obvious case, of all that religious art that bewildered
the tourist with its churches full of flat and gilded ikons.
Many a man has had the sensation of something as full as a picture
gallery and as futile as a lumber-room, merely by not happening to know
what is really of value, or especially in what way it is really valued.
An Armenian or a Syrian might write a report on his visit
to England, saying that our national and especially our naval
heroes were neglected, and left to the lowest dregs of the rabble;
since the portraits of Benbow and Nelson, when exhibited to the public,
were painted on wood by the crudest and most incompetent artists.
He would not perhaps fully appreciate the fine shade of
social status and utility implied in a public-house sign.
He might not realise that the sign of Nelson could be hung on
high everywhere, because the reputation of Nelson was high everywhere,
not because it was low anywhere; that his bad portrait was really
a proof of his good name.  Yet the too rapid reformer may easily
miss even the simple and superficial parallel between the wooden
pictures of admirals and the wooden pictures of angels.
Still less will he appreciate the intense spiritual atmosphere,
that makes the real difference between an ikon and an inn-sign,
and makes the inns of England, noble and national as they are,
relatively the homes of Christian charity but hardly a Christian faith.
He can hardly bring himself to believe that Syrians can be as fond
of religion as Englishmen of beer.

Nobody can do justice to these cults who has not some sympathy with
the power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivial
objects with a kind of magic.  It is easy to talk of superstitiously
attaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetry
of life consists of attaching importance to sticks and stones;
and not only to those tall sticks we call the trees or those large
stones we call the mountains.  Anything that gives to the sticks of our
own furniture, or the stones of our own backyard, even a reflected
or indirect divinity is good for the dignity of life; and this
is often achieved by the dedication of similar and special things.
At least we should desire to see the profane things transfigured
by the sacred, rather than the sacred disenchanted by the profane;
and it was a prophet walking on the walls of this mountain city,
who said that in his vision all the bowls should be as the bowls
before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem should be written
Holy unto the Lord.

Anyhow, this intensity about trifles is not always understood.
Several quite sympathetic Englishmen told me merely as a funny story
(and God forbid that I should deny that it is funny) the fact
of the Armenians or some such people having been allowed to suspend
a string of lamps from a Greek pillar by means of a nail, and their
subsequent alarm when their nail was washed by the owners of the pillar;
a sort of symbol that their nail had finally fallen into the hands
of the enemy.  It strikes us as odd that a nail should be so valuable
or so vivid to the imagination.  And yet, to men so close to Calvary,
even nails are not entirely commonplace.

All this, regarding a decent delay and respect for religion or
even for superstition, is obvious and has already been observed.
But before leaving it, we may note that the same argument cuts
the other way; I mean that we should not insolently impose our own ideas
of what is picturesque any more than our own ideas of what is practical.
The aesthete is sometimes more of a vandal than the vandal.
The proposed reconstructions of Jerusalem have been on
the whole reasonable and sympathetic; but there is always
a danger from the activities, I might almost say the antics,
of a sort of antiquary who is more hasty than an anarchist.
If the people of such places revolt against their own limitations,
we must have a reasonable respect for their revolt, and we must
not be impatient even with their impatience.

It is their town; they have to live in it, and not we.
As they are the only judges of whether their antiquities are
really authorities, so they are the only judges of whether their
novelties are really necessities.  As I pointed out more than once
to many of my friends in Jerusalem, we should be very much annoyed
if artistic visitors from Asia took similar liberties in London.
It would be bad enough if they proposed to conduct excavations
in Pimlico or Paddington, without much reference to the people
who lived there; but it would be worse if they began to relieve them
of the mere utilitarianism of Chelsea Bridge or Paddington Station.
Suppose an eloquent Abyssinian Christian were to hold up his hand and stop
the motor-omnibuses from going down Fleet Street on the ground that
the thoroughfare was sacred to the simpler locomotion of Dr. Johnson.
We should be pleased at the African's appreciation of Johnson;
but our pleasure would not be unmixed.  Suppose when you or I are
in the act of stepping into a taxi-cab, an excitable Coptic Christian
were to leap from behind a lamp-post, and implore us to save
the grand old growler or the cab called the gondola of London.
I admit and enjoy the poetry of the hansom; I admit and enjoy
the personality of the true cabman of the old four-wheeler, upon whose
massive manhood descended something of the tremendous tradition
of Tony Weller.  But I am not so certain as I should like to be,
that I should at that moment enjoy the personality of the Copt.
For these reasons it seems really desirable, or at least defensible,
to defer any premature reconstruction of disputed things,
and to begin this book as a mere note-book or sketch-book
of things as they are, or at any rate as they appear.
It was in this irregular order, and in this illogical disproportion,
that things did in fact appear to me, and it was some time before I saw
any real generalisation that would reduce my impressions to order.
I saw that the groups disagreed, and to some extent why they disagreed,
long before I could seriously consider anything on which they would
be likely to agree.  I have therefore confined the first section
of this book to a mere series of such impressions, and left to the last
section a study of the problem and an attempt at the solution.
Between these two I have inserted a sort of sketch of what seemed to me
the determining historical events that make the problem what it is.
Of these I will only say for the moment that, whether by a coincidence
or for some deeper cause, I feel it myself to be a case of first
thoughts being best; and that some further study of history served
rather to solidify what had seemed merely a sort of vision.
I might almost say that I fell in love with Jerusalem at first sight;
and the final impression, right or wrong, served only to fix
the fugitive fancy which had seen, in the snow on the city,
the white crown of a woman of Bethlehem.

But there is another cause for my being content for the moment,
with this mere chaos of contrasts.  There is a very real reason
for emphasising those contrasts, and for shunning the temptation
to shut our eyes to them even considered as contrasts.
It is necessary to insist that the contrasts are not easy to turn
into combinations; that the red robes of Rome and the green
scarves of Islam will not very easily fade into a dingy russet;
that the gold of Byzantium and the brass of Babylon will require
a hot furnace to melt them into any kind of amalgam.  The reason
for this is akin to what has already been said about Jerusalem as a
knot of realities.  It is especially a knot of popular realities.
Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is so
small a place, it is a domain and a dominion for the masses.
Democracy is never quite democratic except when it is quite direct;
and it is never quite direct except when it is quite small.
So soon as a mob has grown large enough to have delegates it has
grown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are often
much the more representative of the two.  Now in a place so small
as Jerusalem, what we call the rank and file really counts.
And it is generally true, in religions especially, that the real
enthusiasm or even fanaticism is to be found in the rank and file.
In all intense religions it is the poor who are more religious
and the rich who are more irreligious.  It is certainly so with
the creeds and causes that come to a collision in Jerusalem.
The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour's
declaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they might
have shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage.
It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung back
and hesitated about Zionism.  The mass of Mahometans really are
ready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combined
against the Crusades.  It is rather the responsible Mahometan
leaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic.
This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry
out many things, right and wrong.  But a mob cries out "No Popery";
it does not cry out "Not so much Popery," still less "Only a moderate
admixture of Popery."  It shouts "Three cheers for Gladstone,"
it does not shout "A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards
some ideal similar to that of Gladstone."  It would find it quite
a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same
difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation
and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity.
No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivist
formula of "The nationalisation of all the means of production,
distribution, and exchange."  The mob of Jerusalem is no
exception to the rule, but rather an extreme example of it.
The mob of Jerusalem has cried some remarkable things in its time;
but they were not pedantic and they were not evasive.
There was a day when it cried a single word; "Crucify." It was
a thing to darken the sun and rend the veil of the temple;
but there was no doubt about what it meant.

This is an age of minorities; of minorities powerful and predominant,
partly through the power of wealth and partly through the idolatry
of education.  Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War,
when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic
minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists
and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend.
A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real
representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight;
while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out
of focus and therefore looked like a fog.  Just as such figures
give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting
for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures
giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds.
There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always
been a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists.  Perhaps it
would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy
in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend
to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists.
The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives
very different from the dry idealism of men like Mr. Macdonald,
which is probably sincere enough in its way.  But with whatever motives,
these intermediaries everywhere bridge the chasm between creeds
as they do the chasm between countries.  Everywhere they exalt
the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested.
Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors
of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out of
the heretics of all religions.

Mild constitutionalists in our own country often discuss
the possibility of a method of protecting the minority.
If they will find any possible method of protecting the majority,
they will have found something practically unknown to the modern world.
The majority is always at a disadvantage; the majority is
difficult to idealise, because it is difficult to imagine.
The minority is generally idealised, sometimes by its servants,
always by itself.  But my sympathies are generally, I confess,
with the impotent and even invisible majority.  And my sympathies,
when I go beyond the things I myself believe, are with all
the poor Jews who do believe in Judaism and all the Mahometans
who do believe in Mahometanism, not to mention so obscure a crowd
as the Christians who do believe in Christianity.  I feel I have
more morally and even intellectually in common with these people,
and even the religions of these people, than with the supercilious
negations that make up the most part of what is called enlightenment.
It is these masses whom we ought to consider everywhere; but it
is especially these masses whom we must consider in Jerusalem.
And the reason is in the reality I have described; that the place
is like a Greek city or a medieval parish; it is sufficiently
small and simple to be a democracy.  This is not a university town
full of philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges raging
with religions; not a place where resolutions can be voted and amended,
but a place where men can be crowned and crucified.

There is one small thing neglected in all our talk
about self-determination; and that is determination.
There is a great deal more difference than there is between most
motions and amendments between the things for which a democracy
will vote and the things on which a democracy is determined.
You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whether
lamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians painted
at all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference.
Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but there
is no self-determination about it.  The people are not determined.
You cannot take a vote when the people are determined.
You accept a vote, or something very much more obvious than a vote.

Now it may be that in Jerusalem there is not one people but rather
three or four; but each is a real people, having its public opinion,
its public policy, its flag and almost, as I have said, its frontier.
It is not a question of persuading weak and wavering voters, at a vague
parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose
afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and
only differ on a question about which nobody knows or cares anything.
It is a question of contrasts that will almost certainly remain contrasts,
except under the flood of some spiritual conversion which cannot
be foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced.  We cannot enrol
these people under our religion, because we have not got one.
We can enrol them under our government, and if we are obliged to do that,
the obvious essential is that like Roman rule before Christianity,
or the English rule in India it should profess to be impartial if only
by being irreligious.  That is why I willingly set down for the moment
only the first impressions of a stranger in a strange country.
It is because our first safety is in seeing that it is a strange country;
and our present preliminary peril that we may fall into the habit
of thinking it a familiar country.  It does no harm to put the facts
in a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all is
that they are disconnected.  And the first danger of all is that we
may allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to imply
that they are connected when they are not.  It does no harm,
at any rate to start with, to state the differences as irreconcilable.
For the first and most unfamiliar fact the English have to learn
in this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable.
And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordy
compromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abysses
can be filled up with rubbish, or such chasms bridged with cobwebs.
For we have created in England a sort of compromise which may up to a
certain point be workable in England; though there are signs that even
in England that point is approaching or is past.  But in any case we
could only do with that compromise as we could do without conscription;
because an accident had made us insular and even provincial.
So in India where we have treated the peoples as different from
ourselves and from each other we have at least partly succeeded.
So in Ireland, where we have tried to make them agree with us
and each other, we have made one never-ending nightmare.

We can no more subject the world to the English compromise than to the
English climate; and both are things of incalculable cloud and twilight.
We have grown used to a habit of calling things by the wrong
names and supporting them by the wrong arguments; and even doing
the right thing for the wrong cause.  We have party governments which
consist of people who pretend to agree when they really disagree.
We have party debates which consist of people who pretend to disagree
when they really agree.  We have whole parties named after things they
no longer support, or things they would never dream of proposing.
We have a mass of meaningless parliamentary ceremonials that are
no longer even symbolic; the rule by which a parliamentarian
possesses a constituency but not a surname; or the rule by
which he becomes a minister in order to cease to be a member.
All this would seem the most superstitious and idolatrous
mummery to the simple worshippers in the shrines of Jerusalem.
You may think what they say fantastic, or what they mean fanatical,
but they do not say one thing and mean another.  The Greek
may or may not have a right to say he is Orthodox, but he means
that he is Orthodox; in a very different sense from that in which
a man supporting a new Home Rule Bill means that he is Unionist.
A Moslem would stop the sale of strong drink because he is a Moslem.
But he is not quite so muddleheaded as to profess to stop it because
he is a Liberal, and a particular supporter of the party of liberty.
Even in England indeed it will generally be found that there
is something more clear and rational about the terms of theology
than those of politics and popular science.  A man has at least
a more logical notion of what he means when he calls himself
an Anglo-Catholic than when he calls himself an Anglo-Saxon. But
the old Jew with the drooping ringlets, shuffling in and out
of the little black booths of Jerusalem, would not condescend
to say he is a child of anything like the Anglo-Saxon race.
He does not say he is a child of the Aramaico-Semitic race.
He says he is a child of the Chosen Race, brought with thunder
and with miracles and with mighty battles out of the land of Egypt
and out of the house of bondage.  In other words, he says something
that means something, and something that he really means.
One of the white Dominicans or brown Franciscans, from the great
monasteries of the Holy City, may or may not be right in maintaining
that a Papacy is necessary to the unity of Christendom.
But he does not pass his life in proving that the Papacy
is not a Papacy, as many of our liberal constitutionalists
pass it in proving that the Monarchy is not a Monarchy.
The Greek priests spend an hour on what seems to the sceptic
mere meaningless formalities of the preparation of the Mass.
But they would not spend a minute if they were themselves sceptics
and thought them meaningless formalities, as most modern people do
think of the formalities about Black Rod or the Bar of the House.
They would be far less ritualistic than we are, if they cared
as little for the Mass as we do for the Mace.  Hence it is
necessary for us to realise that these rude and simple worshippers,
of all the different forms of worship, really would be bewildered
by the ritual dances and elaborate ceremonial antics of John Bull,
as by the superstitious forms and almost supernatural incantations
of most of what we call plain English.

Now I take it we retain enough realism and common sense not to
wish to transfer these complicated conventions and compromises
to a land of such ruthless logic and such rending divisions.
We may hope to reproduce our laws, we do not want to reproduce our
legal fictions.  We do not want to insist on everybody referring
to Mr. Peter or Mr. Paul, as the honourable member for Waddy Walleh;
because a retiring Parliamentarian has to become Steward
of the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall not insist on a retiring
Palestinian official becoming Steward of the Moabitic Hundreds.
But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are making
that very mistake.  We are transferring the fictions and even the
hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they
can be tolerated to a place where they will be torn in pieces.
I have confined myself hitherto to descriptions and not to criticisms,
to stating the elements of the problem rather than attempting
as yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that we
shall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description;
that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shall
too severely criticise the solution.  But I would conclude this chapter
with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly
from all that is said here of our legal fictions and local anomalies.
One thing at least has been done by our own Government, which is entirely
according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament.  It is a
parliament of Pooh Bah, where anybody may be Lord High Everything Else.
It is a parliament of Alice in Wonderland, where the name of a thing is
different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called.
It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a
foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories.
And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even
the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British
representative in Palestine.

I have heard it supported as an interesting experiment in Zionism.
I have heard it denounced as a craven concession to Zionism.
I think it is quite obviously a flat and violent contradiction
to Zionism.  Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeed
as I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that it
would be better for all parties if Israel had the dignity
and distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and that
this should be effected, if possible, or so far as possible,
by giving the Jews a national home, preferably in Palestine.
But where is Sir Herbert Samuel's national home?  If it is in
Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England.
If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does
not need a national home in Palestine.  If there is any point
in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong
man and sent him to precisely the wrong country.  You have asserted
not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you have
ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom.
In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not
belong to the Jews, than by sending a Jew to claim it for the English.
And yet in practice, of course, all the Anti-Semites will say he is
claiming it for the Jews.  You combine all possible disadvantages
of all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hard
Zionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal.
You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while you
allow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishman
but a Jew.

Now this sort of confusion or compromise is as local as a London fog.
A London fog is tolerable in London, indeed I think it is very
enjoyable in London.  There is a beauty in that brown twilight
as well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South.
But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carry
his cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air about
the crags of Zion, or under the terrible stars of the desert.
There men see differences with almost unnatural clearness,
and call things by savagely simple names.  We in England may
consider all sorts of aspects of a man like Sir Herbert Samuel;
we may consider him as a Liberal, or a friend of the Fabian Socialists,
or a cadet of one of the great financial houses, or a Member of
Parliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire,
or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways.  But the people
in Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personal
aspect indeed.  For the enthusiastic Moslems he will simply be a Jew;
for the enthusiastic Zionists he will not really be a Zionist.
For them he will always be the type of Jew who would be willing
to remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster.
Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he will
only be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of which
he is the denial in theory.  He will not mean that Palestine
is not surrendered to the Jews, but only that England is.
Now I have nothing as yet to do with the truth of that suggestion;
I merely give it as an example of the violent and unexpected
reactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amid
the red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow man
into a furnace.  I have no objection to a snow man as a part of our
own Christmas festivities; indeed, as has already been suggested,
I think such festivities a great glory of English life.
But I have seen the snow melting in the steep places about Jerusalem;
and I know what a cataract it could feed.

As I considered these things a deepening disquiet possessed me,
and my thoughts were far away from where I stood.  After all,
the English did not indulge in this doubling of parts and muddling
of mistaken identity in their real and unique success in India.
They may have been wrong or right but they were realistic about Moslems
and Hindoos; they did not say Moslems were Hindoos, or send a highly
intelligent Hindoo from Oxford to rule Moslems as an Englishman.
They may not have cared for things like the ideal of Zionism;
but they understood the common sense of Zionism, the desirability
of distinguishing between entirely different things.
But I remembered that of late their tact had often failed them
even in their chief success in India; and that every hour
brought worse and wilder news of their failure in Ireland.
I remembered that in the Early Victorian time, against the advice
only of the wisest and subtlest of the Early Victorians, we had tied
ourselves to the triumphant progress of industrial capitalism; and that
progress had now come to a crisis and what might well be a crash.
And now, on the top of all, our fine patriotic tradition of foreign
policy seemed to be doing these irrational and random things.
A sort of fear took hold of me; and it was not for the Holy Land
that I feared.

A cold wave went over me, like that unreasonable change and chill
with which a man far from home fancies his house has been burned down,
or that those dear to him are dead.  For one horrible moment at least I
wondered if we had come to the end of compromise and comfortable nonsense,
and if at last the successful stupidity of England would topple
over like the successful wickedness of Prussia; because God is not
mocked by the denial of reason any more than the denial of justice.
And I fancied the very crowds of Jerusalem retorted on me words
spoken to them long ago; that a great voice crying of old along
the Via Dolorosa was rolled back on me like thunder from the mountains;
and that all those alien faces are turned against us to-day,
bidding us weep not for them, who have faith and clarity and a purpose,
but weep for ourselves and for our children.



CHAPTER VIII

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT

There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can see
the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage.
It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the
English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring
the slow death of desert warfare.  There were German and Austrian
elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three
allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other.
In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, "who had some dignity
or other," like Lord Lundy's grandmother.  She was very beautiful,
very fashionable, somewhat frivolous, but with fits of Catholic devotion.
She had some very valuable Christian virtues, such as indiscriminate
charity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians.
She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance.  One day she was driving
just outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figures
which make the Holy City seem like the eternal crisis of an epic.
Such a man will enter the gate in the most ghastly rags as if
he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head
lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at
which the towers might fall.  This man was ragged beyond all that
moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing
he was uttering with arms held up to heaven was evidently a curse.
The lady sent an inquiry by her German servant, whom also I can see
in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing
all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire.  This ambassador
soon returned in state and said, "Your Serene High Sublimity
(or whatever it is), he says he is cursing the English."  Her pity
and patriotism were alike moved; and she again sent the plenipotentiary
to discover why he cursed the English, or what tale of wrong or ruin
at English hands lay behind the large gestures of his despair.
A second time the wooden intermediary returned and said,
"Your Ecstatic Excellency (or whatever be the correct form),
he says he is cursing the English because they don't come."

There are a great many morals to this story, besides the general
truth to which it testifies; that the Turkish rule was not
popular even with Moslems, and that the German war was not
particularly popular even with Turks.  When all deductions are
made for the patriot as a partisan, and his way of picking up
only what pleases him, it remains true that the English attack
was very widely regarded rather as a rescue than an aggression.
And what complaint there was really was, in many cases, a complaint
that the rescue did not come with a rush; that the English forces
had to fall back when they had actually entered Gaza, and could not
for long afterwards continue their advance on Jerusalem.  This kind
of criticism of military operations is always, of course, worthless.
In journalists it is generally worthless without being even harmless.
There were some in London whose pessimistic wailing was less excusable
than that of the poor Arab in Jerusalem; who cursed the English with
the addition of being English themselves, who did it, not as he did,
before one foreigner, but before all foreign opinion; and who
advertised their failure in a sort of rags less reputable than his.
No one can judge of a point like the capture and loss of Gaza,
unless he knows a huge mass of technical and local detail that can
only be known to the staff on the spot; it is not a question
of lack of water but of exactly how little water; not of the
arrival of reinforcements but of exactly how much reinforcement;
not of whether time presses, but of exactly how much time there is.
Nobody can know these things who is editing a newspaper at the other
end of the world; and these are the things which, for the soldier
on the spot, make all the difference between jumping over a paling
and jumping over a precipice.  Even the latter, as the philosophic
relativist will eagerly point out, is only a matter of degree.
But this is a parenthesis; for the purpose with which I mentioned
the anecdote is something different.  It is the text of another and
somewhat more elusive truth; some appreciation of which is necessary
to a sympathy with the more profound problems of Palestine.
And it might be expressed thus; it is a proverb that the Eastern
methods seem to us slow; that the Arabs trail along on labouring
camels while the Europeans flash by on motors or mono-planes. But
there is another and stranger sense in which we do seem to them slow,
and they do seem to themselves to have a secret of swiftness.
There is a sense in which we here touch the limits of a land of lightning;
across which, as in a dream, the motor-car can be seen crawling
like a snail.

I have said that there is another side to the desert; though there
is something queer in talking of another side to something so bare
and big and oppressively obvious.  But there is another side besides
the big and bare truths, like giant bones, that the Moslem has
found there; there is, so to speak, an obverse of the obvious.
And to suggest what I mean I must go back again to the desert and
the days I spent there, being carted from camp to camp and giving
what were courteously described as lectures.  All I can say is that if
those were lectures, I cannot imagine why everybody is not a lecturer.
Perhaps the secret is already out; and multitudes of men in evening dress
are already dotted about the desert, wandering in search of an audience.
Anyhow in my own wanderings I found myself in the high narrow house
of the Base Commandant at Kantara, the only house in the whole
circle of the horizon; and from the wooden balustrade and verandah,
running round the top of it, could be seen nine miles of tents.
Sydney Smith said that the bulbous domes of the Brighton Pavilion
looked as if St. Paul's Cathedral had come down there and littered;
and that grey vista of countless cones looked rather as if the
Great Pyramid had multiplied itself on the prolific scale of the herring.
Nor was even such a foolish fancy without its serious side; for though
these pyramids would pass, the plan of them was also among the mightiest
of the works of man; and the king in every pyramid was alive.
For this was the great camp that was the pivot of the greatest campaign;
and from that balcony I had looked on something all the more
historic because it may never be seen again.  As the dusk fell
and the moon brightened above that great ghostly city of canvas,
I had fallen into talk with three or four of the officers at the base;
grizzled and hard-headed men talking with all the curious and almost
colourless common sense of the soldier.  All that they said was objective;
one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing
and not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. I
think there is something in this of a sympathy between the English
and the Moslems, which may have helped us in India and elsewhere.
For they mentioned many Moslem proverbs and traditions,
lightly enough but not contemptuously, and in particular another
of the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power.
They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never depart
until the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at least
was evidently a proverb of pride and security, like many such;
as who should say until the sea is dry or the sun rises in the west.
And one of them smiled and made a small gesture as of attention.
And in the silence of that moonlit scene we heard the clanking of a pump.
The water from the Nile had been brought in pipes across the desert.

And I thought that the symbol was a sound one, apart from all vanities;
for this is indeed the special sort of thing that Christendom
can do, and that Islam by itself would hardly care to do.
I heard more afterwards of that water, which was eventually carried
up the hills to Jerusalem, when I myself followed it thither;
and all I heard bore testimony to this truth so far as it goes; the sense
among the natives themselves of something magic in our machinery,
and that in the main a white magic; the sense of all the more solid sort
of social service that belongs rather to the West than to the East.
When the fountain first flowed in the Holy City in the mountains,
and Father Waggett blessed it for the use of men, it is said that
an old Arab standing by said, in the plain and powerful phraseology
of his people:  "The Turks were here for five hundred years,
and they never gave us a cup of cold water."

I put first this minimum of truth about the validity of Western
work because the same conversation swerved slowly, as it were,
to the Eastern side.  These same men, who talked of all things
as if they were chairs and tables, began to talk quite calmly of
things more amazing than table-turning. They were as wonderful as if
the water had come there like the wind, without any pipes or pumps;
or if Father Waggett had merely struck the rock like Moses.
They spoke of a solitary soldier at the end of a single telephone wire
across the wastes, hearing of something that had that moment happened
hundreds of miles away, and then coming upon a casual Bedouin who knew
it already.  They spoke of the whole tribes moving and on the march,
upon news that could only come a little later by the swiftest wires
of the white man.  They offered no explanation of these things;
they simply knew they were there, like the palm-trees and the moon.
They did not say it was "telepathy"; they lived much too close to
realities for that.  That word, which will instantly leap to the lips
of too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence of two
of our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the loss
of common sense.  It may have been telepathy, whatever that is;
but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfied
to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy.  If everybody
is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?
Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark
to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen?  Why does
not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question
by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin?  The common
sense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference;
the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot;
and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another.
In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of all
mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless;
the mystery of locality.  It works back at last to the hardest of
all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing
as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people;
that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones;
in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good,
can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.

It may be said in passing that this _genius loci_ is here very much
the presiding genius.  It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the
theory of pantheism goes with a considerable practice of particularism;
and that people everywhere are beginning to wish they were somewhere.
And even where it is not true of men, it seems to be true of the
mysterious forces which men are once more studying.  The words we now
address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words
they are said to address to us are parochial and even private.
While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere
to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society
is conducting practical experiments round a haunted house.
Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots.
Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well,
but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic who
comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard
like a ghost.  There may be something faintly amusing about the idea
of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons,
one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning.  But the driving
force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable
because it drives against most modern theories and associations.
The truth is that, upon a more transcendental consideration,
we do not know what place is any more than we know what time is.
We do not know of the unknown powers that they cannot concentrate
in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds
to a crisis.  And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily
and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots.
It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie
about the holy hill of Zion.

In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much too
large for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions.
The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as any
quaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings through
the chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah.  There is no difference,
except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved,
while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved.
But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a mere
score in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science.
Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisans
on either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plains
the traveller does realise it.  It was never so well expressed
as by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilities
were gloriously broken off by the great war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornish
who left a strange and striking fragment, about a man who came
to these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself back
against the stream of time into the very fountain of creation.
This is a parenthesis; but before resuming the more immediate
matter of the supernormal tricks of the tribes of the East,
it is well to recognise this very real if much more general historic
impression about the particular lands in which they lived.
I have called it a historic impression; but it might more truly be called
a prehistoric impression.  It is best expressed in symbol by saying
that the legendary site of the Garden of Eden is in Mesopotamia.
It is equally well expressed in concrete experience by saying that,
when I was in these parts, a learned man told me that the primitive form
of wheat had just, for the first time, been discovered in Palestine.

The feeling that fills the traveller may be faintly suggested thus;
that here, in this legendary land between Asia and Europe, may well
have happened whatever did happen; that through this Eastern gate,
if any, entered whatever made and changed the world.  Whatever else
this narrow strip of land may seem like, it does really seem,
to the spirit and almost to the senses, like the bridge that may have
borne across archaic abysses the burden and the mystery of man.
Here have been civilisations as old as any barbarism; to all
appearance perhaps older than any barbarism.  Here is the camel;
the enormous unnatural friend of man; the prehistoric pet.
He is never known to have been wild, and might make a man fancy
that all wild animals had once been tame.  As I said elsewhere,
all might be a runaway menagerie; the whale a cow that went swimming
and never came back, the tiger a large cat that took the prize
(and the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle.  This is not
(I venture to think) true; but it is true as Pithecanthropus and
Primitive Man and all the other random guesses from dubious bits
of bone and stone.  And the truth is some third thing, too tremendous
to be remembered by men.  Whatever it was, perhaps the camel saw it;
but from the expression on the face of that old family servant,
I feel sure that he will never tell.

I have called this the other side of the desert; and in another
sense it is literally the other side.  It is the other shore
of that shifting and arid sea.  Looking at it from the West
and considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desert
is but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen from
the other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom far
more mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be.
Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feel
the virtue of the Moslem movement.  It belonged to the desert,
but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that rests
upon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumes
of vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond.
It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face was
turned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise;
and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginnings
of that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream full
of faces, the gods of Asia on their thousand thrones.

It is not a mere romance that calls it a land of magic,
or even of black magic.  Those who carry that atmosphere to us
are not the romanticists but the realists.  Every one can feel
it in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarked
on his repulsive little masterpiece called "The Mark of the Beast,"
to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, "It's a
beastly story.  But those devils really can do jolly queer things."
It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless more
notable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick.
Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindedness
that hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism.
It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indian
had killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practice
of human sacrifice.  Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a man
to alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers;
wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it is
something so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explain
the explanation; certainly something that explains it better
than a Greek word for sleep.  But the impression of these special
instances is but one example of a more universal impression of
the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example
of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words.
Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well
as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even
a pressure.  It might be called the spiritual world let loose;
or a sort of psychical anarchy; a jungle of mango plants.
And it is pressing upon the West also to-day because of the breaking
down of certain materialistic barriers that have hitherto held it back.
In plain words the attitude of science is not only modified;
it is now entirely reversed.  I do not say it with mere pleasure;
in some ways I prefer our materialism to their spiritualism.
But for good or evil the scientists are now destroying their
own scientific world.

The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism;
and are already recovering from the shock.  They find
themselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods;
a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious.
For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics.
They might be better described as reverent materialists;
or at any rate monists.  They had at least at the back
of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather
clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest
speck of the supernatural into their clockwork.  But to-day it is
very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends
or the natural begins, or what name should be given to either.
The word agnostic has ceased to be a polite word for atheist.
It has become a real word for a very real state of mind,
conscious of many possibilities beyond that of the atheist,
and not excluding that of the polytheist.  It is no longer a question
of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing
the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap
and might even conflict.  Nature herself has become unnatural.
The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with
noble truism "There is no God but God," but rather with that other
motto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling,
in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned;
"Your gods and my gods, do you or I know which is the stronger?"
There was a mystical story I read somewhere in my boyhood,
of which the only image that remains is that of a rose-bush growing
mysteriously in the middle of a room.  Taking this image for the sake
of argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convinced
that he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he sees
such a magic bush growing irrationally in the middle of his bedroom.
All the walls and furniture are familiar and solid, the table,
the clock, the telephone, the looking glass or what not; there is
nothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or optical
delusion of green and red.  Now that was very much the view taken
of the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred tradition
of Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalism
of the eighteenth century was supposed to have found full
support in the science of the nineteenth.  He had a sentiment
about a rose:  he was still glad it had fragrance or atmosphere;
though he remembered with a slight discomfort that it had thorns.
But what bothered him about it was that it was impossible.
And what made him think it impossible was it was inconsistent
with everything else.  It was one solitary and monstrous
exception to the sort of rule that ought to have no exceptions.
Science did not convince him that there were few miracles,
but that there were no miracles; and why should there be miracles
only in Palestine and only for one short period?  It was a single
and senseless contradiction to an otherwise complete cosmos.
For the furniture fitted in bit by bit and better and better;
and the bedroom seemed to grow more and more solid.
The man recognised the portrait of himself over the mantelpiece or
the medicine bottles on the table, like the dying lover in Browning.
In other words, science so far had steadily solidified things;
Newton had measured the walls and ceiling and made a calculus
of their three dimensions.  Darwin was already arranging
the animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faraday
the chemical elements as clearly as a row of medicine bottles.
From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth,
science was not only making discoveries, but all the discoveries
were in one direction.  Science is still making discoveries;
but they are in the opposite direction.

For things are rather different when the man in the bed
next looks at the bedroom.  Not only is the rose-bush still
very obvious; but the other things are looking very odd.
The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to vary
in measurement till the man thinks he is going mad.  The wall-paper
has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots.
The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown
the medicine bottles out of the window.  The telephone has vanished
from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it.
The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is
not his own.

That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole
trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years.
It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening
or the destruction of the scientific universe.
It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have
opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it.
It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder
and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley.
I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases:
it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression
one of common sense.  It is really true that the perspective and
dimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein
will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure
more one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?
It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turned
into the fourth dimension or something entirely different;
and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour
of the invisible telepath.  It is true that the pattern of the paper
has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed;
we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of
electrons like the spirals.  Scientific men of the first rank
have seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself.
It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enough
that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists.
I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact
that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering.
Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out
of the window; and some of them at least are working purely
psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called
miraculous healing.  I do not say we know how far this could go;
it is my whole point that we do not know, that we are in contact
with numbers of new things of which we know uncommonly little.
But the vital point is, not that science deals with what we do not know,
but that science is destroying what we thought we did know.
Nearly all the latest discoveries have been destructive, not of the old
dogmas of religion, but rather of the recent dogmas of science.
The conservation of energy could not itself be entirely conserved.
The atom was smashed to atoms.  And dancing to the tune
of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving
with lamentable levity.

And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does not
see himself.  He sees his Other Self, which some say is the opposite
of his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self,
said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates him
though it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality.
It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit of
these speculations, or whether they be medicinal or morbid.
My purpose is served in pointing out the plain historical fact;
that if you had talked to a Utilitarian and Rationalist of Bentham's time,
who told men to follow "enlightened self-interest," he would have been
considerably bewildered if you had replied brightly and briskly,
"And to which self do you refer; the sub-conscious, the conscious,
the latently criminal or suppressed, or others that we fortunately have
in stock?"  When the man looks at his own portrait in his own bedroom,
it does really melt into the face of a stranger or flicker into
the face of a fiend.  When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short,
it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortable
and solid part of the vision that is altering and breaking up.
It is the walls and furniture that are only a dream or memory.
And when he looks again at the incongruous rose-bush, he seems
to smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and his
finger bleeds upon a thorn.

It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the man
recovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in a
hammock in a rose-garden. It is not so very unreasonable when you come
to think of it; or at least when you come to think of the whole of it.
He was not wrong in thinking the whole must be a consistent whole,
and that one part seemed inconsistent with the other.
He was only wrong about which part was wrong through being inconsistent
with the other.  Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about
the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth
century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded
on the fixity of facts.  Miracles were monstrosities because they
were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law.
The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the New
were extravagances because they were exceptions; and they were
exceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule.
In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trim
and tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpets
in trim and tidy bedrooms.  So far it seemed reasonable enough.
But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a room
as well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as well
as an exception.

As soon as the men of science began to doubt the rules of the game,
the game was up.  They could no longer rule out all the old marvels
as impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admit
as possible.  They were themselves dealing now with a number of
unknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when is
matter an illusion of mind; what is identity, what is individuality,
is there a limit to logic in the last extremes of mathematics?
They knew by a hundred hints that their non-miraculous world was no
longer watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which
they were already out of their depth, and down among very fantastical
deep-sea fishes.  They could hardly feel certain even about the fish
that swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very true
one that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it.
Logically they would find it quite as hard to draw the line
at the miraculous draught of fishes.  I do not mean that they,
or even I, need here depend on those particular stories;
I mean that the difficulty now is to draw a line, and a new line,
after the obliteration of an old and much more obvious line.
Any one can draw it for himself, as a matter of mere taste in probability;
but we have not made a philosophy until we can draw it for others.
And the modern men of science cannot draw it for others.
Men could easily mark the contrast between the force of gravity
and the fable of the Ascension.  They cannot all be made to see
any such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as a
possibility and the ascension which is still derided as a miracle.
I do not even say that there is not a great difference between them;
I say that science is now plunged too deep in new doubts
and possibilities to have authority to define the difference.
I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what is
said to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less it
knows what did or did not happen on that lofty and legendary hill,
where a spire rises over Jerusalem and can be seen beyond Jordan.

But with that part of the Palestinian story which is told in the
New Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter;
and the matter here is a more general one.  The truth is that through
a thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind.
It is not Christianity.  On the contrary, it would be truer
to say that it is paganism.  In reality it is in a very special
sense paganism; because it is polytheism.  The word will startle
many people, but not the people who know the modern world best.
When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differed
from his view of the universe, he answered, "Why universe?
Why should it not be a multiverse?"  The essence of polytheism is
the worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarily
the author and the authority of all things.  Men are feeling more
and more that there are many spiritual forces in the universe,
and the wisest men feel that some are to be trusted more than others.
There will be a tendency, I think, to take a favourite force,
or in other words a familiar spirit.  Mr. H. G. Wells, who is,
if anybody is, a genius among moderns and a modern among geniuses,
really did this very thing; he selected a god who was really
more like a daemon.  He called his book _God, the Invisible King_;
but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differed
from other people's God in the very fact that he was not a king.
He was very particular in explaining that his deity did not
rule in any almighty or infinite sense; but merely influenced,
like any wandering spirit.  Nor was he particularly invisible,
if there can be said to be any degrees in invisibility.
Mr. Wells's Invisible God was really like Mr. Wells's Invisible Man.
You almost felt he might appear at any moment, at any rate to his
one devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad cry
might ring through the woods of Essex, the voice of Mr. Wells crying,
"We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible God."  I do not mean
this disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically;
I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the general
sense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us.
It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighed
on men of imagination forty years ago.  But my point for the moment
is that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic,
in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of a
single spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world.
The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not his
creator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to prevent
Mr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god in
another temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberate
his mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple.
My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the image
and symbolism of Mr. Bennett's or Mr. Archer's idolatries;
and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be found
as an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells.  But, anyhow, the trend
of all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the old
civilisation of paganism.

There is the same modern mark in Spiritualism.  Spiritualism also
has the trend of polytheism, if it be in a form more akin to
ancestor-worship. But whether it be the invocation of ghosts or of gods,
the mark of it is that it invokes something less than the divine;
nor am I at all quarrelling with it on that account.  I am merely
describing the drift of the day; and it seems clear that it is towards
the summoning of spirits to our aid whatever their position in the
unknown world, and without any clear doctrinal plan of that world.
The most probable result would seem to be a multitude of psychic cults,
personal and impersonal, from the vaguest reverence for the powers
of nature to the most concrete appeal to crystals or mascots.
When I say that the agnostics have discovered agnosticism,
and have now recovered from the shock, I do not mean merely to sneer
at the identity of the word agnosticism with the word ignorance.
On the contrary, I think ignorance the greater thing; for ignorance
can be creative.  And the thing it can create, and soon probably
will create, is one of the lost arts of the world; a mythology.

In a word, the modern world will probably end exactly where the
Bible begins.  In that inevitable setting of spirit against spirit,
or god against god, we shall soon be in a position to do more
justice not only to the New Testament, but to the Old Testament.
Our descendants may very possibly do the very thing we scoff
at the old Jews for doing; grope for and cling to their own
deity as one rising above rivals who seem to be equally real.
They also may feel him not primarily as the sole or even the supreme
but only as the best; and have to abide the miracles of ages to prove
that he is also the mightiest.  For them also he may at first
be felt as their own, before he is extended to others; he also,
from the collision with colossal idolatries and towering spiritual
tyrannies, may emerge only as a God of Battles and a Lord of Hosts.
Here between the dark wastes and the clouded mountain was fought
out what must seem even to the indifferent a wrestle of giants
driving the world out of its course; Jehovah of the mountains
casting down Baal of the desert and Dagon of the sea.  Here wandered
and endured that strange and terrible and tenacious people who held
high above all their virtues and their vices one indestructible idea;
that they were but the tools in that tremendous hand.
Here was the first triumph of those who, in some sense beyond
our understanding, had rightly chosen among the powers invisible,
and found their choice a great god above all gods.  So the future
may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith;
and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological war
in the desert than like the dry radiance of theism or monism.
I have said nothing here of my own faith, or of that name on which,
I am well persuaded, the world will be most wise to call.
But I do believe that the tradition founded in that far tribal battle,
in that far Eastern land, did indeed justify itself by leading
up to a lasting truth; and that it will once again be justified
of all its children.  What has survived through an age of atheism
as the most indestructible would survive through an age of polytheism
as the most indispensable.  If among many gods it could not presently
be proved to be the strongest, some would still know it was the best.
Its central presence would endure through times of cloud and confusion,
in which it was judged only as a myth among myths or a man among men.
Even the old heathen test of humanity and the apparition of the body,
touching which I have quoted the verse about the pagan polytheist
as sung by the neo-pagan poet, is a test which that incarnate
mystery will abide the best.  And however much or little our
spiritual inquirers may lift the veil from their invisible kings,
they will not find a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiled
upon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible god.



CHAPTER IX

THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON

Lydda or Ludd has already been noted as the legendary birthplace
of St. George, and as the camp on the edge of the desert from which,
as it happened, I caught the first glimpse of the coloured
fields of Palestine that looked like the fields of Paradise.
Being an encampment of soldiers, it seems an appropriate place for
St. George; and indeed it may be said that all that red and empty land
has resounded with his name like a shield of copper or of bronze.
The name was not even confined to the cries of the Christians;
a curious imaginative hospitality in the Moslem mind, a certain innocent
and imitative enthusiasm, made the Moslems also half-accept a sort
of Christian mythology, and make an abstract hero of St. George.
It is said that Coeur de Lion on these very sands first invoked
the soldier saint to bless the English battle-line, and blazon his cross
on the English banners.  But the name occurs not only in the stories
of the victory of Richard, but in the enemy stories that led up
to the great victory of Saladin.  In that obscure and violent quarrel
which let loose the disaster of Hattin, when the Grand Master
of the Templars, Gerard the Englishman from Bideford in Devon,
drove with demented heroism his few lances against a host, there fell
among those radiant fanatics one Christian warrior, who had made
with his single sword such a circle of the slain, that the victorious
Moslems treated even his dead body as something supernatural;
and bore it away with them with honour, saying it was the body
of St. George.

But if the purpose of the camp be appropriate to the story of St. George,
the position of the camp might be considered appropriate to the more
fantastic story of St. George and the Dragon.  The symbolic struggle
between man and monster might very well take place somewhere where
the green culture of the fields meets the red desolation of the desert.
As a matter of fact, I dare say, legend locates the duel itself
somewhere else, but I am only making use of the legend as a legend,
or even as a convenient figure of speech.  I would only use it
here to make a kind of picture which may clarify a kind of paradox,
very vital to our present attitude towards all Palestinian traditions,
including those that are more sacred even than St. George.  This paradox
has already been touched on in the last chapter about polytheistic
spirits or superstitions such as surrounded the Old Testament,
but it is yet more true of the criticisms and apologetics surrounding
the New Testament.  And the paradox is this; that we never find
our own religion so right as when we find we are wrong about it.
I mean that we are finally convinced not by the sort of evidence we
are looking for, but by the sort of evidence we are not looking for.
We are convinced when we come on a ratification that is almost as abrupt
as a refutation.  That is the point about the wireless telegraphy
or wordless telepathy of the Bedouins.  A supernatural trick in a dingy
tribe wandering in dry places is not the sort of supernaturalism
we should expect to find; it is only the sort that we do find.
These rocks of the desert, like the bones of a buried giant,
do not seem to stick out where they ought to, but they stick out,
and we fall over them.

Whatever we think of St. George, most people would see a mere
fairy-tale in St. George and the Dragon.  I dare say they are right;
and I only use it here as a figure for the sake of argument.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man has come to
the conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George,
in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wings
and claws that has somehow interwreathed itself with his image.
Perhaps he is a little biased by patriotism or other ethical aims;
and thinks the saint a good social ideal.  Perhaps he knows that
early Christianity, so far from being a religion of pacifists,
was largely a religion of soldiers.  Anyhow he thinks St. George
himself a quite sufficiently solid and historical figure;
and has little doubt that records or traces can be found of him.
Now the point is this; suppose that man goes to the land of
the legendary combat; and finds comparatively few or faint traces
of the personality of St. George.  But suppose he _does_ find,
on that very field of combat, the bones of a gigantic monster unlike
every other creature except the legendary dragon.  Or suppose he only
finds ancient Eastern sculptures and hieroglyphics representing maidens,
being sacrificed to such a monster, and making it quite clear that
even within historic times one of those sacrificed was a princess.
It is surely clear that he will be considerably impressed by
this confirmation, not of the part he did believe, but actually
of the part he did not believe.  He has not found what he expected
but he has found what he wanted, and much more than he wanted.
He has not found a single detail directly in support of St. George.
But he had found a very considerable support of St. George
and the Dragon.

It is needless to inform the reader, I trust, that I do not think
this particular case in the least likely; or that I am only using it
for the sake of lucidity.  Even as it stands, it would not necessarily
make a man believe the traditional story, but it would make him
guess that it was some sort of tradition of some sort of truth;
that there was something in it, and much more in it than even
he himself had imagined.  And the point of it would be precisely
that his reason had not anticipated the extent of his revelation.
He has proved the improbable, not the probable thing.
Reason had already taught him the reasonable part; but facts had
taught him the fantastic part.  He will certainly conclude that
the whole story is very much more valid than anybody has supposed.
Now as I have already said, it is not in the least likely that
this will happen touching this particular tale of Palestine.
But this is precisely what really has happened touching
the most sacred and tremendous of all the tales of Palestine.
This is precisely what has happened touching that central figure,
round which the monster and the champion are alike only
ornamental symbols; and by the right of whose tragedy even
St. George's Cross does not belong to St. George.  It is not likely
to be true of the desert duel between George and the Dragon;
but it is already true of the desert duel between Jesus and the Devil.
St. George is but a servant and the Dragon is but a symbol,
but it is precisely about the central reality, the mystery of Christ
and His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradox
has proved itself a fact.

Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than once
moved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swine
that rushed down a steep place into the sea.  I do not insist on
the personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pig
I am not a flying pig, a pig with wings of speed and precipitancy;
and if I am possessed of a devil, it is not the blue devil of suicide.
But the phrase came back into my mind because going down to
the Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place.
Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestine
is one single steep place.  It is as if all other countries lay
flat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways.
This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweep
as of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is never
conveyed by any maps or books or even pictures.  All the pictures
of Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costume
or corners of architecture, at most views of famous places;
they cannot give the bottomless vision of this long descent.
We went in a little rocking Ford car down steep and jagged roads
among ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failed
us altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rocky
banks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinister
and discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea.  And the distance looks
far enough on the map, and seems long enough in the motor journey,
to make a man feel he has come to another part of the world;
yet so much is it all a single fall of land that even when he gets
out beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can still
look back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spire
of the Russian church (I fancy) upon the hill of the Ascension.
And though the story of the swine is attached in truth to another place,
I was still haunted with its fanciful appropriateness to this one,
because of the very steepness of this larger slope and the mystery
of that larger sea.  I even had the fancy that one might fish
for them and find them in such a sea, turned into monsters;
sea-swine or four-legged fishes, swollen and with evil eyes,
grown over with sea-grass for bristles; the ghosts of Gadara.

And then it came back to me, as a curiosity and almost a coincidence,
that the same strange story had actually been selected as the text
for the central controversy of the Victorian Age between Christianity
and criticism.  The two champions were two of the greatest men
of the nineteenth century; Huxley representing scientific scepticism
and Gladstone scriptural orthodoxy.  The scriptural champion
was universally regarded as standing for the past, if not for the
dead past; and the scientific champion as standing for the future,
if not the final judgment of the world.  And yet the future
has been entirely different to anything that anybody expected;
and the final judgment may yet reverse all the conceptions of their
contemporaries and even of themselves.  The philosophical position
now is in a very curious way the contrary of the position then.
Gladstone had the worst of the argument, and has been proved right.
Huxley had the best of the argument, and has been proved wrong.
At any rate he has been ultimately proved wrong about the way the world
was going, and the probable position of the next generation.
What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought dead
is rather too much alive.

Huxley was not only a man of genius in logic and rhetoric; he was
a man of a very manly and generous morality.  Morally he deserves
much more sympathy than many of the mystics who have supplanted him.
But they have supplanted him.  In the more mental fashions
of the day, most of what he thought would stand has fallen,
and most of what he thought would fall is standing yet.
In the Gadarene controversy with Gladstone, he announced it
as his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thought
self-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thought
self-evidently ridiculous.  And yet if we take any typical man
of the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley's sublime
thing scoffed at, and Huxley's ridiculous thing taken seriously.
I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley's may
be found in Mr. George Moore.  He has one of the most critical,
appreciative and atmospheric talents of the age.  He has lived in most
of the sets of the age, and through most of the fashions of the age.
He has held, at one time or another, most of the opinions of the age.
Above all, he has not only thought for himself, but done it
with peculiar pomp and pride; he would consider himself the freest
of all freethinkers.  Let us take him as a type and a test of what has
really happened to Huxley's analysis of the gold and the dross.
Huxley quoted as the indestructible ideal the noble passage in Micah,
beginning "He hath shewed thee, O man, that which is good";
and asked scornfully whether anybody was ever likely to suggest
that justice was worthless or that mercy was unlovable,
and whether anything would diminish the distance between ourselves
and the ideals that we reverence.  And yet already, perhaps,
Mr. George Moore was anticipating Nietzsche, sailing near,
as he said, "the sunken rocks about the cave of Zarathustra."
He said, if I remember right, that Cromwell should be admired
for his injustice.  He implied that Christ should be condemned,
not because he destroyed the swine, but because he delivered the sick.
In short he found justice quite worthless and mercy quite unlovable;
and as for humility and the distance between himself and his ideals,
he seemed rather to suggest (at this time at least) that his somewhat
varying ideals were only interesting because they had belonged
to himself.  Some of this, it is true, was only in the _Confessions
of a Young Man_; but it is the whole point here that they were then
the confessions of a young man, and that Huxley's in comparison
were the confessions of an old man.  The trend of the new time,
in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merely
the Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology,
not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christian
ethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secure
as the stars.

But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed,
it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked.  The next phase
of Mr. George Moore himself, whom I have taken as a type of the time,
was the serious and sympathetic consideration of Irish mysticism,
as embodied in Mr. W. B. Yeats.  I have myself heard Mr. Yeats,
about that time, tell a story, to illustrate how concrete and even
comic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knew
a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten.
Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this
glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort.
Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen under
the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates,
who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they
went in a wild dance down to the village pond.  Would Mr. Moore
have thought that story any more incredible than the other?
Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that a
modern mystic may lawfully believe?  Would he have risen to his feet
and told Mr. Yeats that all was over between them?  Not a bit of it.
He would at least have listened with a serious, nay, a solemn face.
He would think it a grim little grotesque of rustic diablerie,
a quaint tale of goblins, neither less nor more improbable
than hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there is
really a good deal of evidence.  He would be ready to entertain
the idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament.
As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followed
after the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind.
And they have been directed not by imaginative artists
like Mr. Yeats or even Mr. Moore, but by solid scientific
students like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legs
of a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table.
But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am only
trying to describe the atmosphere.  Whatever has happened in more
recent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened.
There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where there
has not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return of
the mysticism without the Christianity.  Mysticism itself has returned,
with all its moons and twilights, its talismans and spells.
Mysticism itself has returned, and brought with it seven devils
worse than itself.

But the scientific coincidence is even more strict and close.
It affects not only the general question of miracles,
but the particular question of possession.  This is the very
last element in the Christian story that would ever have been
selected by the enlightened Christian apologist.  Gladstone would
defend it, but he would not go out of his way to dwell on it.
It is an excellent working model of what I mean by finding
an unexpected support, and finding it in an unexpected quarter.
It is not theological but psychological study that has brought us
back into this dark underworld of the soul, where even identity
seems to dissolve or divide, and men are not even themselves.
I do not say that psychologists admit the discovery of demoniacs;
and if they did they would doubtless call them something else,
such as demono-maniacs. But they admit things which seem almost
as near to a new supernaturalism, and things quite as incredible
to the old rationalism.  Dual personality is not so very far
from diabolic possession.  And if the dogma of subconsciousness
allows of agnosticism, the agnosticism cuts both ways.
A man cannot say there is a part of him of which he is quite unconscious,
and only conscious that it is not in contact with the unknown.
He cannot say there is a sealed chamber or cellar under his house,
of which he knows nothing whatever; but that he is quite certain that it
cannot have an underground passage leading anywhere else in the world.
He cannot say he knows nothing whatever about its size or shape
or appearance, except that it certainly does not contain a relic
of the finger-joint of St. Catherine of Alexandria, or that it
certainly is not haunted by the ghost of King Herod Agrippa.
If there is any sort of legend or tradition or plausible probability
which says that it is, he cannot call a thing impossible where he is
not only ignorant but even unconscious.  It comes back therefore
to the same reality, that the old compact cosmos depended on a
compact consciousness.  If we are dealing with unknown quantities,
we cannot deny their connection with other unknown quantities.
If I have a self of which I can say nothing, how can I even say
that it is my own self?  How can I even say that I always had it,
or that it did not come from somewhere else?  It is clear that we
are in very deep waters, whether or no we have rushed down a steep
place to fall into them.

It will be noted that what we really lack here is not
the supernatural but only the healthy supernatural.
It is not the miracle, but only the miracle of healing.
I warmly sympathise with those who think most of this rather morbid,
and nearer the diabolic than the divine, but to call a thing
diabolic is hardly an argument against the existence of diabolism.
It is still more clearly the case when we go outside the sphere
of science into its penumbra in literature and conversation.
There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may
truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power
to cast them out.  It combines the occult with the obscene;
the sensuality of materialism with the insanity of spiritualism.
In the story of Gadara we have left out nothing except the Redeemer,
we have kept the devils and the swine.

In other words, we have not found St. George; but we have found
the Dragon.  We have found in the desert, as I have said,
the bones of the monster we did not believe in, more plainly than
the footprints of the hero we did.  We have found them not because we
expected to find them, for our progressive minds look to the promise
of something much brighter and even better; not because we wanted
to find them, for our modern mood, as well as our human nature,
is entirely in favour of more amiable and reassuring things;
not because we thought it even possible to find them, for we really
thought it impossible so far as we ever thought of it at all.
We have found them because they are _there_; and we are bound
to come on them even by falling over them.  It is Huxley's
method that has upset Huxley's conclusion.  As I have said,
that conclusion itself is completely reversed.  What he thought
indisputable is disputed; and what he thought impossible is possible.
Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals,
Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology.
But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the style
of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according
to the advice of Huxley.  We in the West have "followed our reason
as far as it would go," and our reason has led us to things that
nearly all the rationalists would have thought wildly irrational.
Science was supposed to bully us into being rationalists;
but it is now supposed to be bullying us into being irrationalists.
The science of Einstein might rather be called following our
unreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crack
under the conception that space is curved, or that parallel
straight lines always meet.  And the science of Freud would make it
essentially impossible to say how far our reason or unreason does go,
or where it stops.  For if a man is ignorant of his other self,
how can he possibly know that the other self is ignorant?
He can no longer say with pride that at least he knows that
he knows nothing.  That is exactly what he does not know.
The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below may
contain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts.
He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himself
an agnostic about whether he is an agnostic.

That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reached
even in the scientific regions of the West.  I only describe
the tangle; I do not delight in it.  Like most people with a taste
for Catholic tradition, I am too much of a rationalist for that;
for Catholics are almost the only people now defending reason.
But I am not talking of the true relations of reason and mystery,
but of the historical fact that mystery has invaded the peculiar
realms of reason; especially the European realms of the motor
and the telephone.  When we have a man like Mr. William Archer,
lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and saying
it is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature,
those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished record
of that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy.
I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuff
as dreams are made of; and if he is becoming a mystic in his old age
(I use the phrase in a mystical and merely relative sense)
we may take it that the occult oriental flood is rising fast,
and reaching places that are not only high but dry.
But the change is much more apparent to a man who has chanced
to stray into those orient hills where those occult streams
have always risen, and especially in this land that lies
between Asia, where the occult is almost the obvious, and Europe,
where it is always returning with a fresher and younger vigour.
The truth becomes strangely luminous in this wilderness between
two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bones
of the Dragon.

As I went down that sloping wall or shoulder of the world
from the Holy City on the mountain to the buried Cities of
the Plain, I seemed to see more and more clearly all this Western
evolution of Eastern mystery, and how on this one high place,
as on a pivot, the whole purpose of mankind had swerved.
I took up again the train of thought which I had trailed through
the desert, as described in the last chapter, about the gods of Asia
and of the ancient dispensation, and I found it led me along
these hills to a sort of vista or vision of the new dispensation
and of Christendom.  Considered objectively, and from the outside,
the story is something such as has already been loosely outlined;
the emergence in this immemorial and mysterious land of what
was undoubtedly, when thus considered, one tribe among many
tribes worshipping one god among many gods, but it is quite
as much an evident external fact that the god has become God.
Still stated objectively, the story is that the tribe having this
religion produced a new prophet, claiming to be more than a prophet.
The old religion killed the new prophet; but the new prophet killed
the old religion.  He died to destroy it, and it died in destroying him.
Now it may be reaffirmed equally realistically that there was nothing
normal about the case or its consequences.  The things that took part
in that tragedy have never been the same since, and have never been
like anything else in the world.  The Church is not like other religions;
its very crimes were unique.  The Jews are not like other races;
they remain as unique to everybody else as they are to themselves.
The Roman Empire did not pass like other empires; it did not perish
like Babylon and Assyria.  It went through a most extraordinary
remorse amounting to madness and resuscitation into sanity,
which is equally strange in history whether it seems as ghastly
as a galvanised corpse or as glorious as a god risen from the dead.
The very land and city are not like other lands and cities.
The concentration and conflict in Jerusalem to-day, whether we
regard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews
or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect
of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment
in the history of the city.  They equally proclaim the paradox
of its insignificance and its importance.

But above all the prophet was not and is not like other prophets;
and the proof of it is to be found not primarily among
those who believe in him, but among those who do not.
He is not dead, even where he is denied.  What is the use of a modern
man saying that Christ is only a thing like Atys or Mithras,
when the next moment he is reproaching Christianity for not
following Christ?  He does not suddenly lose his temper and talk
about our most unmithraic conduct, as he does (very justly as a rule)
about our most unchristian conduct.  We do not find a group of ardent
young agnostics, in the middle of a great war, tried as traitors
for their extravagant interpretation of remarks attributed to Atys.
It is improbable that Tolstoy wrote a book to prove that all modern
ills could be cured by literal obedience to all the orders of Adonis.
We do not find wild Bolshevists calling themselves Mithraic Socialists
as many of them call themselves Christian Socialists.  Leaving orthodoxy
and even sanity entirely on one side, the very heresies and insanities
of our time prove that after nearly two thousand years the issue
is still living and the name is quite literally one to conjure with.
Let the critics try to conjure with any of the other names.
In the real centres of modern inquiry and mental activity,
they will not move even a mystic with the name of Mithras
as they will move a materialist with the name of Jesus.
There are men who deny God and accept Christ.

But this lingering yet living power in the legend, even for
those to whom it is little more than a legend, has another
relevancy to the particular point here.  Jesus of Nazareth,
merely humanly considered, has thus become a hero of humanitarianism.
Even the eighteenth-century deists in denying his divinity generally
took pains to exalt his humanity.  Of the nineteenth-century
revolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exalted
him as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman.
That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preaching
a decisively superior and ever strange morality, not only
in advance of his age but practically in advance of our age.
They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialism
or Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see rather
as something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limit
of universal love.  I am not discussing here whether they are
right or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figure
a type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness.
Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterances
that do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching.
Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intensely
poetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them has
a joy in life and living things like that of Shelley or Whitman,
combined with a return to simplicity beyond that of Tolstoy or Thoreau.
Indeed I rather wonder that those, whose merely historic or humanistic
view of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity,
have not made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structure
of such passages.  Certainly there are few finer examples of the swift
architecture of style than that single fragment about the flowers;
the almost idle opening of a chance reference to a wild flower,
the sudden unfolding of the small purple blossom into pavilions
and palaces and the great name of the national history; and then with
a turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grass
that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven.  Then follows,
as so often in the Gospels, the "how much more" which is like a
celestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic.  Indeed this
_a fortiori_, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I may
remark incidentally) a thing very much needed in modern discussion.
Many minds apparently cannot stretch to three dimensions,
or to thinking that a cube can go beyond a surface as a surface
goes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitely
above all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen.
But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of this
many-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy with
the modern mood.  Judged even by our modern tests of emancipated
art or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood all
that is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life.
I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say this
pantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels.
For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merely
as a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of natural
things, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of his
testimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things.
Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and read
it steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and you
will certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man.
It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet;
that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons.
He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty of
the flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle.
And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that there
is at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers,
an unfathomable evil.

In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhaps
the mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we know
about ethics and economics, knew a little more than we are
beginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena.
I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant
article in the _Hibbert Journal_, in which Christ's admission
of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity.
The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory
through all the changing years, ran thus:  "If he was God,
he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession."
It did not seem to strike the _Hibbert_ critic that this line
of criticism raises the question, not of whether Christ is God,
but of whether the critic in the _Hibbert Journal_ is God.
About that mystery as about the other I am for the moment agnostic;
but I should have thought that the meditations of Omniscience
on the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic,
to be a little difficult to discover.  Of Christ in the Gospels
and in modern life I will merely for the moment say this; that if
he was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knew
the next discovery in science, as well as the last, not to mention
(what is more common in rationalistic culture) the last but three.
And what will be the next discovery in psychological science nobody
can imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and their
name is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now.  But at any rate
the days are over of Omniscience like that of the _Hibbert_ critic,
who knows exactly what he would know if he were God Almighty.
What is pain?  What is evil?  What did they mean by devils?
What do we mean by madness?  The rising generation, when asked
by a venerable Victorian critic and catechist, "What does God know?"
will hardly think it unreasonably flippant to answer, "God knows."

There was something already suggested about the steep scenery
through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense
of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep
division of the cliffs and crags.  They were all the more
profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as
subconscious as the subconsciousness about which I was reflecting.
I had fallen again into the old habit of forgetting where I was going,
and seeing things with one eye off, in a blind abstraction.
I awoke from a sort of trance of absentmindedness in a landscape
that might well awaken anybody.  It might awaken a man sleeping;
but he would think he was still in a nightmare.  It might wake
the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell.
Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had
about it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created.
There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies which
contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary
condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene;
but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about
the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape.
But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by God
or at least by the gods, something with an aim in its anarchy.
It was very different in the final stage of the descent, where my mind
woke up from its meditations.  One can only say that the whole landscape
was like a leper.  It was of a wasting white and silver and grey,
with mere dots of decadent vegetation like the green spots of a plague.
In shape it not only rose into horns and crests like waves
or clouds, but I believe it actually alters like waves or clouds,
visibly but with a loathsome slowness.  The swamp is alive.
And I found again a certain advantage in forgetfulness;
for I saw all this incredible country before I even remembered
its name, or the ancient tradition about its nature.
Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemed
to fall away into a universal blank under the staring sun,
as I came, in the great spaces of the circle of a lifeless sea,
into the silence of Sodom and Gomorrah.

For these are the foundations of a fallen world, and a sea
below the seas on which men sail.  Seas move like clouds and
fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land.
And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty
perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death
of abominable things.  I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride;
such things are hideous not because they are distant but because
they are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine,
were buried things as bad as any buried under that bitter sea,
and if He did not come to do battle with them, even in the darkness
of the brain of man, I know not why He came.  Certainly it
was not only to talk about flowers or to talk about Socialism.
The more truly we can see life as a fairy-tale, the more clearly the tale
resolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland.
I will not enter on the theology behind the symbol; but I
am sure it was of this that all the symbols were symbolic.
I remember distinguished men among the liberal theologians,
who found it more difficult to believe in one devil than in many.
They admitted in the New Testament an attestation to evil spirits,
but not to a general enemy of mankind.  As some are said
to want the drama of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark,
they would have the drama of Hell without the Prince of Darkness.
I say nothing of these things, save that the language of the
Gospel seems to me to go much more singly to a single issue.
The voice that is heard there has such authority as speaks to an army;
and the highest note of it is victory rather than peace.
When the apostles were first sent forth with their faces to the four
corners of the earth, and turned again to acclaim their master,
he did not say in that hour of triumph, "All are aspects of one
harmonious whole" or "The universe evolves through progress
to perfection" or "All things find their end in Nirvana"
or "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea."  He looked up and said,
"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."

Then I looked up and saw in the long jagged lines of road and rock
and cleft something of the swiftness of such a thunderbolt.
What I saw seemed not so much a scene as an act; as when
abruptly Michael barred the passage of the Lord of Pride.
Below me all the empire of evil was splashed and scattered
upon the plain, like a wine-cup shattered into a star.
Sodom lay like Satan, flat upon the floor of the world.  And far away
and aloft, faint with height and distance, small but still visible,
stood up the spire of the Ascension like the sword of the Archangel,
lifted in salute after a stroke.



CHAPTER X

THE ENDLESS EMPIRE

One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in finding
that popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say.
We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we have
seen the fact.  We make a picture of the things we do not know
out of the things we know; and suppose the traveller's tale
to mean no more abroad than it would at home.  If a man acquainted
only with English churches is told about certain French churches
that they are much frequented, he makes an English picture.
He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their best
clothes going all together at eleven o'clock, and all coming back
together to lunch.  He does not picture the peculiar impression
he would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out of
the church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if it
were a sort of sacred inn.  Or suppose a man knowing only English
beer-shops hears for the first time of a German beer-garden,
he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place.
He does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the top
of his beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture,
beer will go on flowing into it as from a natural fountain;
the drinking of beer being regarded as the normal state of man,
and the cessation of it a decisive and even dramatic departure.
I do not give this example in contempt; heaven forbid.
I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of Prussianised Germany
that I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those more
generous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germany
once more a part of Christendom.  I merely give it as an instance
of the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-going
or beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and something
much more special, than we should infer from our own land.
Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted cities
or temples in the Near East:  "The Bedouins camp in the ruins."
When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted town
or temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsies
near some place like Stonehenge.  They would make their own rude shelter
near the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire;
and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there without
making much difference.  The thing I saw more than once in Egypt
and Palestine was much more curious.  It was as if the gipsies set
to work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence.
It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circle
of stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as to
turn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion.
In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sense
much more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stops
short of the true creative independence of going off and building
a house of their own.  That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runs
through all his history.  Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque
of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion.
It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments,
it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions
or even shams.

I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls
of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making
an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour.
He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does
he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and
he has only done the ramshackle part.  You can say that he is nobly
superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition,
or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody
else's house and half in his own.  The real quality is probably too
subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there
is in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common sense;
which might even be called a short-sighted common sense.
But however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arab
conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency.
That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they
have succeeded and failed.  In that sense they are constructive
and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that
sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical;
in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent.  The curtains they
would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours.
The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious
courage and enthusiasm.  The prayers they recited in Stonehenge
might be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a great
improvement on its older associations of human sacrifice.  All this
is true of Islam and the idolatries and negations are often replaced.
But they would not have built Stonehenge; they would scarcely,
so to speak, have troubled to lift a stone of Stonehenge.
They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisbury
or Glastonbury or Lincoln.

That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it,
after its ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in a
subtle manner superficial.  When a man first sees the Eastern deserts,
he sees this influence as I first described it, very present
and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent.  But I fancy that to me
and to others it is partly striking only because it is strange.
Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is at
first like entering a new world.  But, in my own case at any rate,
as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I saw
more of the established seats of history, the cities and the framework
of the different states, I became conscious of something else.
It was something underneath, undestroyed and even in a sense unaltered.
It was something neither Moslem nor modern; not merely oriental and yet
very different from the new occidental nations from which I came.
For a long time I could not put a name to this historical atmosphere.
Then one day, standing in one of the Greek churches, one of those houses
of gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me.
It was the Empire.  And certainly not the raid of Asiatic bandits
we call the Turkish Empire.  The thing which had caught my eye
in that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eagle
in such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a cross.
Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might well
suggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of an
Established Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ.
But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire;
it would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle.
The double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Rome
and of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other to
the east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset.
Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as late
as Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austria
as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire.  And what I
felt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was something
older not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself.
I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies over
Palestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom such
as are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China.
I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid and
handsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets.
They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mighty
routine of some far-off official system.  In so far as the eagle was
an emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant imperial wars,
it was of wars that we in the West have hardly heard of;
it was the emblem of official ovations.

When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan With
the captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van.


That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light mastery
of the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion,
when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the walls
of stone.  This also was far too great a thing for facile praise
or blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified,
the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations.
It was an endless end of the world; for ever repeating its rich finality.
And I myself was still walking in that long evening of the earth;
and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium.

But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was not
always at its evening.  Byzantium was not always Byzantine.
Nor was the seat of that power always in the city of Constantine,
which was primarily a mere outpost of the city of Caesar.
We must remember Rome as well as Byzantium; as indeed
nobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome.
The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolved
round that original idea which may be called the Mediterranean;
and the fact that it became two empires, but remained one civilisation,
just as it has become two churches, but remained one religion.

In this little world there is a story attached to every word;
and never more than when it is the wrong word.  For instance,
we may say that in certain cases the word Roman actually means Greek.
The Greek Patriarch is sometimes called the Roman Patriarch;
while the real Roman Patriarch, who actually comes from Rome, is only
called the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium.
The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundred
very vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmen
by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merely
decadent and the notion that the Middle Ages were merely dark.
As a fact, even the Dark Ages were not merely dark.
And even the Byzantine Empire was not merely Byzantine.
It seems a little unfair that we should take the very title
of decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet
more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city.
I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word
as "Constantinopolitan." But it would surely be a better word for
stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish.  But for the Moslems
and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was
that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome.
Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city,
and though and priest or soldier who came out of it might be
speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman.  Its critics in
these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation.
But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation.
Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops
degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a
sounder historical instinct, "The monks of the imperial race."
The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial
city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim
to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor.
That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this
distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see
of Rome sometimes bear the strange name of "The Romans."

Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other.
We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture;
not half so much.  The people who say that parliaments or pictures
or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic
race from the north can be disposed of by the simple question:
why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?
Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the neighbourhood
of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace
of Homer?  Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion
is no longer largely shared.  Anyhow it seems strange that the roads
of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons;
and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came
from Germany.  If I looked about in these parts for a local emblem
like that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion.
The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art both
hagiological and heraldic.  Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which I
shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he lived
with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicate
humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters.
That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should
appear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems
are in theory forbidden so to carve images of living things.
Some say the Persian Moslems are less particular; but whatever
the explanation, two lions of highly heraldic appearance are carved
over that Saracen gate which Christians call the gate of St. Stephen;
and the best judges seem to agree that, like so much of the Saracenic
shell of Zion, they were partly at least copied from the shields
and crests of the Crusaders.

And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well be
the text for a whole book on the subject.  For if they indicate,
however indirectly, the presence of the Latins of the twelfth century,
they also indicate the earlier sources from which the Latin life had
itself been drawn.  The two lions are pacing, passant as the heralds
would say, in two opposite directions almost as if prowling to and fro.
And this also might well be symbolic as well as heraldic.
For if the Crusaders brought the lion southward in spite of
the conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was only because
the Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the cold
seas and the savage forests.  The image of the lion came from north
to south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago come
from south to north.  The Christian had a symbolic lion he had
never seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw.
For we could deduce from the case of this single creature
the fact that all our civilisation came from the Mediterranean,
and the folly of pretending that it came from the North Sea.
Those two heraldic shapes over the gate may be borrowed from the Norman
or Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England.  They may
have been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin King
of England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion.
They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boast
or jest of our own comic papers when they talk about the British Lion.
But why are there lions, though of French or feudal origin,
on the flag of England?  There might as well be camels or crocodiles,
for all the apparent connection with England or with France.
Why was an English king described as having the heart of a lion, any more
than of a tiger?  Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the world
with the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if they
warned it against stimulating the rage of the British rhinoceros.
Why did not the French and English princes find in the wild boars,
that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their heraldry?
If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of Scandinavian
piracy, why did they not display three wolves on their shields?
Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull,
or the English bull-dog?

The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very name
of John Bull is foreign.  The surname comes through France from Rome;
and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine.  If there
had really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation,
we should expect the surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we should
expect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and not
the prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or the
mystic who mused with his burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos.
If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately
because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the
tapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture,
like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean.
And if this is true of our use of the word "bull," it is obviously
even truer of our use of the word "lion." The later emblem is enough
to show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean,
but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean.
In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea;
the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle of
the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands
that mattered most to civilisation.  One of these, and the one
that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.

In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard
the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers
in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he.
His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in
knowing where he was and why he was there.  It arose from the fact
that in his time there remained a sort of memory of the Roman Empire,
which some would have re-established as a Holy Roman Empire.
Christendom was still almost one commonwealth; and it seemed to Richard
quite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be called
England to the opposite edge of it that happened to be called Palestine.
We may think him right or wrong in the particular quarrel,
we may think him innocent or unscrupulous in his incidental methods;
but there is next to no doubt whatever that he did regard
himself not merely as conquering but as re-conquering a realm.
He was not like a man attacking total strangers on a hitherto
undiscovered island.  He was not opening up a new country,
or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast none
of those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the more
enlightened pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguish
republics for the sake of a gold-mine or an oil-field. Some day,
if our modern educational system is further expanded and enforced,
the whole of the past of Palestine may be entirely forgotten;
and a traveller in happier days may have all the fresher sentiments
of one stepping on a new and nameless soil.  Disregarding any dim
and lingering legends among the natives, he may then have the honour
of calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking on
a new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville.
But King Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the full
freshness of this sort of adventure.  He was not riding into Asia thus
romantically and at random; indeed he was not riding into Asia at all.
He was riding into Europa Irredenta.

But that is to anticipate what happened later and must be
considered later.  I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a pagan
and political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning of
the Crusade on the merely pagan and political side.  In one sentence,
it meant that Rome had to recover what Byzantium could not keep.
But something further had happened as affecting Rome than anything
that could be understood by a man standing as I have imagined
myself standing, in the official area of Byzantium.  When I have
said that the Byzantian civilisation seemed still to be reigning,
I meant a curious impression that, in these Eastern provinces,
though the Empire had been more defeated it has been less disturbed.
There is a greater clarity in that ancient air; and fewer clouds of real
revolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun.
This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreign
religion has successfully fought and ruled.  But indeed the enigma
is also the explanation.  In the East the continuity of culture
has only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done.
In the West it has been interrupted by positive things that
Christendom itself has done.  In the West the past of Christendom
has its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the East
it is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with round
Byzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars.  That, I incline
to fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the west
of Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void.
It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absence
of the experiments of parliament and popular representation,
the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality.
In the East the civilisation lived on, or if you will, lingered on;
in the West it died and was reborn.  But for a long time, it should
be remembered, it must have seemed to the East merely that it died.
The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of barbaric war,
while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous in the sun.
The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was stiffening
and growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may not
have revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle.
It was something else that was destined to reveal it.
The Crusades meant many things; but in this matter they meant one thing,
which was like a word carried to them on the great west wind.
And the word was like that in an old Irish song:  "The west is awake."
They heard in the distance the cries of unknown crowds and felt
the earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them came
the trampling of horses and the noise of harness and of horns of war;
new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men full of hope
crying out in the old Roman tongue "Id Deus vult," Rome was risen
from the dead.

Almost any traveller could select out of the countless things
that he has looked at the few things that he has seen.
I mean the things that come to him with a curious clearness;
so that he actually sees them to be what he knows them to be.
I might almost say that he can believe in them although he has seen them.
There can be no rule about this realisation; it seems to come in
the most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speak
for himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others.
In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity at
Bethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet driving
me beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description.
The church is entered through a door so small that it it might fairly
be called a hole, in which many have seen, and I think truly,
a symbol of some idea of humility.  It is also said that the wall
was pierced in this way to prevent the appearance of a camel
during divine service, but even that explanation would only repeat
the same suggestion through the parable of the needle's eye.
Personally I should guess that, in so far as the purpose was practical,
it was meant to keep out much more dangerous animals than camels,
as, for instance, Turks.  For the whole church has clearly been
turned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickened
in some or all of its thousand years of religious war.  In the blank
spaces above the little doorway hung in old times that strange
mosaic of the Magi which once saved the holy place from destruction,
in the strange interlude between the decline of Rome and the rise
of Mahomet.  For when the Persians who had destroyed Jerusalem rode
out in triumph to the village of Bethlehem, they looked up and saw
above the door a picture in coloured stone, a picture of themselves.
They were following a strange star and worshipping an unknown child.
For a Christian artist, following some ancient Eastern tradition
containing an eternal truth, had drawn the three wise men with
the long robes and high head-dresses of Persia.  The worshippers
of the sun had come westward for the worship of the star.
But whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it is
now or coloured with the gold and purple images of the Persians,
the inside of the church would always be by comparison abruptly dark.
As familiarity turns the darkness to twilight, and the twilight
to a grey daylight, the first impression is that of two rows
of towering pillars.  They are of a dark red stone having much
of the appearance of a dark red marble; and they are crowned
with the acanthus in the manner of the Corinthian school.
They were carved and set up at the command of Constantine;
and beyond them, at the other end of the church beside the attar,
is the dark stairway that descends under the canopies of rock
to the stable where Christ was born.

Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it
were crushing, were these red columns of Constantine.
In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that want
saying and cannot be said.  Never have I felt so vividly the great
fact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a huge
bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men
who made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world.
To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it was
possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him.
All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know
the life that was in them.  We know that here and there was a temple
to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know
what he really felt about Venus or Vesta?  Was a Vestal Virgin
like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different?
Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous
about Venus, like a Christian?  If the spirit was different from ours
we cannot hope to understand it, and if the spirit was like ours,
the spirit was expressed in images that no longer express it.
But it is here that he and I meet; and salute the same images
in the end.

In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of
sympathy with strange things that went through me in that
twilight of the tall pillars, like giants robed in purple,
standing still and looking down into that dark hole in the ground.
Here halted that imperial civilisation, when it had marched in triumph
through the whole world; here in the evening of its days it came
trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings.
For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one
that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave.
And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down
into that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars
in his own sky were dead.  They were deities no longer but only
a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius.
The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die
for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable
immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were
chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead.
There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood,
though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and
seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients.  Only above the black
hole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark;
and it had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do.
It had disappeared.

There are some who resent the presence of such purple beside
the plain stable of the Nativity.  But it seems strange that they
always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red
plush of a parvenu; a mere insensibility to a mere incongruity.
For in fact the insensibility is in the critics and not the artists.
It is an insensibility not to an accidental incongruity but to an
artistic contrast.  Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat
tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who
make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail
to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale,
even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors
and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of
the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting
on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger,
it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been
conscious of the contrast themselves.  I confess this is an insensibility,
not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I
find very fatiguing.  I do not mind a man not believing a story,
but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression)
by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point of
the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie.
And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy
inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design.
He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar
maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really _a
mariage de convenance_; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but
not without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience,"
any more than _hors d'oeuvre_ is the French for "out of work";
but may be more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match."
But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maid
conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have
thought the story worth telling if it had been.  It is like saying
that Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of Alexander,
must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek architecture;
or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly inconsistent
with court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable cookery book.
I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a lie;
but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might even
say the joke of it.  I do not object to his rejecting the story
as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see
the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle
or spire of that sublime tower.

This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of many
sacred things as it does that of the shrine of Bethlehem.
It is applied to the divine reality of Bethlehem itself,
as when sceptics still sneer at the littleness, the localism,
the provincial particularity and obscurity of that divine origin;
as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a contrast
which Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons have
incessantly shouted and proclaimed.  In this capital case, of course,
the same principle holds.  A man may think the tale is incredible;
but it would never have been told at all if it had not been incongruous.
But this particular case of the lesser contrast, that between the imperial
pomp and the rustic poverty of the carpenter and the shepherds,
is alone enough to illustrate the strange artistic fallacy involved.
If it be the point that an emperor came to worship a carpenter,
it is as artistically necessary to make the emperor imperial
as to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plain
people that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds,
it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as that
the shepherds should have crooks.  And if modern intellectuals
do not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enough
even to try to make modern intellectualism popular.  Now this
conception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concession
to common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerable
bearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasm
that spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire.
It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebuked
historic Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad.
They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire of
all nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds,
because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magic
as their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovable
as their native land.  In many other matters indeed, besides this
popular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice.
Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians against
the Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christians
the very human indulgences that they have praised in heathens.
The same arts and allegories, the same phraseologies and philosophies,
which appear first as proofs of heathen health turn up later
as proofs of Christian corruption.  It was noble of pagans to
be pagan, but it was unpardonable of Christians to be paganised.
They never tire of telling us of the glory that was Greece,
the grandeur that was Rome, but the Church was infamous because it
satisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the Roman power.

Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meet
the claims of philosophy I will not here dwell at length.
I will only remark in passing that it is an utter fallacy
to suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests in his fascinating
_Outline of History_, that the subtleties of theology were
a mere falling away from the simplicities of religion.
Religion may be better simple for those who find it simple;
but there are bound to be many who in any case find it subtle,
among those who think about it and especially those who doubt about it.
To take an example, there is no saying which the humanitarians
of a broad religion more commonly offer as a model of simplicity
than that most mystical affirmation "God is Love."  And there is
no theological quarrel of the Councils of the Church which they,
especially Mr. Wells, more commonly deride as bitter and barren than
that at the Council of Nicea about the Co-eternity of the Divine Son.
Yet the subtle statement is simply a metaphysical explanation
of the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even to
make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not love
when there was nothing to be loved.  Now the Church Councils
were originally very popular, not to say riotous assemblies.
So far from being undemocratic, they were rather too democratic;
the real case against them was that they passed by uproarious votes,
and not without violence, things that had ultimately to be considered
more calmly by experts.  But it may reasonably be suggested, I think,
that the concentration of the Greek intellect on these things did
gradually pass from a popular to a more professional or official thing;
and that the traces of it have finally tended to fade from the
official religion of the East.  It was far otherwise with the more
poetical and therefore more practical religion of the West.
It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affection
in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King.
In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered
its youth.  That is the meaning of the movement I have described
as the awakening of the West and the resurrection of Rome.
And the whole point of that movement, as I propose to suggest,
was that it was a popular movement.  It had returned with exactly
that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem.
Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into
that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed
to end in the entrails of the earth.  The men who followed him passed on,
as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark Ages;
but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that world
of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living.
They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men
have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds
of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will,
and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds.



CHAPTER XI

THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE

There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope
of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating
the truth about the different influences of the West on the East.
At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans
on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive
that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ.
Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition
is not so unreasonable as some may suppose.  But whether or not it
is historically right, it is not artistically wrong.  The instinct,
if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange
growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct.
One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is
its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch
of an olive is like striking rock.  With its stony surface,
stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more
like a grotto than a tree.  Hence it does not seem so unnatural
that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange
vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument.
Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living
olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it
had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine
vision of death.  A child from one of the villages said to me,
in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers.
I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement
of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew;
_credo quia impossibile_.

Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will
strike many good and thoughtful people as quite fantastically inadequate;
and which strikes me as fantastically but precisely right.
They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a way
that is completely natural because it is completely artificial.
They have made flower-beds in the shape of stars and moons,
and coloured them with flowers like those in the backyard of a cottage.
The combination of these bright patterns in the sunshine
with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruity
in the sense of a contrast.  But it is a poetical contrast,
like that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb.
The best way of suggesting what I for one feel about it would
be something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children,
such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put
permanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow; it is probable that,
if they could do anything with it, they would do something like this.
They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with red
daisies or yellow marigolds.  I really do not know that there
is anything better that grown up people could do, since anything
that the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small.
"Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy ray, dare to be reverent?"
The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent; they have only dared
to be cheerful.  It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination
to imagine Christ in that garden.  But there is not the smallest
difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something
to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.

Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost
overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes
and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation
with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over
the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks.
Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think
that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime.
But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly.
It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike;
but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight
of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky.
It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art
as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is
oriental literature.  Those wise missionaries in China who were not
afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen
might have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques.
And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child
and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere,
and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour.
It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it;
and those who do not like it can look at something else.  This sort
of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious.
What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill;
towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.

The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting.
The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace for the
German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower,
planned I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort,
and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernity
compared with the things around, with the quaint garden
of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians.
It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as
the more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman.
By calling it a handsome building I mean that from the top of its dizzy
tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line
or one tint of beauty.  This negative fact, however, would be nothing;
it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison;
but it is not.  It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it;
and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentious
in a good and innocent way.  What annoys me about it is that it
was not built by children, or even by savages, but by professors;
and the professors could profess the art and could not practise it.
The architects knew everything about a Romanesque building except
how to build it.  We feel that they accumulated on that spot
all the learning and organisation and information and wealth of
the world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong.
They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical
exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure,
profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectual
incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride.
I will mention only one matter out of a hundred.  All the columns
in the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place;
every one of them has a swelled head.  The column itself is slender
but the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air
of bulging _downwards_, as if pressing heavily on something too
slender to support it.  This is false, not to any of the particular
schools of architecture about which professors can read in libraries,
but to the inmost instinctive idea of architecture itself.
A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick,
and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose.
And a Gothic column can be slender, because its strength is energy;
and is expressed in its line, which shoots upwards like the life of
a tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket.
But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloated
thing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakes
that are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right.
And to all this is added the intolerable intuition; that the Russians
and the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance,
are at least looking up at the sky; and we know how the learned
Germans would look down upon them, from their monstrous tower
upon the hill.

And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements
in the modern Jerusalem.  To show that I am not unjustly partisan,
I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common
subject of complaint; the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling
of the chapel.  It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown
practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations.
The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked
the barbaric imperialism can be found in another figure of which,
curiously enough, considerably less notice seems to have been taken.
It is the more remarkable because it is but an artistic shadow of
the actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporary
masquerade in which the man walked about in broad daylight.
I mean the really astounding trick of dressing himself up as a Crusader.
That was, under the circumstances, far more ludicrous and lunatic
a proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherub
heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with one
ornamental pattern of his moustaches.

The German Emperor came to Jerusalem under the escort of the Turks,
as the ally of the Turks, and solely because of the victory
and supremacy of the Turks.  In other words, he came to
Jerusalem solely because the Crusaders had lost Jerusalem;
he came there solely because the Crusaders had been routed,
ruined, butchered before and after the disaster of Hattin:
because the Cross had gone down in blood before the Crescent,
under which alone he could ride in with safety.  Under those
circumstances to dress up as a Crusader, as if for a fancy dress ball,
was a mixture of madness and vulgarity which literally stops the breath.
There is no need whatever to blame him for being in alliance with
the Turks; hundreds of people have been in alliance with the Turks;
the English especially have been far too much in alliance with them.
But if any one wants to appreciate the true difference, distinct from all
the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans
(who were classed together by the same newspapers a little time
before the war) let him take this single incident as a test.
Lord Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks.
Imagine Lord Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shield
of a Red Cross Knight.

It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared
no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy
was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment;
and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century
as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions.  In this he would be
quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English
aristocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the English
aristocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simply
those of Voltaire.  And these things are something of an allegory.
For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by far
the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades.
If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were
simply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree
with Voltaire in calling it superstition or with Villehardouin in
calling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmen
would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts.
But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at once
patronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theory
that at once patronises and minimises the Crusades.  According to this
theory the essential truth about a Crusade was that it was not a Crusade.
It was something that the professors, in the old days before the war,
used to call a Teutonic Folk-Wandering. Godfrey and St. Louis
were not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth;
they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they
thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought,
and they were really thinking of something entirely different.
They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new
and unexpected nomadism.  They were not inspired either by faith
or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel.
This theory that the war of the two great religions could be
explained by "Wanderlust" was current about twenty years ago among
the historical professors of Germany, and with many of their other views,
was often accepted by the historical professors of England.
It was swallowed by an earthquake, along with other rubbish,
in the year 1914.

Since then, so far as I know, the only person who has been
patient enough to dig it up again is Mr. Ezra Pound.
He is well known as an American poet; and he is, I believe,
a man of great talent and information.  His attempt to recover
the old Teutonic theory of the Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermit
was expressed, however, in prose; in an article in the _New Age_.
I have no reason to doubt that he was to be counted among the most
loyal of our allies; but he is evidently one of those who,
quite without being Pro-German, still manage to be German.
The Teutonic theory was very Teutonic; like the German Hospice
on the hill it was put together with great care and knowledge
and it is rotten from top to bottom.  I do not understand,
for that matter, why that alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Pound
should not be treated in the same way as the other historical event;
or why the war should not be an example of the Wanderlust.
Surely the American Army in France must have drifted eastward merely
through the same vague nomadic need as the Christian Army in Palestine.
Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restless
gentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene.
The Americans said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting
for democracy; and the Crusaders said, and perhaps thought,
that they were fighting for Christianity.  But as we know what
the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot
quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience
about the Americans.  Indeed I do not see why we should not enjoy it
(for it would be very enjoyable) about any individual American.
Surely it was this vague vagabond spirit that moved Mr. Pound,
not only to come to England, but in a fashion to come to Fleet Street.
A dim tribal tendency, vast and invisible as the wind, carried him
and his article like an autumn leaf to alight on the _New Age_ doorstep.
Or a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational motive,
led him one day to put on his hat, and go out with his article
in an envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correct
by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herself
was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed.
And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace
the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruled
by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans
should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall
or the flowers return.

In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against
the intellectual dignity of man.  It is a blunder as well as
a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial
explanation when there is obviously a human explanation.
It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a
quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave
disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg.  Or it is as if I
were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early
forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore.
I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is because
the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory
to swim on the land.  In short this sort of vague evolutionary
theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation
of something that needs no explanation.  And the case is really quite
as simple with great political and religious movements by which man
has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect
in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change.
The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly
rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement.
I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for
a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps
generally is, quite horribly immoral.  But when he implies that it
is irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not.

It is not enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity,
which causes most of us to miss this fact.  But it certainly is the fact
that religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic war.
I for one have often defended and even encouraged patriotic war,
and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion.
But it cannot be denied that there is more of mere passion,
of mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere personal accident,
in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith.
The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modern
conscript or professional soldier.  He is more rational in
his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object
of conversion; where the modern militarist has an object much
more confused by momentary vanity and one-sided satisfaction.
The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town;
but the Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town.
He has only a healthy hatred of it as a Prussian town.
The Moslem wished to make the Christian a Moslem; but even
the Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian.
He only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian;
and not only were the means he adopted somewhat ill-considered for
this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational.
The object of all war is peace; but the object of religious
war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement.
In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national
war aims relatively at superiority.  Conversion is the one sort
of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.

In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer
at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place,
when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put
across a frontier.  It is absurd for us to despise those who shed
blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.
But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad,
is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only
in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act
of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference.
It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matter
and his religion does not matter.  It is to say he is affected
by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in.
It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking
under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking
under strange stars.  It is exactly as if we were to say that two people
ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town.
It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included
York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long
as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.

Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract
in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power
that was not Christian.  Nobody nowadays would think it odd
to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist
or Socialist or even Protectionist.  But it is far more natural
to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but
the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions,
but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment;
not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreigners
but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends.
These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views
of the ultimate nature of the universe.  For the things of our country
are often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near;
we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town;
but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases;
that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared
to christen as the love that makes the world go round.
For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only
wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller.
When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death
and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise
of another community founded on another conception as the rise
of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile.
Indeed, as I have pointed out touching certain political theories,
we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples.
We only deny the large and obvious examples.

Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not
been attacked.  But as a matter of history it had been attacked.
The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem
even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter
of history he was already an old enemy.  The critic of the Crusade
talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the
interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded.
They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed
of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.
They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine,
it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I
have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference;
it had already made a difference.  The difference stared them
in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary
and of Roman Spain.  In short it was something which must happen
in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation
suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so.
Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically,
they proceeded to deal with it equally practically.  The first division
involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last
developments followed out every principle of the science of war.
The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking
the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base.
And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act,
that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wandering
of an animal.  But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake
so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential
to consider.  To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly,
in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating
like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that
the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion
towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill's introduction
of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks.
Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their
own actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason,
and it is a perfectly reasonable reason?

I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history to
the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount
of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity
for the medieval simplicity.  But just as the German Hospice after
all stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building,
so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous,
which the German historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possibly
have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said.
There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade does
differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition
or the penny post.  I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities
as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through
the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience
of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police.
It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be
what these critics mean.  But the difference is not in the evolutionary,
but rather the revolutionary spirit.

The First Crusade was not a racial migration; it was something much
more intellectual and dignified; a riot.  In order to understand this
religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of history
as with the revolutions of history.  As I shall try to show briefly
on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar
evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution,
but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them.
The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that it
was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal.
In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like
democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling
the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than
a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats.  The new sociologists
call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it
the many-headed beast.  But both agree in implying that it is hardly
worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle.
In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively
mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects.
Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence
that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong.
It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their
ideas appeal to more and more of humanity.  Nor can we deduce that men
are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind.
In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd
of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob
can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings.
Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage
of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few
other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost
empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny.
And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order
to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished,
as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a
far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross.
In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat
is the only rationalist.  But it will seem more truly rational
to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such
instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas
as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.

What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite
a new and abnormal sense a popular movement.  I might almost say
it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world.
For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually
a thing which the populace led.  It was not only essentially
a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which
the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any
support from any of the classes.  When they had acted, the classes
came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural,
that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded.
But it was the uneducated who educated the educated.
The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain
ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached
by demagogues to the democracy.  This was to a great extent true
of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the
Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade
of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong.
In the First Crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong.
He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images or
private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic
poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons
of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy.
There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages;
but the typical leader of the Crusade was not Abelard or Aquinas
but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader,
but rather a popular flag.  And it was his army, or rather
his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die
for the deliverance of Jerusalem.

Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were only
nine knights.  To any one who knows even a little of medieval
war the fact seems astounding.  It is indeed a long exploded
fallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism.
There were countless democratic institutions, such as the guilds;
sometimes as many as twenty guilds in one small town.
But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ages
was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism
was the name of their military organisation.  That so vast a military
mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural
military leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative.
It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election,
in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper.

This mob marched against the military discipline of the Moslems
and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred.
Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks
did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity
of their motives.  The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible,
and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they
indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers;
a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging
on alarm.  A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many
slaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers;
but in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain.
The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all had
a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very
different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest
captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age.
For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured
gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant,
and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere
name of Christ.

It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history
rubs away the romance of history.  It is dear to the modern mind
because it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true.
Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic,
than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic.
It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modern
man vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights,
Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal baron.
The historical facts are all in favour of his having been much
more like a knight of the Round Table.  In fact he was a far
better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose
characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable,
was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice.  Truth is
not only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction.
For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic.
Curiously enough Godfrey seems to have been heroic even in those
admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded
as the trappings of fiction.  Thus he was of heroic stature,
a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring;
and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem,
like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story.  But he was also,
the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man,
and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimity
of knighthood.  Everything about him suggests it; from his first
conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his
great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; "I will
not wear a crown of gold where my Master wore a crown of thorns."
He was a just ruler, and the laws he made were full of the plainest
public spirit.  But even if we dismiss all that was written
of him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends
(which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious
unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain
sufficiently assoiled and crowned with the words of his enemies.
For a Saracen chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity,
that if all truth and honour had otherwise withered off the earth,
there would still remain enough of them so long as Duke Godfrey was alive.

Allied with Godfrey were Tancred the Italian, Raymond of Toulouse
with the southern French and Robert of Normandy, the adventurous
son of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English.
But it would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole
subsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible,
to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenly
and unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline.
Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army
was still very much of a mob.  It is probable _a priori_,
since the great popular movement was still profoundly popular.
It is supported by a thousand things in the story of the campaign;
the extraordinary emotionalism that made throngs of men weep and
wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit,
in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences between
the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file.
It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves
on the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountain
town which they had tramped for two thousand miles to see.
Tancred saw it first from the slope by the village of Bethlehem,
which had opened its gates willingly to his hundred Italian knights;
for Bethlehem then as now was an island of Christendom in the sea
of Islam.  Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa,
and crossing the mountain ridge, saw also with his living eyes
his vision of the world's desire.  But the poorest men about him
probably felt the same as he; all ranks knelt together in the dust,
and the whole story is one wave of numberless and nameless men.
It was a mob that had risen like a man for the faith.
It was a mob that had truly been tortured like a man for the faith.
It was already transfigured by pain as well as passion.
Those that know war in those deserts through the summer months,
even with modern supplies and appliances and modern maps and calculations,
know that it could only be described as a hell full of heroes.
What it must have been to those little local serfs and peasants from
the Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of such
landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such
a furnace and could neither guess the alleviations nor get them,
is beyond the imagination of man.  They arrived dying with thirst,
dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted
along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving
with fever and they did what they had come to do.

Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues
of a mob.  The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden
relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob.
It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have
been for the most part a French mob.  It was of the same order
as the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth
that the First Crusade was as revolutionary as the French Revolution.
It was of the same order as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
which was also a piece of purely popular fanaticism, directed
against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy.
It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were
opposed to it, and tried to stop it.  Tancred promised their lives
to the Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him.
Raymond of Toulouse himself saved those in the Tower of David,
and managed to send them safely with their property to Ascalon.
But revolution with all its evil as well as its good was loose
and raging in the streets of the Holy City.  And in nothing do we
see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight
of all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wild
moment in revolt, not only against the conquered lords of Islam,
but even against the conquering lords of Christendom.

The whole strain of the siege indeed had been one of high and even
horrible excitement.  Those who tell us to-day about the psychology
of the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeeded
are not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful balance which may
turn either way.  They entered the city at last in a mood in which they
might all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers.
A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recent
Palestinian campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardly
wondered at the story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort
of fury of disappointment; "We went through such a hell to get there,
and now it's spoilt for all of us."  Such is the heavy irony that
hangs over our human nature, making it enter the Holy City as if it
were the Heavenly City, and more than any earthly city can be.
But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the
First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable than
anything that can be conceived in modern war.  We can hardly wonder
that the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort
of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted
and accursed land.  For in one very real sense it really was so;
for all the elements and expedients were alike unknown qualities.
All their enemies' methods were secrets sprung upon them.
All their own methods were new things made out of nothing.
They wondered alike what would be done on the other side and what
could be done on their own side; every movement against them
was a stab out of the darkness and every movement they made
was a leap in the dark.  First, on the one side, we have Tancred
trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single
slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain.
Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange
and frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had caught fire.
It was afterwards known as the Greek Fire and was probably petroleum;
but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before it may well have
seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft.  Then Godfrey and the wiser
of the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found
they had next to no wood to build them.  There was scarcely anything
in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy
woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered
even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place.
And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature
of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees,
hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin.
It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern;
they tore down the beams from ruined houses; at last they got into touch
with some craftsmen from Genoa who went to work more successfully;
skinning the cattle, who had died in heaps, and covering the timbers.
They built three high towers on rollers, and men and beasts dragged
them heavily against the high towers of the city.  The catapults
of the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down;
the wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuck
motionless and useless.  And as the darkness fell a great flare
must have told them that the third and last was in flames.

All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster.
He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raised
it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is
now marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod's gate.
And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers sat
upon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoing
of the labour of man.  If the great knight had a touch of such
symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife
with the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded
the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter.
And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there
is something more than an accident in the allegory.  The transverse
position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical
that are analogous to moral truths and almost every structural
shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions
have a shadow of the Trinity.  Here is the true mystery of equality;
since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never
be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter.
Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and
supporting each other; the meeting-place of contraries which we,
by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the question.
Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circle
of Asia.  It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible
(for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey
thus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writer
of a real romance about him would be well within his rights in making
him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above
him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven
or showing its network of beams black against the daybreak;
scaling the skies and open to all the winds, a ladder and a labyrinth,
repeating till it was lost in the twilight the pattern of the sign
of the cross.

When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood
before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair.
Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers
looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells
paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort
of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure.
The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey
de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave
the order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on either
side of the postern gate.  So they crawled again across the fosse
full of the slain, dragging their huge house of timber behind them,
and all the blast and din of war broke again about their heads.
A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for a canopy,
stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies in
the mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents
of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell.
For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened
with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our
own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war;
a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven.
Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry may
have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light
as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields,
to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging
and such a hailstorm of death.  They may have heard through
all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries
of Moslem triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes,
and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them.
It was most likely that they laboured and strove in that lower darkness,
not knowing that high over their heads, and up above the cloud
of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched
and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive,
had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem.



CHAPTER XII

THE FALL OF CHIVALRY

On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and on
the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back
to the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps
to a sign-post. The common sense of that process is indeed most
mysteriously misunderstood.  Any suggestion that progress has at
any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument
that men idealise the past, and make a myth of the Age of Gold.
If my progressive guide has led me into a morass or a man-trap
by turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of to
the right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun,
my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talking
about the myth of an Age of Gold.  He says I am idealising
the right turning.  He says the blue palings are not so blue
as they are painted.  He says they are only blue with distance.
He assures me there are spots on the sun, even on the rising sun.
Sometimes he tells me I am wrong in my fixed conviction that the blue
was of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold.  In short he assures
me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every
possible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort.
I want to go back to that particular place, not because it was
all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy
can paint; but because it was a many thousand times better place
than the man-trap in which he and his like have landed me.
But above all I want to go back to it, not because I know it was
the right place but because I think it was the right turning.
And the right turning might possibly have led me to the right place;
whereas the progressive guide has quite certainly led me to
the wrong one.

Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony
to the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notion
of a Golden Age in the past.  But neither of those ideas, whether or
no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain
man in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to find
some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future.
What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapse
of the present.  Now that is the exact truth about the thing so often
rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things.
They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they know
they are in the wrong place.  To know that, it is necessary not to
idealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world.
It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above
the average as that they feel sure the modern world is below the average.
They do not start either with the idea that man is meant to live
in a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a man
was meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past;
but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was
not meant to live in a man-trap.

For there is and will be more and more a turn of total change
in all our talk and writing about history.  Everything in the past
was praised if it had led up to the present, and blamed if it
would have led up to anything else.  In short everybody has been
searching the past for the secret of our success.  Very soon
everybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure.
They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smash
or a bankruptcy; where was the blunder?  They may be writing such books
as generals write after a military defeat; whose was the fault?
The failure will be assumed even in being explained.

For industrialism is no longer a vulgar success.
On the contrary, it is now too tragic even to be vulgar.
Under the cloud of doom the modern city has taken on something
of the dignity of Babel or Babylon.  Whether we call it the nemesis
of Capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference;
the rich grumble as much as the poor; every one is discontented, and none
more than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent.
About that discord we are in perfect harmony; about that disease we
all think alike, whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure.
By whatever process in the past we might have come to the
right place, practical facts in the present and future will
prove more and more that we have come to the wrong place.
And for many a premonition will grow more and more of a probability;
that we may or may not await another century or another world
to see the New Jerusalem rebuilt and shining on our fields;
but in the flesh we shall see Babylon fall.

But there is another way in which that metaphor of the forked road
will make the position plain.  Medieval society was not the right place;
it was only the right turning.  It was only the right road;
or perhaps only the beginning of the right road.  The medieval age
was very far from being the age in which everything went right.
It would be nearer the truth I mean to call it the age in which
everything went wrong.  It was the moment when things might have
developed well, and did develop badly.  Or rather, to be yet
more exact, it was the moment when they were developing well,
and yet they were driven to develop badly.  This was the history
of all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem;
indeed there were signs of some serious idea of making it the model
medieval state.  Of this notion of Jerusalem as the New Jerusalem,
of the Utopian aspect of the adventure of the Latin Kingdom,
something may be said in a moment.  But meanwhile there was a more
important part played by Jerusalem, I think, in all that great
progress and reaction which has left us the problem of modern Europe.
And the suggestion of it is bound up with the former suggestion,
about the difference between the goal and the right road that
might have led to it.  It is bound up with that quality of the
civilisation in question, that it was potential rather than perfect;
and there is no need to idealise it in order to regret it.
This peculiar part played by Jerusalem I mention merely as a suggestion;
I might almost say a suspicion.  Anyhow, it is something of a guess;
but I for one have found it a guide.

Medievalism died, but it died young.  It was at once energetic
and incomplete when it died, or very shortly before it died.
This is not a matter of sympathy or antipathy, but of appreciation
of an interesting historic comparison with other historic cases.
When the Roman Empire finally failed we cannot of course say
that it had done all it was meant to do, for that is dogmatism.
We cannot even say it had done all that it might have done,
for that is guesswork.  But we can say that it had done
certain definite things and was conscious of having done them;
that it had long and even literally rested on its laurels.
But suppose that Rome had fallen when she had only half defeated Carthage,
or when she had only half conquered Gaul, or even when the city was
Christian but most of the provinces still heathen.  Then we should
have said, not merely that Rome had not done what she might have done,
but that she had not done what she was actually doing.  And that is
very much the truth in the matter of the medieval civilisation.
It was not merely that the medievals left undone what they might
have done, but they left undone what they were doing.  This potential
promise is proved not only in their successes but in their failures.
It is shown, for instance, in the very defects of their art.
All the crafts of which Gothic architecture formed the frame-work
were developed, not only less than they should have been,
but less than they would have been.  There is no sort of reason
why their sculpture should not have become as perfect as
their architecture; there is no sort of reason why their sense
of form should not have been as finished as their sense of colour.
A statue like the St. George of Donatello would have stood
more appropriately under a Gothic than under a Classic arch.
The niches were already made for the statues.  The same thing is true,
of course, not only about the state of the crafts but about the status
of the craftsman.  The best proof that the system of the guilds
had an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern men
are now going back five hundred years to get the good out of it.
The best proof that a rich house was brought to ruin is that our
very pioneers are now digging in the ruins to find the riches.
That the new guildsmen add a great deal that never belonged
to the old guildsmen is not only a truth, but is part of
the truth I maintain here.  The new guildsmen add what the old
guildsmen would have added if they had not died young.
When we renew a frustrated thing we do not renew the frustration.
But if there are some things in the new that were not in the old,
there were certainly some things in the old that are not yet
visible in the new; such as individual humour in the handiwork.
The point here, however, is not merely that the worker worked well
but that he was working better; not merely that his mind was free
but that it was growing freer.  All this popular power and humour was
increasing everywhere, when something touched it and it withered away.
The frost had struck it in the spring.

Some people complain that the working man of our own day does
not show an individual interest in his work.  But it will be well
to realise that they would be much more annoyed with him if he did.
The medieval workman took so individual an interest in his work
that he would call up devils entirely on his own account,
carving them in corners according to his own taste and fancy.
He would even reproduce the priests who were his patrons and make them
as ugly as devils; carving anti-clerical caricatures on the very seats
and stalls of the clerics.  If a modern householder, on entering his
own bathroom, found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the images
of two horned and grinning fiends, he would be faintly surprised.
If the householder, on returning at evening to his house,
found the door-knocker distorted into a repulsive likeness
of himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval.
It may be just as well that builders and bricklayers do not
gratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas.
But well or ill, it is certainly true that this feature of a
flexible popular fancy has never reappeared in any school of
architecture or any state of society since the medieval decline.
The great classical buildings of the Renascence were swept as bare
of it as any villa in Balham.  But those who best appreciate this
loss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best it
retained a touch of the barbaric as well as the popular.  While we can
admire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their work
was sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque.
Some of the carving did remain so rude that the angels were almost
as ugly as the devils.  But this is the very point upon which I
would here insist; the mystery of why men who were so obviously
only beginning should have so suddenly stopped.

Men with medieval sympathies are sometimes accused, absurdly enough,
of trying to prove that the medieval period was perfect.
In truth the whole case for it is that it was imperfect.
It was imperfect as an unripe fruit or a growing child is imperfect.
Indeed it was imperfect in that very particular fashion which most
modern thinkers generally praise, more than they ever praise maturity.
It was something now much more popular than an age of perfection;
it was an age of progress.  It was perhaps the one real age of progress
in all history.  Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such
unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of
the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments,
the cathedrals and the guilds.  Up to a certain point we may say
that everything, at whatever stage of improvement, was full
of the promise of improvement.  Then something began to go wrong,
almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great culture
is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done.
It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations, full of
the very fantasy of free will, in which the schoolmen tried to fancy
the fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple.
It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the great
might-have-beens of history.

I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say that
it suddenly grew old.  Like Godfrey and many of its great champions in
Jerusalem, it was overtaken in the prime of life by a mysterious malady.
The more a man reads of history the less easy he will find it to explain
that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within.
Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francis
from the world that burned Joan of Arc.  One would think there
might be no more than a date and a number between the white mystery
of Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh.
This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our study
of medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiar
creeping paralysis which affected things so virile and so full of hope.
There was a growth of moral morbidity as well as social inefficiency,
especially in the governing classes; for even to the end the guildsmen
and the peasants remained much more vigorous.  How it ended we all know;
personally I should say that they got the Reformation and deserved it.
But it matters nothing to the truth here whether the Reformation
was a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest.
It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligence
that evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evils
were produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day.
We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat
the Thirty Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War begat the
Seven Years' War, and the Seven Years' War begat the Great War,
which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes.
After the schism Prussia could relapse into heathenry and erect
an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom.
But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can
still be reasonably answered; something that went wrong with medievalism.
But what was it that went wrong?

When I looked for the last time on the towers of Zion I had a
fixed fancy that I knew what it was.  It is a thing that cannot
be proved or disproved; it must sound merely an ignorant guess.
But I believe myself that it died of disappointment.
I believe the whole medieval society failed, because the heart
went out of it with the loss of Jerusalem.  Let it be observed
that I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade.
For the war against Islam was not lost.  The Moslem was overthrown
in the real battle-field, which was Spain; he was menaced in Africa;
his imperial power was already stricken and beginning slowly to decline.
I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war.
I do not even mean the Papal conceptions about the Holy War.
I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City.
For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing was
a vision; something with which all stories stop, something where
the rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away.
In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not even
a castle in Spain.  It was a castle east of the sun and west
of the moon, and the fairy prince could find it no more.
Indeed that idle image out of the nursery books fits it very exactly.
For its mystery was and is in standing in the middle, or as they
said in the very centre of the earth.  It is east of the sun
of Europe, which fills the world with a daylight of sanity,
and ripens real and growing things.  It is west of the moon of Asia,
mysterious and archaic with its cold volcanoes, silver mirror
for poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics.

Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of
the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest,
for the reason I have myself suggested.  Because it had been a
popular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it had
been a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picture
in the imagination.  For poor men are almost always particularists;
and nobody has ever seen such a thing as a mob of pantheists.
I have seen in some of that lost literature of the old guilds,
which is now everywhere coming to light, a list of the stage
properties required for some village play, one of those popular
plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild
of the shipwrights would build Noah's Ark or the guild of the barbers
provide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles.
The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colour
of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade;
a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the walls
and towers of Jerusalem.  I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded
as a special feature, like the two tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummles.
But I can also imagine that towards the end of the Middle Ages,
the master of the revels might begin to look at those towers
of wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put them
away in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if it
is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding.
There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a
disposition to sulk about the Crusades.  But though the popular
feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its
degree occur in the political realm that was purely practical.
The Moslem had been checked, but he had not been checked enough.
The whole story of what was called the Eastern Question,
and three-quarters of the wars of the modern world, were due
to the fact that he was not checked enough.

The only thing to do with unconquerable things is to conquer them.
That alone will cure them of invincibility; or what is worse, their own
vision of invincibility.  That was the conviction of those of us who
would not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia.
That is why we would not listen either to the Tory Pro-Germanism
of Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist Pro-Germanism of Mr. Macdonald.
If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure be
cannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believe
in it more and more, until the actual instant when he is caught.
The longer the chase, the more certain he will be of escaping;
the more narrow the escapes, the more certain will be the escape.
And indeed if he does escape it will seem a miracle, and almost
a divine intervention, not only to the pursued but to the pursuers.
The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who try
to conquer it.  It will seem after all to have a secret of success;
and those who failed against it will hide in their hearts
a secret of failure.  It was that secret of failure, I fancy,
that slowly withered from within the high hopes of the Middle Ages.
Christianity and chivalry had measured their force against Mahound,
and Mahound had not fallen; the shadow of his horned helmet,
the crest of the Crescent, still lay across their sunnier lands;
the Horns of Hattin.  The streams of life that flowed to guilds
and schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friars
were strangely changed and chilled.  So, if the peace had left
Prussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberal
ideals of the Latins, and all the liberties of the English,
and the whole theory of a democratic experiment in America,
would have begun to die of a deep and even subconscious despair.
A vote, a jury, a newspaper, would not be as they are,
things of which it is hard to make the right use, or any use;
they would be things of which nobody would even try to make any use.
A vote would actually look like a vassal's cry of "haro,"
a jury would look like a joust; many would no more read headlines
than blazon heraldic coats.  For these medieval things look dead
and dusty because of a defeat, which was none the less a defeat
because it was more than half a victory.

A curious cloud of confusion rests on the details of that defeat.
The Christian captains who acted in it were certainly men on a different
moral level from the good Duke Godfrey; their characters were by
comparison mixed and even mysterious.  Perhaps the two determining
personalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skilful soldier whom his
enemies seemed to have accused of being much too skilful a diplomatist;
and Renaud of Chatillon, a violent adventurer whom his enemies
seem to have accused of being little better than a bandit.
And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into trouble
for making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Renaud got
into trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens.
Renaud exacted from Moslem travellers on a certain road what
he regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regarded
as a brigand ransom; and when they did not pay he attacked them.
This was regarded as a breach of the truce; but probably it would
have been easier to regard Renaud as waging the war of a robber,
if many had not regarded Raymond as having made the truce of a traitor.
Probably Raymond was not a traitor, since the military advice he gave
up to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound,
and worthy of so wise a veteran.  And very likely Renaud was not
merely a robber, especially in his own eyes; and there seems
to be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow.
But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the factions
shows a certain fall from the first days under the headship of
the house of Bouillon.  No slanderer ever suggested that Godfrey
was a traitor; no enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief.
It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration; but most people
hardly realise sufficiently that there had been a very great thing
from which to degenerate.

The first Crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as a
New Jerusalem.  I mean they had really had a vision of the place being
not only a promised land but a Utopia or even an Earthly Paradise.
The outstanding fact and feature which is seldom seized is this:
that the social experiment in Palestine was rather in advance of
the social experiments in the rest of Christendom.  Having to begin
at the beginning, they really began with what they considered the best
ideas of their time; like any group of Socialists founding an ideal
Commonwealth in a modern colony.  A specialist on this period,
Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the core
of the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself
in his "Letters of the Sepulchre"; and he observes concerning it:
"The basis of these laws was found in Justinian's code, and they
presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their
careful provision of justice for the bourgeois and the peasant,
and for the trading communes whose fleets were so necessary to the king.
Not only were free men judged by juries of their equals, but the same
applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines."
The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularly
liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives.
That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is
no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers
serfs are still called citizens.  The whole point about the villein
was that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant.
He "went with the land"; and there are a good many hopeless tramps
starving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorry
if they could go with a little land.  It would not be very much
worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden
of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips;
or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerable
proportion of the corn.  There has been many a modern man would have been
none the worse for "going" about burdened with such a green island,
or dragging the chains of such a tangle of green living things.
As a fact, of course, this system throughout Christendom was already
evolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship; and it will be
long before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equal
or so free.  Above all, there appears notably that universal mark
of the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves.
But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier success
of all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knights
fresh from the West; and especially to the personal justice
and moderation of Godfrey and some of his immediate kindred.
Godfrey died young; his successors had mostly short periods of power,
largely through the prevalence of malaria and the absence of medicine.
Royal marriages with the more oriental tradition of the Armenian
princes brought in new elements of luxury and cynicism;
and by the time of the disputed truce of Raymond of Tripoli,
the crown had descended to a man named Guy of Lusignan who seems
to have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character.
He had quarrelled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and a
curious and rather incomprehensible concession made by the latter,
that the Saracens should ride in arms but in peace round his land,
led to alleged Moslem insults to Nazareth, and the outbreak of the furious
Templar, Gerard of Bideford, of which mention has been made already.
But the most serious threat to them and their New Jerusalem
was the emergence among the Moslems of a man of military genius,
and the fact that all that land lay now under the shadow of the ambition
and ardour of Saladin.

With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the common
danger of Christians was apparent; and Raymond of Tripoli repaired
to the royal headquarters to consult with his late enemy the king;
but he seems to have been almost openly treated as a traitor.
Gerard of Bideford, the fanatic who was Grand Master of the Templars,
forced the king's hand against the advice of the wiser soldier,
who had pointed out the peril of perishing of thirst in the waterless
wastes between them and the enemy.  Into those wastes they advanced,
and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the time
they came in sight of the strange hills that will be remembered
for ever under the name of the Horns of Hattin.  On those hills,
a few hours later, the last knights of an army of which half had
fallen gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relic
they carried in their midst, a fragment of the True Cross.
In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselves
could number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages.
There fell with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbol
of a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilities
of Christendom of which this vision was the centre, all that "justice
for the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes,"
all the guilds that gained their charters by fighting for the Cross,
all the hopes of a happier transformation of the Roman Law wedded
to charity and to chivalry.  There was the first slip and the great
swerving of our fate; and in that wilderness we lost all the things
we should have loved, and shall need so long a labour to find again.

Raymond of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and ridden
away to Tyre.  The king, with a few of the remaining nobles,
including Renaud de Chatillon, were brought before Saladin in his tent.
There occurred a scene strangely typical of the mingled strains
in the creed or the culture that triumphed on that day;
the stately Eastern courtesy and hospitality; the wild Eastern
hatred and self-will. Saladin welcomed the king and gracefully
gave him a cup of sherbet, which he passed to Renaud.
"It is thou and not I who hast given him to drink," said the Saracen,
preserving the precise letter of the punctilio of hospitality.
Then he suddenly flung himself raving and reviling upon Renaud
de Chatillon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands.
Outside, two hundred Hospitallers and Templars were beheaded on
the field of battle; by one account I have read because Saladin
disliked them, and by another because they were Christian priests.

There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour of
the Moslems and the Jews in most of the Victorian historical works,
especially historical novels.  And most people of modern,
or rather of very recent times got all their notions of history
from dipping into historical novels.  In those romances the Jew is
always the oppressed where in reality he was often the oppressor.
In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignity
and courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty.
The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means
of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction.
Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian
mob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who
mentions that the Moslem commander commanded in cold blood the murder
of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after
the victory of Hattin.  The former cannot be shown to have been the act
of Tancred, while the latter was quite certainly the act of Saladin.
Yet Tancred is described as at best a doubtful character,
while Saladin is represented as a Bayard without fear or blame.
Both of them doubtless were ordinary faulty fighting men, but they
are not judged by an equal balance.  It may seem a paradox that there
should be this prejudice in Western history in favour of Eastern heroes.
But the cause is clear enough; it is the remains of the revolt among many
Europeans against their own old religious organisation, which naturally
made them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims.
It was natural that Voltaire should sympathise more with a Brahmin
he had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in a
violent controversy; and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholic
who was his enemy than of a Moslem who was the enemy of his enemy.
In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arose
the habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders with
the toleration shown by the Moslems.  Now as there are two sides
to everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tell
the tale of the Crusades, correctly enough in detail, and in such
a way as entirely to justify the Moslems and condemn the Crusaders.
But any such real record of the Moslem case would have very
little to do with any questions of tolerance or intolerance,
or any modern ideas about religious liberty and equality.
As the modern world does not know what it means itself by religious
liberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logical
theory of toleration at all (for their vague generalisations can
always be upset by twenty tests from Thugs to Christian Science)
it would obviously be unreasonable to expect the moderns
to understand the much clearer philosophy of the Moslems.
But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be found
convenient in this case.

Islam was not originally a movement directed against Christianity at all.
It did not face westwards, so to speak; it faced eastwards towards
the idolatries of Asia.  But Mahomet believed that these idols
could be fought more successfully with a simpler kind of creed;
one might almost say with a simpler kind of Christianity.
For he included many things which we in the West commonly suppose not
only to be peculiar to Christianity but to be peculiar to Catholicism.
Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are not
rejected by Mahometanism.  Thus the Moslems believe in Purgatory,
and they give at least a sort of dignity to the Mother of Christ.
About such things as these they have little of the bitterness that rankles
in the Jews and is said sometimes to become hideously vitriolic.  While I
was in Palestine a distinguished Moslem said to a Christian resident:
"We also, as well as you, honour the Mother of Christ.
Never do we speak of her but we call her the Lady Miriam.
I dare not tell you what the Jews call her."

The real mistake of the Moslems is something much more modern in its
application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians
as such.  It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a
simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians.
They thought it could be made universal merely by being
made uninteresting.  Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude
is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox.
It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as
to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody,
that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it
on everybody.  It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow.
And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule.
Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed
of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous
appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord.
As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had
the simplest sort of government, monarchy.  There was exactly
the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism.
The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters
and chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert.
The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent,
and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated.  Those who
complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate
Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions;
and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated.
And the real moral of the relations of the two great religions is
something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales
against Turks.  It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusal
of a Pagan Pantheon in which Christ should rank with Ammon and Apollo.
Twice the Christian Church refused what seemed like a handsome
offer of a large latitudinarian sort; once to include Christ as a
god and once to include him as a prophet; once by the admission
of all idols and once by the abandonment of all idols.
Twice the Church took the risk and twice the Church survived alone
and succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children;
and leaving her rivals in a desert, where the idols were dead
and the iconoclasts were dying.

But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice more
general than the particular case of Saracens and Crusaders.
The modern, or rather the Victorian prejudice against Crusaders
is positive and not relative; and it would still desire to
condemn Tancred if it could not acquit Saladin.  Indeed it is
a prejudice not so much against Crusaders as against Christians.
It will not give to these heroes of religious war the fair measure
it gives to the heroes of ordinary patriotic and imperial war.
There never was a nobler hero than Nelson, or one more national
or more normal.  Yet Nelson quite certainly did do what Tancred
almost certainly did not do; break his own word by giving up his own
brave enemies to execution.  If the cause of Nelson in other times
comes to be treated as the creed of Tancred has often in recent
times been treated, this incident alone will be held sufficient
to prove not only that Nelson was a liar and a scoundrel, but that
he did not love England at all, did not love Lady Hamilton at all,
that he sailed in English ships only to pocket the prize money
of French ships, and would as willingly have sailed in French ships
for the prize money of English ships.  That is the sort of dull dust
of gold that has been shaken like the drifting dust of the desert
over the swords and the relics, the crosses and the clasped
hands of the men who marched to Jerusalem or died at Hattin.
In these medieval pilgrims every inconsistency is a hypocrisy; while in
the more modern patriots even an infamy is only an inconsistency.
I have rounded off the story here with the ruin at Hattin because
the whole reaction against the pilgrimage had its origin there;
and because it was this at least that finally lost Jerusalem.
Elsewhere in Palestine, to say nothing of Africa and Spain,
splendid counter-strokes were still being delivered from the West,
not the least being the splendid rescue by Richard of England.
But I still think that with the mere name of that tiny town upon
the hills the note of the whole human revolution had been struck,
was changed and was silent.  All the other names were only the names
of Eastern towns; but that was nearer to a man than his neighbours;
a village inside his village, a house inside his house.

There is a hill above Bethlehem of a strange shape, with a flat top
which makes it look oddly like an island, habitable though uninhabited,
when all Moab heaves about it and beyond it as with the curves
and colours of a sea.  Its stability suggests in some strange
fashion what may often be felt in these lands with the longest
record of culture; that there may be not only a civilisation
but even a chivalry older than history.  Perhaps the table-land
with its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table.
Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is felt
most when the low skies are swimming with the colours of sunset,
and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take on
the shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it.
I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscape
suggested such visions and it was only afterwards that I heard
the local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christian
knights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem and which
names this height The Mountain of the Latins.

They fell, and the ages rolled on them the rocks of scorn;
they were buried in jests and buffooneries.  As the Renascence
expanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemed
so ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert not only
for a tomb, but an empty tomb.  The last legend of them withered
under the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the last
Crusade at Lepanto.  They were kicked about like dead donkeys
by the cool vivacity of Voltaire; who went off, very symbolically,
to dance attendance on the new drill-sergeant of the Prussians.
They were dissected like strange beasts by the serene disgust
of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which
he regarded the similar violence of the French Revolution.
By our own time even the flippancy has become a platitude.
They have long been the butt of every penny-a-liner who can talk of a
helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw
a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional
politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renounced
by their children and refuted by their biographers; they were exposed,
they were exploded, they were ridiculed and they were right.

They were proved wrong, and they were right.  They were judged
finally and forgotten, and they were right.  Centuries after
their fall the full experience and development of political
discovery has shown beyond question that they were right.
For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very
thing which was dismissed, as a dream of the ages of faith,
we have been forced to turn into a fact in the ages of fact.
It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe must
rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces.
Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it
would be better if the Entente could do so, I think a serious question.
But in some form they are reverting for the Roman Empire.
Every opportunity has been given for any other empire that could
be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission
for Imperial Islam.  If ever a human being had a run for his money,
it was the Sultan of the Moslems riding on his Arab steed.
His empire expanded over and beyond the great Greek empire of Byzantium;
a last charge of the chivalry of Poland barely stopped it at the very
gates of Vienna.  He was free to unfold everything that was in him,
and he unfolded the death that was in him.  He reigned and he could
not rule; he was successful and he did not succeed.  His baffled
and retreating enemies left him standing, and he could not stand.
He fell finally with that other half-heathen power in the North,
with which he had made an alliance against the remains of Roman
and Byzantine culture.  He fell because barbarism cannot stand;
because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes and
crushes them.  And after all these things, after all these ages,
with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forced
to do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing.
What Western men failed to do for the faith, other Western men
have been forced to do even without the faith.  The sons of Tancred
are again in Tripoli.  The heirs of Raymond are again in Syria.
And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went again
through a furnace of thirst and fever and furious fighting,
to gain the same water-courses and invest the same cities as of old.
They trod the hills of Galilee and the Horns of Hattin threw no shadow
on their souls; they crossed dark and disastrous fields whose fame
had been hidden from them, and avenged the fathers they had forgotten.
And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlement
by the most sceptical of modern philosophies, can find no practical
or even temporary solution for this sacred land, except to bring it
again under the crown of Coeur de Lion and the cross of St. George.

There came in through the crooked entry beside the great gap
in the wall a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearing
only the dust-hued habit of modern war.  There went no trumpet
before him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silence
of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far
away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men.
For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and something
counted irrational returned in the reason of things.
And at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learned
were enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mob
in a darker age had known by the light of nature; something that
could be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped for ever.
_Id Deus vult_.



CHAPTER XIII

THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM

There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period
rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are
less likely than ever to repent.  It was always called Anti-Semitism;
but it was always much more true to call it Zionism.  At any rate
it was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism,
whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion.
The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple.  It consisted
entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence
that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen
or Englishmen.  During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them
as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember
one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End
complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade
them to eat pork.  My own brief contact with the Greek priests
of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover
any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian
pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter.
The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed
to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews;
or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews.
But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter;
and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity
and status of a separate nation.  We desired that in some fashion,
and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live
in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews.
I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more
rational to call it Semitism.

Of this attitude, I repeat, I am now less likely than ever to repent.
I have lived to see the thing that was dismissed as a fad discussed
everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age.
I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism
become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was.
I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews,
who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them
at all.  But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs
marching through a great city, raving not only against Jews,
but against the English for identifying themselves with the Jews.
I have seen the whole prestige of England brought into peril,
merely by the trick of talking about two nations as if they were one.
I have seen an Englishman arriving in Jerusalem with somebody he had
been taught to regard as his fellow countryman and political colleague,
and received as if he had come arm-in-arm with a flaming dragon.
So do our frosty fictions fare when they come under that burning sun.

Twice in my life, and twice lately, I have seen a piece of English
pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril.
The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers
had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german
and even germane; something naturally near and sympathetic.
That also was an identification; that also was an assimilation;
that also was a union of hearts.  For the second time in a few
short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered
the dreadful revenge of reality.  To pretend that something is what it
is not is business that can easily be fashionable and sometimes popular.
But the thing we have agreed to regard as what it is not will always
abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is.
For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman
because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we
found out what Teutons really were.  For years we were told that Jews
were a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects.
It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them,
not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects;
as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks.
We are in the absurd position of introducing to these people
a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy.
It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it
is merely the penalty of falsehood.

Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed
in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but
the astonishment; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment.
We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman;
but there was no reason why they should regard him as
an Englishman, since they already recognised him as a Jew.
This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine;
and it must be solved either by the logic of Zionism or the logic
of purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by what
seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two.
But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made
the realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all
the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion.
The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are
now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews.
Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists
have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists.  Those who
had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein,
even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover
the nationality of Braunstein, even, when he calls, himself Trotsky.
And much of this peril also might easily have been lessened,
by the simple proposal to call men and things by their own names.

I will confess, however, that I have no very full sympathy with
the new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good,
honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are many
to whom I am greatly attached among my own friends in my own rank;
but if I have to make a general choice on a general chance among
different types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jew
who is revolutionary than the Jew who is plutocratic.  In other words,
I have much more sympathy for the Israelite we are beginning to reject,
than for the Israelite we have already accepted.  I have more respect
for him when he leads some sort of revolt, however narrow and anarchic,
against the oppression of the poor, than when he is safe at the head
of a great money-lending business oppressing the poor himself.
It is not the poor aliens, but the rich aliens I wish we had excluded.
I myself wholly reject Bolshevism, not because its actions
are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean.
And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times
truer of Zionism.  It really seems to me rather hard that the full
storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment
when some of them at least have felt the call of a far cleaner ideal;
and that when we have tolerated their tricks with our country,
we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerity
for their own.

But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand
more fully the nature of the Jewish problem.  We must consider it
from the start, because there are still many who do not know that
there is a Jewish problem.  That problem has its proof, of course,
in the history of the Jew, and the fact that he came from the East.
A Jew will sometimes complain of the injustice of describing
him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real
injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West.
Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against
those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they
have made out of the Jew.  This is true especially, for instance,
of many points of religion and ritual.  Thus we cannot help feeling,
for instance, that there is something a little grotesque about
the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship.
It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another
class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not
therefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal,
leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven.
To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is something
inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue.
But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions
which startle the Western eyes.  It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat
as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat
is worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch.
It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties,
a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helps
himself to a hat as a sort of _hors d'oeuvre_. All this could
easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke
is against ourselves.  It is not merely we who make fun of it,
but we who have made it funny.  For, after all, nobody can
pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that
uncouth imagery "setting painting and sculpture at defiance"
which Renan remarked in the tradition of Hebrew civilisation.
Nobody can say that a top-hat was among the strange symbolic utensils
dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose
that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels
of the flying visions of the Prophets.  For this wild vision the West
is entirely responsible.  Europe has created the Tower of Giotto;
but it has also created the topper.  We of the West must bear
the burden, as best we may, both of the responsibility and of the hat.
It is solely the special type and shape of hat that makes the Hebrew
ritual seem ridiculous.  Performed in the old original Hebrew
fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime.
For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews
are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing
of long and loose draperies.  To throw those loose draperies
over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture.
One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty
and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake.
It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew
covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God,
which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering
of the head suggests rather the love of God that is the end of wisdom.
But this has nothing to do with the taste and dignity of the ceremony;
and to do justice to these we must treat the Jew as an oriental;
we must even dress him as an oriental.

I have only taken this as one working example out of many that
would point to the same conclusion.  A number of points upon
which the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improved
if he were, not less of an alien, but rather more of an alien.
They arise from his being too like us, and too little like himself.
It is obviously the case, for instance, touching that vivid vulgarity
in clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certain
sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many
holiday resorts.  When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier
wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie,
we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social
sensibility and fitness.  It might considerably surprise the company
on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his
green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head.
Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logical
and artistic.  As soon as the green tie had become a green turban,
it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turban
of any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walks
with a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem.
The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighter
than those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque.  They are only worn
in the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a type
and cut of clothing that is meant to be more sober and restrained.
Little can really be urged against him, in that respect,
except that his artistic instinct is rather for colour than form,
especially of the kind that we ourselves have labelled good form.

This is a mere symbol, but it is so suitable a symbol that I have
often offered it symbolically as a solution of the Jewish problem.
I have felt disposed to say:  let all liberal legislation stand,
let all literal and legal civic equality stand; let a Jew occupy any
political or social position which he can gain in open competition;
let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary
restrictions or racial privilege.  Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice,
if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked
him out for that post.  Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury,
if our national religion has attained to that receptive
breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable
and even unconscious.  But let there be one single-clause bill;
one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other.
Be it enacted, by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with
the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in
Parliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab.
Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab.
Let him preach in St. Paul's Cathedral, but let him preach there
dressed as an Arab.  It is not my point at present to dwell on
the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform
the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel
swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater
grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East.
If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point
of it is not personal to any particular Jew.  The point applies
to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him.
The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know
where he is, which is in a foreign land.

This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to
the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem.
Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty
disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem,
or even that the Jew was a Jew.  Through much misunderstanding certain
friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence
thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words.
By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem
than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews.  The folly
of the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names,
must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them.
To mention but one example of the way in which this fiction
falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough
to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new
and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war.
A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely
because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly
mobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium.
He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims;
and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pair
of shears.  It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask
Bethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces.
But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself,
and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had led
him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.

In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults
they have not got; but there are faults that they have got.
Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted
concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely
to the false light in which they are regarded.  Other faults
may also be due to the false position in which they are placed.
But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody
concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them.
It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience
and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority
of poor people.  It was done by confining the controversy to a small
world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved.
For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best
that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their
ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.

I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this
absurd fashion.  There was a controversy in the columns
of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject
of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare.  Actors and authors
of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews,
argued the matter from the most varied points of view.
Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices
of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers
of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer
story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have
to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock.
In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much
of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must
have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted
that they were puzzled as to what the play was about.
The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks.
And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human
being even so much as mentioned the word "usury." It is exactly
as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about
the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention
the word "murder."

The play called _The Merchant of Venice_ happens to be about usury,
and its story is a medieval satire on usury.  It is the fashion
to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it
is an exceedingly good story.  It is a perfect and pointed story
for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story.  And the
moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life,
and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life.
In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or a
man's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs.
This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very
sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying
to take away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying
to take away a man's life.  And if anybody thinks that usury can
never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image,
then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much.
He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims
of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential
rich who are money-lenders themselves.

All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side
to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered.
What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt
to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock
the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.
It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert
that the usurer was a man.  And the Elizabethan dramatist does
make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster.
Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly
sincere and self-respecting man.  But the point is this:
that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury.
He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself
for being a usurer.  In one word, he regards usury as normal.
In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews.
What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way,
millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a
rough and ready way.  Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas
about interest, they think either that he is simply immoral;
or that if he is moral, then he has a different morality.
There is a great deal more to be said about how far this is true,
and about what are its causes and excuses if it is true.
But it is an old story, surely, that the worst of all cures is
to deny the disease.

To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for
everybody and especially vital for Jews.  To pretend that there is no
problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience,
which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational
form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria,
for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no
worse than the Armenian.  The Armenian also is said to be unpopular
as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures
as a martyr for the Christian faith and a victim of the Moslem fury.
But this is one of those arguments which really carry their own answer.
It is like the sceptical saying that man is only an animal,
which of itself provokes the retort, "What an animal!"
The very similarity only emphasises the contrast.  Is it seriously
suggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew in
the study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews?  Could we
talk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers,
or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade?  Can Armenian usury
be a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a club
in Piccadilly?  Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian towering
over the great Venice of the Renascence?  Does Dickens show us
a realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves' kitchens of the slums?
When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do we
speculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian name
to match his Armenian nose?  Is it true, in short, that all sorts
of people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal,
can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia?  Obviously it
is not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is only
a local question of certain Christians, who may be more avaricious
than other Christians.  But it is the truth about the Jews.
It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjust
to the Jews.  But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharply
and clearly as we can.  The truth is that it is rather strange
that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements.
For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion
of the Jews.

A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews
and gipsies; for the latter at least cover several countries,
and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts.
And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful.
Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore in
different ways lawless.  For the fundamental laws are land laws.
In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity,
without wishing to indulge any task for persecution.
In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault,
while admitting that it may be largely a racial misfortune.
That is to say, the drifting and detached condition may be largely
the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense
to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury.
The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions
by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience.
It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money
methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred
of their religion.  We might as well say that people only protect
the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly
condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain
that Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender;
or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods.
It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a child
as stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers' meeting.
It is to complain of facts and probabilities.  There may be good gipsies;
there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies;
many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised a
certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany.
But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect
for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can
be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury.  Above all, there is one
other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point.
It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not
become national merely by becoming a political part of any nation.
We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham,
when their caravans stood on Clapham Common.

But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoples
fails in the presence of the greater problem.  Here again even the attempt
at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique.  The gipsies do
not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes,
and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English
merely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America.
But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal.
His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and name
of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham.  The municipal authorities generally
notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not
fall into the error.  The gipsy may halt in a particular parish,
but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor.
The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly made
the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare.
And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors
and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen
and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises
an outcry that _they_ are the victims of religious persecution;
nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptions
or sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody else
with the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world.
The case of the Jew in the nation is very different from
that of the tinker in the town.  The moral elements that can
be appealed to are of a very different style and scale.
No gipsies are millionaires.

In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy
problem in two highly practical respects.  First, the Jews already
exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power.  And second,
the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national
political power.  Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser
and the vagrant is actually made a mayor.  As will be seen shortly,
there is a Jewish side of the story which leads really to the same
ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent
of any sympathetic or unsympathetic view of the race in question.
It is a question of fact, which a sensible Jew can afford to recognise,
and which the most sensible Jews do very definitely recognise.
It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews
are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers
or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact
as the family of Rothschild.  Nobody can pretend that such
an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins,
in the five great capitals of Europe.  Nobody can pretend that the
Seventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather,
scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth.
Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers,
or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or in
Petrograd as in Plymouth.

The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all.
It is normal for the nation to contain the family.
With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations.
This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations,
those who really think there ought not to be any nations.
But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotism
thinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it.
It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint,
that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be bound
to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private
and personal even than nationality.  Even when the purpose is not
any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason.
Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially,
the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot.
But least of all can it conceivably be satisfactory to a Jewish patriot;
by which I do not mean a sham Englishman or a sham Frenchman,
but a man who is sincerely patriotic for the historic and highly
civilised nation of the Jews.

For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negative
side of Zionism.  For the sake of convenience I have begun by stating
it in terms of the universal popular impression which some call
a popular prejudice.  But such a truth of differentiation is equally
true on both its different sides.  Suppose somebody proposes to mix up
England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire.
One man may say, "Why should the jolly English inns and villages
be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?"  Another may say,
"Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your
snobbish old squirarchy?"  But both these views are only versions
of the same view of a great American:  "God never made one people
good enough to rule another."

The primary point about Zionism is that, whether it is right or wrong,
it does offer a real and reasonable answer both to Anti-Semitism
and to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases about
religious persecution and racial hatred are not reasonable answers,
or answers at all.  These Jews do not deny that they are Jews;
they do not deny that Jews may be unpopular; they do not deny that there
may be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity.
They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talks
about being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theological
fanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth on
Derby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to that
Christian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf.
They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravagant
a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling
motive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses,
of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier,
or nearly every working man who grumbles against the local
pawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common.
The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things;
what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy.
Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedy
is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something
like a fair summary of what is to be said on both sides.
But their theory, on the face of it, is perfectly reasonable.
It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due
to the abnormal position of the Jews.  They are traders rather
than producers because they have no land of their own from
which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots
because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic.
They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they
could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building
the Pyramids of Egypt.  They can no more feel the full stream
of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than
they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping
by the waters of Babylon.  For exile is the worst kind of bondage.
In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon
a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues.
It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular
home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in.
The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.

It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle
applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered.
The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second
the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment.
The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only
a specially dangerous development of the general charge of
uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise;
the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour.
It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible,
commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple
communities like those of Palestine.  A very honest Moslem Arab
said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, "A Jew
does not work; but he grows rich.  You never see a Jew working;
and yet they grow rich.  What I want to know is, why do we not
all do the same?  Why do we not also do this and become rich?"
This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often
work hard at some things, especially intellectual things.
But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious
Jewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists,
chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways.
The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell us
that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen,
many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers
and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen.
In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life,
as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionable
to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews
do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts
that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is
because it can never really be their own land.  That is Zionism,
and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion.

Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation.  It is dying
with the nation.  It is regarding the fatherland not merely
as a real resting-place like an inn, but as a final resting-place,
like a house or even a grave.  Even the most Jingo of the Jews
do not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubt
if the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did.
Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived
for England, we cannot think that he would have died with her.
If England had sunk in the Atlantic he would not have sunk with her,
but easily floated over to America to stand for the Presidency.
Even if we are profoundly convinced that Mr. Beit or Mr. Eckstein
had patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concession
from Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he would
have refused a similar concession from the German Emperor.
When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot
he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it
more truly if he said he was a good exile.  Sometimes indeed
he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and
execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case.
I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance
of England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romance
of Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance,
they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy.  They would have
seen that the story had a happy ending, especially for themselves.
These Jews would not have died with any Christian nation.

But the Jews did die with Jerusalem.  That is the first and
last great truth in Zionism.  Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews
were destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live because
the city of their faith had fallen.  It may be questioned whether
all the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots.
But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionists
might feel like this about Zion.  It is nonsense to suggest
that they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow.
And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitism
is included in Zionism.

It is a commonplace that the infamous are more famous than the famous.
Byron noted, with his own misanthropic moral, that we think more
of Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the noble
Roman who defeated Hannibal.  The name of Julian more often suggests
Julian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crowned
his canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saint
of inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historical
habit is the most famous of all and the most infamous of all.
If there is one proper noun which has become a common noun,
if there is one name which has been generalised till it means a thing,
it is certainly the name of Judas.  We should hesitate perhaps to call
it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude.
And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another
illustration of the same injustice; for, by comparison with the other,
Jude the faithful might almost be called Jude the obscure.
The critic who said, whether innocently or ironically, "What wicked
men these early Christians were!" was certainly more successful
in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or
ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion.  Judas Iscariot
was one of the very earliest of all possible early Christians.
And the whole point about him was that his hand was in the same dish;
the traitor is always a friend, or he could never be a foe.
But the point for the moment is merely that the name is known
everywhere merely as the name of a traitor.  The name of Judas nearly
always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus.
And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a political
tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards,
with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something
of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny
of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.

Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another
compact embodiment of the case for Zionism.  Numberless international
Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly
earned it.  If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas,
it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not
the fault of the Jews, but of the peculiar position of the Jews.
A man can betray like Judas Iscariot in another man's house;
but a man cannot fight like Judas Maccabeus for another man's temple.
There is no more truly rousing revolutionary story amid all the stories
of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry
in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed
from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall
of that huge and living castle.  But it would be unreasonable to ask
Mr. Montagu to stick a knife into the elephant on which Lord Curzon,
let us say, was riding in all the pomp of Asiatic imperialism.
For Mr. Montagu would not be liberating his own land; and therefore
he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver
or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation.
In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services
such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France
in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit
a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind
us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots.
A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national
hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion
it is necessary to have a _patria_.  The Zionists therefore are
maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge
of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could
be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.

Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their own
reasonable proposition.  Some of them have a most unlucky habit
of ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evil
that they are wisely trying to cure.  I have already remarked
this irritating innocence in the first of the two questions;
the criticism that sees everything in Shylock except the point of him,
or the point of his knife.  How in the politics of Palestine at this
moment this first question is in every sense the primary question.
Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but it
certainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to be
oppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling.
The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations
of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent
of the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simple
reason of the reputation which the Jews have all over the world.
It is really ridiculous in people so intelligent as the Jews,
and especially so intelligent as the Zionists, to ignore so enormous
and elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results.
It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case it
is not unnatural.  It may be the result of persecution, but it
is one that has definitely resulted.  It may be the consequence
of a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itself
be understood.  Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestine
fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts;
they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by a
thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation.
I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerly
disproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it while
exposing what is untrue.  What is strange, I might almost say weird,
about the attitude of some quite intelligent and sincere Zionists,
is that they talk, write and apparently think as if there were no
such thing in the world.

I will give one curious example from one of the best and most
brilliant of the Zionists.  Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind
and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one
with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything
like a sense of humour.  Yet, in the middle of a very temperate
and magnanimous address on "Zionist Policy," he can actually
say a thing like this, "The Arabs need us with our knowledge,
and our experience and our money.  If they do not have us they
will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks."
One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else
in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange
mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity.
It is much as if President Wilson were to say, "Unless America deals
with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power,
that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires."  But would
President Wilson say it?  It is as if the German Chancellor had said,
"We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put
under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy."
But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?
Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of
sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it?  Would even the Turks say,
"The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms.
If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will
perhaps be in danger of massacres."  I suspect that a Turk would see
the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.
If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the
first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of.
And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they
are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic
or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin
and the crescent of cruel teeth.  This may be a fairy-tale about
a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe,
and certainly one which these races believe.

But the case is yet more curious than that.  These simple tribes
are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements
which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got;
they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got.
They may be in error, at the first superficial glance,
in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark.
But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable
professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect.
And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical
or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in
stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews.  They fear,
in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money.
The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need.
Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery
and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given
by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples.
About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust;
but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind
it has to be proved to be unjust.  Feeling as I do the force
of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly
to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it.
But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again
and again of their knowledge and their experience and their money.
That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake;
their knowledge and their experience and their money.
It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desire
to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly
out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker;
and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven
their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites.
But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic
culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers
reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of
their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers.
Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves
in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.

In short the fear of the Jews in Palestine, reasonable or unreasonable,
is a thing that must be answered by reason.  It is idle for the unpopular
thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality
that makes it unpopular.  But I think it could be answered by reason,
or at any rate tested by reason; and the tests by consideration.
The principle is still as stated above; that the tests must
not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather
deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused
of not showing.  It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly
than it is generally understood, and especially better than it
is usually stated in the language of fashionable controversy.
For the question involves the whole success or failure of Zionism.
Many of the Zionists know it; but I rather doubt whether most of
the Anti-Zionists know that they know it.  And some of the phrases
of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend
to produce the impression that they ignore when they are not ignorant.
They are not ignorant; and they do not ignore in practice;
even when an intellectual habit makes them seem to ignore in theory.
Nobody who has seen a Jewish rural settlement, such as Rishon,
can doubt that some Jews are sincerely filled with the vision
of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its
accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree
and the vine.

The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test.
It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather
by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly
not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures.
It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top
of the ladder, but by whether Jews can remain at the bottom;
not by whether they have a hundred arts of becoming important,
but by whether they have any skill in the art of remaining insignificant.
It is often noted that the intelligent Israelite can rise to positions
of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs
in England.  It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country;
but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their
own country.  Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers
and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews,
then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy.
It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies
into hewers of wood and drawers of water.  The modern Jews have
to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water.
If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens,
but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kinds
the most perilous and the most imperilled.  Hence a Jewish
state will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful,
or even when the Jews in it are statesmen.  It will be a success
when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps,
when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen.
When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has _not_
risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease
as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village
idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village,
then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift
up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned
the captivity of Zion.

Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced,
and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told
me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a
beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land.
One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "this
very un-Jewish characteristic."  She was perfectly well aware both of
the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race.
In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy
test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges.
When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly
expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim
is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside.
I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the
circumstances to set it altogether aside.  It is our whole complaint
against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade;
it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give me
a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it."
It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love
any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be
deaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it."
I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land,
(in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long
as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles
I have suggested.  If he asks for the spade he must use the spade,
and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundred
men to use spades.  If he asks for the soil he must till the soil;
that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soil
belong to him.  He must have the simplicity, and what many would
call the stupidity of the peasant.  He must not only call a spade
a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation.
By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not
only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick
of inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return.
He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean.

How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody,
especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis.
It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed;
and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jew
as a mere capitalist.  The Jews explain it, however, by saying
that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is
necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists.
In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none
the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers.
It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to
be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself
does not prove them to be peasants.  So far as that is concerned,
it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an
agricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer.
On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments,
if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants,
most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists.
There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in which
many of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose.
They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel,
and none the less though they prophesied in vain.

I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason
already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt
of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected
as one of their irregularities.  But I do not disguise the enormous
difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine.
In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it
has to take place in Zion.  There are other difficulties, however,
which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are
very much the fault of Jews.  The worst is the general impression
of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type
of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation.
When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers
had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made
by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government
had yielded to them.  If this were true it was a heavier reproach
to the government even than to the Jews.  But the general truth
is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid
patriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible,
and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise.
The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionists
was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly
intelligent but ardent and sympathetic.  And the phrase he used
gives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution,
though he himself would probably, not accept that solution.

Dr. Weizmann suggested, if I understood him rightly, that he did
not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory
quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not
be a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland.
Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons,
and so on according to the type of population.  This is in itself
more reasonable than much that is suggested on the same side;
but the point of it for my own purpose is more particular.
This idea, whether it correctly represents Dr. Weizmann's meaning
or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity
of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being
separated from each other by populations of a different type.
Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me
capable of considerable extension.  It seems possible that there
might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons
outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected
places in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world.
They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine,
or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least some
great religious headquarters of the scattered race and religion.
The nature of that religious centre it must be for Jews to decide;
but I think if I were a Jew I would build the Temple without
bothering about the site of the Temple.  That they should
have the old site, of course, is not to be thought of;
it would raise a Holy War from Morocco to the marches of China.
But seeing that some of the greatest of the deeds of Israel were done,
and some of the most glorious of the songs of Israel sung,
when their only temple was a box carried about in the desert,
I cannot think that the mere moving of the situation of the place
of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition
as it would to many others.  That the Jews should have some high
place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building
like the Mosque of Omar, is certainly right and reasonable;
for upon no theory can their historic connection be dismissed.
I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites,
that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites.
If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it.
I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest,
in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I:  "The people that remembers
has a right."  The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best,
do in some sense remember.  They are hated and persecuted and
frightened into false names and double lives; but they remember.
They lie, they swindle, they betray, they oppress; but they remember.
The more we happen to hate such elements among the Hebrews the more
we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague
and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox.
The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people
have no memory.

But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine
or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something
like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit
the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups.
It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism
we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism,
the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race
on so small a land.  For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews
is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get
rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain
all their advantage and none of our own.  Therefore I would leave
as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these
I would give a special position best described as privilege;
some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions;
for instance, I would certainly excuse them from conscription,
which I think a gross injustice in their case. [Footnote: Of course
the privileged exile would also lose the rights of a native.]
A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador,
but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner.  Finally, I would give
the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative
policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named;
the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not
so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.

There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably
and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned
to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire
and the Crusades.  The European can do justice to the Jew;
but it must be the European who does it.  Such a possibility
as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can
think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general
suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew.
Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general
suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy
of England.  And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain
the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it.
I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic
situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it
is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately.
But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together
to hold Syria and Palestine together rather than separately,
that only completes and clinches the conclusion that has haunted me,
with almost uncanny recurrence, since I first saw Jerusalem
sitting on the hill like a turreted town in England or in France;
and for one moment the dark dome of it was again the Templum Domini,
and the tower on it was the Tower of Tancred.

Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the last
and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew.
We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has
ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure.
Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and
comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian
agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief
medieval insanity.  In this as in greater things, even if we lost
our faith we could not recover our agnosticism.  We can never
recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance.
We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there
is a Jewish solution.  If there is not, there is no other.
We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain
theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part
of the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial.
A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success.
An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure;
but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt.
And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion.
Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we
can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion.
We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure,
knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well
as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ
or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.



CONCLUSION

To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London
might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff
like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather
that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some
identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God.
Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one
who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only
symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal
coloured like copper and brass.  For on it was written in Greek
characters the word "Jerusalem," and though it may be less valuable
than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand.
All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze
and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold
and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled
down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger.
I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I
rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again.
And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all.
We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impression
of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its
shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build
the palace or the paradise of a day.  As I saw the low and solid
English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets
under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather
we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace.
It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment.
And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable
thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey;
that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace
of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe
the form.  The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that
very striking book _Form and Colour_, by Mr. March Philips.
When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured
against such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant.
To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals,
and I think I prefer the idols.  I have far more sympathy with
the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms
and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented
by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument
in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind.
I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun,
than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist.
Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one
thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it,
and become something real as well.  It has gone westward by a sort
of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made
the revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem,
do something at last.

Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I felt
strongly disposed to take the privileges of one.  I wanted to be
entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner,
and to tell them interminable tales of my travels.  I wanted to linger
in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town.  I nearly got
out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded
cottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land.
For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends;
all these English places had come much closer together after travels
that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars.
The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own
kitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End.
London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield.
By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was dropping
over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed
to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long
lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer,
I heard the barking of a dog.



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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Varied Types, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Varied Types

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: November 29, 2004 [EBook #14203]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VARIED TYPES ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









_Varied Types_

_By_

G.K. Chesterton

Author _of_ "The Defendant," etc.

New York: _Dodd, Mead and Company_




PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1905




NOTE

These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted
with the kind permission of the Editors of _The Daily News_ and _The
Speaker_.

G.K.C.

Kensington.




CONTENTS

                                       Page
Charlotte Brontë                         3
William Morris And His School           15
The Optimism Of Byron                   29
Pope And The Art Of Satire              43
Francis                                 59
Rostand                                 73
Charles II.                             85
Stevenson                               97
Thomas Carlyle                         109
Tolstoy And The Cult Of Simplicity     125
Savonarola                             147
The Position Of Sir Walter Scott       159
Bret Harte                             179
Alfred The Great                       199
Maeterlinck                            209
Ruskin                                 217
Queen Victoria                         225
The German Emperor                     227
Tennyson                               249
Elizabeth Barrett Browning             261




CHARLOTTE BRONTË


Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals
so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real
objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a
man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and
insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself
is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of
his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which
do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do
not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that
they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as
the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he
thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's
name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these
are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in
the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities
form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild
and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of
literature, like Mr. Augustine Birrell and Mr. Andrew Lang, never tire
of collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights
and sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are
the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the
limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old
Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation,
though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës.
For the Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme
unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been
conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte
Brontë electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and
more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,
good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great
assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as
tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a _bal masqué_. She showed that
abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a
manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of
merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte
Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her
genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the
artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural
gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt
that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the
interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the
ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens
of Dante.

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of
the Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter
less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting
to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the
officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.
It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or
been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is
conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them.
But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is
that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story
as "Jane Eyre" is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be
excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they
ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the
insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct
of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte
in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. "Then, resuming his
usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew," does perhaps
reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester
dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be
found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime,
where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast
nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, "Jane
Eyre" is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential
truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true
to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost
always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true,
emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not
matter a single straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than "Jane Eyre," or a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than "Wuthering Heights." It would not matter
if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs. Read rode on a dragon, if
Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St. John Rivers three legs, the
story would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical
Brontë character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except
the essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on
his arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right
place.

The great and abiding truth for which the Brontë cycle of fiction stands
is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,
the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontë
heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating
inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her
solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is
possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an
ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of
humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on
evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first
night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man
of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all
conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them
prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit
him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,
who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened
enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of
fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the
central spirit of the Brontë novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration
of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of
which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does
not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of
Charlotte Brontë, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more
commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than
a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with real
simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so
to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had
possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as
black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and
the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of pleasure.

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the
dark wild youth of the Brontës in their dark wild Yorkshire home has
been somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their
conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,
emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the
springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some
midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which
there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and
panic of "Wuthering Heights." Every one of us has had a day-dream of
our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than "Jane Eyre."
And the truth which the Brontës came to tell us is the truth that many
waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch
or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is
built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the
wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean
religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found
any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on
working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones
one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her
name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us upon every side to-day
like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of
the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as
well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the
frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of
ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;
there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses
is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these
men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of
these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house
of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the
heart of all things and the end of travel.




WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL


It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris
should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many
men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious
hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious
problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of
workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time
has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be
described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter
instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully
conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we
should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with
the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should
have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an
ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the
nails of the Cross.

The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the
limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his
literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the
qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his
religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length
and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men
could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the
unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the
unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man
was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring
consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against
the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would
be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he
were a piece of exquisitely coloured card-board.

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of
human nature--took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the
round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere æsthete. He
perceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The
difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have
to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of
it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the
most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of
the thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was
pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory
beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and
the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical
bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat.
He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in
raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It
is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which
blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In
all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as
a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and
thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most repulsive
of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of blood or
fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no reason
whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of civic
dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a
thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may be
sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,
figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediæval Christians has
possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole
of St. Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all
our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under
one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the
miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and
imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth
century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues
underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing
human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to
this pulverising portent chirpily as "The Twopenny Tube," they would
have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted
atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic
element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great
reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil
that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out
his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant.
Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring,
and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms
at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in
with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and
universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every
family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously
improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it is
only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human
decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier
than they were before, from the "coiffure" of a Papuan savage to the
wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.

But great and beneficent as was the æsthetic revolution of Morris, there
was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that
his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial
explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses
of modern ladies, "upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped
like women," as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical
imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than
this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now,
the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at
least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would
have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the
bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an æsthetic blue,
after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that
a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners
sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to
lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the
beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the
life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and
hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic
costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or
satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress
ball.

But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We may best
suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various works he
performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his
great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the
supreme credit of showing that the fairy tales contain the deepest truth
of the earth, the real record of men's feeling for things. Trifling
details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have climbed up so tall a
beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not such things that
make a story false; it is a far different class of things that makes
every modern book of history as false as the father of lies; ingenuity,
self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us that of
all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the old
story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is
written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and
essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we
cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William Morris as a
reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he hated modern
life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough
and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a million
eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet can love
this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous excitement
his massive and mysterious _joie-de-vivre_, the vast scale of his iron
anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and will not
change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvantage was that
he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could not
understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really develop
it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in the
æsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that
of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these æsthetic
shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the
decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving
the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things
that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to
some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are
beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs,
beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful.
There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful
engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized
hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And
this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the
supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the
Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.

But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great
reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better
proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than
that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to
needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and
more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the
armour of the twelfth century, but the machinery of the twentieth. A
lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the
sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical
of the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State.
Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured
stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of
their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and
genuine movement of our time towards beauty--not backwards, but
forwards--does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it.
Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,
prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be
remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and
proved that this painful greenish grey of the æsthetic twilight in
which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the
greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.




OPTIMISM OF BYRON


Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of
Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when
we wake in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the
world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world,
where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in
bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery.
Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men,
a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental
thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity
is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see
some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial
woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent
explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe
that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some
of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,
we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation.
We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box,
artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great
convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an
extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything
that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning
are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies
in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself
as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron
without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself
that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of
what is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any real
pessimism could ever be.

It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably
extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has
been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,
love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,
money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life
close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained
by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise
indefensible world. Thus, while the world is almost always condemned in
summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after
detail.

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously
among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House
of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.
Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a
life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the
cellar, and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the
blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment
that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation,
his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of
gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far
as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored
by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised
the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little
more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this
popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated
pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would
no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the
harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than
they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a
breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is
popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but
because he shows some things to be good.

Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of
denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something,
even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically
the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded
not upon the fact that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that
they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man
merely as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were
the energies of Nature. Man was to them what talk and fashion were to
Carlyle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what
the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing
which must be censured in order that somebody else may be exalted. It
was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white
chalk except on a black-board.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was
the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was
only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the
earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were
flaming like their own firesides.

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr.
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial
life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new
pessimism is a revolt in its favour.

The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent,
going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an
affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their
frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in
their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair.
It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were
his frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire
upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the
ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of
man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a
despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless
faith in thus parleying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It
was not until the time in which he wrote "Don Juan" that he really lost
this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilarious
laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a
pessimist.

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his
metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a
hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of
horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding _pas de quatre_. He may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the
most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk
in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood
alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

  "Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
  When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;
  'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
  But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past."

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the
time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and subconscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears
of the enemy.




POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE


The general critical theory common in this and the last century is
that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry.
The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that
goes, one may justifiably answer by asking anyone to try. It may be
easier really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring
sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to
have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a
sham rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be
unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is
the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:
he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits
out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may
be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical
couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great
liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of
small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but
at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's:

  "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,"

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

  "A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound.
The one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of
writing,

  "A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:

  "A creature
  Of feature
  More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
  Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
  Darkly wise as a formless fate.
  And if he be great,
  If he be great, then rudely great,
  Rudely great as a plough that plies,
  And darkly wise, and darkly wise."

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of the
typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion
more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been
artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of
paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the
realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we
cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of
divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was
truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in
the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we
cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or
magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to
meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural
irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses
were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in
terms.

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of
civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come
Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.
But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques
and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea
Islander--the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art
which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one
especially he was supreme--the great and civilised art of satire. And in
this we have fallen away utterly.

We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and
hostility. Mr. Henley and his young men have an infinite number of
furious epithets with which to overwhelm anyone who differs from them.
It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr. Henley's enemy,
though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And
yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and
social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be
worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.

It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous
enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very
accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a
man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is
necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the
merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only
another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army
we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.
England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same
simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of
battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an
idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a
people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of
trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the
enemy; whereas, when the enemy is strong, every honest scout ought to
praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a
full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without
having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhuman, as utterly
careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since
the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often have a
great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may
raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is one
man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly
ever touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one
person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man
whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He
knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is
not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous
and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can
count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours
of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind
all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly
visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough, but
firm, grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the

  "daring pilot in extremity,"

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

  "Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit."

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause
of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that
is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent
has his strong points, just as Mr. Chamberlain could not endure to be
told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If
we take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as Sir
William Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which all
party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William
Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is
inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and
disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all that is that we all
know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not
inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone
knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the
old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.
Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable
honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is
therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if
we were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of
stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire: for
a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because
it is true.

Mr. Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire; if
they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need
only turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The
Henleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt
for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the
man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr.
Gladstone by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting
that Mr. Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I
have said, go quietly and read Pope's "Atticus," they would see how a
great satirist approaches a great enemy:

  "Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires
  True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
  Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
  And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
  Should such a man--"

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not
such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that
Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in
Pope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so
pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He
said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and
everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary
temperament:

  "Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
  View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
  And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
  And sit attentive to his own applause.
  While wits and templars every sentence raise,
  And wonder with a foolish face of praise."

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it
aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is
addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the
applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.

In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption
that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can
benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his
merits, we cannot even hurt him.




FRANCIS


Asceticism is a thing which, in its very nature, we tend in these days
to misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation
of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the
one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined
to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts
that truth is alone satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which
asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean
asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the
speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and
essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that "love
is enough," it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts,
gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals, and
any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:

  "A book of verses underneath the bough,
  A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
  Beside me singing in the wilderness--
  O wilderness were Paradise enow."

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
æsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

  "From quiet home and first beginning
    Out to the undiscovered ends--
  There's nothing worth the wear of winning
    But laughter and the love of friends."

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if, in any case, it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that
in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge
were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were
forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco
during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal
fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours
and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their
health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is
perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism,
as much as the monastic rules. Men have overstrained themselves and
killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference
and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of
religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the
purchase in the other.

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their asceticism was merely the purchasing price? The
mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in
which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and
dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it
as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur
to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe
is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit
to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with
joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.
The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood
up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea
gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these
disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one
dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly
tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that
the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and
ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition of
an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times more
optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr. Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this
out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather
the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,
but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason
that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,
because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to
their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,
because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of
benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,
in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost
indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr. Adderley should see Francis primarily
as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,
perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of
the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast
practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this
amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple-minded infant was one
of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this
bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is
their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe
in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his
success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of
this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their
common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the
Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of "his little sisters the
larks." He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It
was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often "got round him,"
as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had
"got round" them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret
nobility.

Conceiving of St. Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan
Order, Mr. Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the
history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in
the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan
ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of
self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But
he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the
absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason
that, not being an outsider, he does not find it a problem at all.

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the
position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language
than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as
tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to
take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water, as
it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of
men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation
of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he
loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most
large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial
atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all
men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a
monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be
answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to
have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered, we
should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours
was answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in
human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white,
and the party which sees it white against black, the party which
macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice because the background is
full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns
itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches because it
stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are
old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts
of happiness, and we who are its misers.

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr. Adderley's book, the clear and
tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire "brother," and the
water "sister," in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes "that they alone were saved in the Flood." In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments,
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his
genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the
weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast,
and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and
more transparent life.

The general attitude of St. Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
"Alice in Wonderland"--"Why not?" impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages, and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world
was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the
reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives
were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that
the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in
it the features of a new friend.




ROSTAND


When "Cyrano de Bergerac" was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due
to the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies
of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for
remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for
"Frenchiness." The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school
which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view
which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.
The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, _par excellence_, a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr. Max Beerbohm's "Happy
Hypocrite" are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter
nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,
the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken
seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with
more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such
comedies one laughs with the heroes, and not at them. The humour which
steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not
superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.
Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were
the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of
comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, "A
Sentimental Comedy." The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.

"Cyrano de Bergerac" came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his
highest moment of happiness, _Il me faut des géants_. An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing _bouts rimés_. In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of
youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an
unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the
moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak, it is because we have
an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or
artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering
attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like
"Cyrano de Bergerac," speaking in rhyme, it is not our language
disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes
answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each
other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or
in love they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent
the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul.
Monsieur Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called
"Cyrano de Bergerac" a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking,
it ends with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a
spiritual breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the
spiritual sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not
the facts themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and
comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck.
The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of
"L'Aiglon," now being performed with so much success. Although the hero
is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a
personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have
been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pæan of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so
high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the
characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern
life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of
the wounded cry out, _Les corbeaux, les corbeaux_, the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, _Où, où, sont les
aigles?_ That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When
an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor, he replies, _La fatigue_, and at that a veteran private of the
Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, _Et nous?_ pours out
a terrible description of the life lived by the commoner soldier.
To-day, when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion
as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life
in few other words but _la fatigue_, there might surely come a cry from
the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning--_et nous?_ It is
this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the
function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's "Much Ado
About Nothing" is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole
pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is
common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. "Love's Labour's Lost" is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our
subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically
as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love
is to the Shakespearean comedies, that other and more mysterious human
passion, the love of death, is to "L'Aiglon." Whether we shall ever have
in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present
to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that
comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,
that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.
Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not
shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when
the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final
word, they all cry together _Vive l'Empereur!_ Monsieur Rostand,
perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field
of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing
but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of
them should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life, as
they are in modern art, the only voices; they are the voices of men, but
not the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their
conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice
and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, _Vive l'Empereur_.




CHARLES II


There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II.,
one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things
Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very
satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism, both in
its advantages and disadvantages, is greatly misunderstood in our time.
There is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with
such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of
course a mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories
simply because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a
spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing
round an African idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as
Darwin. He thinks that mysticism is every bit as rational as
rationalism. He has indeed the most profound doubts as to whether St.
Matthew wrote his own gospel. But he has quite equally profound doubts
as to whether the tree he is looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in
the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in
the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between
atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and
fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the
most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day
of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man
to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there
are no insects in any of the stars.

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might
not be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and
poetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous
mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as
outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly a
dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to guard himself against hell
fire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the
world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase,
the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed
themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and
sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was
consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.

The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a
moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that
some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the
saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in
these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and
the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat
more exhaustive study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood
when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is
insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the
good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire
of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,
which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that
the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that
they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that
they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans
fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,
through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never
satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson
that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always
wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the
head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily
men of violence. We speak of "touching" a man's heart, but we can do
nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the
bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and
conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the
tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human
spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved
and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,
madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were
fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which
means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in
that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a
little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality
of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a
pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed
parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be
left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely
account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and
horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts
also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a
nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the
type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of
politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in
little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the
ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts
of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those
acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which
lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. "Charles II.," said
Thackeray, with unerring brevity, "was a rascal, but not a snob." Unlike
George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys
strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises
strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was
the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But
more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a
recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.
That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too
far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an
almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration
infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a
collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism
was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true
order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no
effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been
widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot
compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and
almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But
the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.
seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and
poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears
inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with
the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not
only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even
for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the
pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game
of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as
arduous to write "Paradise Lost" as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,
though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and
poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly
significant as the phrase "killing time." It is a tremendous and
poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There are on
the earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,
fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the
men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we
have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place
among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged to
those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher
epicureans who make time live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful
head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all
his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless
flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning
politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly
that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived
almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was,
as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism,
it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is
the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave.
Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them,
professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were,
like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality
broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and
problems we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than
their laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty.




STEVENSON[1]


A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we
suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,
from the scorn of "Ephemera Critica" and Mr. George Moore, that
Stevenson had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of
being misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs.
Chatto & Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson's works,
"Robert Louis Stevenson," by Mr. H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he
has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by
his admirers. Mr. Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about
Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by
any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially "Beau Austin," is
remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes
far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality
which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can
number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame
with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of
the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very
things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express.

Mr. Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his
"pessimism"; surely a strange charge against a man who has done more
than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But
he complains that, in "The Master of Ballantrae" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde," Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was
one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised
than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and
beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space
and time. "Whatever we are intended to do," he said, "we are not
intended to succeed." That the stars in their courses fight against
virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very
spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to
all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone
stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It
is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an
old church and see none in the ruins of a man.

The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood
and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we
use Mr. Baildon's own phrase) a kind of "homicidal mania." "He
[Stevenson] arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be
better employed than in taking life." Mr. Baildon might as well say that
Dr. Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr.
Clark Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr. Wilkie Collins thought
that one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones
and falsifying marriage registers. But Mr. Baildon is scarcely alone in
this error: few people have understood properly the goriness of
Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws
skeletons and gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took
pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular
and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the
life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman
and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there
are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.
The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such
stories as "The Master of Ballantrae" and "Weir of Hermiston." But there
is another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abrupt
and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a
blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the
standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of "Treasure Island" and "The
Wrecker." It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he
loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring
universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as
has not been known since St. Francis called the sun brother and the well
sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that
Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones left
at the "Admiral Benbow," with the knife that Wicks drove through his own
hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain clean-cut
angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with
an axe.

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an
object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, "The Destroying Angel,"
in "The Dynamiter," that it is "highly fantastic and putting a strain
on our credulity." This is rather like describing the travels of Baron
Munchausen as "unconvincing." The whole story of "The Dynamiter" is a
kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story "The Destroying
Angel" is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the
moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability
is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr. Baildon, whether from
hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least
comprehend that rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories.
He actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel
of Bohemia, that, "though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me
on the whole rather an irritating presence." From this we are almost
driven to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr.
Baildon thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he
were a man in real life. For ourselves. Prince Florizel is almost our
favourite character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that
if we met him in real life we should kill him.

The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and
intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional
virtue--that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great
message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters,
it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his
light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone
supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his
versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well
enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,
pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could
not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can
play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he
is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly
well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has
happened in the case of Stevenson. If "Dr. Jekyll," "The Master of
Ballantrae," "The Child's Garden of Verses," and "Across the Plains" had
been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by
succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he
has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But
the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mohamet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as
that of James Watt. The conception which unites the whole varied work of
Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of
things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the
soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious
thing. The germ of all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape
or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing
before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a
mere fact that no one has been through it but an elderly female cook.
But everything exists in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own
brain, and there it is the shrine and theatre of some strange chance
between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for
the conception that ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are
our adventures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met
one. And this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he
had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a
hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of
the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge "The Teller of
Tales" (as the Samoans called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as
one would judge Mr. George Moore by "Esther Waters." These novels were
only the two or three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell.
But he died with a thousand stories in his heart.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism." By H. Bellyse
Baildon. Chatto & Windus.




THOMAS CARLYLE


There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the
first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second
is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was
the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's alleged
gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and
as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his
"liver" is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a
"Sartor Resartus," it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is.
Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with
the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults and
literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the
situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult
to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal
predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage
egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. "Ruskin," says a critic, "did, all the same, verily
believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself." This is certainly a
distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has
not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have
believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,
because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was
not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief
in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis,
Bunyan, Wesley, Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable
variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man
as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear
and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not
only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must
absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense
of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has
the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets--humour. A man
must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan
delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted
Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of
cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion
was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of
its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.
So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and
literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had
seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of
them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and
eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the
passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates
that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as "falling asleep in the
Lord." "Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick
night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through
unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more ... and we go on, if
not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones."

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the
founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern
rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or
valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive
tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual
system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the
trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the
trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual
intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic
is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up
the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind,
and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.
When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using
words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an
extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant
is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering
from "nerves," which is about as sensible as talking about a man
suffering from ten fingers. We speak of "liver" and "digestion" when we
mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same
manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the
danger of fallacy.

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial
overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat
different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they
bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.
Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to
forget that there are two parts of a logical process, the first the
choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it, and
humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound
assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational
and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as "He did not prove the
very thing with which he started," or, "The whole of his case rested
upon a pure assumption," two peculiarities which may be found by the
curious in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how
constantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic,
apparently without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having
lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a
man's assumption. For instance, two men will argue about whether
patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all,
that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man
should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no
prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very
start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has
feathers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments,
but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men
of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed
directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be
true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and
more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where
his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and
beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the
age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which
assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth
century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century,
according to him, depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to
be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but
the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real
ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last
era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there
has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,
as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common
sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the
dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally
demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common sense are
alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have
no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in
breaking through formulæ, old and new, to these old and silent and
ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times
over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and
woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for
the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,
it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About
hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to
Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he
sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were
a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his
philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and
arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some
questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not
that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided
and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous
and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in
them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to
rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone
invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with
admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.
Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero
worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great
men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were
more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and
his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship
of valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part
of all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact
that he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of
that modern habit of what is vulgarly called "Going the whole hog."
Often in matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog.
This remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion,
politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for
opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is
a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon
and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were
melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of
to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him
dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a
good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly
possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take
the same view of the wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at
Donnybrook Fair. It was this species of insane logic which led him into
his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example.
Carlyle's defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak
alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took
it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence
of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that
slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is,
indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its
thoughtful defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons
could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of
the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the
good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for
the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service
of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is
no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed
he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a
child--for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very
type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute
contradiction to that human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that
a man should be owned like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had
no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular
error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious example of the
waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, "the whole
hog," more than once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an
unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic
which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for
once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately
deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.
Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though
Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle
being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,
they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and
pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to
everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it
can hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual courage brought many at
last.




TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY


The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not
deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false
innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,
who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous
expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of
peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep
and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before
we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are
contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to
simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always
sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,
suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and
staring face.

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are
upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more
fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to
undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,
classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,
who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with
colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going
yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is
certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes
the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is
a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of
our time represent in one form or another this attempt to reestablish
communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly
and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the
return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it
consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think
that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into
ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into
very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according
to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself
with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to
kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would
be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the
claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is
interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of
paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth
of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike
in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the
return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of
fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to
nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he
can reject.

Now, this heroic desire to return to nature, is, of course, in some
respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own
tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and
soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but
characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is
impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if
attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in
the sense that it vitally important, if it is to discharge its real
duty, that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see
nature, especially our own nature, face to face, is a folly; it is even
a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who
should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would
find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the
world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search
of nature, when seen from the outside, looks very like the gyrations of
the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,
much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is
omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think
that she is heeding us least. "Thou art a God that hidest Thyself," said
the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a
man's back that the spirit of nature hides.

It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to
all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We
feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on
complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments, that a man cannot
make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far
more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of
the pomp and sumptuousness of the world's history was simple in the
truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the
work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

  "King Solomon brought merchant men
    Because of his desire
  With peacocks, apes, and ivory,
    From Tarshish unto Tyre."

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a
part of his folly--I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel,
would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at "Solomon in
all his glory." With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step
further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the
shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.

The new collection of "Tales from Tolstoy," translated and edited by Mr.
R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this
ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's work. In one sense, and that the
deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble
appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is
pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that an
artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his
landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique--all the part of his
work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by
the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his
opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the
ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the
bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real
moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral
which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably
unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently
disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all
the tales, the folklore simplicity with which "a man or a woman" are
spoken of without further identification, the love--one might almost say
the lust--for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood,
and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient
kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man--these
influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and
tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene
purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small
sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect
to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan
and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy
has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist
who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.

It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with
Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a
man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of
humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that
dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a
man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending
emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of
their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to
believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the
earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the
landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that
which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is
difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable
insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay
the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search
after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more
natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it
would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest
kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done,
accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called,
the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.

The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It
represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common sense which
characterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we
cannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our
cloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vain-glorious,
too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in other
words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of
Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached
to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a
sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon
on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the
way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and
self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot
turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that
we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they
have the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign
they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent
thing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which
is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every
existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more
formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only
succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with
the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the
maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are
conquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated
by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can,
conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St. George did not conquer the
dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of
milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would
have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the
Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with
the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed
up in the celebrated verse of Mr. Edward Lear:

  "There was an old man who said, 'How
  Shall I flee from this terrible cow?
  I will sit on a stile and continue to smile
  Till I soften the heart of this cow.'"

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;
it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of
mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But
although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to
consider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some
brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a
singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come
to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our
modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion
more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.

From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered
almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It
turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially
possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty
casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this
phenomenon as it realty is.

The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an
extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist
philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon
its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of
the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and
supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to
triumph over many kings and civilise many continents. We all agree that
these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we
all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day
is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a
Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,
like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are
symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who
did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been
outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer
race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than
nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single
cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the
elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They
have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have arraigned
theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower than they
have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly and
conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national
limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like
a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this
saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals
of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this
school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr. Watts or
Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was
such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.
Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven
asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the
phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the
ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen,
who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the
gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid
themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes
written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it
something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in
its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees
the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of
a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark
sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in
themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

This value which we have above suggested unquestionably belongs to the
Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their
strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer
a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot
but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the
rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of
non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think,
characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its
supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary
number of statements about the new Testament, of which the accuracy is
by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must
protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time.
When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all
what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had
expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and
answer:

Q. "How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?"

A. "Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in
the spirit world is merciful, is perfect."

There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said
except the abominable metaphysical modernism of "the spirit world"; but
to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is
recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and
unadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words have
meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient
sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had
the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain
printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are
mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and
philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with
flatly denying: "The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take
special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign
countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have
an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people,
and those who are in sympathy with us." I should very much like to know
where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent,
unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of
regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that
there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most
improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own.
The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest
compliment He paid was, "Behold an Israelite indeed." The author has
simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to
have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to
speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering
nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must
be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we
love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as
sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.
Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved
men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a
gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure
to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of
humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their
own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the
teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and
ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching--its
absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern
interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except
with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous
and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it
before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced
afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any
elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle
words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the
sun was darkened at noonday.




SAVONAROLA


Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we
know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not
know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may
never understand Savonarola.

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from
calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the
ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:
the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved
us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared
with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can
fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it
satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;
not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from
luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous
psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name
has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and
civilisation potentially the end of man.

For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his
day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern
rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,
dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of
Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the
crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not
be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely
picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish
enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate
the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is
precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.
He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen
jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;
that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and
pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist
would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred
of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are
sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which
all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the
sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that
clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as
to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has
truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally
anti-æsthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,
and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity
are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently
the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires
a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads
to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old
with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The
monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of
imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as
it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be
surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that
of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt
to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the
doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is
nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as
the saying that they are all the sons of God.

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men
as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to
fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those
which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is
more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense
that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In
many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly
Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The
bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far
more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the
Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for
the strong man which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is
worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the "Bow Bells
Novelettes," and for the same reason--a profound sense of personal
weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is
the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs
or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in
everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The
issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of
liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the
security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of
pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among
us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the
moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp
and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political
philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon
the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their
statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while "Macbeth" is in
comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their
campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar and
Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell
of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole
nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer
merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr. M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other,
and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.




THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT


Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now
dwindling, schools of severely technical and æsthetic criticism have
been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if
there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is
in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire
whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,
is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects
carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the
incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter
could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are
neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it
exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like
the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing
that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too
large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be
really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's
consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is
difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it
seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some
disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is
not because they are giants, but because they are hunchbacks or
cripples. Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I
do not think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on
which his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He
arranged his endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an
architect plans great gates and long approaches to a really large
house. He did not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a
story. He enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a
story like a pill, that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to
taste it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time.
The reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of
immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not
be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart
of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without
either beginning or close.

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never
be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when
Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than
any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these
days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises
from one fundamental mistake--the idea that romance is in some way a
plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the
outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have
grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but
absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a
dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like
toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege
and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)
is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow
incision, if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.
Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering and
sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of can-dour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but
it does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanity
which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that
is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance
we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure
are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the
multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy
or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental
reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked
in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of certain
human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden
bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the
selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a
net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His finest scenes
affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have the same
quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal comedies--that of
seeming more human than our waking life--even while they are less
possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the old beggar
crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the tide closes
around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of practical
situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be called
boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sunset. Rob
Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie,
draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling
external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain
and humourous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance
which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps the most
profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in which the
family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or
may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely
possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a
ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous
old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes
these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that
here the wind blows strong.

It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness
that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the
contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of
romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case by
this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast multiplication
of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of
Mr. Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of their hands;
the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the sword is at
the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be pictured.
The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper except in
the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is employed in
lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there is no
characteristic so typical or so worthy of humour as their disposition to
linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of Copmanhurst
or of Mr. Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are described
as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In
short, Mr. Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that the sole
essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to
incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment
of "Oh! still delay, thou art so fair"! more of a certain patriarchal
enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the side and the
wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so
much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How little
the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and weapons
may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of adventure is
concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert island with two
guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful
and monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The
critic in the _Edinburgh Review_ said indignantly that he could tolerate
a somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it
came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and
yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about
that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly
imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's
sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott
valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a
dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,
as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the
profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is
this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own
inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the
wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with
Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps
the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the
only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a
character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the
matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a
menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating--it was a two-handed sword.

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in
recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is
compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature
had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal
heroes in the "Waverley Novels" retort upon each other with a passionate
dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly be
paralleled in political eloquence except in "Julius Cæsar." With a
certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his
noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain
every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of
Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,
for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting
miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the
passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of
putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems
frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the
scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then
compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing
bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself,
or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion
upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just
now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating
ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom.

In politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence
in the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders
purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing
questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war
uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would
have used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions of
facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in
prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilies
hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: "Ride your ways. Laird
of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour
burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar
houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may
stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare
does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey
Bertram."

The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott
was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just
as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object
of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls,
to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have
any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside
it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms,
but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with roars of
popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting any
central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to think
of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of eloquence,
the whole question is one of the immediate effect of greatness, such as
is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to call it merely
superficial; here there is no question of superficiality; we might as
well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial.
The very word "superficial" is founded on a fundamental mistake about
life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impression
of the world is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and
casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends,
that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to
our dying day.

Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who
approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.
We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring
melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit
that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond
all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to
simplify one's mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. "You
do me wrong," said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. "Many a law, many
a commandment have I broken, but my word, never." "Die," cries Balfour
of Burley to the villain in "Old Mortality." "Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing--" "And fearing nothing," replies the other. This is
the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the
great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along
with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,
and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly
effected.

Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction
by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of
the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr. Henry James) is primarily
concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper
and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which
mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.
Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr. Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of "Candida" it is clearly a
part of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be
eloquent, but he is not eloquent because the whole "G.B.S." condition of
mind renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.
Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the
way that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains. It is
the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word
artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was
never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some
motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we
think.

Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,
for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no
adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have
compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the
poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish, neglected and nameless.
It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and
pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of
eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr. Johnson. To him, as to
most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an institution--a
toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and King. But it is
far better to consider the difference rather as a special merit, in that
he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks of incident which are
untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain breezy bachelorhood,
which is almost essential to the literature of adventure. With all his
faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the great mass of natural
manliness which must be absorbed into art unless art is to be a mere
luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test
of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and
defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round
ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible perfection,
leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that strange old world which is
as confused and as indefensible and as inspiring and as healthy as he.




BRET HARTE


There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons
which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte. But one
supreme reason stands not in a certain general superiority to them
all--a reason which may be stated in three propositions united in a
common conclusion: first, that he was a genuine American; second, that
he was a genuine humourist; and, third, that he was not an American
humourist. Bret Harte had his own peculiar humour, but it had nothing in
particular to do with American humour. American humour has its own
peculiar excellence, but it has nothing in particular to do with Bret
Harte. American humour is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte's humour was
sympathetic and analytical.

In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely
and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international
difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world--the
joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat--we shall yet find
that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it
humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be
in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator
in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he
could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose,
full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, "Should I be in
order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that
when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?" Here is a glorious
example of Irish humour--the bull not unconscious, not entirely
conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can
hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would
have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman's
humour would have been logical: he would have said, "The orator
denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a
good example!" What the Scotchman's humour would have said I am not so
certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability
of making such speeches on top of someone else's hat. But American
humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The
American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat
down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one
crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to
speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the
House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the
debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised
by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the
subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither
unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and
appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of
realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.
It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of
heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.

With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing
in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine
qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two
qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of
supreme importance to humour--reverence and sympathy. And these two
qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humour.
Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he ought to be read and
enjoyed will remember a very funny and irreverent story about an
organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the
parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great
spirit, "We'll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home."
The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American
humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would
in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the
incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme. You
would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the
Prodigal Son was funny. But America is under a kind of despotism of
humour. Everyone is afraid of humour: the meanest of human nightmares.
Bret Harte had, to express the matter briefly but more or less
essentially, the power of laughing not only at things, but also with
them. America has laughed at things magnificently, with Gargantuan
reverberations of laughter. But she has not even begun to learn the
richer lesson of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of
reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist.
This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of
many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as
whether it is not obviously true. Mere derision, mere contempt, never
produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski
for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable
imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to
parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through
one process first: he must admire it, and even reverence it. Bret Harte
had a real power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies on
Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Brontë. This means, and can only
mean, that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas
and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë. To take an example, Bret Harte has
in his imitation of Hugo a passage like this:

"M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an
angel. M. Madeline was a good man." I do not know whether Victor Hugo
ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it
and thanked his stars if he had thought of it. This is real parody,
inseparable from admiration. It is the same in the parody of Dumas,
which is arranged on the system of "Aramis killed three of them. Porthos
three. Athos three." You cannot write that kind of thing unless you
have first exulted in the arithmetical ingenuity of the plots of Dumas.
It is the same in the parody of Charlotte Brontë, which opens with a
dream of a storm-beaten cliff, containing jewels and pelicans. Bret
Harte could not have written it unless he had really understood the
triumph of the Brontës, the triumph of asserting that great mysteries
lie under the surface of the most sullen life, and that the most real
part of a man is in his dreams.

This kind of parody is for ever removed from the purview of ordinary
American humour. Can anyone imagine Mark Twain, that admirable author,
writing even a tolerable imitation of authors so intellectually
individual as Hugo or Charlotte Brontë? Mark Twain would yield to the
spirit of contempt which destroys parody. All those who hate authors
fail to satirise them, for they always accuse them of the wrong faults.
The enemies of Thackeray call him a worldling, instead of what he was, a
man too ready to believe in the goodness of the unworldly. The enemies
of Meredith call his gospel too subtle, instead of what it is, a
gospel, if anything, too robust. And it is this vulgar misunderstanding
which we find in most parody--which we find in all American parody--but
which we never find in the parodies of Bret Harte.

  "The skies they were ashen and sober,
  The streets they were dirty and drear,
  It was the dark month of October,
  In that most immemorial year.
  Like the skies, I was perfectly sober,
  But my thoughts they were palsied and sear,
  Yes, my thoughts were decidedly queer."

This could only be written by a genuine admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, who
permitted himself for a moment to see the fun of the thing. Parody might
indeed be defined as the worshipper's half-holiday.

The same general characteristic of sympathy amounting to reverence marks
Bret Harte's humour in his better-known class of works, the short
stories. He does not make his characters absurd in order to make them
contemptible: it might almost be said that he makes them absurd in order
to make them dignified. For example, the greatest creation of Bret
Harte, greater even than Colonel Starbottle (and how terrible it is to
speak of anyone greater than Colonel Starbottle!) is that unutterable
being who goes by the name of Yuba Bill. He is, of course, the
coach-driver in the Bret Harte district. Some ingenious person, whose
remarks I read the other day, had compared him on this ground with old
Mr. Weller. It would be difficult to find a comparison indicating a more
completely futile instinct for literature. Tony Weller and Yuba Bill
were both coach-drivers, and this fact establishes a resemblance just
about as much as the fact that Jobson in "Rob Roy" and George Warrington
in "Pendennis" were both lawyers; or that Antonio and Mr. Pickwick were
both merchants; or that Sir Galahad and Sir Willoughby Patten were both
knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and
his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is
garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that
great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much
that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten
o'clock at night, and that nights last forever. But Yuba Bill is a
figure of a widely different character. He is not convivial; it might
almost be said that he is too great ever to be sociable. A circle of
quiescence and solitude such as that which might ring a saint or a
hermit rings this majestic and profound humourist. His jokes do not flow
upon him like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling, continual, and deliberate,
like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and
capriciously, like a crash of avalanches from a great mountain. Tony
Weller has the noisy humour of London, Yuba Bill has the silent humour
of the earth.

One of the worst of the disadvantages of the rich and random fertility
of Bret Harte is the fact that it is very difficult to trace or recover
all the stories that he has written. I have not within reach at the
moment the story in which the character of Yuba Bill is exhibited in its
most solemn grandeur, but I remember that it concerned a ride on the
San Francisco stage coach, a difficulty arising from storm and darkness,
and an intelligent young man who suggested to Yuba Bill that a certain
manner of driving the coach in a certain direction might minimise the
dangers of the journey. A profound silence followed the intelligent
young man's suggestion, and then (I quote from memory) Yuba Bill
observed at last:

"Air you settin' any value on that remark?"

The young man professed not fully to comprehend him, and Yuba Bill
continued reflectively:

"'Cos there's a comic paper in 'Frisco pays for them things, and I've
seen worse in it."

To be rebuked thus is like being rebuked by the Pyramids or by the
starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm,
a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like
that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressively
increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte
paints so powerfully; the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking
and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge
dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humour.

Another unrecovered and possibly irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill,
I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his
protége in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished
literary man in Boston. Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him in
evening dress lifts up his voice in a superb lamentation over the
tragedy of finding his old friend at last "a 'otel waiter." Then,
vindictively pursuing the satire, he calls fiercely to his young friend,
"Hi, Alphonse! bring me a patty de foy gras, damme." These are the
things that make us love the eminent Bill. He is one of those who
achieve the noblest and most difficult of all the triumphs of a
fictitious character--the triumph of giving us the impression of having
a great deal more in him than appears between the two boards of the
story. Smaller characters give us the impression that the author has
told the whole truth about them, greater characters give the impression
that the author has given of them, not the truth, but merely a few hints
and samples. In some mysterious way we seem to feel that even if
Shakespeare was wrong about Falstaff, Falstaff existed and was real;
that even if Dickens was wrong about Micawber, Micawber existed and was
real. So we feel that there is in the great salt-sea of Yuba Bill's
humour as good fish as ever came out of it. The fleeting jests which
Yuba Bill throws to the coach passengers only give us the opportunity of
fancying and deducing the vast mass of jests which Yuba Bill shares with
his creator.

Bret Harte had to deal with countries and communities of an almost
unexampled laxity, a laxity passing the laxity of savages, the laxity of
civilised men grown savage. He dealt with a life which we in a venerable
and historic society may find it somewhat difficult to realise. It was
the life of an entirely new people, a people who, having no certain
past, could have no certain future. The strangest of all the sardonic
jests that history has ever played may be found in this fact: that
there is a city which is of all cities the most typical of innovation
and dissipation, and a certain almost splendid vulgarity, and that this
city bears the name in a quaint old European language of the most
perfect exponent of the simplicity and holiness of the Christian
tradition; the city is called San Francisco. San Francisco, the capital
of the Bret Harte country, is a city typifying novelty in a manner in
which it is typified by few modern localities. San Francisco has in all
probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are
less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its
inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose
worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing
compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint
tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was
new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, bad, and indifferent,
heroes and dastards, they were all men from nowhere.

Most of us have come across the practical problem of London landladies,
the problem of the doubtful foreign gentleman in a street of respectable
English people. Those who have done so can form some idea of what it
would be to live in a street full of doubtful foreign gentlemen, in a
parish, in a city, in a nation composed entirely of doubtful foreign
gentlemen. Old California, at the time of the first rush after gold, was
actually this paradox of the nation of foreigners. It was a republic of
incognitos: no one knew who anyone else was, and only the more
ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. In such a country as this,
gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves
living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism. In
such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone is a stranger. In
such a country it is not strange if men in moral matters feel something
of the irresponsibility of a dream. To plan plans which are continually
miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing by the
assistance of you know not whom, to crush you know not whom, this must
be a demoralising life for any man; it must be beyond description
demoralising for those who have been trained in no lofty or orderly
scheme of right. Small blame to them indeed if they become callous and
supercilious and cynical. And the great glory and achievement of Bret
Harte consists in this, that he realised that they do not become
callous, supercilious, and cynical, but that they do become sentimental
and romantic, and profoundly affectionate. He discovered the intense
sensibility of the primitive man. To him we owe the realisation of the
fact that while modern barbarians of genius like Mr. Henley, and in his
weaker moments Mr. Rudyard Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness
and crude cynicism and fierce humour of the unlettered classes, the
unlettered classes are in reality highly sentimental and religious, and
not in the least like the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret
Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the grossest, the most
rapacious of all the districts of the earth--the truth that, while it is
very rare indeed in the world to find a thoroughly good man, it is
rarer still, rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who does
not either desire to be one, or imagine that he is one already.




ALFRED THE GREAT


The celebrations in connection with the millenary of King Alfred struck
a note of sympathy in the midst of much that was unsympathetic, because,
altogether apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men feel the
sanctifying character of that which is at once strong and remote; the
ancient thing is always the most homely, and the distant thing the most
near. The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since by the
sublime religious story a dead man only could reconcile heaven and
earth. In a certain sense we always feel the past ages as human, and our
own age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised. In our own time the
details overpower us; men's badges and buttons seem to grow larger and
larger as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the present is like
studying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past is
like studying it through a telescope.

For this reason England, like every other great and historic nation, has
sought its typical hero in remote and ill-recorded times. The personal
and moral greatness of Alfred is, indeed, beyond question. It does not
depend any more than the greatness of any other human hero upon the
accuracy of any or all of the stories that are told about him. Alfred
may not have done one of the things which are reported of him, but it is
immeasurably easier to do every one of those things than to be the man
of whom such things are reported falsely. Fable is, generally speaking,
far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his
own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable
antiquarians many centuries after. Whether Alfred watched the cakes for
the neat-herd's wife, whether he sang songs in the Danish camp, is of no
interest to anyone except those who set out to prove under considerable
disadvantages that they are genealogically descended from him. But the
man is better pictured in these stories than in any number of modern
realistic trivialities about his favourite breakfast and his favourite
musical composer. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells
us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. If we read of a
man who could make green grass red and turn the sun into the moon, we
may not believe these particular details about him, but we learn
something infinitely more important than such trivialities, the fact
that men could look into his face and believe it possible. The glory and
greatness of Alfred, therefore, is like that of all the heroes of the
morning of the world, set far beyond the chance of that strange and
sudden dethronement which may arise from the unsealing of a manuscript
or the turning over of a stone. Men may have told lies when they said
that he first entrapped the Danes with his song and then overcame them
with his armies, but we know very well that it is not of us that such
lies are told. There may be myths clustering about each of our
personalities; local saga-men and chroniclers have very likely
circulated the story that we are addicted to drink, or that we
ferociously ill-use our wives. But they do not commonly lie to the
effect that we have shed our blood to save all the inhabitants of the
street. A story grows easily, but a heroic story is not a very easy
thing to evoke. Wherever that exists we may be pretty certain that we
are in the presence of a dark but powerful historic personality. We are
in the presence of a thousand lies all pointing with their fantastic
fingers to one undiscovered truth.

Upon this ground alone every encouragement is due to the cult of Alfred.
Every nation requires to have behind it some historic personality, the
validity of which is proved, as the validity of a gun is proved, by its
long range. It is wonderful and splendid that we treasure, not the
truth, but the very gossip about a man who died a thousand years ago. We
may say to him, as M. Rostand says to the Austrian Prince:

  "Dors, ce n'est pas toujours la Légende qui ment:
  Une rêve est parfois moins trompeur qu'un document."

To have a man so simple and so honourable to represent us in the
darkness of primeval history, binds all the intervening centuries
together, and mollifies all their monstrosities. It makes all history
more comforting and intelligible; it makes the desolate temple of the
ages as human as an inn parlour.

But whether it come through reliable facts or through more reliable
falsehoods the personality of Alfred has its own unmistakable colour and
stature. Lord Rosebery uttered a profound truth when he said that that
personality was peculiarly English. The great magnificence of the
English character is expressed in the word "service." There is, perhaps,
no nation so vitally theocratical as the English; no nation in which the
strong men have so consistently preferred the instrumental to the
despotic attitude, the pleasures of the loyal to the pleasures of the
royal position. We have had tyrants like Edward I. and Queen Elizabeth,
but even our tyrants have had the worried and responsible air of
stewards of a great estate. Our typical hero is such a man as the Duke
of Wellington, who had every kind of traditional and external arrogance,
but at the back of all that the strange humility which made it
physically possible for him without a gleam of humour or discomfort to
go on his knees to a preposterous bounder like George IV. Across the
infinite wastes of time and through all the mists of legend we still
feel the presence in Alfred of this strange and unconscious
self-effacement. After the fullest estimate of our misdeeds we can still
say that our very despots have been less self-assertive than many
popular patriots. As we consider these things we grow more and more
impatient of any modern tendencies towards the enthronement of a more
self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our
imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast
modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread
Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the
world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full
of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything
but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a
great man of old time our inventions and appliances have not the
vulgarity and ugliness that we see in them. To Alfred a steamboat would
be a new and sensational sea-dragon, and the penny postage a miracle
achieved by the despotism of a demi-god.

But when we have realised all this there is something more to be said in
connection with Lord Rosebery's vision. What would King Alfred have said
if he had been asked to expend the money which he devoted to the health
and education of his people upon a struggle with some race of Visigoths
or Parthians inhabiting a small section of a distant continent? What
would he have said if he had known that that science of letters which he
taught to England would eventually be used not to spread truth, but to
drug the people with political assurances as imbecile in themselves as
the assurance that fire does not burn and water does not drown? What
would he have said if the same people who, in obedience to that ideal of
service and sanity of which he was the example, had borne every
privation in order to defeat Napoleon, should come at last to find no
better compliment to one of their heroes than to call him the Napoleon
of South Africa? What would he have said if that nation for which he had
inaugurated a long line of incomparable men of principle should forget
all its traditions and coquette with the immoral mysticism of the man of
destiny?

Let us follow these things by all means if we find them good, and can
see nothing better. But to pretend that Alfred would have admired them
is like pretending that St. Dominic would have seen eye to eye with Mr.
Bradlaugh, or that Fra Angelico would have revelled in the posters of
Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. Let us follow them if we will, but let us take
honestly all the disadvantages of our change; in the wildest moment of
triumph let us feel the shadow upon our glories of the shame of the
great king.




MAETERLINCK


The selection of "Thoughts from Maeterlinck" is a very creditable and
also a very useful compilation. Many modern critics object to the
hacking and hewing of a consistent writer which is necessary for this
kind of work, but upon more serious consideration, the view is not
altogether adequate. Maeterlinck is a very great man; and in the long
run this process of mutilation has happened to all great men. It was the
mark of a great patriot to be drawn and quartered and his head set on
one spike in one city and his left leg on another spike in another city.
It was the mark of a saint that even these fragments began to work
miracles. So it has been with all the very great men of the world.
However careless, however botchy, may be the version of Maeterlinck or
of anyone else given in such a selection as this, it is assuredly far
less careless and far less botchy than the version, the parody, the
wild misrepresentation of Maeterlinck which future ages will hear and
distant critics be called upon to consider.

No one can feel any reasonable doubt that we have heard about Christ and
Socrates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere chaos of excerpts, a mere
book of quotations. But from those fragmentary epigrams we can deduce
greatness as clearly as we can deduce Venus from the torso of Venus or
Hercules _ex pede Herculem_. If we knew nothing else about the Founder
of Christianity, for example, beyond the fact that a religious teacher
lived in a remote country, and in the course of his peregrinations and
proclamations consistently called Himself "the Son of Man," we should
know by that alone that he was a man of almost immeasurable greatness.
If future ages happened to record nothing else about Socrates except
that he owned his title to be the wisest of men because he knew that he
knew nothing, they would be able to deduce from that the height and
energy of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of
such random compilations as that which "E.S.S." and Mr. George Allen
have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal
editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are
forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny
of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never
been founded upon consistent editions; all of them have been founded
upon scrap-books.

The position of Maeterlinck in modern life is a thing too obvious to be
easily determined in words. It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying
that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the
expense of the outside. There is one great evil in modern life for which
nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description: I can only
invent a word and call it "remotism." It is the tendency to think first
of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual
centre of human experience. Thus people say, "All our knowledge of life
begins with the amoeba." It is false; our knowledge of life begins with
ourselves. Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the
very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and
Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs
to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills. The one real struggle
in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who
sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the
outside as the truth. A hundred cases might be given. We may take, for
the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love. The
sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical
science, says, "You may, if you like, describe this thing as a divine
and sacred and incredible vision; that is your sentimental theory about
it. But what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for
certain natural purposes." The man on the other side, the idealist,
replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of
the truth. I put it as it has always struck me; he replies, "Not at all.
You may, if you like, describe this thing as an animal and sexual
instinct, designed for certain natural purposes; that is your
philosophical or zoölogical theory about it. What it is, beyond all
doubt of any kind, is a divine and sacred and incredible vision." The
fact that it is an animal necessity only comes to the naturalistic
philosopher after looking abroad, studying its origins and results,
constructing an explanation of its existence, more or less natural and
conclusive. The fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to the first
errand boy who happens to feel it. If a lad of seventeen falls in love
and is struck dead by a hansom cab an hour afterwards, he has known the
thing as it is, a spiritual ecstasy; he has never come to trouble about
the thing as it may be, a physical destiny. If anyone says that falling
in love is an animal thing, the answer is very simple. The only way of
testing the matter is to ask those who are experiencing it, and none of
those would admit for a moment that it was an animal thing.

Maeterlinck's appearance in Europe means primarily this subjective
intensity; by this the materialism is not overthrown: materialism is
undermined. He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism,
not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which
is more right than realism, but something which is more real than
realism. He discovers the one indestructible thing. This material world
on which such vast systems have been superimposed--this may mean
anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or
temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only
thing of which we are certain is this human soul. This human soul finds
itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought
forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; it will bring
them forth again. It matters not one atom how often the lulls of
materialism and scepticism occur; they are always broken by the
reappearance of a fanatic. They have come in our time: they have been
broken by Maeterlinck.




RUSKIN[2]


I do not think anyone could find any fault with the way in which Mr.
Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin
himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in
passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for
admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and
revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin's humour, and one of the
deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone
else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great
humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as "one-sided"
were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in
language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not
sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by
rhetoric. One tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a
modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of
nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbohm. Only ... he was fond of other things too.
He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.

But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship
with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the
last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early
Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit
above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have
destroyed it; humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as
scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and
persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away.
The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under
the last leadership of Mr. Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the
box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of
that prophecy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it.
It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical,
Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the
ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the
greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no
frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.

But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we
feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic
eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the
prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as
far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of
"Ibsenites" rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have
found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr. Henry James: an idea
full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches
shouting passages from "The Awkward Age." It is right and proper for a
multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the
world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that
he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the
multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made
roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany.
He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars,
where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue
unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to
the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were
torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will
never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.

Mr. Collingwood's excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin
would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the
after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of
Ruskin's teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it
was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that
Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old
error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to
revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he
could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance,
but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins
of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.

But neither in Mr. Collingwood's book nor in Ruskin's own delightful
"Præterita" shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of
Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness
of their victory. Fallen forever is that vast brick temple of
Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the
spell. Liberal Unionists howl in its high places, and in its ruins Mr.
Lecky builds his nest. Its records read with something of the mysterious
arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a
race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism
with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his
head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of
the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian
pictures--"an opening into eternity."

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "The Life of John Ruskin." By W.G. Collingwood. London: Methuen.




QUEEN VICTORIA


Anyone who possesses spiritual or political courage has made up his mind
to a prospect of immutable mutability; but even in a "transformation"
there is something catastrophic in the removal of the back scene. It is
a truism to say of the wise and noble lady who is gone from us that we
shall always remember her; but there is a subtler and higher compliment
still in confessing that we often forgot her. We forgot her as we forget
the sunshine, as we forget the postulates of an argument, as we commonly
forget our own existence. Mr. Gladstone is the only figure whose loss
prepared us for such earthquakes altering the landscape. But Mr.
Gladstone seemed a fixed and stationary object in our age for the same
reason that one railway train looks stationary from another; because he
and the age of progress were both travelling at the same impetuous rate
of speed. In the end, indeed, it was probably the age that dropped
behind. For a symbol of the Queen's position we must rather recur to the
image of a stretch of scenery, in which she was as a mountain so huge
and familiar that its disappearance would make the landscape round our
own door seem like a land of strangers. She had an inspired genius for
the familiarising virtues; her sympathy and sanity made us feel at home
even in an age of revolutions. That indestructible sense of security
which for good and evil is so typical of our nation, that almost
scornful optimism which, in the matter of ourselves, cannot take peril
or even decadence seriously, reached by far its highest and healthiest
form in the sense that we were watched over by one so thoroughly English
in her silence and self-control, in her shrewd trustfulness and her
brilliant inaction. Over and above those sublime laws of labour and pity
by which she ordered her life, there are a very large number of minor
intellectual matters in which we might learn a lesson from the Queen.
There is one especially which is increasingly needed in an age when
moral claims become complicated and hysterical. That Queen Victoria was
a model of political unselfishness is well known; it is less often
remarked that few modern people have an unselfishness so completely free
from morbidity, so fully capable of deciding a moral question without
exaggerating its importance. No eminent person of our time has been so
utterly devoid of that disease of self-assertion which is often rampant
among the unselfish. She had one most rare and valuable faculty, the
faculty of letting things pass--Acts of Parliament and other things. Her
predecessors, whether honest men or knaves, were attacked every now and
then with a nightmare of despotic responsibility; they suddenly
conceived that it rested with them to save the world and the Protestant
Constitution. Queen Victoria had far too much faith in the world to try
to save it. She knew that Acts of Parliament, even bad Acts of
Parliament, do not destroy nations. But she knew that ignorance,
ill-temper, tyranny, and officiousness do destroy nations, and not upon
any provocation would she set an example in these things. We fancy that
this sense of proportion, this largeness and coolness of intellectual
magnanimity is the one of the thousand virtues of Queen Victoria of
which the near future will stand most in need. We are gaining many new
mental powers, and with them new mental responsibilities. In psychology,
in sociology, above all in education, we are learning to do a great many
clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be
to learn not to do them. If that time comes, assuredly we cannot do
better than turn once more to the memory of the great Queen who for
seventy years followed through every possible tangle and distraction the
fairy thread of common sense.

We are suffering just now from an outbreak of the imagination which
exhibits itself in politics and the most unlikely places. The German
Emperor, for example, is neither a tyrant nor a lunatic, as used to be
absurdly represented; he is simply a minor poet; and he feels just as
any minor poet would feel if he found himself on the throne of
Barbarossa. The revival of militarism and ecclesiasticism is an invasion
of politics by the artistic sense; it is heraldry rather than chivalry
that is lusted after. Amid all this waving of wands and flaunting of
uniforms, all this hedonistic desire to make the most of everything,
there is something altogether quiet and splendid about the sober disdain
with which this simple and courteous lady in a black dress left idle
beside her the sceptre of a hundred tyrants. The heart of the whole
nation warmed as it had never warmed for centuries at the thought of
having in their midst a woman who cared nothing for her rights, and
nothing for those fantastic duties which are more egotistical than
rights themselves.

The work of the Queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly
underrated. She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt
invented the steam engine. William IV., from whom we think of her as
inheriting her Constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely
different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII. William IV. was
a limited monarch; that is to say, he had a definite, open, and
admitted power in politics, but it was a limited power. Queen Victoria
was not a limited monarch; in the only way in which she cared to be a
monarch at all she was as unlimited as Haroun Alraschid. She had
unlimited willing obedience, and unlimited social supremacy. To her
belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy; in which the
Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department
of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment,
was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and
purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does
not drive. Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident
completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political
supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of
the monarchy. She had her reward. For while William IV.'s supremacy may
be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen's
supremacy might be called a prophecy. By lifting a figure purely human
over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic
fashion the abiding, if unreasoning, hope which dwells in all human
hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of
nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some
such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in
the noble old language of mediæval monarchy, "a fountain of mercy and a
fountain of honour."

In the universal reverence paid to the Queen there was hardly anywhere a
touch of snobbishness. Snobbishness, in so far as it went out towards
former sovereigns, went out to them as aristocrats rather than as kings,
as heads of that higher order of men, who were almost angels or demons
in their admitted superiority to common lines of conduct. This kind of
reverence was always a curse: nothing can be conceived as worse for the
mass of the people than that they should think the morality for which
they have to struggle an inferior morality, a thing unfitted for a
haughtier class. But of this patrician element there was hardly a trace
in the dignity of the Queen. Indeed, the degree to which the middle and
lower classes took her troubles and problems to their hearts was almost
grotesque in its familiarity. No one thought of the Queen as an
aristocrat like the Duke of Devonshire, or even as a member of the
governing classes like Mr. Chamberlain. Men thought of her as something
nearer to them even in being further off; as one who was a good queen,
and who would have been, had her fate demanded, with equal cheerfulness,
a good washerwoman. Herein lay her unexampled triumph, the greatest and
perhaps the last triumph of monarchy. Monarchy in its healthiest days
had the same basis as democracy: the belief in human nature when
entrusted with power. A king was only the first citizen who received the
franchise.

Both royalty and religion have been accused of despising humanity, and
in practice it has been too often true; but after all both the
conception of the prophet and that of the king were formed by paying
humanity the supreme compliment of selecting from it almost at random.
This daring idea that a healthy human being, when thrilled by all the
trumpets of a great trust, would rise to the situation, has often been
tested, but never with such complete success as in the case of our dead
Queen. On her was piled the crushing load of a vast and mystical
tradition, and she stood up straight under it. Heralds proclaimed her as
the anointed of God, and it did not seem presumptuous. Brave men died in
thousands shouting her name, and it did not seem unnatural. No mere
intellect, no mere worldly success could, in this age of bold inquiry,
have sustained that tremendous claim; long ago we should have stricken
Cæsar and dethroned Napoleon. But these glories and these sacrifices did
not seem too much to celebrate a hardworking human nature; they were
possible because at the heart of our Empire was nothing but a defiant
humility. If the Queen had stood for any novel or fantastic imperial
claims, the whole would have seemed a nightmare; the whole was
successful because she stood, and no one could deny that she stood, for
the humblest, the shortest and the most indestructible of human gospels,
that when all troubles and troublemongers have had their say, our work
can be done till sunset, our life can be lived till death.




THE GERMAN EMPEROR


The list of the really serious, the really convinced, the really
important and comprehensible people now alive includes, as most
Englishmen would now be prepared to admit, the German Emperor. He is a
practical man and a poet. I do not know whether there are still people
in existence who think there is some kind of faint antithesis between
these two characters; but I incline to think there must be, because of
the surprise which the career of the German Emperor has generally
evoked. When he came to the throne it became at once apparent that he
was poetical; people assumed in consequence that he was unpractical;
that he would plunge Europe into war, that he would try to annex France,
that he would say he was the Emperor of Russia, that he would stand on
his head in the Reichstag, that he would become a pirate on the Spanish
Main. Years upon years have passed; he has gone on making speeches, he
has gone on talking about God and his sword, he has poured out an ever
increased rhetoric and æstheticism. And yet all the time people have
slowly and surely realised that he knows what he is about, that he is
one of the best friends of peace, that his influence on Europe is not
only successful, but in many ways good, that he knows what world he is
living in better than a score of materialists.

The explanation never comes to them--he is a poet; therefore, a
practical man. The affinity of the two words, merely as words, is much
nearer than many people suppose, for the matter of that. There is one
Greek word for "I do" from which we get the word practical, and another
Greek word for "I do" from which we get the word poet. I was doubtless
once informed of a profound difference between the two, but I have
forgotten it. The two words practical and poetical may mean two subtly
different things in that old and subtle language, but they mean the same
in English and the same in the long run. It is ridiculous to suppose
that the man who can understand the inmost intricacies of a human being
who has never existed at all cannot make a guess at the conduct of man
who lives next door. It is idle to say that a man who has himself felt
the mad longing under the mad moon for a vagabond life cannot know why
his son runs away to sea. It is idle to say that a man who has himself
felt the hunger for any kind of exhilaration, from angel or devil,
cannot know why his butler takes to drink. It is idle to say that a man
who has been fascinated with the wild fastidiousness of destiny does not
know why stockbrokers gamble, to say that a man who has been knocked
into the middle of eternal life by a face in a crowd does not know why
the poor marry young; that a man who found his path to all things kindly
and pleasant blackened and barred suddenly by the body of a man does not
know what it is to desire murder. It is idle, in short, for a man who
has created men to say that he does not understand them. A man who is a
poet may, of course, easily make mistakes in these personal and
practical relations; such mistakes and similar ones have been made by
poets; such mistakes and greater ones have been made by soldiers and
statesmen and men of business. But in so far as a poet is in these
things less of a practical man he is also less of a poet.

If Shakespeare really married a bad wife when he had conceived the
character of Beatrice he ought to have been ashamed of himself: he had
failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art. If Balzac got
into rows with his publishers he ought to be rebuked and not
commiserated, having evolved so many consistent business men from his
own inside. The German Emperor is a poet, and therefore he succeeds,
because poetry is so much nearer to reality than all the other human
occupations. He is a poet, and succeeds because the majority of men are
poets. It is true, if that matter is at all important, that the German
Emperor is not a good poet. The majority of men are poets, only they
happen to be bad poets. The German Emperor fails ridiculously, if that
is all that is in question, in almost every one of the artistic
occupations to which he addresses himself: he is neither a first-rate
critic, nor a first-rate musician, nor a first-rate painter, nor a
first-rate poet. He is a twelfth-rate poet, but because he is a poet at
all he knocks to pieces all the first-rate politicians in the war of
politics.

Having made clear my position so far, I discover with a certain amount
of interest that I have not yet got to the subject of these remarks. The
German Emperor is a poet, and although, as far as I know, every line he
ever wrote may be nonsense, he is a poet in this real sense, that he has
realised the meaning of every function he has performed. Why should we
jeer at him because he has a great many uniforms, for instance? The very
essence of the really imaginative man is that he realises the various
types or capacities in which he can appear. Every one of us, or almost
every one of us, does in reality fulfil almost as many offices as
Pooh-Bah. Almost every one of us is a ratepayer, an immortal soul, an
Englishman, a baptised person, a mammal, a minor poet, a juryman, a
married man, a bicyclist, a Christian, a purchaser of newspapers, and a
critic of Mr. Alfred Austin. We ought to have uniforms for all these
things. How beautiful it would be if we appeared to-morrow in the
uniform of a ratepayer, in brown and green, with buttons made in the
shape of coins, and a blue income-tax paper tastefully arranged as a
favour; or, again, if we appeared dressed as immortal souls, in a blue
uniform with stars. It would be very exciting to dress up as Englishmen,
or to go to a fancy dress ball as Christians.

Some of the costumes I have suggested might appear a little more
difficult to carry out. The dress of a person who purchases newspapers
(though it mostly consists of coloured evening editions arranged in a
stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer)
has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise
the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not
even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal,
and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons up behind.

But most assuredly we ought not to abuse the Kaiser because he is fond
of putting on all his uniforms; he does so because he has a large number
of established and involuntary incarnations. He tries to do his duty in
that state of life to which it shall please God to call him; and it so
happens that he has been called to as many different estates as there
are regiments in the German Army. He is a huntsman and proud of being a
huntsman, an engineer and proud of being an engineer, an infantry
soldier and proud of being so, a light horseman and proud of being so.
There is nothing wrong in all this; the only wrong thing is that it
should be confined to the merely destructive arts of war. The sight of
the German Kaiser in the most magnificent of the uniforms in which he
had led armies to victory is not in itself so splendid or delightful as
that of many other sights which might come before us without a whisper
of the alarms of war. It is not so splendid or delightful as the sight
of an ordinary householder showing himself in that magnificent uniform
of purple and silver which should signalise the father of three
children. It is not so splendid or delightful as the appearance of a
young clerk in an insurance office decorated with those three long
crimson plumes which are the well-known insignia of a gentleman who is
just engaged to be married. Nor can it compare with the look of a man
wearing the magnificent green and silver armour by which we know one who
has induced an acquaintance to give up getting drunk, or the blue and
gold which is only accorded to persons who have prevented fights in the
street. We belong to quite as many regiments as the German Kaiser. Our
regiments are regiments that are embattled everywhere; they fight an
unending fight against all that is hopeless and rapacious and of evil
report. The only difference is that we have the regiments, but not the
uniforms.

Only one obvious point occurs to me to add. If the Kaiser has more than
any other man the sense of the poetry of the ancient things, the sword,
the crown, the ship, the nation, he has the sense of the poetry of
modern things also. He has one sense, and it is even a joke against
him. He feels the poetry of one thing that is more poetic than sword or
crown or ship or nation, the poetry of the telegram. No one ever sent a
telegram who did not feel like a god. He is a god, for he is a minor
poet; a minor poet, but a poet still.




TENNYSON


Mr. Morton Luce has written a short study of Tennyson which has
considerable cultivation and suggestiveness, which will be sufficient to
serve as a notebook for Tennyson's admirers, but scarcely sufficient,
perhaps, to serve as a pamphlet against his opponents. If a critic has,
as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to a
prophet, it ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson
will pass through a period of facile condemnation and neglect before we
arrive at the true appreciation of his work. The same thing has happened
to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of
romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is
considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost
certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has
discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens. It is only
necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by a reaction.

The attempts which have been made to discredit the poetical position of
Tennyson are in the main dictated by an entire misunderstanding of the
nature of poetry. When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest
that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as
Matthew Arnold proved, that they themselves could never be great poets.
It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses
is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the
noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of
ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiments that is made by a
popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature. Unless he
is to some extent a demagogue, he cannot be a poet. A man who expresses
in poetry new and strange and undiscovered emotions is not a poet; he is
a brain specialist. Tennyson can never be discredited before any serious
tribunal of criticism because the sentiments and thoughts to which he
dedicates himself are those sentiments and thoughts which occur to
anyone. These are the peculiar province of poetry; poetry, like
religion, is always a democratic thing, even if it pretends the
contrary. The faults of Tennyson, so far as they existed, were not half
so much in the common character of his sentiments as in the arrogant
perfection of his workmanship. He was not by any means so wrong in his
faults as he was in his perfections.

Men are very much too ready to speak of men's work being ordinary, when
we consider that, properly considered, every man is extraordinary. The
average man is a tribal fable, like the Man-Wolf or the Wise Man of the
Stoics. In every man's heart there is a revolution; how much more in
every poet's? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part
of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to
others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that
part of a man's work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be
interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic
is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true
that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and
up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of
men's sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues.

Tennyson's work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which
he had inherited or copied, resolves itself, like that of any other man
of genius, into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all
his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine
fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he
disguised revolution under the name of evolution. He is only a very
shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the
Conservative.

Tennyson had certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the
ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of
these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets (and
perhaps the last) to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous
vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind.
Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of
poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a
Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands still.
Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical
constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were
really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters,
the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies
and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great
literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: "He saw Behemoth, and he
played with him as with a bird."

Instances of this would not be difficult to find. But the tests of
poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific
phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his
own exquisite lyrics describing the exultation of a lover on the evening
before his bridal day. This would be an occasion, if ever there was one,
for falling back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the domed
heaven and the flat earth in which generations of poets have made us
feel at home. We can imagine the poet in such a lyric saluting the
setting sun and prophesying the sun's resurrection. There is something
extraordinarily typical of Tennyson's scientific faith in the fact that
this, one of the most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens with
the two lines:

  "Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
  Yon orange sunset waning slow."

Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets, and flowers to blossom
in their season, and both were doubtless grateful for the permission.
But the terrestrial globe of science has only twice, so far as we know,
been encouraged in poetry to continue its course, one instance being
that of this poem, and the other the incomparable "Address to the
Terrestrial Globe" in the "Bab Ballads."

There was, again, another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson,
which his critics have, in many cases, ridiculously confused with a
fault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern poets
in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of Liberal
Conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have
abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and
original for a poet to defend conventionality than to defend a cart-load
of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of Liberty,

  "Turning to scorn with lips divine
  The falsehood of extremes,"

is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in
the Liberal century. Moderation is _not_ a compromise; moderation is a
passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical
enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and
ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the
empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer
poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any poetaster can describe a
thunderstorm; it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky.


I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in his somewhat frigid
and patrician theory of poetry. "Dialect," he says, "mostly falls below
the dignity of art." I cannot feel myself that art has any dignity
higher than the indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great
poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their
thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls "the seemly raiment of cultured
speech" than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois
in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If
Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as "The Northern
Farmer," it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the
dialect, but because he used too little.

Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided; the
period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and
religion; the period in which the Missing Link was really missing. But
his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered; he was the
apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs; above all,
like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words.




ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING


The delightful new edition of Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows" which
Mr. John Lane has just issued ought certainly to serve as an opportunity
for the serious criticism and inevitable admiration to which a great
poet is entitled. For Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is
idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is
bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is
more remarkable about Mrs. Browning's work than the absence of that
trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded
from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad it is bad from some
extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of
debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from
a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, she is far more a
great poet than she is a good one.

Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many
other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires
a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete
self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of
us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she
really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite
abandoning the world. Such a couplet as:

  "Our Euripides, the human,
  With his dropping of warm tears,"

gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well
conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with
a loud splash, and Mrs. Browning coming after him with a thermometer.
But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs.
Hemans would never have written it. She would have written something
perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs.
Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant
something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it.
She had that catastrophic and public failure which is, as much as a
medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.

In spite of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts
require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more
especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for
example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Anyone who has tried
to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve,
as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary
art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have
commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense.
Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning
was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic
scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare,
that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great
curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything
alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit:

  "And the eyes of the peacock fans
  Winked at the alien glory,"

she said of the Papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolour:

  "And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble,
  And the shadow of a monarch's crown is softened in her hair,"

is her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of
peacock feathers winking like so many London urchins is perhaps one of
her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a
woman's hair as the softened shadow of a crown is a singularly vivid and
perfect one. But both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and
intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of
ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs.
Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as
every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic,
irrevocable, and big with coming events, so every one of her wild
weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a
certain effect on the imagination, which has for good or evil become
part and parcel of our mental vision forever. She gives the reader the
impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentlemen of
the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell it was
always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the
leap.

"Casa Guidi Windows" is, in one aspect, a poem very typical of its
author. Mrs. Browning may fairly be called the peculiar poet of
Liberalism, of that great movement of the first half of the nineteenth
century towards the emancipation of men from ancient institutions which
had gradually changed their nature, from the houses of refuge which had
turned into dungeons, and the mystic jewels which remained only as
fetters. It was not what we ordinarily understand by revolt. It had no
hatred in its heart for ancient and essentially human institutions. It
had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions,
the average man, which goes by the name of democracy. It had none of
the spirit of modern Imperialism which is kicking a man because he is
down. But, on the other hand, it had none of the spirit of modern
Anarchism and scepticism which is kicking a man merely because he is up.
It was based fundamentally on a belief in the destiny of humanity,
whether that belief took an irreligious form, as in Swinburne, or a
religious form, as in Mrs. Browning. It had that rooted and natural
conviction that the Millennium was coming to-morrow which has been the
conviction of all iconoclasts and reformers, and for which some
rationalists have been absurd enough to blame the early Christians. But
they had none of that disposition to pin their whole faith to some
black-and-white scientific system which afterwards became the curse of
philosophical Radicalism. They were not like the sociologists who lay
down a final rectification of things, amounting to nothing except an end
of the world, a great deal more depressing than would be the case if it
were knocked to pieces by a comet. Their ideal, like the ideal of all
sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up
of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April, and
regiments being cut to pieces for a flag. They were neither Radicals nor
Socialists, but Liberals, and a Liberal is a noble and indispensable
lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.

Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals.
Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the
heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into
the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad
because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because
humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain
to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man
the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious
revolutions. He could follow the mediæval logicians in all their sowing
of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour
which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the
young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of
love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning
doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she
went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true
revolutionist; for does not the very word "revolution" mean a rolling
backward. All true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the
normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an
idiot. For how could a man even wish for something which he had never
heard of? Mrs. Browning's inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient
and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in
her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason, which it is
difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to
mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic
feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction
exist. Men whose lives are mainly based upon friendship sympathise with
the friendships of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other
is a proverb, and like many other proverbs sometimes a nuisance. In
patriotism alone it is considered correct just now to assume that the
sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great
Liberals of Mrs. Browning's time. The Brownings had, so to speak, a
disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England and they loved
Italy; yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitans. They loved the
two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe.
They had hold of the root and essence of patriotism. They knew how
certain flowers and birds and rivers pass into the mills of the brain
and come out as wars and discoveries, and how some triumphant adventure
or some staggering crime wrought in a remote continent may bear about it
the colour of an Italian city or the soul of a silent village of Surrey.






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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Man Who Was Thursday
       A Nightmare

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Posting Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1695]
Release Date: April, 1999
[Last updated: April 4, 2015]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY ***




Produced by Harry Plantinga





THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

A NIGHTMARE


by G. K. Chesterton




A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE

It is very difficult to classify THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. It is
possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous
criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the
author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like
no-one else. On this level, therefore, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force of
suspense-writing.

However, the reader will soon discover that it is much more than that.
Carried along on the boisterous rush of the narrative by Chesterton's
wonderful high-spirited style, he will soon see that he is being
carried into much deeper waters than he had planned on; and the totally
unforeseeable denouement will prove for the modern reader, as it has
for thousands of others since 1908 when the book was first published, an
inevitable and moving experience, as the investigators finally discover
who Sunday is.




THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

A NIGHTMARE


To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

  A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
  Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
  Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
  The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
  Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
  Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
  Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
  Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
  Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
  The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
  They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
  Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
  Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
  When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
  Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
  High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
  Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
  When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

  Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
  Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
  I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
  Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
  And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
  Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
  Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
  Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
  Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
  Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
  But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
  God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
  We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
  Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

  This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
  And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--
  Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
  Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
  The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand--
  Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
  The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
  And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
  Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
  Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
  We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
  And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

  G. K. C.



CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK

THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and
ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout;
its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had
been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who
called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne,
apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical.
It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though
it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its
pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its
pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger
who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think
how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor
when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place
was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a
deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists,"
the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long,
auburn hair and the impudent face--that young man was not really a poet;
but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white
beard and the wild, white hat--that venerable humbug was not really a
philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others.
That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare,
bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed.
He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological
creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and
thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be
considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but
finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt
as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall,
when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole
insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was
more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the
little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns
glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit.
And this was strongest of all on one particular evening, still vaguely
remembered in the locality, of which the auburn-haired poet was the
hero. It was not by any means the only evening of which he was the hero.
On many nights those passing by his little back garden might hear his
high, didactic voice laying down the law to men and particularly
to women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed one of the
paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind vaguely
called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy.
Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment
which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he
is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was really (in
some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the
end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art
of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a
momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity
of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it
was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literally like a
woman's, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite
picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face
projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a
look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified
the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy,
a blend of the angel and the ape.

This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be
remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the
end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and
palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers,
and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of
the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve
and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole
grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot
plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The
whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent
secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that
splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky
seemed small.

I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening
if only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it
because it marked the first appearance in the place of the second
poet of Saffron Park. For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had
reigned without a rival; it was upon the night of the sunset that his
solitude suddenly ended. The new poet, who introduced himself by the
name of Gabriel Syme was a very mild-looking mortal, with a fair,
pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But an impression grew that he was
less meek than he looked. He signalised his entrance by differing with
the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole nature of poetry. He said
that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a
poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers looked at him as if
he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.

In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two
events.

"It may well be," he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, "it may well be
on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth
upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a
poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder
there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this
garden."

The man with the meek blue eyes and the pale, pointed beard endured
these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity. The third party of
the group, Gregory's sister Rosamond, who had her brother's braids of
red hair, but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such mixture
of admiration and disapproval as she gave commonly to the family oracle.

Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.

"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might
transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man
who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to
everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing
light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few
shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all
conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the
most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

"So it is," said Mr. Syme.

"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else
attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway
trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It
is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they
know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they
will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know
that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh,
their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in
Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"

"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say
of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare,
strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss
it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant
bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a
distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed
go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and
his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is
Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a
time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the
defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give
me Bradshaw, I say!"

"Must you go?" inquired Gregory sarcastically.

"I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man
has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has
left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do
a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have
the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the
word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of
a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the
victory of Adam."

Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.

"And even then," he said, "we poets always ask the question, 'And what
is Victoria now that you have got there?' You think Victoria is like
the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like
Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of
heaven. The poet is always in revolt."

"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being
in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick.
Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the
wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can
see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is--revolting. It's
mere vomiting."

The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too hot
to heed her.

"It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions,
for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation
of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the
flowers, more poetical than the stars--the most poetical thing in the
world is not being sick."

"Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"

"I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I forgot we had abolished all
conventions."

For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.

"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionise society on this lawn?"

Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.

"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."

Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.

"Don't you think, then," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I am
serious about my anarchism?"

"I beg your pardon?" said Syme.

"Am I not serious about my anarchism?" cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.

"My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.

With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.

"Mr. Syme," she said, "do the people who talk like you and my brother
often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?"

Syme smiled.

"Do you?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.

"My dear Miss Gregory," said Syme gently, "there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you
mean what you say? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean
what you say? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a
man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only
a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he
means--from sheer force of meaning it."

She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave
and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.

"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.

"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."

She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--

"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"

Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.

"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."

And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in
spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And
it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches
himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and
exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and
propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once
he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to
play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny
tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered
the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again
until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she
kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures
afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread
through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what
followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the
fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost
as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long
frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as
dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also something
aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He
had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for
his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.

"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"

"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There
is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there
is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid
in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the
lamp by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I
ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our
little argument?"

"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."

The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing, listened
instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth voice and
with a rather bewildering smile.

"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman has
ever succeeded in doing before."

"Indeed!"

"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."

"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.

"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe it
out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way
by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am going,
at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you that
you were wrong in what you said."

"In what I said?"

"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."

"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you
said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to
a neglected truth."

Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.

"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think me
a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."

Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.

"Serious!" he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One
comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well,
but I should think very little of a man who didn't keep something in
the background of his life that was more serious than all this
talking--something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink."

"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion."

Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.

"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you
have one?"

"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."

"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any
son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If
you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation if you will consent
to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a
knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return--"

"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused.

"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took off
his hat.

"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that
a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he
is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian,
and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not
report anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the
name of Colney Hatch, what is it?"

"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a
cab."

He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road. The
two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the address
of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river. The cab
whisked itself away again, and in it these two fantastics quitted their
fantastic town.



CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME

THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop, into
which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated themselves in
a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden table with one
wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very little could
be seen of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a vague and dark
impression of something bulky and bearded.

"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate de
foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."

Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference--

"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."

To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly, sir!"
and went away apparently to get it.

"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a creme de menthe myself; I have
dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you with
a half-bottle of Pommery at least?"

"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."

His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the actual
appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it particularly
good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.

"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,
smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is
new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other
way."

"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your existence.
Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a slight
disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements of this
excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior. But that is
all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever lived on earth."

"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.

"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious anarchists,
in whom you do not believe."

"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."

"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.

Then after a pause he added--

"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little, don't
put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish you to do
yourself an injustice."

"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm;
"but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition. May I
smoke?"

"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of mine."

Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and let out a long
cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit that he performed these
rites with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them the
table at which he sat had begun to revolve, first slowly, and then
rapidly, as if at an insane seance.

"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."

"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that is!"

The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory chimney,
and the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through the floor
as if the earth had swallowed them. They went rattling down a kind of
roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came with an
abrupt bump to the bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair of doors
and let in a red subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg
thrown over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.

Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which was
the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as big as a
fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the door there was
a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory struck five times. A
heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was. To this he gave
the more or less unexpected reply, "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy
hinges began to move; it was obviously some kind of password.

Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering
pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and revolvers,
closely packed or interlocked.

"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory; "we
have to be very strict here."

"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and
order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel weapons.
With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked a
singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining
avenue of death.

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a
queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but
presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of
a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this
apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful
shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs
of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the
inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and
went in.

"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any
notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite arbitrary
emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love. Suffice it to
say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you
justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the
pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you have of lighting a cigar
would make a priest break the seal of confession. Well, you said that
you were quite certain I was not a serious anarchist. Does this place
strike you as being serious?"

"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented Syme; "but
may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information,
because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me a promise not
to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So it is in mere
curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all
about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations;
that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the
Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to
deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour
and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly
sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We
hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."

"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."

"You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.

"With pleasure," resumed Syme. "In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt
who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people
living from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door.
You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling
yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments
which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike.
May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in
the bowels of the earth, you then parade your whole secret by talking
about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron Park?"

Gregory smiled.

"The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them
into this infernal room they would not believe me."

Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.

"The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable
disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our
anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I
certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old
men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my
first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in
a voice of thunder, 'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found
out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once.
Then I made up as a millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much
intelligence that a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried
being a major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope,
enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who,
like Nietzsche, admire violence--the proud, mad war of Nature and all
that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved
it constantly. I called out 'Blood!' abstractedly, like a man calling
for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak perish; it is the Law.' Well,
well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went
in despair to the President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the
greatest man in Europe."

"What is his name?" asked Syme.

"You would not know it," answered Gregory. "That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they
were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he
is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him
without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his
hands."

He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--

"But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as
an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to
him, 'What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more
respectable than bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his large but
indecipherable face. 'You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress
which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever
look for a bomb?' I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion's voice. 'Why,
then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!' he roared so that the room
shook. 'Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.' And
he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took his advice,
and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those
women day and night, and--by God!--they would let me wheel their
perambulators."

Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.

"You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."

Then after a pause he added--

"What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"

"We generally call him Sunday," replied Gregory with simplicity. "You
see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they
are named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his
admirers Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter,
because the very night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is
the night on which our London branch, which assembles in this room, has
to elect its own deputy to fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman
who has for some time past played, with propriety and general applause,
the difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently,
we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor."

He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling
embarrassment.

"I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued casually.
"I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have promised to tell
nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not say in
so many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room in about
ten minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of election; but I
don't mind telling you that it is practically certain what the result
will be." He looked down for a moment modestly. "It is almost a settled
thing that I am to be Thursday."

"My dear fellow." said Syme heartily, "I congratulate you. A great
career!"

Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking
rapidly.

"As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table," he
said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."

Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick,
a large Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of
brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking
cape or cloak.

"I have only to get the form of election finished," continued Gregory
with animation, "then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these
other things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which
opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me,
and then--then--oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!" And he clasped his
hands.

Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor, got to
his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.

"Why is it," he asked vaguely, "that I think you are quite a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment, and
then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you are such
an ass?"

There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--

"Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in
in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a
promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under
red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise
of the same kind?"

"A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.

"Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God that I
would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or
whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret
to the anarchists?"

"Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"

"Yes," said Syme, "I have a secret." Then after a pause, "Will you
swear?"

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said
abruptly--

"You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you.
Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But
look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his
long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so there came five
knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the
conspirators.

"Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you the truth more
shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless
poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge
for some time at Scotland Yard."

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

"What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.

"Yes," said Syme simply, "I am a police detective. But I think I hear
your friends coming."

From the doorway there came a murmur of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." It
was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of
Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling down the
corridor.



CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

BEFORE one of the fresh faces could appear at the doorway, Gregory's
stunned surprise had fallen from him. He was beside the table with a
bound, and a noise in his throat like a wild beast. He caught up the
Colt's revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did not flinch, but he put up
a pale and polite hand.

"Don't be such a silly man," he said, with the effeminate dignity of a
curate. "Don't you see it's not necessary? Don't you see that we're both
in the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick."

Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire either, and he looked his
question.

"Don't you see we've checkmated each other?" cried Syme. "I can't tell
the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists I'm a
policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you can only
watch me, knowing what I am. In short, it's a lonely, intellectual
duel, my head against yours. I'm a policeman deprived of the help of the
police. You, my poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help of
that law and organisation which is so essential to anarchy. The one
solitary difference is in your favour. You are not surrounded by
inquisitive policemen; I am surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I
cannot betray you, but I might betray myself. Come, come! wait and see
me betray myself. I shall do it so nicely."

Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he were
a sea-monster.

"I don't believe in immortality," he said at last, "but if, after all
this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell only for you,
to howl in for ever."

"I shall not break my word," said Syme sternly, "nor will you break
yours. Here are your friends."

The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily, with a slouching
and somewhat weary gait; but one little man, with a black beard and
glasses--a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim Healy--detached himself,
and bustled forward with some papers in his hand.

"Comrade Gregory," he said, "I suppose this man is a delegate?"

Gregory, taken by surprise, looked down and muttered the name of Syme;
but Syme replied almost pertly--

"I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it hard
for anyone to be here who was not a delegate."

The brow of the little man with the black beard was, however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.

"What branch do you represent?" he asked sharply.

"I should hardly call it a branch," said Syme, laughing; "I should call
it at the very least a root."

"What do you mean?"

"The fact is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I
have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of
Sunday."

The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker of fear went
over all the faces of the group. Evidently the awful President, whose
name was Sunday, did sometimes send down such irregular ambassadors to
such branch meetings.

"Well, comrade," said the man with the papers after a pause, "I suppose
we'd better give you a seat in the meeting?"

"If you ask my advice as a friend," said Syme with severe benevolence,
"I think you'd better."

When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for
his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought. He
was, indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear that Syme's inspired
impudence was likely to bring him out of all merely accidental dilemmas.
Little was to be hoped from them. He could not himself betray Syme,
partly from honour, but partly also because, if he betrayed him and for
some reason failed to destroy him, the Syme who escaped would be a Syme
freed from all obligation of secrecy, a Syme who would simply walk
to the nearest police station. After all, it was only one night's
discussion, and only one detective who would know of it. He would let
out as little as possible of their plans that night, and then let Syme
go, and chance it.

He strode across to the group of anarchists, which was already
distributing itself along the benches.

"I think it is time we began," he said; "the steam-tug is waiting on the
river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair."

This being approved by a show of hands, the little man with the papers
slipped into the presidential seat.

"Comrades," he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, "our meeting tonight
is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the
honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have
elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of
the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know,
his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great
dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to
have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as
self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic
mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he
regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or
anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not
to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a harder task. It is
difficult properly to praise his qualities, but it is more difficult to
replace them. Upon you, comrades, it devolves this evening to choose
out of the company present the man who shall be Thursday. If any comrade
suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no comrade suggests a
name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter, who is gone
from us, has carried into the unknowable abysses the last secret of his
virtue and his innocence."

There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes
heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable white
beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose lumberingly and
said--

"I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday," and sat lumberingly
down again.

"Does anyone second?" asked the chairman.

A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.

"Before I put the matter to the vote," said the chairman, "I will call
on Comrade Gregory to make a statement."

Gregory rose amid a great rumble of applause. His face was deadly pale,
so that by contrast his queer red hair looked almost scarlet. But he was
smiling and altogether at ease. He had made up his mind, and he saw
his best policy quite plain in front of him like a white road. His best
chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave
on the detective's mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood
was a very mild affair after all. He believed in his own literary power,
his capacity for suggesting fine shades and picking perfect words. He
thought that with care he could succeed, in spite of all the people
around him, in conveying an impression of the institution, subtly and
delicately false. Syme had once thought that anarchists, under all their
bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now, in the hour of
peril, make Syme think so again?

"Comrades," began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, "it is not
necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your policy
also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured, it has been
utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been altered. Those who
talk about anarchism and its dangers go everywhere and anywhere to get
their information, except to us, except to the fountain head. They learn
about anarchists from sixpenny novels; they learn about anarchists from
tradesmen's newspapers; they learn about anarchists from Ally Sloper's
Half-Holiday and the Sporting Times. They never learn about anarchists
from anarchists. We have no chance of denying the mountainous slanders
which are heaped upon our heads from one end of Europe to another. The
man who has always heard that we are walking plagues has never heard our
reply. I know that he will not hear it tonight, though my passion
were to rend the roof. For it is deep, deep under the earth that the
persecuted are permitted to assemble, as the Christians assembled in the
Catacombs. But if, by some incredible accident, there were here tonight
a man who all his life had thus immensely misunderstood us, I would put
this question to him: 'When those Christians met in those Catacombs,
what sort of moral reputation had they in the streets above? What tales
were told of their atrocities by one educated Roman to another? Suppose'
(I would say to him), 'suppose that we are only repeating that still
mysterious paradox of history. Suppose we seem as shocking as the
Christians because we are really as harmless as the Christians. Suppose
we seem as mad as the Christians because we are really as meek."'

The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been gradually
growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped suddenly. In the abrupt
silence, the man with the velvet jacket said, in a high, squeaky voice--

"I'm not meek!"

"Comrade Witherspoon tells us," resumed Gregory, "that he is not meek.
Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed, extravagant; his
appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary taste) unattractive.
But only the eye of a friendship as deep and delicate as mine can
perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness which lies at the base of
him, too deep even for himself to see. I repeat, we are the true early
Christians, only that we come too late. We are simple, as they revere
simple--look at Comrade Witherspoon. We are modest, as they were
modest--look at me. We are merciful--"

"No, no!" called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.

"I say we are merciful," repeated Gregory furiously, "as the early
Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused
of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh--"

"Shame!" cried Witherspoon. "Why not?"

"Comrade Witherspoon," said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, "is anxious
to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at any rate,
which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love--"

"No, no!" said Witherspoon, "down with love."

"Which is founded upon love," repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth,
"there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue as a
body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the representative
of that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that represent us as
assassins and enemies of human society, we shall pursue with moral
courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the permanent ideals of
brotherhood and simplicity."

Gregory resumed his seat and passed his hand across his forehead. The
silence was sudden and awkward, but the chairman rose like an automaton,
and said in a colourless voice--

"Does anyone oppose the election of Comrade Gregory?"

The assembly seemed vague and sub-consciously disappointed, and Comrade
Witherspoon moved restlessly on his seat and muttered in his thick
beard. By the sheer rush of routine, however, the motion would have been
put and carried. But as the chairman was opening his mouth to put it,
Syme sprang to his feet and said in a small and quiet voice--

"Yes, Mr. Chairman, I oppose."

The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the voice.
Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said these first
formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief simplicity, he made
his next word ring and volley in the vault as if one of the guns had
gone off.

"Comrades!" he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his
boots, "have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in
order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to
while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with
weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear
Comrade Gregory saying to us, 'Be good, and you will be happy,' 'Honesty
is the best policy,' and 'Virtue is its own reward'? There was not
a word in Comrade Gregory's address to which a curate could not have
listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud
cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers).
The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a
resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear)."

"Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we
are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies
of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of
society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most
pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us (apologetically
again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are not murderers,
we are executioners (cheers)."

Ever since Syme had risen Gregory had sat staring at him, his face
idiotic with astonishment. Now in the pause his lips of clay parted, and
he said, with an automatic and lifeless distinctness--

"You damnable hypocrite!"

Syme looked straight into those frightful eyes with his own pale blue
ones, and said with dignity--

"Comrade Gregory accuses me of hypocrisy. He knows as well as I do that
I am keeping all my engagements and doing nothing but my duty. I do not
mince words. I do not pretend to. I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit
to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be Thursday
because of his amiable qualities. We do not want the Supreme Council of
Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy (hear, hear). This is no time for
ceremonial politeness, neither is it a time for ceremonial modesty. I
set myself against Comrade Gregory as I would set myself against all the
Governments of Europe, because the anarchist who has given himself
to anarchy has forgotten modesty as much as he has forgotten pride
(cheers). I am not a man at all. I am a cause (renewed cheers). I set
myself against Comrade Gregory as impersonally and as calmly as I should
choose one pistol rather than another out of that rack upon the wall;
and I say that rather than have Gregory and his milk-and-water methods
on the Supreme Council, I would offer myself for election--"

His sentence was drowned in a deafening cataract of applause. The faces,
that had grown fiercer and fiercer with approval as his tirade grew more
and more uncompromising, were now distorted with grins of anticipation
or cloven with delighted cries. At the moment when he announced himself
as ready to stand for the post of Thursday, a roar of excitement and
assent broke forth, and became uncontrollable, and at the same moment
Gregory sprang to his feet, with foam upon his mouth, and shouted
against the shouting.

"Stop, you blasted madmen!" he cried, at the top of a voice that tore
his throat. "Stop, you--"

But louder than Gregory's shouting and louder than the roar of the room
came the voice of Syme, still speaking in a peal of pitiless thunder--

"I do not go to the Council to rebut that slander that calls us
murderers; I go to earn it (loud and prolonged cheering). To the priest
who says these men are the enemies of religion, to the judge who says
these men are the enemies of law, to the fat parliamentarian who says
these men are the enemies of order and public decency, to all these I
will reply, 'You are false kings, but you are true prophets. I am come
to destroy you, and to fulfil your prophecies.'"

The heavy clamour gradually died away, but before it had ceased
Witherspoon had jumped to his feet, his hair and beard all on end, and
had said--

"I move, as an amendment, that Comrade Syme be appointed to the post."

"Stop all this, I tell you!" cried Gregory, with frantic face and hands.
"Stop it, it is all--"

The voice of the chairman clove his speech with a cold accent.

"Does anyone second this amendment?" he said. A tall, tired man, with
melancholy eyes and an American chin beard, was observed on the back
bench to be slowly rising to his feet. Gregory had been screaming for
some time past; now there was a change in his accent, more shocking than
any scream. "I end all this!" he said, in a voice as heavy as stone.

"This man cannot be elected. He is a--"

"Yes," said Syme, quite motionless, "what is he?" Gregory's mouth worked
twice without sound; then slowly the blood began to crawl back into his
dead face. "He is a man quite inexperienced in our work," he said, and
sat down abruptly.

Before he had done so, the long, lean man with the American beard was
again upon his feet, and was repeating in a high American monotone--

"I beg to second the election of Comrade Syme."

"The amendment will, as usual, be put first," said Mr. Buttons, the
chairman, with mechanical rapidity.

"The question is that Comrade Syme--"

Gregory had again sprung to his feet, panting and passionate.

"Comrades," he cried out, "I am not a madman."

"Oh, oh!" said Mr. Witherspoon.

"I am not a madman," reiterated Gregory, with a frightful sincerity
which for a moment staggered the room, "but I give you a counsel which
you can call mad if you like. No, I will not call it a counsel, for I
can give you no reason for it. I will call it a command. Call it a mad
command, but act upon it. Strike, but hear me! Kill me, but obey me! Do
not elect this man." Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for
a moment Syme's slender and insane victory swayed like a reed. But you
could not have guessed it from Syme's bleak blue eyes. He merely began--

"Comrade Gregory commands--"

Then the spell was snapped, and one anarchist called out to Gregory--

"Who are you? You are not Sunday;" and another anarchist added in a
heavier voice, "And you are not Thursday."

"Comrades," cried Gregory, in a voice like that of a martyr who in an
ecstacy of pain has passed beyond pain, "it is nothing to me whether you
detest me as a tyrant or detest me as a slave. If you will not take my
command, accept my degradation. I kneel to you. I throw myself at your
feet. I implore you. Do not elect this man."

"Comrade Gregory," said the chairman after a painful pause, "this is
really not quite dignified."

For the first time in the proceedings there was for a few seconds a real
silence. Then Gregory fell back in his seat, a pale wreck of a man,
and the chairman repeated, like a piece of clock-work suddenly started
again--

"The question is that Comrade Syme be elected to the post of Thursday on
the General Council."

The roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest, and three
minutes afterwards Mr. Gabriel Syme, of the Secret Police Service, was
elected to the post of Thursday on the General Council of the Anarchists
of Europe.

Everyone in the room seemed to feel the tug waiting on the river, the
sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant the
election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper
proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery
groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or
other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him with a stare of
stunned hatred. They were silent for many minutes.

"You are a devil!" said Gregory at last.

"And you are a gentleman," said Syme with gravity.

"It was you that entrapped me," began Gregory, shaking from head to
foot, "entrapped me into--"

"Talk sense," said Syme shortly. "Into what sort of devils' parliament
have you entrapped me, if it comes to that? You made me swear before
I made you. Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we
think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between
us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but
honour and death," and he pulled the great cloak about his shoulders and
picked up the flask from the table.

"The boat is quite ready," said Mr. Buttons, bustling up. "Be good
enough to step this way."

With a gesture that revealed the shop-walker, he led Syme down a short,
iron-bound passage, the still agonised Gregory following feverishly at
their heels. At the end of the passage was a door, which Buttons opened
sharply, showing a sudden blue and silver picture of the moonlit river,
that looked like a scene in a theatre. Close to the opening lay a dark,
dwarfish steam-launch, like a baby dragon with one red eye.

Almost in the act of stepping on board, Gabriel Syme turned to the
gaping Gregory.

"You have kept your word," he said gently, with his face in shadow. "You
are a man of honour, and I thank you. You have kept it even down to a
small particular. There was one special thing you promised me at the
beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by the
end of it."

"What do you mean?" cried the chaotic Gregory. "What did I promise you?"

"A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military salute
with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.



CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet;
he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of
anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life
into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most
revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His
respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against
rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest
people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about
without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk
about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and
self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence
the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any
drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he
had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than
pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing
vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending
cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing
left--sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these
fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce
to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also
by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the
instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment,
and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding
faces. After that he went about as usual--quiet, courteous, rather
gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did
not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men,
combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and
pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets
a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this
deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his
enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames
embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of
Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or
so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone
and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have
cared for it otherwise.

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky,
indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so
lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it
mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast
caverns of a subterranean country.

Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak, black
and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains
in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more
unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and
pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black cigar, bought
in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his tightened teeth, and
altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon
whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the
Embankment spoke to him, and said "Good evening."

Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the
mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the
twilight.

"A good evening is it?" he said sharply. "You fellows would call the end
of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that bloody
river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt and
shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking out
for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen are
cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were
not for your calm."

"If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organised
resistance."

"Eh?" said Syme, staring.

"The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the
policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation."

"Good God, the Board Schools!" said Syme. "Is this undenominational
education?"

"No," said the policeman sadly, "I never had any of those advantages.
The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very
rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid."

"Where did you have it?" asked Syme, wondering.

"Oh, at Harrow," said the policeman

The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in
so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.

"But, good Lord, man," he said, "you oughtn't to be a policeman!"

The policeman sighed and shook his head.

"I know," he said solemnly, "I know I am not worthy."

"But why did you join the police?" asked Syme with rude curiosity.

"For much the same reason that you abused the police," replied the
other. "I found that there was a special opening in the service
for those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the
aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and
excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I make
myself clear."

"If you mean that you make your opinion clear," said Syme, "I suppose
you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do.
How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on
the Thames embankment?"

"You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police
system," replied the other. "I am not surprised at it. We are keeping it
rather dark from the educated class, because that class contains most
of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of mind. I
think you might almost join us."

"Join you in what?" asked Syme.

"I will tell you," said the policeman slowly. "This is the situation:
The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated
detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely
intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of
civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are
silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has,
therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also
philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this
conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am
a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary
man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be
undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is
also a heresy hunt."

Syme's eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.

"What do you do, then?" he said.

"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is
at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective.
The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go
to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective
discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We
discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have
to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last
to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in
time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely
due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly
understood a triolet."

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you
were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the
poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes
sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon
the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a
very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the
uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors.
We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that
the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they
merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or
they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic
formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater
fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to
them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as
much as other people's."

Syme struck his hands together.

"How true that is," he cried. "I have felt it from my boyhood, but never
could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but
at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only
a certain obstacle be removed--say a wealthy uncle--he is then prepared
to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an
anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But
the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate
them. Yes, the modern world has retained all those parts of police work
which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor,
the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up its more dignified
work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and powerful
heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics.
My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else."

"But this is absurd!" cried the policeman, clasping his hands with an
excitement uncommon in persons of his figure and costume, "but it is
intolerable! I don't know what you're doing, but you're wasting your
life. You must, you shall, join our special army against anarchy. Their
armies are on our frontiers. Their bolt is ready to fall. A moment more,
and you may lose the glory of working with us, perhaps the glory of
dying with the last heroes of the world."

"It is a chance not to be missed, certainly," assented Syme, "but still
I do not quite understand. I know as well as anybody that the modern
world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements. But,
beastly as they are, they generally have the one merit of disagreeing
with each other. How can you talk of their leading one army or hurling
one bolt. What is this anarchy?"

"Do not confuse it," replied the constable, "with those chance dynamite
outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks
of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement,
consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer
ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the
outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty
section. The outer ring--the main mass of their supporters--are merely
anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have
destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of
human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime. They
do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe that
the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man seduced
seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the flowers of
spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would naturally
feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section."

"Oh!" said Syme.

"Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming';
'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice
and the bondage of virtue,' and so on. And so also the men of the inner
circle speak--the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding
crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But
in their mouths"--and the policeman lowered his voice--"in their
mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no
illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth
can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean
death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that
mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right
or wrong, they mean the grave.

"They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then
themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The
innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed
the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed
somebody."

"How can I join you?" asked Syme, with a sort of passion.

"I know for a fact that there is a vacancy at the moment," said the
policeman, "as I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of
the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or
rather, I should not say see him, nobody ever sees him; but you can talk
to him if you like."

"Telephone?" inquired Syme, with interest.

"No," said the policeman placidly, "he has a fancy for always sitting
in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter. Do come
along."

Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led
to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost
before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands
of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a
room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light.
It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced;
it was like going suddenly stone-blind.

"Are you the new recruit?" asked a heavy voice.

And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape
in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of
massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.

"Are you the new recruit?" said the invisible chief, who seemed to have
heard all about it. "All right. You are engaged."

Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this
irrevocable phrase.

"I really have no experience," he began.

"No one has any experience," said the other, "of the Battle of
Armageddon."

"But I am really unfit--"

"You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown.

"Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere
willingness is the final test."

"I do," said the other--"martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good
day."

Thus it was that when Gabriel Syme came out again into the crimson light
of evening, in his shabby black hat and shabby, lawless cloak, he came
out a member of the New Detective Corps for the frustration of the great
conspiracy. Acting under the advice of his friend the policeman (who
was professionally inclined to neatness), he trimmed his hair and beard,
bought a good hat, clad himself in an exquisite summer suit of light
blue-grey, with a pale yellow flower in the button-hole, and, in short,
became that elegant and rather insupportable person whom Gregory had
first encountered in the little garden of Saffron Park. Before he
finally left the police premises his friend provided him with a small
blue card, on which was written, "The Last Crusade," and a number,
the sign of his official authority. He put this carefully in his upper
waistcoat pocket, lit a cigarette, and went forth to track and fight the
enemy in all the drawing-rooms of London. Where his adventure ultimately
led him we have already seen. At about half-past one on a February night
he found himself steaming in a small tug up the silent Thames, armed
with swordstick and revolver, the duly elected Thursday of the Central
Council of Anarchists.

When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation of
stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the landscape
of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet. This was
mainly due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening, though
partly also to an entire change in the weather and the sky since he
entered the little tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the
passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked
moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full that (by a
paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not
the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.

Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as
of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in
eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was
actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some
sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the
moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like
a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him--the food and
the brandy and the loaded pistol--took on exactly that concrete and
material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey
or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask,
though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the
expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick
became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the
stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend
on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the
adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even
be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the
presence of a man really human. To Syme's exaggerative mind the bright,
bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the mountains
of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there is a man
in the moon.

The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the
time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous
bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the
splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had
brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course,
turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.

The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white
dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of
some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he
was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible
and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and
stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two men
in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never spoken
a word.



CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR

AT first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in
his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not even
move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in the dim,
pale morning light that his face was long, pale and intellectual, and
ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the very point of the
chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair almost seemed
a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type that is best
shaven--clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew closer and
closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.

At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was
meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded
that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the
man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained
more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so close.
He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves somewhat in
the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale, dignified and
delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across the river. Then
he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving his election,
and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the man smiled, and
his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right
cheek and down in the left.

There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many
people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is
even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and
the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there
was something unnerving in it.

There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic
face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly
went wrong.

The spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man's face dropped at once
into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further explanation or
inquiry, like a man speaking to an old colleague.

"If we walk up towards Leicester Square," he said, "we shall just be in
time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast. Have
you had any sleep?"

"No," said Syme.

"Nor have I," answered the man in an ordinary tone. "I shall try to get
to bed after breakfast."

He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly dead voice that
contradicted the fanaticism of his face. It seemed almost as if all
friendly words were to him lifeless conveniences, and that his only life
was hate. After a pause the man spoke again.

"Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be
told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of the
President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case you
don't know, I'd better tell you that he is carrying out his notion
of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most
extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a
cell underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a
private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn't seem
to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth, I
know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a little
mad in its old age. For now we flaunt ourselves before the public.
We have our breakfast on a balcony--on a balcony, if you
please--overlooking Leicester Square."

"And what do the people say?" asked Syme.

"It's quite simple what they say," answered his guide.

"They say we are a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are
anarchists."

"It seems to me a very clever idea," said Syme.

"Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!" cried out the other in
a sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his
crooked smile. "When you've seen Sunday for a split second you'll leave
off calling him clever."

With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early
sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose,
why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so
continental. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look that
attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign look.
But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly bright and
clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the statue and
the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the replica of some
French or even Spanish public place. And this effect increased in
Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had through the whole
adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a
fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was
a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish
cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place
de something or other in some foreign town.

At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a
prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street
behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the
window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost literally
overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony, big enough
to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a dining-table, or
more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the breakfast-table, glowing
in the sunlight and evident to the street, were a group of noisy and
talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with white
waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost
be heard across the square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural
smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret
conclave of the European Dynamiters.

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had
not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large
to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of
the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme
had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break
down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact
that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was
planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved
deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen
from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood
out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to
scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw
him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become
dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and
frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five
children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter
came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

"The gentlemen are up there, sare," he said. "They do talk and they do
laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king."

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased
with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous
certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the
more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous
to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a
great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already
that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost
pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the
head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew
nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked
across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew
larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was
quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would
scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the
mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so
large.

By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an
empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him
with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered
himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid,
shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very
large, but it was still possible to humanity.

In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that
by the President's caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One
man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was the
common or garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar and
satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this
collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a
bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes
like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle,
and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this
figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every
diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that stiff
tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a dog, it
could not have been a more idiotic contrast.

The man's name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle
of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably
tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous
part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came in
the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which was
his policy, was actually chaffing Gogol upon his inability to assume
conventional graces.

"Our friend Tuesday," said the President in a deep voice at once of
quietude and volume, "our friend Tuesday doesn't seem to grasp the idea.
He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a soul to
behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage conspirator. Now if
a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a frock-coat, no one need
know that he is an anarchist. But if a gentleman puts on a top hat and
a frock-coat, and then goes about on his hands and knees--well, he may
attract attention. That's what Brother Gogol does. He goes about on his
hands and knees with such inexhaustible diplomacy, that by this time he
finds it quite difficult to walk upright."

"I am not good at goncealment," said Gogol sulkily, with a thick foreign
accent; "I am not ashamed of the cause."

"Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you," said the President
good-naturedly. "You hide as much as anybody; but you can't do it, you
see, you're such an ass! You try to combine two inconsistent methods.
When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will probably pause to
note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in a top hat,
you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely even to
forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin's bed--"

"I am not good at deception," said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.

"Right, my boy, right," said the President with a ponderous heartiness,
"you aren't good at anything."

While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more
steadily at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his
sense of something spiritually queer return.

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and
costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked
at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen
in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided
laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original
guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about
him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not
normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think
of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would
look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.

Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed
eccentricity. Syme's original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was
the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with
more terror than anything, except the President's horrible, happy
laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him,
there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme
thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very
distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that
troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure
thought was pain.

He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and differently
wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man more
obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a
sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing
unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore
the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black
French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer.
But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a
rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded
one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker
poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not
in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer
and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of
profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being
too dense a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by
being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his
dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not
a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in
the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and
pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see just those almond eyes,
those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.

Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still
kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his
death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last
dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey
beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild
despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom
brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For
the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was
literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some
drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or
sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was
expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the
horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but
corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind. He
could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might
fall off.

Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had
that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness
which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with
confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was
nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark,
almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous
fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme;
they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about
pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the
black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or
even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the
younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the
key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant.
Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in
most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of
all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be
covered up because they were too frightful to see.



CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE

SUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and
again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective,
that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another
nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism
always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on
the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of
thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end,
so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as
in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the
world he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than a
tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end
of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself--a
tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures
seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate
horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.

Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the
least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the
contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible
purport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate
plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said that
they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days afterwards the
Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and over
their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen
had decided how both should die. Even the instrument was chosen; the
black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the bomb.

Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective
crime would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical
tremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at
least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaring
gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a
third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral
revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to
spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for
himself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, debating now with
their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for
an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face as
the jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one
persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.
The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and
baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes
stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.

Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the
President's eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He had
hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary way
Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of
the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,
staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.

Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him
for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men,
who were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and
fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism.
He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played
together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to
Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing
that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised not
to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his cold
hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo of
moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to
a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as
the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his
antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this
great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.
Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable
policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked
back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying
him with big, unbearable eyes.

In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never
crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the
President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand
alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.
But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without
having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by
anonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire from
hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he was
probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long afterwards
as by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police promptly, arrested
everyone, told all, and set against them the whole energy of England, he
would probably escape; certainly not otherwise. They were a balconyful
of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy square; but he felt no
more safe with them than if they had been a boatful of armed pirates
overlooking an empty sea.

There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to
him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to
a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their
allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have
called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he
looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction,
as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above
man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with
his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a
kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme
morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but
he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.
Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best
things on the table--cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary
was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over
half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old
Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And
even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere
mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful
freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory.
Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or drunk a quart
of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one side staring at
Syme.

"I have often wondered," said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a
slice of bread and jam, "whether it wouldn't be better for me to do
it with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with
a knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French
President and wriggle it round."

"You are wrong," said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together.
"The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with
a personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best
symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of
the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even
so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb,"
he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his
own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It
must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up
the universe."

"I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis.
"I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one
yesterday in bed."

"No, if the only end of the thing is nothing," said Dr. Bull with his
sphinx-like smile, "it hardly seems worth doing."

The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.

"Every man knows in his heart," he said, "that nothing is worth doing."

There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said--

"We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how
Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with
the original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should
suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to--"

The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday
had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.

"Before we discuss that," he said in a small, quiet voice, "let us go
into a private room. I have something very particular to say."

Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come
at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could
hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,
was cold.

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial
tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.
He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from
nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity,
and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets
were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His
youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not
think of himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned
into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark
room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and
kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the
music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted
him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around
him. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawling
eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felt
towards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that a
brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors.
He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor the physical strength
of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no more than the
fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose like
a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty that the
President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was right. There clanged
in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in the song of
Roland--

    "Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit."

which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organ
could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride in
keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his
last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and
die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ
seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises
of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the
trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.

The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his brain
and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them down an
irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and into a dim,
cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an abandoned boardroom.
When they were all in, he closed and locked the door.

The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
with inarticulate grievance.

"Zso! Zso!" he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
accent becoming almost impenetrable. "You zay you nod 'ide. You zay you
show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you run
yourselves in a dark box!"

The President seemed to take the foreigner's incoherent satire with
entire good humour.

"You can't get hold of it yet, Gogol," he said in a fatherly way. "When
once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not
care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have
had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don't seem to know anything
about mankind."

"I die for zem," cried the Pole in thick excitement, "and I slay zare
oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze
tyrant in ze open square."

"I see, I see," said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself
at the top of a long table. "You die for mankind first, and then you get
up and smite their oppressors. So that's all right. And now may I ask
you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the other
gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning something
intelligent is going to be said."

Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original
summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown
beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of
the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling
of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of
making a good speech.

"Comrades," said the President, suddenly rising, "we have spun out this
farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so
simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our
levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we were
discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying anything
else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this meeting,
but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable member. I
suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull."

They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the
next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.
Sunday struck the table.

"Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this
meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be
mentioned in this company."

Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemed
as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved
feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his
hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the
attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at
least if the President was mortal.

Sunday went on smoothly--

"You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive
for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers
overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But
what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one
actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but
does not share it, who--"

The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.

"It can't be!" he cried, leaping. "There can't--"

The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin of
some huge fish.

"Yes," he said slowly, "there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor
at this table. I will waste no more words. His name--"

Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.

"His name is Gogol," said the President. "He is that hairy humbug over
there who pretends to be a Pole."

Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash
three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort
to rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a
beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in a
palsy of passionate relief.



CHAPTER VII. THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS

"SIT down!" said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice in his
life, a voice that made men drop drawn swords.

The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that equivocal person
himself resumed his seat.

"Well, my man," said the President briskly, addressing him as one
addresses a total stranger, "will you oblige me by putting your hand in
your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what you have there?"

The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark hair, but he
put two fingers into the pocket with apparent coolness and pulled out
a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it lying on the table, he woke up
again to the world outside him. For although the card lay at the other
extreme of the table, and he could read nothing of the inscription on
it, it bore a startling resemblance to the blue card in his own pocket,
the card which had been given to him when he joined the anti-anarchist
constabulary.

"Pathetic Slav," said the President, "tragic child of Poland, are you
prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are in this
company--shall we say de trop?"

"Right oh!" said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to hear a clear,
commercial and somewhat cockney voice coming out of that forest of
foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a Chinaman had suddenly spoken
with a Scotch accent.

"I gather that you fully understand your position," said Sunday.

"You bet," answered the Pole. "I see it's a fair cop. All I say is, I
don't believe any Pole could have imitated my accent like I did his."

"I concede the point," said Sunday. "I believe your own accent to be
inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving
your beard with your card?"

"Not a bit," answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped off the whole
of his shaggy head-covering, emerging with thin red hair and a pale,
pert face. "It was hot," he added.

"I will do you the justice to say," said Sunday, not without a sort of
brutal admiration, "that you seem to have kept pretty cool under it. Now
listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me
for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in
torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about
us, I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your
discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step."

The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to his
feet without a word, and walked out of the room with an air of perfect
nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to realise that this ease
was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight stumble outside the door,
which showed that the departing detective had not minded the step.

"Time is flying," said the President in his gayest manner, after
glancing at his watch, which like everything about him seemed bigger
than it ought to be. "I must go off at once; I have to take the chair at
a Humanitarian meeting."

The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.

"Would it not be better," he said a little sharply, "to discuss further
the details of our project, now that the spy has left us?"

"No, I think not," said the President with a yawn like an unobtrusive
earthquake. "Leave it as it is. Let Saturday settle it. I must be off.
Breakfast here next Sunday."

But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked nerves of the
Secretary. He was one of those men who are conscientious even in crime.

"I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular," he said. "It
is a fundamental rule of our society that all plans shall be debated in
full council. Of course, I fully appreciate your forethought when in the
actual presence of a traitor--"

"Secretary," said the President seriously, "if you'd take your head home
and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might."

The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.

"I really fail to understand--" he began in high offense.

"That's it, that's it," said the President, nodding a great many times.
"That's where you fail right enough. You fail to understand. Why, you
dancing donkey," he roared, rising, "you didn't want to be overheard by
a spy, didn't you? How do you know you aren't overheard now?"

And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room, shaking with
incomprehensible scorn.

Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any apparent
glimmering of his meaning. Syme alone had even a glimmering, and such
as it was it froze him to the bone. If the last words of the President
meant anything, they meant that he had not after all passed unsuspected.
They meant that while Sunday could not denounce him like Gogol, he still
could not trust him like the others.

The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and betook
themselves elsewhere to find lunch, for it was already well past midday.
The Professor went last, very slowly and painfully. Syme sat long after
the rest had gone, revolving his strange position. He had escaped a
thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud. At last he rose and made
his way out of the hotel into Leicester Square. The bright, cold day had
grown increasingly colder, and when he came out into the street he
was surprised by a few flakes of snow. While he still carried the
sword-stick and the rest of Gregory's portable luggage, he had thrown
the cloak down and left it somewhere, perhaps on the steam-tug, perhaps
on the balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might be slight,
he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up under the
doorway of a small and greasy hair-dresser's shop, the front window of
which was empty, except for a sickly wax lady in evening dress.

Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme, having found
one glance at the wax lady quite sufficient to depress his spirits,
stared out instead into the white and empty street. He was considerably
astonished to see, standing quite still outside the shop and staring
into the window, a man. His top hat was loaded with snow like the hat of
Father Christmas, the white drift was rising round his boots and ankles;
but it seemed as if nothing could tear him away from the contemplation
of the colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That any human being
should stand in such weather looking into such a shop was a matter of
sufficient wonder to Syme; but his idle wonder turned suddenly into
a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing there was the
paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the place for a
person of his years and infirmities.

Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of this
dehumanized brotherhood; but even he could not believe that the
Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady. He could
only suppose that the man's malady (whatever it was) involved some
momentary fits of rigidity or trance. He was not inclined, however, to
feel in this case any very compassionate concern. On the contrary,
he rather congratulated himself that the Professor's stroke and his
elaborate and limping walk would make it easy to escape from him and
leave him miles behind. For Syme thirsted first and last to get clear
of the whole poisonous atmosphere, if only for an hour. Then he could
collect his thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether
he should or should not keep faith with Gregory.

He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or three
streets, down through two or three others, and entered a small Soho
restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of four small and quaint
courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and ended up over black coffee
and a black cigar, still thinking. He had taken his seat in the upper
room of the restaurant, which was full of the chink of knives and the
chatter of foreigners. He remembered that in old days he had imagined
that all these harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He shuddered,
remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the delightful
shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the familiar place, the
faces of natural and talkative men, made him almost feel as if the
Council of the Seven Days had been a bad dream; and although he knew it
was nevertheless an objective reality, it was at least a distant one.
Tall houses and populous streets lay between him and his last sight of
the shameful seven; he was free in free London, and drinking wine among
the free. With a somewhat easier action, he took his hat and stick and
strolled down the stair into the shop below.

When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted to the
spot. At a small table, close up to the blank window and the white
street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a glass of milk,
with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For an instant Syme
stood as rigid as the stick he leant upon. Then with a gesture as of
blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor, dashing open the door and
slamming it behind him, and stood outside in the snow.

"Can that old corpse be following me?" he asked himself, biting his
yellow moustache. "I stopped too long up in that room, so that even
such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort is, with a little brisk
walking I can put a man like that as far away as Timbuctoo. Or am I too
fanciful? Was he really following me? Surely Sunday would not be such a
fool as to send a lame man?"

He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick, in the
direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow
increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began
to darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a swarm of silver bees.
Getting into his eyes and beard, they added their unremitting futility
to his already irritated nerves; and by the time that he had come at a
swinging pace to the beginning of Fleet Street, he lost patience, and
finding a Sunday teashop, turned into it to take shelter. He ordered
another cup of black coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so,
when Professor de Worms hobbled heavily into the shop, sat down with
difficulty and ordered a glass of milk.

Syme's walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great clang, which
confessed the concealed steel. But the Professor did not look round.
Syme, who was commonly a cool character, was literally gaping as a
rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had seen no cab following; he had
heard no wheels outside the shop; to all mortal appearances the man had
come on foot. But the old man could only walk like a snail, and Syme had
walked like the wind. He started up and snatched his stick, half crazy
with the contradiction in mere arithmetic, and swung out of the swinging
doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the Bank went
rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of a
hundred yards to reach it; but he managed to spring, swaying upon the
splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he climbed on to the
top. When he had been seated for about half a minute, he heard behind
him a sort of heavy and asthmatic breathing.

Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up the
omnibus steps a top hat soiled and dripping with snow, and under
the shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky shoulders of
Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with characteristic care,
and wrapped himself up to the chin in the mackintosh rug.

Every movement of the old man's tottering figure and vague hands, every
uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond
question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of
the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps
of caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and
space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite
unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.

Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring wildly at the
wintry sky, that grew gloomier every moment, he ran down the steps. He
had repressed an elemental impulse to leap over the side.

Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one of the
little courts at the side of Fleet Street as a rabbit rushes into a
hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible old Jack-in-the-box
was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he
could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those crooked
lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by the time
that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and described an
unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of pursuit. There
was none; there could not in any case have been much, for the little
streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere behind Red Lion
Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic citizen had
cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty yards, leaving the
wet, glistening cobble-stones. He thought little of this as he passed
it, only plunging into yet another arm of the maze. But when a few
hundred yards farther on he stood still again to listen, his heart stood
still also, for he heard from that space of rugged stones the clinking
crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple.

The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving London in a
darkness and oppression premature for that hour of the evening. On each
side of Syme the walls of the alley were blind and featureless; there
was no little window or any kind of eve. He felt a new impulse to break
out of this hive of houses, and to get once more into the open and
lamp-lit street. Yet he rambled and dodged for a long time before he
struck the main thoroughfare. When he did so, he struck it much farther
up than he had fancied. He came out into what seemed the vast and void
of Ludgate Circus, and saw St. Paul's Cathedral sitting in the sky.

At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a
pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some
degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even
dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very
word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some
indecent pun. Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the
whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green
twilight, as of men under the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset
behind the dark dome of St. Paul's had in it smoky and sinister
colours--colours of sickly green, dead red or decaying bronze, that were
just bright enough to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow.
But right up against these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the
cathedral; and upon the top of the cathedral was a random splash and
great stain of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had fallen
accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from its very
topmost point, and to pick out in perfect silver the great orb and the
cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly straightened himself, and made with
his sword-stick an involuntary salute.

He knew that that evil figure, his shadow, was creeping quickly or
slowly behind him, and he did not care.

It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were
darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might have
captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a new
impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and pursuing
paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon the Circus
he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.

Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley
behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp,
irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery
rhymes, "the crooked man who went a crooked mile." He really looked as
if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had
been threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his
lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. Syme waited for him as St.
George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation
or for death. And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him
like a total stranger, without even a blink of his mournful eyelids.

There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence that left
Syme in a final fury. The man's colourless face and manner seemed
to assert that the whole following had been an accident. Syme was
galvanised with an energy that was something between bitterness and a
burst of boyish derision. He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old
man's hat off, called out something like "Catch me if you can," and went
racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was impossible
now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the black figure
of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging strides like a
man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding body was still
pale, grave and professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body
of a harlequin.

This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill,
round St. Paul's Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the
nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke away towards the river,
and ended almost down by the docks. He saw the yellow panes of a low,
lighted public-house, flung himself into it and ordered beer. It was a
foul tavern, sprinkled with foreign sailors, a place where opium might
be smoked or knives drawn.

A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down carefully,
and asked for a glass of milk.



CHAPTER VIII. THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS

WHEN Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a chair, and
opposite to him, fixed and final also, the lifted eyebrows and
leaden eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully returned. This
incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after all, had certainly
pursued him. If the man had one character as a paralytic and another
character as a pursuer, the antithesis might make him more interesting,
but scarcely more soothing. It would be a very small comfort that
he could not find the Professor out, if by some serious accident the
Professor should find him out. He emptied a whole pewter pot of ale
before the professor had touched his milk.

One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was just
possible that this escapade signified something other than even a slight
suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign. Perhaps the
foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he ought to have
understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new Thursday was always
chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is always escorted along
it. He was just selecting a tentative inquiry, when the old Professor
opposite suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the
first diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without
any sort of preparation--

"Are you a policeman?"

Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only
manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.

"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?"

"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently. "I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."

"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?" asked
Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to
me somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a
policeman? Do, do let me be a postman."

The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.

"But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir,
the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never
detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps
a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have
been. I don't mind being the policeman that might have been. I don't
mind being anything in German thought."

"Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all Syme's
improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?"

Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.

"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"

The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.

"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"

"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.

"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it! If
you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil
dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your
grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a
dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not
in the British police?"

He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.

"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.

"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."

Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a crash.

"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"

"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile,
and beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman only
a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the
British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British
police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club. I
suppose I ought to arrest you." And with these words he laid on the
table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in
his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars
were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the
last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now
the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom
he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house,
who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did
not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
happy and silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an
intolerable oppression of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying
to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free
man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain
healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when
only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride,
secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme's egotism held hard to the
first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted the third.
Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat pocket, he
tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until his spike
of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a
barbaric laughter.

Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there
was something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many half-drunken men
look round.

"What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.

"At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.

"Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get hysterical.
Have some more beer. I'll join you."

"You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.

"My milk!" said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, "my milk! Do you think I'd look at the beastly stuff when
I'm out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We're all Christians in this
room, though perhaps," he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd,
"not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it
right enough!" and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash
of glass and a splash of silver fluid.

Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.

"I understand now," he cried; "of course, you're not an old man at all."

"I can't take my face off here," replied Professor de Worms. "It's
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I'm an old man, that's not
for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday."

"Yes, but I mean," said Syme impatiently, "there's nothing the matter
with you."

"Yes," answered the other dispassionately. "I am subject to colds."

Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief.
He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young
actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would
have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.

The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.

"Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"

"I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise. "But didn't
you?"

"I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called himself de
Worms. "I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in
my boots."

"And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. "I had my hand on my revolver all the time."

"So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol evidently."

Syme struck the table with an exclamation.

"Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!"

The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.

"We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing."

"Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.

"No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three hundred
against Sunday."

And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died in
his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable
President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph,
and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites,
that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred
by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow
more actual during absence, as if a man's painted portrait should slowly
come alive.

They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme's speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.

"Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?"

The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.

"Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."

Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.

"Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne
and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down."

"How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"

"Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should leave in the
universe anything of which he is afraid."

De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
inhuman exaltation--

"Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars."

The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.

"Sunday is a fixed star," he said.

"You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat.

The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.

"Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
"exactly where you are going?"

"Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris."

"Have you any conception how?" inquired the other.

"No," said Syme with equal decision.

"You remember, of course," resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling
his beard and looking out of the window, "that when we broke up rather
hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the
private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time
probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and what he will
do it is doubtful whether even the President knows; certainly we don't
know. The only man who does know is Dr. Bull."

"Confound it!" cried Syme. "And we don't know where he is."

"Yes," said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, "I know where
he is myself."

"Will you tell me?" asked Syme with eager eyes.

"I will take you there," said the Professor, and took down his own hat
from a peg.

Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.

"What do you mean?" he asked sharply. "Will you join me? Will you take
the risk?"

"Young man," said the Professor pleasantly, "I am amused to observe that
you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and that
shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical rhetoric. You
think that it is possible to pull down the President. I know that it
is impossible, and I am going to try it," and opening the tavern door,
which let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together into the dark
streets by the docks.

Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps
irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen
world. Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing
confusion of lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a
certain briskness, towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or
two of the lamplit river looked like a bar of flame.

"Where are you going?" Syme inquired.

"Just now," answered the Professor, "I am going just round the corner
to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires
early."

"Dr. Bull!" exclaimed Syme. "Does he live round the corner?"

"No," answered his friend. "As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he has
gone to bed."

Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side
at this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang
it, a bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted
windows, and rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height.
Their special poise and position made one block of buildings especially
look like a Tower of Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any
of the sky-scraping buildings in America, so he could only think of the
buildings in a dream.

Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of
his innumerable eyes.

Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick against
his boot.

"We are too late," he said, "the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed."

"What do you mean?" asked Syme. "Does he live over there, then?"

"Yes," said de Worms, "behind that particular window which you can't
see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him tomorrow
morning."

Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road.
The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood,
proceeded to a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a
sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out of
repair, stood back some twenty feet from the road.

"You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils," explained the Professor. "I once found a decent place in the
West End."

"I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?"

"It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.

In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme's sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had
been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between
isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians
that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand
times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world
will always return to monogamy.

Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his outrageous
tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little tavern by
the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant monologue, as a
man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also, the man who had
impersonated Professor de Worms was not less communicative. His own
story was almost as silly as Syme's.

"That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
"a lot better than old Gogol's. Even at the start I thought he was a bit
too hairy."

"A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively.
"Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of
an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed,
to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a
portrait."

"I don't understand you," said Syme.

"I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples."

"You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?"

"He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.

"Then why doesn't he denounce you?"

"I have denounced him," answered the Professor.

"Do explain yourself," said Syme.

"With pleasure, if you don't mind hearing my story," replied the eminent
foreign philosopher. "I am by profession an actor, and my name is
Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian and
blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf, sometimes
the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political refugee.
In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great German
Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much about
him beyond his appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I
studied carefully. I understood that he had proved that the destructive
principle in the universe was God; hence he insisted on the need for a
furious and incessant energy, rending all things in pieces. Energy, he
said, was the All. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic.
When I met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much
that I resolved to imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would have
drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a caricature.
I made myself up into what was meant for a wild exaggeration of the
old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the room full of his
supporters I expected to be received with a roar of laughter, or (if
they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the insult. I
cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received with
a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with
a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon
me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really
was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy-minded young man
at the time, and I confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully
recover, however, two or three of these admirers ran up to me radiating
indignation, and told me that a public insult had been put upon me in
the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed that an impertinent
fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had
drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly I
decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the
glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes that
the real Professor came into the room.

"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which
was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like
my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a
young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis,
and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly
paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I
countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that
nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could
not even understand myself. 'I don't fancy,' he said, 'that you could
have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since
there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential
of differentiation.' I replied quite scornfully, 'You read all that up
in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was
exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary for me to say that there
never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all
round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and
the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him
rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell
back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail
like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like
the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no hedgehog in
Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.'
I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather
witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,'
at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The
real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one
man tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe,
received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent
earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining."

"Well," said Syme, "I can understand your putting on his dirty old beard
for a night's practical joke, but I don't understand your never taking
it off again."

"That is the rest of the story," said the impersonator. "When I myself
left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went limping down the
dark street, hoping that I should soon be far enough away to be able
to walk like a human being. To my astonishment, as I was turning the
corner, I felt a touch on the shoulder, and turning, found myself under
the shadow of an enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I struck
a sort of paralytic attitude, and cried in a high German accent, 'Yes,
I am wanted--by the oppressed of the world. You are arresting me on the
charge of being the great anarchist, Professor de Worms.' The policeman
impassively consulted a paper in his hand, 'No, sir,' he said civilly,
'at least, not exactly, sir. I am arresting you on the charge of not
being the celebrated anarchist, Professor de Worms.' This charge, if it
was criminal at all, was certainly the lighter of the two, and I went
along with the man, doubtful, but not greatly dismayed. I was shown into
a number of rooms, and eventually into the presence of a police officer,
who explained that a serious campaign had been opened against the
centres of anarchy, and that this, my successful masquerade, might be of
considerable value to the public safety. He offered me a good salary and
this little blue card. Though our conversation was short, he struck me
as a man of very massive common sense and humour; but I cannot tell you
much about him personally, because--"

Syme laid down his knife and fork.

"I know," he said, "because you talked to him in a dark room."

Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.



CHAPTER IX. THE MAN IN SPECTACLES

"BURGUNDY is a jolly thing," said the Professor sadly, as he set his
glass down.

"You don't look as if it were," said Syme; "you drink it as if it were
medicine."

"You must excuse my manner," said the Professor dismally, "my position
is rather a curious one. Inside I am really bursting with boyish
merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't
leave off. So that when I am among friends, and have no need at all
to disguise myself, I still can't help speaking slow and wrinkling my
forehead--just as if it were my forehead. I can be quite happy, you
understand, but only in a paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant
exclamations leap up in my heart, but they come out of my mouth quite
different. You should hear me say, 'Buck up, old cock!' It would bring
tears to your eyes."

"It does," said Syme; "but I cannot help thinking that apart from all
that you are really a bit worried."

The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.

"You are a very clever fellow," he said, "it is a pleasure to work
with you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There is a great
problem to face," and he sank his bald brow in his two hands.

Then he said in a low voice--

"Can you play the piano?"

"Yes," said Syme in simple wonder, "I'm supposed to have a good touch."

Then, as the other did not speak, he added--

"I trust the great cloud is lifted."

After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous shadow of
his hands--

"It would have done just as well if you could work a typewriter."

"Thank you," said Syme, "you flatter me."

"Listen to me," said the other, "and remember whom we have to see
tomorrow. You and I are going tomorrow to attempt something which is
very much more dangerous than trying to steal the Crown Jewels out
of the Tower. We are trying to steal a secret from a very sharp, very
strong, and very wicked man. I believe there is no man, except the
President, of course, who is so seriously startling and formidable as
that little grinning fellow in goggles. He has not perhaps the white-hot
enthusiasm unto death, the mad martyrdom for anarchy, which marks the
Secretary. But then that very fanaticism in the Secretary has a human
pathos, and is almost a redeeming trait. But the little Doctor has a
brutal sanity that is more shocking than the Secretary's disease. Don't
you notice his detestable virility and vitality. He bounces like an
india-rubber ball. Depend on it, Sunday was not asleep (I wonder if he
ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this outrage in the
round, black head of Dr. Bull."

"And you think," said Syme, "that this unique monster will be soothed if
I play the piano to him?"

"Don't be an ass," said his mentor. "I mentioned the piano because it
gives one quick and independent fingers. Syme, if we are to go through
this interview and come out sane or alive, we must have some code of
signals between us that this brute will not see. I have made a rough
alphabetical cypher corresponding to the five fingers--like this, see,"
and he rippled with his fingers on the wooden table--"B A D, bad, a word
we may frequently require."

Syme poured himself out another glass of wine, and began to study the
scheme. He was abnormally quick with his brains at puzzles, and with his
hands at conjuring, and it did not take him long to learn how he might
convey simple messages by what would seem to be idle taps upon a table
or knee. But wine and companionship had always the effect of inspiring
him to a farcical ingenuity, and the Professor soon found himself
struggling with the too vast energy of the new language, as it passed
through the heated brain of Syme.

"We must have several word-signs," said Syme seriously--"words that
we are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is
'coeval'. What's yours?"

"Do stop playing the goat," said the Professor plaintively. "You don't
know how serious this is."

"'Lush' too," said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously, "we must have
'lush'--word applied to grass, don't you know?"

"Do you imagine," asked the Professor furiously, "that we are going to
talk to Dr. Bull about grass?"

"There are several ways in which the subject could be approached," said
Syme reflectively, "and the word introduced without appearing forced.
We might say, 'Dr. Bull, as a revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant
once advised us to eat grass; and indeed many of us, looking on the
fresh lush grass of summer...'"

"Do you understand," said the other, "that this is a tragedy?"

"Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce
else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope. I
suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That would
involve pulling off our boots and socks during the conversation, which
however unobtrusively performed--"

"Syme," said his friend with a stern simplicity, "go to bed!"

Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new
code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with
darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like a ghost beside
his bed.

Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw
off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way
that all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the
bedclothes off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still
felt an entire trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the
trust between two men going to the scaffold.

"Well," said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on his
trousers, "I dreamt of that alphabet of yours. Did it take you long to
make it up?"

The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with eyes the
colour of a wintry sea; so Syme repeated his question.

"I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I'm considered good at
these things, and it was a good hour's grind. Did you learn it all on
the spot?"

The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he wore a fixed
but very small smile.

"How long did it take you?"

The Professor did not move.

"Confound you, can't you answer?" called out Syme, in a sudden anger
that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor
could answer, he did not.

Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but
his second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know about
this queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend? What
did he know, except that the man had been at the anarchist breakfast and
had told him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was that there
should be another friend there beside Gogol! Was this man's silence a
sensational way of declaring war? Was this adamantine stare after all
only the awful sneer of some threefold traitor, who had turned for the
last time? He stood and strained his ears in this heartless silence.
He almost fancied he could hear dynamiters come to capture him shifting
softly in the corridor outside.

Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five
dumb fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the
twinkling movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message--

"I will only talk like this. We must get used to it."

He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief--

"All right. Let's get out to breakfast."

They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
sword-stick, he held it hard.

They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse thick
sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the river,
which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as Acheron.
They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which they had
seen from across the river, and began in silence to mount the naked and
numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make short remarks
on the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight they passed
a window; each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn lifting itself
laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate looked
like the leaden surges of a grey, troubled sea after rain. Syme was
increasingly conscious that his new adventure had somehow a quality of
cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the past. Last night, for
instance, the tall tenements had seemed to him like a tower in a dream.
As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and
bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot
horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion.
Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something
unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning
statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He
was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason
itself.

By the time they reached Dr. Bull's landing, a last window showed them
a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like
red clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull's bare garret it
was full of light.

Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with these
empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the garret
and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the memory
was--the French Revolution. There should have been the black outline of
a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull
was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head
might well have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a
more slipshod Robespierre.

Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
position gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both
more pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the
balcony. Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might
really have been black cavities in his skull, making him look like a
death's-head. And, indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a wooden
table, it might have been he.

He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set
chairs for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded
to put on a coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up
neatly, and came back to sit down at his table.

The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
began, "I'm sorry to disturb you so early, comrade," said he, with a
careful resumption of the slow de Worms manner. "You have no doubt made
all the arrangements for the Paris affair?" Then he added with infinite
slowness, "We have information which renders intolerable anything in the
nature of a moment's delay."

Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word--

"Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with
all the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an
experience which it would take more time to recount than we can afford,
if we are to act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in
detail, even at the risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is
essential to the understanding of the problem we have to discuss."

He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little Doctor
continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill work.
Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor's smile and
silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible silence
which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before. About the
Professor's makeup and all his antics there was always something merely
grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday
as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood. But here was
daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered man in tweeds, not odd
save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not glaring or grinning at
all, but smiling steadily and not saying a word. The whole had a sense
of unbearable reality. Under the increasing sunlight the colours of
the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded
outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel.
But his smile was quite slight, the pose of his head polite; the only
uncanny thing was his silence.

"As I say," resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, "the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to
have narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than
me--"

His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge
of the crazy table. He read the message, "You must go on. This devil has
sucked me dry!"

Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.

"Yes, the thing really happened to me," he said hastily. "I had the good
fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me, thanks
to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my reputation for
respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at the Savoy. Under
this influence he became friendly, and told me in so many words that
within a day or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in France.

"So unless you or I can get on his track--"

The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his protected
eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme that he
would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same elaborate
calm.

"Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems
to me unquestionably urgent that--"

All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily
as the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The
nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of
motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly
tapped the edge of the table. His message to his ally ran, "I have an
intuition."

The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
"Then sit on it."

Syme telegraphed, "It is quite extraordinary."

The other answered, "Extraordinary rot!"

Syme said, "I am a poet."

The other retorted, "You are a dead man."

Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were burning
feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to a sort
of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he signalled to
his friend, "You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is. It has
that sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of spring."

He then studied the answer on his friend's fingers. The answer was, "Go
to hell!"

The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.

"Perhaps I should rather say," said Syme on his fingers, "that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart
of lush woods."

His companion disdained to reply.

"Or yet again," tapped Syme, "it is positive, as is the passionate red
hair of a beautiful woman."

The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that
could not be neglected--

"Dr. Bull!"

The Doctor's sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.

"Dr. Bull," said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
"would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off
your spectacles?"

The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his life
and fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The Doctor
did not move.

For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames.
Then Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.

Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for
an instant he could only point without speaking.

The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at
Dr. Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes.
And indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.

The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an
open expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and
an unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather
commonplace. The smile was still there, but it might have been the first
smile of a baby.

"I knew I was a poet," cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. "I knew my
intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did
it! It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all
the rest of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil
among dead ones."

"It certainly does make a queer difference," said the Professor shakily.
"But as regards the project of Dr. Bull--"

"Project be damned!" roared Syme, beside himself. "Look at him! Look
at his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don't
suppose, do you, that that thing's an anarchist?"

"Syme!" cried the other in an apprehensive agony.

"Why, by God," said Syme, "I'll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
I am a police officer. There's my card," and he flung down the blue card
upon the table.

The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend's. Then
the third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning
they heard his voice.

"I'm awfully glad you chaps have come so early," he said, with a sort of
schoolboy flippancy, "for we can all start for France together. Yes,
I'm in the force right enough," and he flicked a blue card towards them
lightly as a matter of form.

Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses, the
Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others instinctively
followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he passed under the
doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone passage so that it
rang.

"But Lord God Almighty," he cried out, "if this is all right, there were
more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the damned
Council!"

"We might have fought easily," said Bull; "we were four against three."

The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
below.

"No," said the voice, "we were not four against three--we were not so
lucky. We were four against One."

The others went down the stairs in silence.

The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there his
own robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked quickly
on ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the others over
his shoulder.

"It is jolly to get some pals," he said. "I've been half dead with
the jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and
embraced him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won't despise
me for having been in a blue funk."

"All the blue devils in blue hell," said Syme, "contributed to my blue
funk! But the worst devil was you and your infernal goggles."

The young man laughed delightedly.

"Wasn't it a rag?" he said. "Such a simple idea--not my own. I haven't
got the brains. You see, I wanted to go into the detective service,
especially the anti-dynamite business. But for that purpose they wanted
someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and they all swore by blazes that
I could never look like a dynamiter. They said my very walk was
respectable, and that seen from behind I looked like the British
Constitution. They said I looked too healthy and too optimistic, and too
reliable and benevolent; they called me all sorts of names at Scotland
Yard. They said that if I had been a criminal, I might have made my
fortune by looking so like an honest man; but as I had the misfortune to
be an honest man, there was not even the remotest chance of my assisting
them by ever looking like a criminal. But at last I was brought before
some old josser who was high up in the force, and who seemed to have
no end of a head on his shoulders. And there the others all talked
hopelessly. One asked whether a bushy beard would hide my nice smile;
another said that if they blacked my face I might look like a negro
anarchist; but this old chap chipped in with a most extraordinary
remark. 'A pair of smoked spectacles will do it,' he said positively.
'Look at him now; he looks like an angelic office boy. Put him on a pair
of smoked spectacles, and children will scream at the sight of him.'
And so it was, by George! When once my eyes were covered, all the rest,
smile and big shoulders and short hair, made me look a perfect little
devil. As I say, it was simple enough when it was done, like miracles;
but that wasn't the really miraculous part of it. There was one really
staggering thing about the business, and my head still turns at it."

"What was that?" asked Syme.

"I'll tell you," answered the man in spectacles. "This big pot in the
police who sized me up so that he knew how the goggles would go with my
hair and socks--by God, he never saw me at all!"

Syme's eyes suddenly flashed on him.

"How was that?" he asked. "I thought you talked to him."

"So I did," said Bull brightly; "but we talked in a pitch-dark room like
a coalcellar. There, you would never have guessed that."

"I could not have conceived it," said Syme gravely.

"It is indeed a new idea," said the Professor.

Their new ally was in practical matters a whirlwind. At the inquiry
office he asked with businesslike brevity about the trains for Dover.
Having got his information, he bundled the company into a cab, and put
them and himself inside a railway carriage before they had properly
realised the breathless process. They were already on the Calais boat
before conversation flowed freely.

"I had already arranged," he explained, "to go to France for my lunch;
but I am delighted to have someone to lunch with me. You see, I had to
send that beast, the Marquis, over with his bomb, because the President
had his eye on me, though God knows how. I'll tell you the story some
day. It was perfectly choking. Whenever I tried to slip out of it I saw
the President somewhere, smiling out of the bow-window of a club, or
taking off his hat to me from the top of an omnibus. I tell you, you can
say what you like, that fellow sold himself to the devil; he can be in
six places at once."

"So you sent the Marquis off, I understand," asked the Professor. "Was
it long ago? Shall we be in time to catch him?"

"Yes," answered the new guide, "I've timed it all. He'll still be at
Calais when we arrive."

"But when we do catch him at Calais," said the Professor, "what are we
going to do?"

At this question the countenance of Dr. Bull fell for the first time. He
reflected a little, and then said--

"Theoretically, I suppose, we ought to call the police."

"Not I," said Syme. "Theoretically I ought to drown myself first. I
promised a poor fellow, who was a real modern pessimist, on my word of
honour not to tell the police. I'm no hand at casuistry, but I can't
break my word to a modern pessimist. It's like breaking one's word to a
child."

"I'm in the same boat," said the Professor. "I tried to tell the police
and I couldn't, because of some silly oath I took. You see, when I was
an actor I was a sort of all-round beast. Perjury or treason is the only
crime I haven't committed. If I did that I shouldn't know the difference
between right and wrong."

"I've been through all that," said Dr. Bull, "and I've made up my mind.
I gave my promise to the Secretary--you know him, man who smiles upside
down. My friends, that man is the most utterly unhappy man that was ever
human. It may be his digestion, or his conscience, or his nerves, or his
philosophy of the universe, but he's damned, he's in hell! Well, I can't
turn on a man like that, and hunt him down. It's like whipping a leper.
I may be mad, but that's how I feel; and there's jolly well the end of
it."

"I don't think you're mad," said Syme. "I knew you would decide like
that when first you--"

"Eh?" said Dr. Bull.

"When first you took off your spectacles."

Dr. Bull smiled a little, and strolled across the deck to look at the
sunlit sea. Then he strolled back again, kicking his heels carelessly,
and a companionable silence fell between the three men.

"Well," said Syme, "it seems that we have all the same kind of morality
or immorality, so we had better face the fact that comes of it."

"Yes," assented the Professor, "you're quite right; and we must hurry
up, for I can see the Grey Nose standing out from France."

"The fact that comes of it," said Syme seriously, "is this, that we
three are alone on this planet. Gogol has gone, God knows where; perhaps
the President has smashed him like a fly. On the Council we are three
men against three, like the Romans who held the bridge. But we are worse
off than that, first because they can appeal to their organization and
we cannot appeal to ours, and second because--"

"Because one of those other three men," said the Professor, "is not a
man."

Syme nodded and was silent for a second or two, then he said--

"My idea is this. We must do something to keep the Marquis in Calais
till tomorrow midday. I have turned over twenty schemes in my head. We
cannot denounce him as a dynamiter; that is agreed. We cannot get him
detained on some trivial charge, for we should have to appear; he knows
us, and he would smell a rat. We cannot pretend to keep him on anarchist
business; he might swallow much in that way, but not the notion of
stopping in Calais while the Czar went safely through Paris. We might
try to kidnap him, and lock him up ourselves; but he is a well-known man
here. He has a whole bodyguard of friends; he is very strong and brave,
and the event is doubtful. The only thing I can see to do is actually to
take advantage of the very things that are in the Marquis's favour. I am
going to profit by the fact that he is a highly respected nobleman. I
am going to profit by the fact that he has many friends and moves in the
best society."

"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the Professor.

"The Symes are first mentioned in the fourteenth century," said
Syme; "but there is a tradition that one of them rode behind Bruce at
Bannockburn. Since 1350 the tree is quite clear."

"He's gone off his head," said the little Doctor, staring.

"Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are 'argent a chevron gules
charged with three cross crosslets of the field.' The motto varies."

The Professor seized Syme roughly by the waistcoat.

"We are just inshore," he said. "Are you seasick or joking in the wrong
place?"

"My remarks are almost painfully practical," answered Syme, in an
unhurried manner. "The house of St. Eustache also is very ancient. The
Marquis cannot deny that he is a gentleman. He cannot deny that I am a
gentleman. And in order to put the matter of my social position quite
beyond a doubt, I propose at the earliest opportunity to knock his hat
off. But here we are in the harbour."

They went on shore under the strong sun in a sort of daze. Syme, who had
now taken the lead as Bull had taken it in London, led them along a kind
of marine parade until he came to some cafes, embowered in a bulk of
greenery and overlooking the sea. As he went before them his step was
slightly swaggering, and he swung his stick like a sword. He was making
apparently for the extreme end of the line of cafes, but he stopped
abruptly. With a sharp gesture he motioned them to silence, but he
pointed with one gloved finger to a cafe table under a bank of flowering
foliage at which sat the Marquis de St. Eustache, his teeth shining in
his thick, black beard, and his bold, brown face shadowed by a light
yellow straw hat and outlined against the violet sea.



CHAPTER X. THE DUEL

SYME sat down at a cafe table with his companions, his blue eyes
sparkling like the bright sea below, and ordered a bottle of Saumur with
a pleased impatience. He was for some reason in a condition of curious
hilarity. His spirits were already unnaturally high; they rose as the
Saumur sank, and in half an hour his talk was a torrent of nonsense. He
professed to be making out a plan of the conversation which was going to
ensue between himself and the deadly Marquis. He jotted it down wildly
with a pencil. It was arranged like a printed catechism, with questions
and answers, and was delivered with an extraordinary rapidity of
utterance.

"I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own. I
shall say, 'The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe.' He will say,
'The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume.' He will say in the most exquisite
French, 'How are you?' I shall reply in the most exquisite Cockney, 'Oh,
just the Syme--'"

"Oh, shut it," said the man in spectacles. "Pull yourself together, and
chuck away that bit of paper. What are you really going to do?"

"But it was a lovely catechism," said Syme pathetically. "Do let me read
it you. It has only forty-three questions and answers, and some of the
Marquis's answers are wonderfully witty. I like to be just to my enemy."

"But what's the good of it all?" asked Dr. Bull in exasperation.

"It leads up to my challenge, don't you see," said Syme, beaming. "When
the Marquis has given the thirty-ninth reply, which runs--"

"Has it by any chance occurred to you," asked the Professor, with a
ponderous simplicity, "that the Marquis may not say all the forty-three
things you have put down for him? In that case, I understand, your own
epigrams may appear somewhat more forced."

Syme struck the table with a radiant face.

"Why, how true that is," he said, "and I never thought of it. Sir, you
have an intellect beyond the common. You will make a name."

"Oh, you're as drunk as an owl!" said the Doctor.

"It only remains," continued Syme quite unperturbed, "to adopt some
other method of breaking the ice (if I may so express it) between myself
and the man I wish to kill. And since the course of a dialogue cannot be
predicted by one of its parties alone (as you have pointed out with such
recondite acumen), the only thing to be done, I suppose, is for the one
party, as far as possible, to do all the dialogue by himself. And so I
will, by George!" And he stood up suddenly, his yellow hair blowing in
the slight sea breeze.

A band was playing in a cafe chantant hidden somewhere among the trees,
and a woman had just stopped singing. On Syme's heated head the bray of
the brass band seemed like the jar and jingle of that barrel-organ in
Leicester Square, to the tune of which he had once stood up to die. He
looked across to the little table where the Marquis sat. The man had two
companions now, solemn Frenchmen in frock-coats and silk hats, one of
them with the red rosette of the Legion of Honour, evidently people of
a solid social position. Besides these black, cylindrical costumes,
the Marquis, in his loose straw hat and light spring clothes, looked
Bohemian and even barbaric; but he looked the Marquis. Indeed, one might
say that he looked the king, with his animal elegance, his scornful
eyes, and his proud head lifted against the purple sea. But he was no
Christian king, at any rate; he was, rather, some swarthy despot, half
Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days when slavery seemed natural looked
down on the Mediterranean, on his galley and his groaning slaves. Just
so, Syme thought, would the brown-gold face of such a tyrant have shown
against the dark green olives and the burning blue.

"Are you going to address the meeting?" asked the Professor peevishly,
seeing that Syme still stood up without moving.

Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.

"I am," he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his companions,
"that meeting. That meeting displeases me. I am going to pull that
meeting's great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose."

He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The Marquis, seeing
him, arched his black Assyrian eyebrows in surprise, but smiled
politely.

"You are Mr. Syme, I think," he said.

Syme bowed.

"And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache," he said gracefully. "Permit
me to pull your nose."

He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards, upsetting his
chair, and the two men in top hats held Syme back by the shoulders.

"This man has insulted me!" said Syme, with gestures of explanation.

"Insulted you?" cried the gentleman with the red rosette, "when?"

"Oh, just now," said Syme recklessly. "He insulted my mother."

"Insulted your mother!" exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.

"Well, anyhow," said Syme, conceding a point, "my aunt."

"But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?" said the
second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. "He has been sitting here
all the time."

"Ah, it was what he said!" said Syme darkly.

"I said nothing at all," said the Marquis, "except something about the
band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well."

"It was an allusion to my family," said Syme firmly. "My aunt played
Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted
about it."

"This seems most extraordinary," said the gentleman who was decore,
looking doubtfully at the Marquis.

"Oh, I assure you," said Syme earnestly, "the whole of your conversation
was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt's weaknesses."

"This is nonsense!" said the second gentleman. "I for one have said
nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl
with black hair."

"Well, there you are again!" said Syme indignantly. "My aunt's was red."

"It seems to me," said the other, "that you are simply seeking a pretext
to insult the Marquis."

"By George!" said Syme, facing round and looking at him, "what a clever
chap you are!"

The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger's.

"Seeking a quarrel with me!" he cried. "Seeking a fight with me! By God!
there was never a man who had to seek long. These gentlemen will perhaps
act for me. There are still four hours of daylight. Let us fight this
evening."

Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.

"Marquis," he said, "your action is worthy of your fame and blood.
Permit me to consult for a moment with the gentlemen in whose hands I
shall place myself."

In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they, who had seen
his champagne-inspired attack and listened to his idiotic explanations,
were quite startled at the look of him. For now that he came back to
them he was quite sober, a little pale, and he spoke in a low voice of
passionate practicality.

"I have done it," he said hoarsely. "I have fixed a fight on the beast.
But look here, and listen carefully. There is no time for talk. You are
my seconds, and everything must come from you. Now you must insist, and
insist absolutely, on the duel coming off after seven tomorrow, so as to
give me the chance of preventing him from catching the 7.45 for Paris.
If he misses that he misses his crime. He can't refuse to meet you on
such a small point of time and place. But this is what he will do. He
will choose a field somewhere near a wayside station, where he can pick
up the train. He is a very good swordsman, and he will trust to killing
me in time to catch it. But I can fence well too, and I think I can keep
him in play, at any rate, until the train is lost. Then perhaps he may
kill me to console his feelings. You understand? Very well then, let
me introduce you to some charming friends of mine," and leading them
quickly across the parade, he presented them to the Marquis's seconds by
two very aristocratic names of which they had not previously heard.

Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise a
part of his character. They were (as he said of his impulse about the
spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the exaltation
of prophecy.

He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his opponent.
When the Marquis was informed by his seconds that Syme could only
fight in the morning, he must fully have realised that an obstacle
had suddenly arisen between him and his bomb-throwing business in the
capital. Naturally he could not explain this objection to his friends,
so he chose the course which Syme had predicted. He induced his seconds
to settle on a small meadow not far from the railway, and he trusted to
the fatality of the first engagement.

When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one could have
guessed that he had any anxiety about a journey; his hands were in his
pockets, his straw hat on the back of his head, his handsome face
brazen in the sun. But it might have struck a stranger as odd that there
appeared in his train, not only his seconds carrying the sword-case, but
two of his servants carrying a portmanteau and a luncheon basket.

Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth, and Syme was
vaguely surprised to see so many spring flowers burning gold and silver
in the tall grass in which the whole company stood almost knee-deep.

With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre and solemn
morning-dress, with hats like black chimney-pots; the little Doctor
especially, with the addition of his black spectacles, looked like an
undertaker in a farce. Syme could not help feeling a comic contrast
between this funereal church parade of apparel and the rich and
glistening meadow, growing wild flowers everywhere. But, indeed, this
comic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black hats was but a
symbol of the tragic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black
business. On his right was a little wood; far away to his left lay the
long curve of the railway line, which he was, so to speak, guarding from
the Marquis, whose goal and escape it was. In front of him, behind the
black group of his opponents, he could see, like a tinted cloud, a small
almond bush in flower against the faint line of the sea.

The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was Colonel
Ducroix, approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great politeness,
and suggested that the play should terminate with the first considerable
hurt.

Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon this point
of policy, insisted, with great dignity and in very bad French, that it
should continue until one of the combatants was disabled. Syme had made
up his mind that he could avoid disabling the Marquis and prevent
the Marquis from disabling him for at least twenty minutes. In twenty
minutes the Paris train would have gone by.

"To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de St.
Eustache," said the Professor solemnly, "it must be a matter of
indifference which method is adopted, and our principal has strong
reasons for demanding the longer encounter, reasons the delicacy of
which prevent me from being explicit, but for the just and honourable
nature of which I can--"

"Peste!" broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had suddenly
darkened, "let us stop talking and begin," and he slashed off the head
of a tall flower with his stick.

Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.

Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony,
and another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much
delay as was consistent with dignity.

Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one himself
and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.

Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats.
The principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, "Engage!" and the two
blades touched and tingled.

When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like dreams
from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as
mere delusions of the nerves--how the fear of the Professor had been
the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the
Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was
the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless
modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears
were fancies, for he found himself in the presence of the great fact of
the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt
like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices, and had
woke up on the morning when he was to be hanged. For as soon as he had
seen the sunlight run down the channel of his foe's foreshortened blade,
and as soon as he had felt the two tongues of steel touch, vibrating
like two living things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter,
and that probably his last hour had come.

He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things.
He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost
fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking
into blossom in the meadow--flowers blood red and burning gold and
blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his
eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the
Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line.
He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready
to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the
world.

But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty of a thing
lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass, and he was
parrying his enemy's point with a kind of clockwork skill of which he
had hardly supposed himself capable. Once his enemy's point ran along
his wrist, leaving a slight streak of blood, but it either was not
noticed or was tacitly ignored. Every now and then he riposted, and once
or twice he could almost fancy that he felt his point go home, but as
there was no blood on blade or shirt he supposed he was mistaken. Then
came an interruption and a change.

At the risk of losing all, the Marquis, interrupting his quiet stare,
flashed one glance over his shoulder at the line of railway on his
right. Then he turned on Syme a face transfigured to that of a fiend,
and began to fight as if with twenty weapons. The attack came so fast
and furious, that the one shining sword seemed a shower of shining
arrows. Syme had no chance to look at the railway; but also he had
no need. He could guess the reason of the Marquis's sudden madness of
battle--the Paris train was in sight.

But the Marquis's morbid energy over-reached itself. Twice Syme,
parrying, knocked his opponent's point far out of the fighting circle;
and the third time his riposte was so rapid, that there was no doubt
about the hit this time. Syme's sword actually bent under the weight of
the Marquis's body, which it had pierced.

Syme was as certain that he had stuck his blade into his enemy as a
gardener that he has stuck his spade into the ground. Yet the Marquis
sprang back from the stroke without a stagger, and Syme stood staring at
his own sword-point like an idiot. There was no blood on it at all.

There was an instant of rigid silence, and then Syme in his turn fell
furiously on the other, filled with a flaming curiosity. The Marquis
was probably, in a general sense, a better fencer than he, as he
had surmised at the beginning, but at the moment the Marquis seemed
distraught and at a disadvantage. He fought wildly and even weakly, and
he constantly looked away at the railway line, almost as if he feared
the train more than the pointed steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought
fiercely but still carefully, in an intellectual fury, eager to solve
the riddle of his own bloodless sword. For this purpose, he aimed less
at the Marquis's body, and more at his throat and head. A minute and a
half afterwards he felt his point enter the man's neck below the jaw.
It came out clean. Half mad, he thrust again, and made what should have
been a bloody scar on the Marquis's cheek. But there was no scar.

For one moment the heaven of Syme again grew black with supernatural
terrors. Surely the man had a charmed life. But this new spiritual dread
was a more awful thing than had been the mere spiritual topsy-turvydom
symbolised by the paralytic who pursued him. The Professor was only a
goblin; this man was a devil--perhaps he was the Devil! Anyhow, this
was certain, that three times had a human sword been driven into him
and made no mark. When Syme had that thought he drew himself up, and all
that was good in him sang high up in the air as a high wind sings in the
trees. He thought of all the human things in his story--of the Chinese
lanterns in Saffron Park, of the girl's red hair in the garden, of the
honest, beer-swilling sailors down by the dock, of his loyal companions
standing by. Perhaps he had been chosen as a champion of all these fresh
and kindly things to cross swords with the enemy of all creation. "After
all," he said to himself, "I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do
the one thing which Satan himself cannot do--I can die," and as the word
went through his head, he heard a faint and far-off hoot, which would
soon be the roar of the Paris train.

He fell to fighting again with a supernatural levity, like a Mohammedan
panting for Paradise. As the train came nearer and nearer he fancied he
could see people putting up the floral arches in Paris; he joined in
the growing noise and the glory of the great Republic whose gate he
was guarding against Hell. His thoughts rose higher and higher with
the rising roar of the train, which ended, as if proudly, in a long and
piercing whistle. The train stopped.

Suddenly, to the astonishment of everyone the Marquis sprang back quite
out of sword reach and threw down his sword. The leap was wonderful,
and not the less wonderful because Syme had plunged his sword a moment
before into the man's thigh.

"Stop!" said the Marquis in a voice that compelled a momentary
obedience. "I want to say something."

"What is the matter?" asked Colonel Ducroix, staring. "Has there been
foul play?"

"There has been foul play somewhere," said Dr. Bull, who was a little
pale. "Our principal has wounded the Marquis four times at least, and he
is none the worse."

The Marquis put up his hand with a curious air of ghastly patience.

"Please let me speak," he said. "It is rather important. Mr. Syme,"
he continued, turning to his opponent, "we are fighting today, if
I remember right, because you expressed a wish (which I thought
irrational) to pull my nose. Would you oblige me by pulling my nose now
as quickly as possible? I have to catch a train."

"I protest that this is most irregular," said Dr. Bull indignantly.

"It is certainly somewhat opposed to precedent," said Colonel Ducroix,
looking wistfully at his principal. "There is, I think, one case on
record (Captain Bellegarde and the Baron Zumpt) in which the weapons
were changed in the middle of the encounter at the request of one of the
combatants. But one can hardly call one's nose a weapon."

"Will you or will you not pull my nose?" said the Marquis in
exasperation. "Come, come, Mr. Syme! You wanted to do it, do it! You can
have no conception of how important it is to me. Don't be so selfish!
Pull my nose at once, when I ask you!" and he bent slightly forward with
a fascinating smile. The Paris train, panting and groaning, had grated
into a little station behind the neighbouring hill.

Syme had the feeling he had more than once had in these adventures--the
sense that a horrible and sublime wave lifted to heaven was just
toppling over. Walking in a world he half understood, he took two paces
forward and seized the Roman nose of this remarkable nobleman. He pulled
it hard, and it came off in his hand.

He stood for some seconds with a foolish solemnity, with the pasteboard
proboscis still between his fingers, looking at it, while the sun and
the clouds and the wooded hills looked down upon this imbecile scene.

The Marquis broke the silence in a loud and cheerful voice.

"If anyone has any use for my left eyebrow," he said, "he can have it.
Colonel Ducroix, do accept my left eyebrow! It's the kind of thing
that might come in useful any day," and he gravely tore off one of his
swarthy Assyrian brows, bringing about half his brown forehead with it,
and politely offered it to the Colonel, who stood crimson and speechless
with rage.

"If I had known," he spluttered, "that I was acting for a poltroon who
pads himself to fight--"

"Oh, I know, I know!" said the Marquis, recklessly throwing various
parts of himself right and left about the field. "You are making a
mistake; but it can't be explained just now. I tell you the train has
come into the station!"

"Yes," said Dr. Bull fiercely, "and the train shall go out of the
station. It shall go out without you. We know well enough for what
devil's work--"

The mysterious Marquis lifted his hands with a desperate gesture. He
was a strange scarecrow standing there in the sun with half his old face
peeled off, and half another face glaring and grinning from underneath.

"Will you drive me mad?" he cried. "The train--"

"You shall not go by the train," said Syme firmly, and grasped his
sword.

The wild figure turned towards Syme, and seemed to be gathering itself
for a sublime effort before speaking.

"You great fat, blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless,
Godforsaken, doddering, damned fool!" he said without taking breath.
"You great silly, pink-faced, towheaded turnip! You--"

"You shall not go by this train," repeated Syme.

"And why the infernal blazes," roared the other, "should I want to go by
the train?"

"We know all," said the Professor sternly. "You are going to Paris to
throw a bomb!"

"Going to Jericho to throw a Jabberwock!" cried the other, tearing his
hair, which came off easily.

"Have you all got softening of the brain, that you don't realise what
I am? Did you really think I wanted to catch that train? Twenty Paris
trains might go by for me. Damn Paris trains!"

"Then what did you care about?" began the Professor.

"What did I care about? I didn't care about catching the train; I cared
about whether the train caught me, and now, by God! it has caught me."

"I regret to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks
convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the
remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your
chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself
in many ways. What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you?
It may be my literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ought to mean
something."

"It means everything," said the other, "and the end of everything.
Sunday has us now in the hollow of his hand."

"Us!" repeated the Professor, as if stupefied. "What do you mean by
'us'?"

"The police, of course!" said the Marquis, and tore off his scalp and
half his face.

The head which emerged was the blonde, well brushed, smooth-haired head
which is common in the English constabulary, but the face was terribly
pale.

"I am Inspector Ratcliffe," he said, with a sort of haste that verged
on harshness. "My name is pretty well known to the police, and I can see
well enough that you belong to them. But if there is any doubt about
my position, I have a card," and he began to pull a blue card from his
pocket.

The Professor gave a tired gesture.

"Oh, don't show it us," he said wearily; "we've got enough of them to
equip a paper-chase."

The little man named Bull, had, like many men who seem to be of a mere
vivacious vulgarity, sudden movements of good taste. Here he certainly
saved the situation. In the midst of this staggering transformation
scene he stepped forward with all the gravity and responsibility of a
second, and addressed the two seconds of the Marquis.

"Gentlemen," he said, "we all owe you a serious apology; but I assure
you that you have not been made the victims of such a low joke as you
imagine, or indeed of anything undignified in a man of honour. You have
not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not
buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy. A secret
society of anarchists is hunting us like hares; not such unfortunate
madmen as may here or there throw a bomb through starvation or German
philosophy, but a rich and powerful and fanatical church, a church of
eastern pessimism, which holds it holy to destroy mankind like vermin.
How hard they hunt us you can gather from the fact that we are driven
to such disguises as those for which I apologise, and to such pranks as
this one by which you suffer."

The younger second of the Marquis, a short man with a black moustache,
bowed politely, and said--

"Of course, I accept the apology; but you will in your turn forgive me
if I decline to follow you further into your difficulties, and
permit myself to say good morning! The sight of an acquaintance and
distinguished fellow-townsman coming to pieces in the open air is
unusual, and, upon the whole, sufficient for one day. Colonel Ducroix, I
would in no way influence your actions, but if you feel with me that our
present society is a little abnormal, I am now going to walk back to the
town."

Colonel Ducroix moved mechanically, but then tugged abruptly at his
white moustache and broke out--

"No, by George! I won't. If these gentlemen are really in a mess with a
lot of low wreckers like that, I'll see them through it. I have fought
for France, and it is hard if I can't fight for civilization."

Dr. Bull took off his hat and waved it, cheering as at a public meeting.

"Don't make too much noise," said Inspector Ratcliffe, "Sunday may hear
you."

"Sunday!" cried Bull, and dropped his hat.

"Yes," retorted Ratcliffe, "he may be with them."

"With whom?" asked Syme.

"With the people out of that train," said the other.

"What you say seems utterly wild," began Syme. "Why, as a matter of
fact--But, my God," he cried out suddenly, like a man who sees an
explosion a long way off, "by God! if this is true the whole bally lot
of us on the Anarchist Council were against anarchy! Every born man was
a detective except the President and his personal secretary. What can it
mean?"

"Mean!" said the new policeman with incredible violence. "It means that
we are struck dead! Don't you know Sunday? Don't you know that his jokes
are always so big and simple that one has never thought of them? Can you
think of anything more like Sunday than this, that he should put all his
powerful enemies on the Supreme Council, and then take care that it was
not supreme? I tell you he has bought every trust, he has captured every
cable, he has control of every railway line--especially of that railway
line!" and he pointed a shaking finger towards the small wayside
station. "The whole movement was controlled by him; half the world was
ready to rise for him. But there were just five people, perhaps, who
would have resisted him... and the old devil put them on the Supreme
Council, to waste their time in watching each other. Idiots that we are,
he planned the whole of our idiocies! Sunday knew that the Professor
would chase Syme through London, and that Syme would fight me in France.
And he was combining great masses of capital, and seizing great lines
of telegraphy, while we five idiots were running after each other like a
lot of confounded babies playing blind man's buff."

"Well?" asked Syme with a sort of steadiness.

"Well," replied the other with sudden serenity, "he has found us playing
blind man's buff today in a field of great rustic beauty and extreme
solitude. He has probably captured the world; it only remains to him to
capture this field and all the fools in it. And since you really want
to know what was my objection to the arrival of that train, I will tell
you. My objection was that Sunday or his Secretary has just this moment
got out of it."

Syme uttered an involuntary cry, and they all turned their eyes towards
the far-off station. It was quite true that a considerable bulk of
people seemed to be moving in their direction. But they were too distant
to be distinguished in any way.

"It was a habit of the late Marquis de St. Eustache," said the new
policeman, producing a leather case, "always to carry a pair of opera
glasses. Either the President or the Secretary is coming after us with
that mob. They have caught us in a nice quiet place where we are under
no temptations to break our oaths by calling the police. Dr. Bull, I
have a suspicion that you will see better through these than through
your own highly decorative spectacles."

He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately took off his
spectacles and put the apparatus to his eyes.

"It cannot be as bad as you say," said the Professor, somewhat shaken.
"There are a good number of them certainly, but they may easily be
ordinary tourists."

"Do ordinary tourists," asked Bull, with the fieldglasses to his eyes,
"wear black masks half-way down the face?"

Syme almost tore the glasses out of his hand, and looked through them.
Most men in the advancing mob really looked ordinary enough; but it
was quite true that two or three of the leaders in front wore black
half-masks almost down to their mouths. This disguise is very complete,
especially at such a distance, and Syme found it impossible to conclude
anything from the clean-shaven jaws and chins of the men talking in
the front. But presently as they talked they all smiled and one of them
smiled on one side.



CHAPTER XI. THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE

SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly relief.

"The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped his
forehead.

"But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the bewildered
Colonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull's hasty though polite
explanation. "Could you possibly know your President among all those
people?"

"Could I know a white elephant among all those people!" answered Syme
somewhat irritably. "As you very truly say, they are on the horizon;
but if he were walking with them... by God! I believe this ground would
shake."

After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with gloomy
decision--

"Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he were. Much
more likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris, or sitting
on the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."

"This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in our
absence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like that. It
is quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the distant fields that
lay towards the little station, "it is certainly true that there seems
to be a crowd coming this way; but they are not all the army that you
make out."

"Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they are not a
very valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they are precisely
calculated to our value--we are not much, my boy, in Sunday's universe.
He has got hold of all the cables and telegraphs himself. But to kill
the Supreme Council he regards as a trivial matter, like a post card; it
may be left to his private secretary," and he spat on the grass.

Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely--

"There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has any
preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him to walk
after me."

With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent energy
towards the wood. The others gave one glance over their shoulders, and
saw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself from the station
and was moving with a mysterious discipline across the plain. They saw
already, even with the naked eye, black blots on the foremost faces,
which marked the masks they wore. They turned and followed their leader,
who had already struck the wood, and disappeared among the twinkling
trees.

The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they
had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The
inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows.
They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a
cinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardly
see for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man's
head was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated;
now again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of a
negro. The ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and
the black shade of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it
seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The
fancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask?
Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery,
in which men's faces turned black and white by turns, in which their
figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night,
this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside),
seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving
for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their
spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. That tragic
self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was
a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was
a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewilderments
what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apart
from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned out
to be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and
turn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this
bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only
a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For
Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many
modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the
modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final
scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of his
fancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the Marquis's
straw hat, the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe. In a voice
exaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless silence and
made conversation.

"May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to?"

So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad to
hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.

"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "I
think that part of the country is least likely to be with them."

"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the
real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and
surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."

"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk
about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've
got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from
the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never
been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being
some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country.
The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor
have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always
objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists,
as you can see from the barons' wars."

"As a lecture on English history for the little ones," said Syme, "this
is all very nice; but I have not yet grasped its application."

"Its application is," said his informant, "that most of old Sunday's
right-hand men are South African and American millionaires. That is why
he has got hold of all the communications; and that is why the last four
champions of the anti-anarchist police force are running through a wood
like rabbits."

"Millionaires I can understand," said Syme thoughtfully, "they are
nearly all mad. But getting hold of a few wicked old gentlemen with
hobbies is one thing; getting hold of great Christian nations is
another. I would bet the nose off my face (forgive the allusion) that
Sunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of converting any
ordinary healthy person anywhere."

"Well," said the other, "it rather depends what sort of person you
mean."

"Well, for instance," said Syme, "he could never convert that person,"
and he pointed straight in front of him.

They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to express to
Syme the final return of his own good sense; and in the middle of this
forest clearing was a figure that might well stand for that common
sense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the sun and stained with
perspiration, and grave with the bottomless gravity of small necessary
toils, a heavy French peasant was cutting wood with a hatchet. His cart
stood a few yards off, already half full of timber; and the horse that
cropped the grass was, like his master, valorous but not desperate; like
his master, he was even prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The man was
a Norman, taller than the average of the French and very angular; and
his swarthy figure stood dark against a square of sunlight, almost like
some allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold.

"Mr. Syme is saying," called out Ratcliffe to the French Colonel, "that
this man, at least, will never be an anarchist."

"Mr. Syme is right enough there," answered Colonel Ducroix, laughing,
"if only for the reason that he has plenty of property to defend. But I
forgot that in your country you are not used to peasants being wealthy."

"He looks poor," said Dr. Bull doubtfully.

"Quite so," said the Colonel; "that is why he is rich."

"I have an idea," called out Dr. Bull suddenly; "how much would he take
to give us a lift in his cart? Those dogs are all on foot, and we could
soon leave them behind."

"Oh, give him anything!" said Syme eagerly. "I have piles of money on
me."

"That will never do," said the Colonel; "he will never have any respect
for you unless you drive a bargain."

"Oh, if he haggles!" began Bull impatiently.

"He haggles because he is a free man," said the other. "You do not
understand; he would not see the meaning of generosity. He is not being
tipped."

And even while they seemed to hear the heavy feet of their strange
pursuers behind them, they had to stand and stamp while the French
Colonel talked to the French wood-cutter with all the leisurely badinage
and bickering of market-day. At the end of the four minutes, however,
they saw that the Colonel was right, for the wood-cutter entered into
their plans, not with the vague servility of a tout too-well paid, but
with the seriousness of a solicitor who had been paid the proper fee. He
told them that the best thing they could do was to make their way down
to the little inn on the hills above Lancy, where the innkeeper, an old
soldier who had become devout in his latter years, would be certain to
sympathise with them, and even to take risks in their support. The whole
company, therefore, piled themselves on top of the stacks of wood, and
went rocking in the rude cart down the other and steeper side of the
woodland. Heavy and ramshackle as was the vehicle, it was driven quickly
enough, and they soon had the exhilarating impression of distancing
altogether those, whoever they were, who were hunting them. For, after
all, the riddle as to where the anarchists had got all these followers
was still unsolved. One man's presence had sufficed for them; they had
fled at the first sight of the deformed smile of the Secretary. Syme
every now and then looked back over his shoulder at the army on their
track.

As the wood grew first thinner and then smaller with distance, he could
see the sunlit slopes beyond it and above it; and across these was
still moving the square black mob like one monstrous beetle. In the very
strong sunlight and with his own very strong eyes, which were almost
telescopic, Syme could see this mass of men quite plainly. He could see
them as separate human figures; but he was increasingly surprised by the
way in which they moved as one man. They seemed to be dressed in dark
clothes and plain hats, like any common crowd out of the streets; but
they did not spread and sprawl and trail by various lines to the attack,
as would be natural in an ordinary mob. They moved with a sort of
dreadful and wicked woodenness, like a staring army of automatons.

Syme pointed this out to Ratcliffe.

"Yes," replied the policeman, "that's discipline. That's Sunday. He is
perhaps five hundred miles off, but the fear of him is on all of them,
like the finger of God. Yes, they are walking regularly; and you bet
your boots that they are talking regularly, yes, and thinking regularly.
But the one important thing for us is that they are disappearing
regularly."

Syme nodded. It was true that the black patch of the pursuing men was
growing smaller and smaller as the peasant belaboured his horse.

The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole, fell away on
the farther side of the wood in billows of heavy slope towards the
sea, in a way not unlike the lower slopes of the Sussex downs. The
only difference was that in Sussex the road would have been broken and
angular like a little brook, but here the white French road fell sheer
in front of them like a waterfall. Down this direct descent the cart
clattered at a considerable angle, and in a few minutes, the road
growing yet steeper, they saw below them the little harbour of Lancy and
a great blue arc of the sea. The travelling cloud of their enemies had
wholly disappeared from the horizon.

The horse and cart took a sharp turn round a clump of elms, and the
horse's nose nearly struck the face of an old gentleman who was sitting
on the benches outside the little cafe of "Le Soleil d'Or." The
peasant grunted an apology, and got down from his seat. The others also
descended one by one, and spoke to the old gentleman with fragmentary
phrases of courtesy, for it was quite evident from his expansive manner
that he was the owner of the little tavern.

He was a white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes and a grey
moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that may
often be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany.
Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and his
beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked up
as they entered the inn-parlour, they saw the sword upon the wall.

The Colonel, who greeted the innkeeper as an old friend, passed rapidly
into the inn-parlour, and sat down ordering some ritual refreshment. The
military decision of his action interested Syme, who sat next to him,
and he took the opportunity when the old innkeeper had gone out of
satisfying his curiosity.

"May I ask you, Colonel," he said in a low voice, "why we have come
here?"

Colonel Ducroix smiled behind his bristly white moustache.

"For two reasons, sir," he said; "and I will give first, not the most
important, but the most utilitarian. We came here because this is the
only place within twenty miles in which we can get horses."

"Horses!" repeated Syme, looking up quickly.

"Yes," replied the other; "if you people are really to distance your
enemies it is horses or nothing for you, unless of course you have
bicycles and motor-cars in your pocket."

"And where do you advise us to make for?" asked Syme doubtfully.

"Beyond question," replied the Colonel, "you had better make all haste
to the police station beyond the town. My friend, whom I seconded under
somewhat deceptive circumstances, seems to me to exaggerate very
much the possibilities of a general rising; but even he would hardly
maintain, I suppose, that you were not safe with the gendarmes."

Syme nodded gravely; then he said abruptly--

"And your other reason for coming here?"

"My other reason for coming here," said Ducroix soberly, "is that it
is just as well to see a good man or two when one is possibly near to
death."

Syme looked up at the wall, and saw a crudely-painted and pathetic
religious picture. Then he said--

"You are right," and then almost immediately afterwards, "Has anyone
seen about the horses?"

"Yes," answered Ducroix, "you may be quite certain that I gave orders
the moment I came in. Those enemies of yours gave no impression of
hurry, but they were really moving wonderfully fast, like a well-trained
army. I had no idea that the anarchists had so much discipline. You have
not a moment to waste."

Almost as he spoke, the old innkeeper with the blue eyes and white hair
came ambling into the room, and announced that six horses were saddled
outside.

By Ducroix's advice the five others equipped themselves with some
portable form of food and wine, and keeping their duelling swords as the
only weapons available, they clattered away down the steep, white road.
The two servants, who had carried the Marquis's luggage when he was a
marquis, were left behind to drink at the cafe by common consent, and
not at all against their own inclination.

By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by its rays
Syme could see the sturdy figure of the old innkeeper growing smaller
and smaller, but still standing and looking after them quite silently,
the sunshine in his silver hair. Syme had a fixed, superstitious fancy,
left in his mind by the chance phrase of the Colonel, that this was
indeed, perhaps, the last honest stranger whom he should ever see upon
the earth.

He was still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere
grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of the
steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behind
the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad and marching men.
They seemed to hang above the good man and his house like a black cloud
of locusts. The horses had been saddled none too soon.



CHAPTER XII. THE EARTH IN ANARCHY

URGING the horses to a gallop, without respect to the rather rugged
descent of the road, the horsemen soon regained their advantage over the
men on the march, and at last the bulk of the first buildings of Lancy
cut off the sight of their pursuers. Nevertheless, the ride had been
a long one, and by the time they reached the real town the west was
warming with the colour and quality of sunset. The Colonel suggested
that, before making finally for the police station, they should make
the effort, in passing, to attach to themselves one more individual who
might be useful.

"Four out of the five rich men in this town," he said, "are common
swindlers. I suppose the proportion is pretty equal all over the world.
The fifth is a friend of mine, and a very fine fellow; and what is even
more important from our point of view, he owns a motor-car."

"I am afraid," said the Professor in his mirthful way, looking back
along the white road on which the black, crawling patch might appear at
any moment, "I am afraid we have hardly time for afternoon calls."

"Doctor Renard's house is only three minutes off," said the Colonel.

"Our danger," said Dr. Bull, "is not two minutes off."

"Yes," said Syme, "if we ride on fast we must leave them behind, for
they are on foot."

"He has a motor-car," said the Colonel.

"But we may not get it," said Bull.

"Yes, he is quite on your side."

"But he might be out."

"Hold your tongue," said Syme suddenly. "What is that noise?"

For a second they all sat as still as equestrian statues, and for
a second--for two or three or four seconds--heaven and earth seemed
equally still. Then all their ears, in an agony of attention, heard
along the road that indescribable thrill and throb that means only one
thing--horses!

The Colonel's face had an instantaneous change, as if lightning had
struck it, and yet left it scatheless.

"They have done us," he said, with brief military irony. "Prepare to
receive cavalry!"

"Where can they have got the horses?" asked Syme, as he mechanically
urged his steed to a canter.

The Colonel was silent for a little, then he said in a strained voice--

"I was speaking with strict accuracy when I said that the 'Soleil d'Or'
was the only place where one can get horses within twenty miles."

"No!" said Syme violently, "I don't believe he'd do it. Not with all
that white hair."

"He may have been forced," said the Colonel gently. "They must be at
least a hundred strong, for which reason we are all going to see my
friend Renard, who has a motor-car."

With these words he swung his horse suddenly round a street corner, and
went down the street with such thundering speed, that the others, though
already well at the gallop, had difficulty in following the flying tail
of his horse.

Dr. Renard inhabited a high and comfortable house at the top of a steep
street, so that when the riders alighted at his door they could once
more see the solid green ridge of the hill, with the white road across
it, standing up above all the roofs of the town. They breathed again to
see that the road as yet was clear, and they rang the bell.

Dr. Renard was a beaming, brown-bearded man, a good example of that
silent but very busy professional class which France has preserved even
more perfectly than England. When the matter was explained to him he
pooh-poohed the panic of the ex-Marquis altogether; he said, with the
solid French scepticism, that there was no conceivable probability of a
general anarchist rising. "Anarchy," he said, shrugging his shoulders,
"it is childishness!"

"Et ca," cried out the Colonel suddenly, pointing over the other's
shoulder, "and that is childishness, isn't it?"

They all looked round, and saw a curve of black cavalry come sweeping
over the top of the hill with all the energy of Attila. Swiftly as they
rode, however, the whole rank still kept well together, and they could
see the black vizards of the first line as level as a line of uniforms.
But although the main black square was the same, though travelling
faster, there was now one sensational difference which they could see
clearly upon the slope of the hill, as if upon a slanted map. The bulk
of the riders were in one block; but one rider flew far ahead of the
column, and with frantic movements of hand and heel urged his horse
faster and faster, so that one might have fancied that he was not the
pursuer but the pursued. But even at that great distance they could see
something so fanatical, so unquestionable in his figure, that they
knew it was the Secretary himself. "I am sorry to cut short a cultured
discussion," said the Colonel, "but can you lend me your motor-car now,
in two minutes?"

"I have a suspicion that you are all mad," said Dr. Renard, smiling
sociably; "but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt
friendship. Let us go round to the garage."

Dr. Renard was a mild man with monstrous wealth; his rooms were like the
Musee de Cluny, and he had three motor-cars. These, however, he seemed
to use very sparingly, having the simple tastes of the French middle
class, and when his impatient friends came to examine them, it took them
some time to assure themselves that one of them even could be made
to work. This with some difficulty they brought round into the street
before the Doctor's house. When they came out of the dim garage
they were startled to find that twilight had already fallen with the
abruptness of night in the tropics. Either they had been longer in the
place than they imagined, or some unusual canopy of cloud had gathered
over the town. They looked down the steep streets, and seemed to see a
slight mist coming up from the sea.

"It is now or never," said Dr. Bull. "I hear horses."

"No," corrected the Professor, "a horse."

And as they listened, it was evident that the noise, rapidly coming
nearer on the rattling stones, was not the noise of the whole cavalcade
but that of the one horseman, who had left it far behind--the insane
Secretary.

Syme's family, like most of those who end in the simple life, had once
owned a motor, and he knew all about them. He had leapt at once into the
chauffeur's seat, and with flushed face was wrenching and tugging at the
disused machinery. He bent his strength upon one handle, and then said
quite quietly--

"I am afraid it's no go."

As he spoke, there swept round the corner a man rigid on his rushing
horse, with the rush and rigidity of an arrow. He had a smile that
thrust out his chin as if it were dislocated. He swept alongside of the
stationary car, into which its company had crowded, and laid his hand
on the front. It was the Secretary, and his mouth went quite straight in
the solemnity of triumph.

Syme was leaning hard upon the steering wheel, and there was no sound
but the rumble of the other pursuers riding into the town. Then there
came quite suddenly a scream of scraping iron, and the car leapt
forward. It plucked the Secretary clean out of his saddle, as a knife
is whipped out of its sheath, trailed him kicking terribly for twenty
yards, and left him flung flat upon the road far in front of his
frightened horse. As the car took the corner of the street with a
splendid curve, they could just see the other anarchists filling the
street and raising their fallen leader.

"I can't understand why it has grown so dark," said the Professor at
last in a low voice.

"Going to be a storm, I think," said Dr. Bull. "I say, it's a pity we
haven't got a light on this car, if only to see by."

"We have," said the Colonel, and from the floor of the car he fished up
a heavy, old-fashioned, carved iron lantern with a light inside it. It
was obviously an antique, and it would seem as if its original use had
been in some way semi-religious, for there was a rude moulding of a
cross upon one of its sides.

"Where on earth did you get that?" asked the Professor.

"I got it where I got the car," answered the Colonel, chuckling, "from
my best friend. While our friend here was fighting with the steering
wheel, I ran up the front steps of the house and spoke to Renard, who
was standing in his own porch, you will remember. 'I suppose,' I said,
'there's no time to get a lamp.' He looked up, blinking amiably at the
beautiful arched ceiling of his own front hall. From this was suspended,
by chains of exquisite ironwork, this lantern, one of the hundred
treasures of his treasure house. By sheer force he tore the lamp out of
his own ceiling, shattering the painted panels, and bringing down two
blue vases with his violence. Then he handed me the iron lantern, and I
put it in the car. Was I not right when I said that Dr. Renard was worth
knowing?"

"You were," said Syme seriously, and hung the heavy lantern over the
front. There was a certain allegory of their whole position in the
contrast between the modern automobile and its strange ecclesiastical
lamp. Hitherto they had passed through the quietest part of the town,
meeting at most one or two pedestrians, who could give them no hint of
the peace or the hostility of the place. Now, however, the windows in
the houses began one by one to be lit up, giving a greater sense of
habitation and humanity. Dr. Bull turned to the new detective who had
led their flight, and permitted himself one of his natural and friendly
smiles.

"These lights make one feel more cheerful."

Inspector Ratcliffe drew his brows together.

"There is only one set of lights that make me more cheerful," he said,
"and they are those lights of the police station which I can see beyond
the town. Please God we may be there in ten minutes."

Then all Bull's boiling good sense and optimism broke suddenly out of
him.

"Oh, this is all raving nonsense!" he cried. "If you really think that
ordinary people in ordinary houses are anarchists, you must be madder
than an anarchist yourself. If we turned and fought these fellows, the
whole town would fight for us."

"No," said the other with an immovable simplicity, "the whole town would
fight for them. We shall see."

While they were speaking the Professor had leant forward with sudden
excitement.

"What is that noise?" he said.

"Oh, the horses behind us, I suppose," said the Colonel. "I thought we
had got clear of them."

"The horses behind us! No," said the Professor, "it is not horses, and
it is not behind us."

Almost as he spoke, across the end of the street before them two shining
and rattling shapes shot past. They were gone almost in a flash, but
everyone could see that they were motor-cars, and the Professor stood up
with a pale face and swore that they were the other two motor-cars from
Dr. Renard's garage.

"I tell you they were his," he repeated, with wild eyes, "and they were
full of men in masks!"

"Absurd!" said the Colonel angrily. "Dr. Renard would never give them
his cars."

"He may have been forced," said Ratcliffe quietly. "The whole town is on
their side."

"You still believe that," asked the Colonel incredulously.

"You will all believe it soon," said the other with a hopeless calm.

There was a puzzled pause for some little time, and then the Colonel
began again abruptly--

"No, I can't believe it. The thing is nonsense. The plain people of a
peaceable French town--"

He was cut short by a bang and a blaze of light, which seemed close to
his eyes. As the car sped on it left a floating patch of white smoke
behind it, and Syme had heard a shot shriek past his ear.

"My God!" said the Colonel, "someone has shot at us."

"It need not interrupt conversation," said the gloomy Ratcliffe. "Pray
resume your remarks, Colonel. You were talking, I think, about the plain
people of a peaceable French town."

The staring Colonel was long past minding satire. He rolled his eyes all
round the street.

"It is extraordinary," he said, "most extraordinary."

"A fastidious person," said Syme, "might even call it unpleasant.
However, I suppose those lights out in the field beyond this street are
the Gendarmerie. We shall soon get there."

"No," said Inspector Ratcliffe, "we shall never get there."

He had been standing up and looking keenly ahead of him. Now he sat down
and smoothed his sleek hair with a weary gesture.

"What do you mean?" asked Bull sharply.

"I mean that we shall never get there," said the pessimist placidly.
"They have two rows of armed men across the road already; I can see them
from here. The town is in arms, as I said it was. I can only wallow in
the exquisite comfort of my own exactitude."

And Ratcliffe sat down comfortably in the car and lit a cigarette, but
the others rose excitedly and stared down the road. Syme had slowed down
the car as their plans became doubtful, and he brought it finally to
a standstill just at the corner of a side street that ran down very
steeply to the sea.

The town was mostly in shadow, but the sun had not sunk; wherever its
level light could break through, it painted everything a burning gold.
Up this side street the last sunset light shone as sharp and narrow as
the shaft of artificial light at the theatre. It struck the car of the
five friends, and lit it like a burning chariot. But the rest of the
street, especially the two ends of it, was in the deepest twilight, and
for some seconds they could see nothing. Then Syme, whose eyes were the
keenest, broke into a little bitter whistle, and said,

"It is quite true. There is a crowd or an army or some such thing across
the end of that street."

"Well, if there is," said Bull impatiently, "it must be something
else--a sham fight or the mayor's birthday or something. I cannot and
will not believe that plain, jolly people in a place like this walk
about with dynamite in their pockets. Get on a bit, Syme, and let us
look at them."

The car crawled about a hundred yards farther, and then they were all
startled by Dr. Bull breaking into a high crow of laughter.

"Why, you silly mugs!" he cried, "what did I tell you. That crowd's as
law-abiding as a cow, and if it weren't, it's on our side."

"How do you know?" asked the professor, staring.

"You blind bat," cried Bull, "don't you see who is leading them?"

They peered again, and then the Colonel, with a catch in his voice,
cried out--

"Why, it's Renard!"

There was, indeed, a rank of dim figures running across the road, and
they could not be clearly seen; but far enough in front to catch the
accident of the evening light was stalking up and down the unmistakable
Dr. Renard, in a white hat, stroking his long brown beard, and holding a
revolver in his left hand.

"What a fool I've been!" exclaimed the Colonel. "Of course, the dear old
boy has turned out to help us."

Dr. Bull was bubbling over with laughter, swinging the sword in his hand
as carelessly as a cane. He jumped out of the car and ran across the
intervening space, calling out--

"Dr. Renard! Dr. Renard!"

An instant after Syme thought his own eyes had gone mad in his head. For
the philanthropic Dr. Renard had deliberately raised his revolver and
fired twice at Bull, so that the shots rang down the road.

Almost at the same second as the puff of white cloud went up from this
atrocious explosion a long puff of white cloud went up also from the
cigarette of the cynical Ratcliffe. Like all the rest he turned a little
pale, but he smiled. Dr. Bull, at whom the bullets had been fired, just
missing his scalp, stood quite still in the middle of the road without
a sign of fear, and then turned very slowly and crawled back to the car,
and climbed in with two holes through his hat.

"Well," said the cigarette smoker slowly, "what do you think now?"

"I think," said Dr. Bull with precision, "that I am lying in bed at No.
217 Peabody Buildings, and that I shall soon wake up with a jump; or,
if that's not it, I think that I am sitting in a small cushioned cell in
Hanwell, and that the doctor can't make much of my case. But if you want
to know what I don't think, I'll tell you. I don't think what you think.
I don't think, and I never shall think, that the mass of ordinary men
are a pack of dirty modern thinkers. No, sir, I'm a democrat, and I
still don't believe that Sunday could convert one average navvy or
counter-jumper. No, I may be mad, but humanity isn't."

Syme turned his bright blue eyes on Bull with an earnestness which he
did not commonly make clear.

"You are a very fine fellow," he said. "You can believe in a sanity
which is not merely your sanity. And you're right enough about humanity,
about peasants and people like that jolly old innkeeper. But you're not
right about Renard. I suspected him from the first. He's rationalistic,
and, what's worse, he's rich. When duty and religion are really
destroyed, it will be by the rich."

"They are really destroyed now," said the man with a cigarette, and rose
with his hands in his pockets. "The devils are coming on!"

The men in the motor-car looked anxiously in the direction of his dreamy
gaze, and they saw that the whole regiment at the end of the road was
advancing upon them, Dr. Renard marching furiously in front, his beard
flying in the breeze.

The Colonel sprang out of the car with an intolerant exclamation.

"Gentlemen," he cried, "the thing is incredible. It must be a practical
joke. If you knew Renard as I do--it's like calling Queen Victoria a
dynamiter. If you had got the man's character into your head--"

"Dr. Bull," said Syme sardonically, "has at least got it into his hat."

"I tell you it can't be!" cried the Colonel, stamping.

"Renard shall explain it. He shall explain it to me," and he strode
forward.

"Don't be in such a hurry," drawled the smoker. "He will very soon
explain it to all of us."

But the impatient Colonel was already out of earshot, advancing towards
the advancing enemy. The excited Dr. Renard lifted his pistol again, but
perceiving his opponent, hesitated, and the Colonel came face to face
with him with frantic gestures of remonstrance.

"It is no good," said Syme. "He will never get anything out of that old
heathen. I vote we drive bang through the thick of them, bang as the
bullets went through Bull's hat. We may all be killed, but we must kill
a tidy number of them."

"I won't 'ave it," said Dr. Bull, growing more vulgar in the sincerity
of his virtue. "The poor chaps may be making a mistake. Give the Colonel
a chance."

"Shall we go back, then?" asked the Professor.

"No," said Ratcliffe in a cold voice, "the street behind us is held too.
In fact, I seem to see there another friend of yours, Syme."

Syme spun round smartly, and stared backwards at the track which they
had travelled. He saw an irregular body of horsemen gathering and
galloping towards them in the gloom. He saw above the foremost saddle
the silver gleam of a sword, and then as it grew nearer the silver gleam
of an old man's hair. The next moment, with shattering violence, he had
swung the motor round and sent it dashing down the steep side street to
the sea, like a man that desired only to die.

"What the devil is up?" cried the Professor, seizing his arm.

"The morning star has fallen!" said Syme, as his own car went down the
darkness like a falling star.

The others did not understand his words, but when they looked back at
the street above they saw the hostile cavalry coming round the corner
and down the slopes after them; and foremost of all rode the good
innkeeper, flushed with the fiery innocence of the evening light.

"The world is insane!" said the Professor, and buried his face in his
hands.

"No," said Dr. Bull in adamantine humility, "it is I."

"What are we going to do?" asked the Professor.

"At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I think we
are going to smash into a lamppost."

The next instant the automobile had come with a catastrophic jar against
an iron object. The instant after that four men had crawled out from
under a chaos of metal, and a tall lean lamp-post that had stood up
straight on the edge of the marine parade stood out, bent and twisted,
like the branch of a broken tree.

"Well, we smashed something," said the Professor, with a faint smile.
"That's some comfort."

"You're becoming an anarchist," said Syme, dusting his clothes with his
instinct of daintiness.

"Everyone is," said Ratcliffe.

As they spoke, the white-haired horseman and his followers came
thundering from above, and almost at the same moment a dark string of
men ran shouting along the sea-front. Syme snatched a sword, and took it
in his teeth; he stuck two others under his arm-pits, took a fourth
in his left hand and the lantern in his right, and leapt off the high
parade on to the beach below.

The others leapt after him, with a common acceptance of such decisive
action, leaving the debris and the gathering mob above them.

"We have one more chance," said Syme, taking the steel out of his mouth.
"Whatever all this pandemonium means, I suppose the police station will
help us. We can't get there, for they hold the way. But there's a pier
or breakwater runs out into the sea just here, which we could defend
longer than anything else, like Horatius and his bridge. We must defend
it till the Gendarmerie turn out. Keep after me."

They followed him as he went crunching down the beach, and in a second
or two their boots broke not on the sea gravel, but on broad, flat
stones. They marched down a long, low jetty, running out in one arm into
the dim, boiling sea, and when they came to the end of it they felt that
they had come to the end of their story. They turned and faced the town.

That town was transfigured with uproar. All along the high parade from
which they had just descended was a dark and roaring stream of humanity,
with tossing arms and fiery faces, groping and glaring towards them. The
long dark line was dotted with torches and lanterns; but even where no
flame lit up a furious face, they could see in the farthest figure, in
the most shadowy gesture, an organised hate. It was clear that they were
the accursed of all men, and they knew not why.

Two or three men, looking little and black like monkeys, leapt over the
edge as they had done and dropped on to the beach. These came ploughing
down the deep sand, shouting horribly, and strove to wade into the sea
at random. The example was followed, and the whole black mass of men
began to run and drip over the edge like black treacle.

Foremost among the men on the beach Syme saw the peasant who had driven
their cart. He splashed into the surf on a huge cart-horse, and shook
his axe at them.

"The peasant!" cried Syme. "They have not risen since the Middle Ages."

"Even if the police do come now," said the Professor mournfully, "they
can do nothing with this mob."

"Nonsense!" said Bull desperately; "there must be some people left in
the town who are human."

"No," said the hopeless Inspector, "the human being will soon be
extinct. We are the last of mankind."

"It may be," said the Professor absently. Then he added in his dreamy
voice, "What is all that at the end of the 'Dunciad'?

   'Nor public flame; nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human light is left, nor glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos, is restored;
    Light dies before thine uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall;
    And universal darkness buries all.'"

"Stop!" cried Bull suddenly, "the gendarmes are out."

The low lights of the police station were indeed blotted and broken
with hurrying figures, and they heard through the darkness the clash and
jingle of a disciplined cavalry.

"They are charging the mob!" cried Bull in ecstacy or alarm.

"No," said Syme, "they are formed along the parade."

"They have unslung their carbines," cried Bull dancing with excitement.

"Yes," said Ratcliffe, "and they are going to fire on us."

As he spoke there came a long crackle of musketry, and bullets seemed to
hop like hailstones on the stones in front of them.

"The gendarmes have joined them!" cried the Professor, and struck his
forehead.

"I am in the padded cell," said Bull solidly.

There was a long silence, and then Ratcliffe said, looking out over the
swollen sea, all a sort of grey purple--

"What does it matter who is mad or who is sane? We shall all be dead
soon."

Syme turned to him and said--

"You are quite hopeless, then?"

Mr. Ratcliffe kept a stony silence; then at last he said quietly--

"No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one insane little
hope that I cannot get out of my mind. The power of this whole planet
is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly little
hope is hopeless yet."

"In what or whom is your hope?" asked Syme with curiosity.

"In a man I never saw," said the other, looking at the leaden sea.

"I know what you mean," said Syme in a low voice, "the man in the dark
room. But Sunday must have killed him by now."

"Perhaps," said the other steadily; "but if so, he was the only man whom
Sunday found it hard to kill."

"I heard what you said," said the Professor, with his back turned. "I
also am holding hard on to the thing I never saw."

All of a sudden Syme, who was standing as if blind with introspective
thought, swung round and cried out, like a man waking from sleep--

"Where is the Colonel? I thought he was with us!"

"The Colonel! Yes," cried Bull, "where on earth is the Colonel?"

"He went to speak to Renard," said the Professor.

"We cannot leave him among all those beasts," cried Syme. "Let us die
like gentlemen if--"

"Do not pity the Colonel," said Ratcliffe, with a pale sneer. "He is
extremely comfortable. He is--"

"No! no! no!" cried Syme in a kind of frenzy, "not the Colonel too! I
will never believe it!"

"Will you believe your eyes?" asked the other, and pointed to the beach.

Many of their pursuers had waded into the water shaking their fists,
but the sea was rough, and they could not reach the pier. Two or three
figures, however, stood on the beginning of the stone footway, and
seemed to be cautiously advancing down it. The glare of a chance lantern
lit up the faces of the two foremost. One face wore a black half-mask,
and under it the mouth was twisting about in such a madness of nerves
that the black tuft of beard wriggled round and round like a restless,
living thing. The other was the red face and white moustache of Colonel
Ducroix. They were in earnest consultation.

"Yes, he is gone too," said the Professor, and sat down on a stone.
"Everything's gone. I'm gone! I can't trust my own bodily machinery. I
feel as if my own hand might fly up and strike me."

"When my hand flies up," said Syme, "it will strike somebody else," and
he strode along the pier towards the Colonel, the sword in one hand and
the lantern in the other.

As if to destroy the last hope or doubt, the Colonel, who saw him
coming, pointed his revolver at him and fired. The shot missed Syme,
but struck his sword, breaking it short at the hilt. Syme rushed on, and
swung the iron lantern above his head.

"Judas before Herod!" he said, and struck the Colonel down upon the
stones. Then he turned to the Secretary, whose frightful mouth was
almost foaming now, and held the lamp high with so rigid and arresting
a gesture, that the man was, as it were, frozen for a moment, and forced
to hear.

"Do you see this lantern?" cried Syme in a terrible voice. "Do you see
the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You
did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey,
twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is
not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not
made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats.
You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind;
you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old
Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire
of apes will never have the wit to find it."

He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and
then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea,
where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.

"Swords!" shouted Syme, turning his flaming face to the three behind
him. "Let us charge these dogs, for our time has come to die."

His three companions came after him sword in hand. Syme's sword was
broken, but he rent a bludgeon from the fist of a fisherman, flinging
him down. In a moment they would have flung themselves upon the face
of the mob and perished, when an interruption came. The Secretary, ever
since Syme's speech, had stood with his hand to his stricken head as if
dazed; now he suddenly pulled off his black mask.

The pale face thus peeled in the lamplight revealed not so much rage as
astonishment. He put up his hand with an anxious authority.

"There is some mistake," he said. "Mr. Syme, I hardly think you
understand your position. I arrest you in the name of the law."

"Of the law?" said Syme, and dropped his stick.

"Certainly!" said the Secretary. "I am a detective from Scotland Yard,"
and he took a small blue card from his pocket.

"And what do you suppose we are?" asked the Professor, and threw up his
arms.

"You," said the Secretary stiffly, "are, as I know for a fact, members
of the Supreme Anarchist Council. Disguised as one of you, I--"

Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.

"There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council," he said. "We were all a
lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people
who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters.
I knew I couldn't be wrong about the mob," he said, beaming over the
enormous multitude, which stretched away to the distance on both sides.
"Vulgar people are never mad. I'm vulgar myself, and I know. I am now
going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here."



CHAPTER XIII. THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT

NEXT morning five bewildered but hilarious people took the boat for
Dover. The poor old Colonel might have had some cause to complain,
having been first forced to fight for two factions that didn't exist,
and then knocked down with an iron lantern. But he was a magnanimous old
gentleman, and being much relieved that neither party had anything to do
with dynamite, he saw them off on the pier with great geniality.

The five reconciled detectives had a hundred details to explain to each
other. The Secretary had to tell Syme how they had come to wear
masks originally in order to approach the supposed enemy as
fellow-conspirators.

Syme had to explain how they had fled with such swiftness through a
civilised country. But above all these matters of detail which could be
explained, rose the central mountain of the matter that they could not
explain. What did it all mean? If they were all harmless officers, what
was Sunday? If he had not seized the world, what on earth had he been up
to? Inspector Ratcliffe was still gloomy about this.

"I can't make head or tail of old Sunday's little game any more than
you can," he said. "But whatever else Sunday is, he isn't a blameless
citizen. Damn it! do you remember his face?"

"I grant you," answered Syme, "that I have never been able to forget
it."

"Well," said the Secretary, "I suppose we can find out soon, for
tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me," he
said, with a rather ghastly smile, "for being well acquainted with my
secretarial duties."

"I suppose you are right," said the Professor reflectively. "I suppose
we might find it out from him; but I confess that I should feel a bit
afraid of asking Sunday who he really is."

"Why," asked the Secretary, "for fear of bombs?"

"No," said the Professor, "for fear he might tell me."

"Let us have some drinks," said Dr. Bull, after a silence.

Throughout their whole journey by boat and train they were highly
convivial, but they instinctively kept together. Dr. Bull, who had
always been the optimist of the party, endeavoured to persuade the
other four that the whole company could take the same hansom cab from
Victoria; but this was over-ruled, and they went in a four-wheeler, with
Dr. Bull on the box, singing. They finished their journey at an hotel in
Piccadilly Circus, so as to be close to the early breakfast next morning
in Leicester Square. Yet even then the adventures of the day were not
entirely over. Dr. Bull, discontented with the general proposal to go to
bed, had strolled out of the hotel at about eleven to see and taste some
of the beauties of London. Twenty minutes afterwards, however, he came
back and made quite a clamour in the hall. Syme, who tried at first to
soothe him, was forced at last to listen to his communication with quite
new attention.

"I tell you I've seen him!" said Dr. Bull, with thick emphasis.

"Whom?" asked Syme quickly. "Not the President?"

"Not so bad as that," said Dr. Bull, with unnecessary laughter, "not so
bad as that. I've got him here."

"Got whom here?" asked Syme impatiently.

"Hairy man," said the other lucidly, "man that used to be hairy
man--Gogol. Here he is," and he pulled forward by a reluctant elbow the
identical young man who five days before had marched out of the Council
with thin red hair and a pale face, the first of all the sham anarchists
who had been exposed.

"Why do you worry with me?" he cried. "You have expelled me as a spy."

"We are all spies!" whispered Syme.

"We're all spies!" shouted Dr. Bull. "Come and have a drink."

Next morning the battalion of the reunited six marched stolidly towards
the hotel in Leicester Square.

"This is more cheerful," said Dr. Bull; "we are six men going to ask one
man what he means."

"I think it is a bit queerer than that," said Syme. "I think it is six
men going to ask one man what they mean."

They turned in silence into the Square, and though the hotel was in the
opposite corner, they saw at once the little balcony and a figure that
looked too big for it. He was sitting alone with bent head, poring over
a newspaper. But all his councillors, who had come to vote him down,
crossed that Square as if they were watched out of heaven by a hundred
eyes.

They had disputed much upon their policy, about whether they should
leave the unmasked Gogol without and begin diplomatically, or whether
they should bring him in and blow up the gunpowder at once. The
influence of Syme and Bull prevailed for the latter course, though the
Secretary to the last asked them why they attacked Sunday so rashly.

"My reason is quite simple," said Syme. "I attack him rashly because I
am afraid of him."

They followed Syme up the dark stair in silence, and they all came out
simultaneously into the broad sunlight of the morning and the broad
sunlight of Sunday's smile.

"Delightful!" he said. "So pleased to see you all. What an exquisite day
it is. Is the Czar dead?"

The Secretary, who happened to be foremost, drew himself together for a
dignified outburst.

"No, sir," he said sternly "there has been no massacre. I bring you news
of no such disgusting spectacles."

"Disgusting spectacles?" repeated the President, with a bright,
inquiring smile. "You mean Dr. Bull's spectacles?"

The Secretary choked for a moment, and the President went on with a sort
of smooth appeal--

"Of course, we all have our opinions and even our eyes, but really to
call them disgusting before the man himself--"

Dr. Bull tore off his spectacles and broke them on the table.

"My spectacles are blackguardly," he said, "but I'm not. Look at my
face."

"I dare say it's the sort of face that grows on one," said the
President, "in fact, it grows on you; and who am I to quarrel with the
wild fruits upon the Tree of Life? I dare say it will grow on me some
day."

"We have no time for tomfoolery," said the Secretary, breaking in
savagely. "We have come to know what all this means. Who are you? What
are you? Why did you get us all here? Do you know who and what we are?
Are you a half-witted man playing the conspirator, or are you a clever
man playing the fool? Answer me, I tell you."

"Candidates," murmured Sunday, "are only required to answer eight out of
the seventeen questions on the paper. As far as I can make out, you want
me to tell you what I am, and what you are, and what this table is, and
what this Council is, and what this world is for all I know. Well, I
will go so far as to rend the veil of one mystery. If you want to know
what you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young jackasses."

"And you," said Syme, leaning forward, "what are you?"

"I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an
incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them
and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of
science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about
them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell
you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and
the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the
sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are,
and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have
hunted me like a wolf--kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the
churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet,
and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a
good run for their money, and I will now."

Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung himself like
some huge ourang-outang over the balustrade of the balcony. Yet before
he dropped he pulled himself up again as on a horizontal bar, and
thrusting his great chin over the edge of the balcony, said solemnly--

"There's one thing I'll tell you though about who I am. I am the man in
the dark room, who made you all policemen."

With that he fell from the balcony, bouncing on the stones below like a
great ball of india-rubber, and went bounding off towards the corner of
the Alhambra, where he hailed a hansom-cab and sprang inside it. The six
detectives had been standing thunderstruck and livid in the light of his
last assertion; but when he disappeared into the cab, Syme's practical
senses returned to him, and leaping over the balcony so recklessly as
almost to break his legs, he called another cab.

He and Bull sprang into the cab together, the Professor and the
Inspector into another, while the Secretary and the late Gogol scrambled
into a third just in time to pursue the flying Syme, who was pursuing
the flying President. Sunday led them a wild chase towards the
north-west, his cabman, evidently under the influence of more than
common inducements, urging the horse at breakneck speed. But Syme was in
no mood for delicacies, and he stood up in his own cab shouting, "Stop
thief!" until crowds ran along beside his cab, and policemen began to
stop and ask questions. All this had its influence upon the President's
cabman, who began to look dubious, and to slow down to a trot. He opened
the trap to talk reasonably to his fare, and in so doing let the long
whip droop over the front of the cab. Sunday leant forward, seized it,
and jerked it violently out of the man's hand. Then standing up in front
of the cab himself, he lashed the horse and roared aloud, so that they
went down the streets like a flying storm. Through street after street
and square after square went whirling this preposterous vehicle, in
which the fare was urging the horse and the driver trying desperately
to stop it. The other three cabs came after it (if the phrase be
permissible of a cab) like panting hounds. Shops and streets shot by
like rattling arrows.

At the highest ecstacy of speed, Sunday turned round on the splashboard
where he stood, and sticking his great grinning head out of the cab,
with white hair whistling in the wind, he made a horrible face at
his pursuers, like some colossal urchin. Then raising his right hand
swiftly, he flung a ball of paper in Syme's face and vanished. Syme
caught the thing while instinctively warding it off, and discovered that
it consisted of two crumpled papers. One was addressed to himself, and
the other to Dr. Bull, with a very long, and it is to be feared partly
ironical, string of letters after his name. Dr. Bull's address was,
at any rate, considerably longer than his communication, for the
communication consisted entirely of the words:--

"What about Martin Tupper now?"

"What does the old maniac mean?" asked Bull, staring at the words. "What
does yours say, Syme?"

Syme's message was, at any rate, longer, and ran as follows:--

"No one would regret anything in the nature of an interference by the
Archdeacon more than I. I trust it will not come to that. But, for the
last time, where are your goloshes? The thing is too bad, especially
after what uncle said."

The President's cabman seemed to be regaining some control over his
horse, and the pursuers gained a little as they swept round into the
Edgware Road. And here there occurred what seemed to the allies a
providential stoppage. Traffic of every kind was swerving to right or
left or stopping, for down the long road was coming the unmistakable
roar announcing the fire-engine, which in a few seconds went by like a
brazen thunderbolt. But quick as it went by, Sunday had bounded out of
his cab, sprung at the fire-engine, caught it, slung himself on to it,
and was seen as he disappeared in the noisy distance talking to the
astonished fireman with explanatory gestures.

"After him!" howled Syme. "He can't go astray now. There's no mistaking
a fire-engine."

The three cabmen, who had been stunned for a moment, whipped up their
horses and slightly decreased the distance between themselves and their
disappearing prey. The President acknowledged this proximity by coming
to the back of the car, bowing repeatedly, kissing his hand, and finally
flinging a neatly-folded note into the bosom of Inspector Ratcliffe.
When that gentleman opened it, not without impatience, he found it
contained the words:--

   "Fly at once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known.
   --A FRIEND."

The fire-engine had struck still farther to the north, into a region
that they did not recognise; and as it ran by a line of high railings
shadowed with trees, the six friends were startled, but somewhat
relieved, to see the President leap from the fire-engine, though whether
through another whim or the increasing protest of his entertainers they
could not see. Before the three cabs, however, could reach up to the
spot, he had gone up the high railings like a huge grey cat, tossed
himself over, and vanished in a darkness of leaves.

Syme with a furious gesture stopped his cab, jumped out, and sprang also
to the escalade. When he had one leg over the fence and his friends
were following, he turned a face on them which shone quite pale in the
shadow.

"What place can this be?" he asked. "Can it be the old devil's house?
I've heard he has a house in North London."

"All the better," said the Secretary grimly, planting a foot in a
foothold, "we shall find him at home."

"No, but it isn't that," said Syme, knitting his brows. "I hear the most
horrible noises, like devils laughing and sneezing and blowing their
devilish noses!"

"His dogs barking, of course," said the Secretary.

"Why not say his black-beetles barking!" said Syme furiously, "snails
barking! geraniums barking! Did you ever hear a dog bark like that?"

He held up his hand, and there came out of the thicket a long growling
roar that seemed to get under the skin and freeze the flesh--a low
thrilling roar that made a throbbing in the air all about them.

"The dogs of Sunday would be no ordinary dogs," said Gogol, and
shuddered.

Syme had jumped down on the other side, but he still stood listening
impatiently.

"Well, listen to that," he said, "is that a dog--anybody's dog?"

There broke upon their ear a hoarse screaming as of things protesting
and clamouring in sudden pain; and then, far off like an echo, what
sounded like a long nasal trumpet.

"Well, his house ought to be hell!" said the Secretary; "and if it is
hell, I'm going in!" and he sprang over the tall railings almost with
one swing.

The others followed. They broke through a tangle of plants and shrubs,
and came out on an open path. Nothing was in sight, but Dr. Bull
suddenly struck his hands together.

"Why, you asses," he cried, "it's the Zoo!"

As they were looking round wildly for any trace of their wild quarry,
a keeper in uniform came running along the path with a man in plain
clothes.

"Has it come this way?" gasped the keeper.

"Has what?" asked Syme.

"The elephant!" cried the keeper. "An elephant has gone mad and run
away!"

"He has run away with an old gentleman," said the other stranger
breathlessly, "a poor old gentleman with white hair!"

"What sort of old gentleman?" asked Syme, with great curiosity.

"A very large and fat old gentleman in light grey clothes," said the
keeper eagerly.

"Well," said Syme, "if he's that particular kind of old gentleman,
if you're quite sure that he's a large and fat old gentleman in grey
clothes, you may take my word for it that the elephant has not run away
with him. He has run away with the elephant. The elephant is not made by
God that could run away with him if he did not consent to the elopement.
And, by thunder, there he is!"

There was no doubt about it this time. Clean across the space of grass,
about two hundred yards away, with a crowd screaming and scampering
vainly at his heels, went a huge grey elephant at an awful stride, with
his trunk thrown out as rigid as a ship's bowsprit, and trumpeting like
the trumpet of doom. On the back of the bellowing and plunging animal
sat President Sunday with all the placidity of a sultan, but goading the
animal to a furious speed with some sharp object in his hand.

"Stop him!" screamed the populace. "He'll be out of the gate!"

"Stop a landslide!" said the keeper. "He is out of the gate!"

And even as he spoke, a final crash and roar of terror announced that
the great grey elephant had broken out of the gates of the Zoological
Gardens, and was careening down Albany Street like a new and swift sort
of omnibus.

"Great Lord!" cried Bull, "I never knew an elephant could go so fast.
Well, it must be hansom-cabs again if we are to keep him in sight."

As they raced along to the gate out of which the elephant had vanished,
Syme felt a glaring panorama of the strange animals in the cages which
they passed. Afterwards he thought it queer that he should have seen
them so clearly. He remembered especially seeing pelicans, with their
preposterous, pendant throats. He wondered why the pelican was the
symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity
to admire a pelican. He remembered a hornbill, which was simply a huge
yellow beak with a small bird tied on behind it. The whole gave him a
sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was
always making quite mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they
would understand him when they had understood the stars. He wondered
whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.

The six unhappy detectives flung themselves into cabs and followed the
elephant sharing the terror which he spread through the long stretch of
the streets. This time Sunday did not turn round, but offered them the
solid stretch of his unconscious back, which maddened them, if possible,
more than his previous mockeries. Just before they came to Baker Street,
however, he was seen to throw something far up into the air, as a boy
does a ball meaning to catch it again. But at their rate of racing it
fell far behind, just by the cab containing Gogol; and in faint hope of
a clue or for some impulse unexplainable, he stopped his cab so as to
pick it up. It was addressed to himself, and was quite a bulky parcel.
On examination, however, its bulk was found to consist of thirty-three
pieces of paper of no value wrapped one round the other. When the last
covering was torn away it reduced itself to a small slip of paper, on
which was written:--

"The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'."

The man once known as Gogol said nothing, but the movements of his hands
and feet were like those of a man urging a horse to renewed efforts.

Through street after street, through district after district, went the
prodigy of the flying elephant, calling crowds to every window, and
driving the traffic left and right. And still through all this insane
publicity the three cabs toiled after it, until they came to be regarded
as part of a procession, and perhaps the advertisement of a circus. They
went at such a rate that distances were shortened beyond belief, and
Syme saw the Albert Hall in Kensington when he thought that he was still
in Paddington. The animal's pace was even more fast and free through the
empty, aristocratic streets of South Kensington, and he finally headed
towards that part of the sky-line where the enormous Wheel of Earl's
Court stood up in the sky. The wheel grew larger and larger, till it
filled heaven like the wheel of stars.

The beast outstripped the cabs. They lost him round several corners, and
when they came to one of the gates of the Earl's Court Exhibition they
found themselves finally blocked. In front of them was an enormous
crowd; in the midst of it was an enormous elephant, heaving and
shuddering as such shapeless creatures do. But the President had
disappeared.

"Where has he gone to?" asked Syme, slipping to the ground.

"Gentleman rushed into the Exhibition, sir!" said an official in a dazed
manner. Then he added in an injured voice: "Funny gentleman, sir. Asked
me to hold his horse, and gave me this."

He held out with distaste a piece of folded paper, addressed: "To the
Secretary of the Central Anarchist Council."

The Secretary, raging, rent it open, and found written inside it:--

   "When the herring runs a mile,
    Let the Secretary smile;
    When the herring tries to fly,
    Let the Secretary die.
                    Rustic Proverb."

"Why the eternal crikey," began the Secretary, "did you let the man in?
Do people commonly come to your Exhibition riding on mad elephants? Do--"

"Look!" shouted Syme suddenly. "Look over there!"

"Look at what?" asked the Secretary savagely.

"Look at the captive balloon!" said Syme, and pointed in a frenzy.

"Why the blazes should I look at a captive balloon?" demanded the
Secretary. "What is there queer about a captive balloon?"

"Nothing," said Syme, "except that it isn't captive!"

They all turned their eyes to where the balloon swung and swelled above
the Exhibition on a string, like a child's balloon. A second afterwards
the string came in two just under the car, and the balloon, broken
loose, floated away with the freedom of a soap bubble.

"Ten thousand devils!" shrieked the Secretary. "He's got into it!" and
he shook his fists at the sky.

The balloon, borne by some chance wind, came right above them, and they
could see the great white head of the President peering over the side
and looking benevolently down on them.

"God bless my soul!" said the Professor with the elderly manner that he
could never disconnect from his bleached beard and parchment face. "God
bless my soul! I seemed to fancy that something fell on the top of my
hat!"

He put up a trembling hand and took from that shelf a piece of twisted
paper, which he opened absently only to find it inscribed with a true
lover's knot and, the words:--

"Your beauty has not left me indifferent.--From LITTLE SNOWDROP."

There was a short silence, and then Syme said, biting his beard--

"I'm not beaten yet. The blasted thing must come down somewhere. Let's
follow it!"



CHAPTER XIV. THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS

ACROSS green fields, and breaking through blooming hedges, toiled six
draggled detectives, about five miles out of London. The optimist of the
party had at first proposed that they should follow the balloon across
South England in hansom-cabs. But he was ultimately convinced of the
persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the
still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon.
Consequently the tireless though exasperated travellers broke through
black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each was turned
into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those green
hills of Surrey saw the final collapse and tragedy of the admirable
light grey suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park. His silk
hat was broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his coat-tails were
torn to the shoulder by arresting thorns, the clay of England was
splashed up to his collar; but he still carried his yellow beard forward
with a silent and furious determination, and his eyes were still fixed
on that floating ball of gas, which in the full flush of sunset seemed
coloured like a sunset cloud.

"After all," he said, "it is very beautiful!"

"It is singularly and strangely beautiful!" said the Professor. "I wish
the beastly gas-bag would burst!"

"No," said Dr. Bull, "I hope it won't. It might hurt the old boy."

"Hurt him!" said the vindictive Professor, "hurt him! Not as much as I'd
hurt him if I could get up with him. Little Snowdrop!"

"I don't want him hurt, somehow," said Dr. Bull.

"What!" cried the Secretary bitterly. "Do you believe all that tale
about his being our man in the dark room? Sunday would say he was
anybody."

"I don't know whether I believe it or not," said Dr. Bull. "But it isn't
that that I mean. I can't wish old Sunday's balloon to burst because--"

"Well," said Syme impatiently, "because?"

"Well, because he's so jolly like a balloon himself," said Dr. Bull
desperately. "I don't understand a word of all that idea of his being
the same man who gave us all our blue cards. It seems to make everything
nonsense. But I don't care who knows it, I always had a sympathy for
old Sunday himself, wicked as he was. Just as if he was a great bouncing
baby. How can I explain what my queer sympathy was? It didn't prevent my
fighting him like hell! Shall I make it clear if I say that I liked him
because he was so fat?"

"You will not," said the Secretary.

"I've got it now," cried Bull, "it was because he was so fat and so
light. Just like a balloon. We always think of fat people as heavy, but
he could have danced against a sylph. I see now what I mean. Moderate
strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. It
was like the old speculations--what would happen if an elephant could
leap up in the sky like a grasshopper?"

"Our elephant," said Syme, looking upwards, "has leapt into the sky like
a grasshopper."

"And somehow," concluded Bull, "that's why I can't help liking old
Sunday. No, it's not an admiration of force, or any silly thing like
that. There is a kind of gaiety in the thing, as if he were bursting
with some good news. Haven't you sometimes felt it on a spring day?
You know Nature plays tricks, but somehow that day proves they are
good-natured tricks. I never read the Bible myself, but that part they
laugh at is literal truth, 'Why leap ye, ye high hills?' The hills do
leap--at least, they try to.... Why do I like Sunday?... how can I tell
you?... because he's such a Bounder."

There was a long silence, and then the Secretary said in a curious,
strained voice--

"You do not know Sunday at all. Perhaps it is because you are better
than I, and do not know hell. I was a fierce fellow, and a trifle morbid
from the first. The man who sits in darkness, and who chose us all,
chose me because I had all the crazy look of a conspirator--because my
smile went crooked, and my eyes were gloomy, even when I smiled. But
there must have been something in me that answered to the nerves in all
these anarchic men. For when I first saw Sunday he expressed to me, not
your airy vitality, but something both gross and sad in the Nature of
Things. I found him smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind
down, infinitely more depressing than the genial darkness in which our
master lives. He sat there on a bench, a huge heap of a man, dark and
out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or even
stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked my most
eloquent questions. Then, after a long silence, the Thing began to
shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady. It shook like
a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever
read about the base bodies that are the origin of life--the deep sea
lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most
shapeless and the most shameful. I could only tell myself, from its
shudderings, that it was something at least that such a monster could
be miserable. And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was
shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you
ask me to forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by
something at once lower and stronger than oneself."

"Surely you fellows are exaggerating wildly," cut in the clear voice of
Inspector Ratcliffe. "President Sunday is a terrible fellow for one's
intellect, but he is not such a Barnum's freak physically as you make
out. He received me in an ordinary office, in a grey check coat, in
broad daylight. He talked to me in an ordinary way. But I'll tell you
what is a trifle creepy about Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are
neat, everything seems in order; but he's absent-minded. Sometimes his
great bright eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are
there. Now absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We
think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can't think of a wicked man who is
honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren't think of a wicked man
alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured man. It
means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise. But how will
you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill
you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty.
Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt
that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might
ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour
with an absent-minded tiger?"

"And what do you think of Sunday, Gogol?" asked Syme.

"I don't think of Sunday on principle," said Gogol simply, "any more
than I stare at the sun at noonday."

"Well, that is a point of view," said Syme thoughtfully. "What do you
say, Professor?"

The Professor was walking with bent head and trailing stick, and he did
not answer at all.

"Wake up, Professor!" said Syme genially. "Tell us what you think of
Sunday."

The Professor spoke at last very slowly.

"I think something," he said, "that I cannot say clearly. Or, rather,
I think something that I cannot even think clearly. But it is something
like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too large and loose.

"Well, when I saw Sunday's face I thought it was too large--everybody
does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that one
couldn't focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away from
the nose, that it wasn't an eye. The mouth was so much by itself,
that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to
explain."

He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on--

"But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp
and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and
unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him
again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no
face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards,
the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday's face escaped me; it ran away
to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face
has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces. I don't know
whether your face, Bull, is a face or a combination in perspective.
Perhaps one black disc of your beastly glasses is quite close and
another fifty miles away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth
a dump. Sunday has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts
of a spiritualist. I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not
a creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you
really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter."

Syme's eyes were still fixed upon the errant orb, which, reddened in the
evening light, looked like some rosier and more innocent world.

"Have you noticed an odd thing," he said, "about all your descriptions?
Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can
only find one thing to compare him to--the universe itself. Bull
finds him like the earth in spring, Gogol like the sun at noonday. The
Secretary is reminded of the shapeless protoplasm, and the Inspector
of the carelessness of virgin forests. The Professor says he is like a
changing landscape. This is queer, but it is queerer still that I also
have had my odd notion about the President, and I also find that I think
of Sunday as I think of the whole world."

"Get on a little faster, Syme," said Bull; "never mind the balloon."

"When I first saw Sunday," said Syme slowly, "I only saw his back; and
when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck
and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a
stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had
at once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast
dressed up in men's clothes."

"Get on," said Dr. Bull.

"And then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from the street,
as he sat in the balcony. Then I entered the hotel, and coming round the
other side of him, saw his face in the sunlight. His face frightened me,
as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was
evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful,
because it was so good."

"Syme," exclaimed the Secretary, "are you ill?"

"It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after
heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes, and in the mouth honour
and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great, grey-clad
shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind I
was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was
a god."

"Pan," said the Professor dreamily, "was a god and an animal."

"Then, and again and always," went on Syme like a man talking to
himself, "that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the
mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble
face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the
back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an
accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be
explained. But the whole came to a kind of crest yesterday when I raced
Sunday for the cab, and was just behind him all the way."

"Had you time for thinking then?" asked Ratcliffe.

"Time," replied Syme, "for one outrageous thought. I was suddenly
possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really
was his face--an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that
the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards,
and dancing as he ran."

"Horrible!" said Dr. Bull, and shuddered.

"Horrible is not the word," said Syme. "It was exactly the worst instant
of my life. And yet ten minutes afterwards, when he put his head out of
the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I knew that he was only like
a father playing hide-and-seek with his children."

"It is a long game," said the Secretary, and frowned at his broken
boots.

"Listen to me," cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. "Shall I tell
you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the
back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.
That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the
back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a
face? If we could only get round in front--"

"Look!" cried out Bull clamorously, "the balloon is coming down!"

There was no need to cry out to Syme, who had never taken his eyes off
it. He saw the great luminous globe suddenly stagger in the sky, right
itself, and then sink slowly behind the trees like a setting sun.

The man called Gogol, who had hardly spoken through all their weary
travels, suddenly threw up his hands like a lost spirit.

"He is dead!" he cried. "And now I know he was my friend--my friend in
the dark!"

"Dead!" snorted the Secretary. "You will not find him dead easily. If
he has been tipped out of the car, we shall find him rolling as a colt
rolls in a field, kicking his legs for fun."

"Clashing his hoofs," said the Professor. "The colts do, and so did
Pan."

"Pan again!" said Dr. Bull irritably. "You seem to think Pan is
everything."

"So he is," said the Professor, "in Greek. He means everything."

"Don't forget," said the Secretary, looking down, "that he also means
Panic."

Syme had stood without hearing any of the exclamations.

"It fell over there," he said shortly. "Let us follow it!"

Then he added with an indescribable gesture--

"Oh, if he has cheated us all by getting killed! It would be like one of
his larks."

He strode off towards the distant trees with a new energy, his rags
and ribbons fluttering in the wind. The others followed him in a more
footsore and dubious manner. And almost at the same moment all six men
realised that they were not alone in the little field.

Across the square of turf a tall man was advancing towards them, leaning
on a strange long staff like a sceptre. He was clad in a fine but
old-fashioned suit with knee-breeches; its colour was that shade between
blue, violet and grey which can be seen in certain shadows of the
woodland. His hair was whitish grey, and at the first glance, taken
along with his knee-breeches, looked as if it was powdered. His advance
was very quiet; but for the silver frost upon his head, he might have
been one to the shadows of the wood.

"Gentlemen," he said, "my master has a carriage waiting for you in the
road just by."

"Who is your master?" asked Syme, standing quite still.

"I was told you knew his name," said the man respectfully.

There was a silence, and then the Secretary said--

"Where is this carriage?"

"It has been waiting only a few moments," said the stranger. "My master
has only just come home."

Syme looked left and right upon the patch of green field in which
he found himself. The hedges were ordinary hedges, the trees seemed
ordinary trees; yet he felt like a man entrapped in fairyland.

He looked the mysterious ambassador up and down, but he could discover
nothing except that the man's coat was the exact colour of the purple
shadows, and that the man's face was the exact colour of the red and
brown and golden sky.

"Show us the place," Syme said briefly, and without a word the man in
the violet coat turned his back and walked towards a gap in the hedge,
which let in suddenly the light of a white road.

As the six wanderers broke out upon this thoroughfare, they saw the
white road blocked by what looked like a long row of carriages, such a
row of carriages as might close the approach to some house in Park Lane.
Along the side of these carriages stood a rank of splendid servants, all
dressed in the grey-blue uniform, and all having a certain quality of
stateliness and freedom which would not commonly belong to the servants
of a gentleman, but rather to the officials and ambassadors of a great
king. There were no less than six carriages waiting, one for each of the
tattered and miserable band. All the attendants (as if in court-dress)
wore swords, and as each man crawled into his carriage they drew them,
and saluted with a sudden blaze of steel.

"What can it all mean?" asked Bull of Syme as they separated. "Is this
another joke of Sunday's?"

"I don't know," said Syme as he sank wearily back in the cushions of his
carriage; "but if it is, it's one of the jokes you talk about. It's a
good-natured one."

The six adventurers had passed through many adventures, but not one
had carried them so utterly off their feet as this last adventure of
comfort. They had all become inured to things going roughly; but things
suddenly going smoothly swamped them. They could not even feebly imagine
what the carriages were; it was enough for them to know that they were
carriages, and carriages with cushions. They could not conceive who
the old man was who had led them; but it was quite enough that he had
certainly led them to the carriages.

Syme drove through a drifting darkness of trees in utter abandonment.
It was typical of him that while he had carried his bearded chin forward
fiercely so long as anything could be done, when the whole business was
taken out of his hands he fell back on the cushions in a frank collapse.

Very gradually and very vaguely he realised into what rich roads the
carriage was carrying him. He saw that they passed the stone gates of
what might have been a park, that they began gradually to climb a hill
which, while wooded on both sides, was somewhat more orderly than a
forest. Then there began to grow upon him, as upon a man slowly waking
from a healthy sleep, a pleasure in everything. He felt that the hedges
were what hedges should be, living walls; that a hedge is like a human
army, disciplined, but all the more alive. He saw high elms behind the
hedges, and vaguely thought how happy boys would be climbing there. Then
his carriage took a turn of the path, and he saw suddenly and quietly,
like a long, low, sunset cloud, a long, low house, mellow in the mild
light of sunset. All the six friends compared notes afterwards and
quarrelled; but they all agreed that in some unaccountable way the
place reminded them of their boyhood. It was either this elm-top or that
crooked path, it was either this scrap of orchard or that shape of a
window; but each man of them declared that he could remember this place
before he could remember his mother.

When the carriages eventually rolled up to a large, low, cavernous
gateway, another man in the same uniform, but wearing a silver star
on the grey breast of his coat, came out to meet them. This impressive
person said to the bewildered Syme--

"Refreshments are provided for you in your room."

Syme, under the influence of the same mesmeric sleep of amazement, went
up the large oaken stairs after the respectful attendant. He entered a
splendid suite of apartments that seemed to be designed specially for
him. He walked up to a long mirror with the ordinary instinct of his
class, to pull his tie straight or to smooth his hair; and there he saw
the frightful figure that he was--blood running down his face from where
the bough had struck him, his hair standing out like yellow rags of rank
grass, his clothes torn into long, wavering tatters. At once the whole
enigma sprang up, simply as the question of how he had got there, and
how he was to get out again. Exactly at the same moment a man in blue,
who had been appointed as his valet, said very solemnly--

"I have put out your clothes, sir."

"Clothes!" said Syme sardonically. "I have no clothes except these," and
he lifted two long strips of his frock-coat in fascinating festoons, and
made a movement as if to twirl like a ballet girl.

"My master asks me to say," said the attendant, "that there is a fancy
dress ball tonight, and that he desires you to put on the costume that
I have laid out. Meanwhile, sir, there is a bottle of Burgundy and some
cold pheasant, which he hopes you will not refuse, as it is some hours
before supper."

"Cold pheasant is a good thing," said Syme reflectively, "and Burgundy
is a spanking good thing. But really I do not want either of them so
much as I want to know what the devil all this means, and what sort of
costume you have got laid out for me. Where is it?"

The servant lifted off a kind of ottoman a long peacock-blue drapery,
rather of the nature of a domino, on the front of which was emblazoned
a large golden sun, and which was splashed here and there with flaming
stars and crescents.

"You're to be dressed as Thursday, sir," said the valet somewhat
affably.

"Dressed as Thursday!" said Syme in meditation. "It doesn't sound a warm
costume."

"Oh, yes, sir," said the other eagerly, "the Thursday costume is quite
warm, sir. It fastens up to the chin."

"Well, I don't understand anything," said Syme, sighing. "I have been
used so long to uncomfortable adventures that comfortable adventures
knock me out. Still, I may be allowed to ask why I should be
particularly like Thursday in a green frock spotted all over with the
sun and moon. Those orbs, I think, shine on other days. I once saw the
moon on Tuesday, I remember."

"Beg pardon, sir," said the valet, "Bible also provided for you," and
with a respectful and rigid finger he pointed out a passage in the first
chapter of Genesis. Syme read it wondering. It was that in which the
fourth day of the week is associated with the creation of the sun and
moon. Here, however, they reckoned from a Christian Sunday.

"This is getting wilder and wilder," said Syme, as he sat down in a
chair. "Who are these people who provide cold pheasant and Burgundy, and
green clothes and Bibles? Do they provide everything?"

"Yes, sir, everything," said the attendant gravely. "Shall I help you on
with your costume?"

"Oh, hitch the bally thing on!" said Syme impatiently.

But though he affected to despise the mummery, he felt a curious freedom
and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment fell about
him; and when he found that he had to wear a sword, it stirred a boyish
dream. As he passed out of the room he flung the folds across his
shoulder with a gesture, his sword stood out at an angle, and he had all
the swagger of a troubadour. For these disguises did not disguise, but
reveal.



CHAPTER XV. THE ACCUSER

AS Syme strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the
top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He
was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which
fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of light.
The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment. There
was no need for Syme to search his memory or the Bible in order to
remember that the first day of creation marked the mere creation of
light out of darkness. The vestment itself would alone have suggested
the symbol; and Syme felt also how perfectly this pattern of pure white
and black expressed the soul of the pale and austere Secretary, with his
inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him so easily make
war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of them. Syme was
scarcely surprised to notice that, amid all the ease and hospitality of
their new surroundings, this man's eyes were still stern. No smell
of ale or orchards could make the Secretary cease to ask a reasonable
question.

If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realised that he,
too, seemed to be for the first time himself and no one else. For if the
Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and formless
light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light
in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may
sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him
the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the
sun and moon.

As they descended the broad stairs together they overtook Ratcliffe,
who was clad in spring green like a huntsman, and the pattern upon whose
garment was a green tangle of trees. For he stood for that third day
on which the earth and green things were made, and his square, sensible
face, with its not unfriendly cynicism, seemed appropriate enough to it.

They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a very large
old English garden, full of torches and bonfires, by the broken light
of which a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme
seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume.
There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man dressed
as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon; the two last, together,
seemed to keep the thread of their farcical adventures. Syme even saw,
with a queer thrill, one dancer dressed like an enormous hornbill, with
a beak twice as big as himself--the queer bird which had fixed itself on
his fancy like a living question while he was rushing down the long road
at the Zoological Gardens. There were a thousand other such objects,
however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple tree, a dancing
ship. One would have thought that the untamable tune of some mad
musician had set all the common objects of field and street dancing an
eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme was middle-aged and at rest,
he could never see one of those particular objects--a lamppost, or
an apple tree, or a windmill--without thinking that it was a strayed
reveller from that revel of masquerade.

On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of green bank,
like the terrace in such old-fashioned gardens.

Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs, the thrones
of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in their seats;
the Professor was just mounting to his. Gogol, or Tuesday, had his
simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed upon the division of the
waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his feet,
grey and silver, like a sheet of rain. The Professor, whose day was that
on which the birds and fishes--the ruder forms of life--were created,
had a dress of dim purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed fishes and
outrageous tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable fancy and
of doubt. Dr. Bull, the last day of Creation, wore a coat covered with
heraldic animals in red and gold, and on his crest a man rampant. He lay
back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture of an optimist in his
element.

One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their strange
seats. As each of them sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose from the
carnival, such as that with which crowds receive kings. Cups were
clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in the air. The
men for whom these thrones were reserved were men crowned with some
extraordinary laurels. But the central chair was empty.

Syme was on the left hand of it and the Secretary on the right. The
Secretary looked across the empty throne at Syme, and said, compressing
his lips--

"We do not know yet that he is not dead in a field."

Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in
front of him a frightful and beautiful alteration, as if heaven had
opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed silently along the
front like a shadow, and had sat in the central seat. He was draped
plainly, in a pure and terrible white, and his hair was like a silver
flame on his forehead.

For a long time--it seemed for hours--that huge masquerade of mankind
swayed and stamped in front of them to marching and exultant music.
Every couple dancing seemed a separate romance; it might be a fairy
dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon; but
in each case it was, somehow, as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as
grave and kind as a love story. At last, however, the thick crowd began
to thin itself. Couples strolled away into the garden-walks, or began to
drift towards that end of the building where stood smoking, in huge pots
like fish-kettles, some hot and scented mixtures of old ale or wine.
Above all these, upon a sort of black framework on the roof of the
house, roared in its iron basket a gigantic bonfire, which lit up the
land for miles. It flung the homely effect of firelight over the face
of vast forests of grey or brown, and it seemed to fill with warmth even
the emptiness of upper night. Yet this also, after a time, was allowed
to grow fainter; the dim groups gathered more and more round the great
cauldrons, or passed, laughing and clattering, into the inner passages
of that ancient house. Soon there were only some ten loiterers in the
garden; soon only four. Finally the last stray merry-maker ran into the
house whooping to his companions. The fire faded, and the slow, strong
stars came out. And the seven strange men were left alone, like seven
stone statues on their chairs of stone. Not one of them had spoken a
word.

They seemed in no haste to do so, but heard in silence the hum of
insects and the distant song of one bird. Then Sunday spoke, but so
dreamily that he might have been continuing a conversation rather than
beginning one.

"We will eat and drink later," he said. "Let us remain together a
little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long.
I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were
always heroes--epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers
in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the
beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness,
where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice
commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the
dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the
earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you
in the daylight I denied it myself."

Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was silence, and
the incomprehensible went on.

"But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the
whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew
how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with
King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope."

There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the
black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday,
and said in a harsh voice--

"Who and what are you?"

"I am the Sabbath," said the other without moving. "I am the peace of
God."

The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his
hand.

"I know what you mean," he cried, "and it is exactly that that I cannot
forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call
the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you
were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense to
the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why
were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron
entered into our souls--and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive
God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His
peace."

Sunday answered not a word, but very slowly he turned his face of stone
upon Syme as if asking a question.

"No," said Syme, "I do not feel fierce like that. I am grateful to you,
not only for wine and hospitality here, but for many a fine scamper and
free fight. But I should like to know. My soul and heart are as happy
and quiet here as this old garden, but my reason is still crying out. I
should like to know."

Sunday looked at Ratcliffe, whose clear voice said--

"It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought
yourself."

Bull said--

"I understand nothing, but I am happy. In fact, I am going to sleep."

"I am not happy," said the Professor with his head in his hands,
"because I do not understand. You let me stray a little too near to
hell."

And then Gogol said, with the absolute simplicity of a child--

"I wish I knew why I was hurt so much."

Still Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin upon his
hand, and gazed at the distance. Then at last he said--

"I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think, comes another
to complain, and we will hear him also."

The falling fire in the great cresset threw a last long gleam, like a
bar of burning gold, across the dim grass. Against this fiery band was
outlined in utter black the advancing legs of a black-clad figure. He
seemed to have a fine close suit with knee-breeches such as that which
was worn by the servants of the house, only that it was not blue, but of
this absolute sable. He had, like the servants, a kind of sword by his
side. It was only when he had come quite close to the crescent of
the seven and flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with
thunder-struck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost ape-like
face of his old friend Gregory, with its rank red hair and its insulting
smile.

"Gregory!" gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. "Why, this is the
real anarchist!"

"Yes," said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, "I am the
real anarchist."

"'Now there was a day,'" murmured Bull, who seemed really to have fallen
asleep, "'when the sons of God came to present themselves before the
Lord, and Satan came also among them.'"

"You are right," said Gregory, and gazed all round. "I am a destroyer. I
would destroy the world if I could."

A sense of a pathos far under the earth stirred up in Syme, and he spoke
brokenly and without sequence.

"Oh, most unhappy man," he cried, "try to be happy! You have red hair
like your sister."

"My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world," said Gregory.
"I thought I hated everything more than common men can hate anything;
but I find that I do not hate everything so much as I hate you!"

"I never hated you," said Syme very sadly.

Then out of this unintelligible creature the last thunders broke.

"You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what
you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You
are the police--the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are
the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul
alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been
broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this
crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime
of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the
supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel.
I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for
being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down
from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no
troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind,
if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony
such as I--"

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each
thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small
thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a
fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight
the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the
dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have
the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for
order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real
lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that
by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You
lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this
accuser, 'We also have suffered.'

"It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken
upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from
these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of
unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered
insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not
been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom
he has accused. At least--"

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday,
which wore a strange smile.

"Have you," he cried in a dreadful voice, "have you ever suffered?"

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the
colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew
larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black.
Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed
to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard
somewhere, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"

* * *

When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in
some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair,
or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme's experience
was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed
anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone
through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had
swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever
come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he
knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy
and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his
recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking
like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some
triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body
and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to
everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some
impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an
adorable triviality.

Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as
if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose.
A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew
from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky. Syme felt a
simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the
road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that
he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one white
road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside
a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with
the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great
unconscious gravity of a girl.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Club of Queer Trades

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Posting Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1696]
Release Date: April, 1999

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***




Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers





THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

by G. K. Chesterton




Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something
to do with the designing of the things called flats in England
and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of
economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors
and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets
anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that
the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be
thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the
passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives.
The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the
Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel,
and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the
twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers'
Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street,
and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries
would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice
hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.

The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be,
is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which
the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate
must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be
an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given
in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or
variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would
not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's
furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their
trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech
to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby
Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the
trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its
inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose
to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive
a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when
one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know
whether to laugh or cry.

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing;
to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking
at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should
feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should
have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity,
not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many
societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have
accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my
audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps,
I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged.
I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that
superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain
the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been
so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the
Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten
Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations,
at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as
I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come
across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of
the metropolis call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also call
me 'The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I
have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the
better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club
of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious
thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered
by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely
stirred out of his attic.

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs
of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in
odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords,
armour--the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these
quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful, legal
face. And no one but I knew who he was.

Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
that occurred in--, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as
a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the
people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very
outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said
to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: "I sentence you to
three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given
conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside." He
accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal
crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of
justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately
encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in
which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come
forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet.
After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited,
the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with
quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: "Get a
new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul." All this, of
course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy
and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court.
It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers,
against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought.
The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but
at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great
judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of
lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken
very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering
at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a
stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:

"O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow."

He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.

I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that
gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the
great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck
his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even
unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily,
when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a
huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.

"Sorry to bother you, Basil," he gasped. "I took a liberty--made an
appointment here with a man--a client--in five minutes--I beg your
pardon, sir," and he gave me a bow of apology.

Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a practical
brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is
to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at
everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist,
an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a--what are you now, Rupert?"

"I am and have been for some time," said Rupert, with some dignity, "a
private detective, and there's my client."

A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being
given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked
swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and
said, "Good evening, gentlemen," with a stress on the last syllable that
somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social.
He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black
moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by
his sad sea-blue eyes.

Basil immediately said to me, "Let us come into the next room, Gully,"
and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:

"Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly."

The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major
Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a
quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I
do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.

Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he
was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who
recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and
tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his
habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup.
One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion--the
cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his
blue eyes glittered like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had
remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts
at Candahar.

"Well, Major," said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
himself into a chair, "what is the matter with you?"

"Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover," said the Major, with
righteous indignation.

We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
shut in his abstracted way, said simply:

"I beg your pardon."

"Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
Something. Preposterous."

We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the
reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major
Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes
of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert
and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the
most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in
black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay,
it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's
house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in
the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and
had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was
one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand
rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would
not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that
within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught
in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse
gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of
a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before
him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were
splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite
pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and
then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors
and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of
anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent, praised some,
disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth
and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The
man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to
the Major.

"I'll tell you what, sir," he said. "If you're interested in them
things, you just get on to that wall."

"On the wall!" cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.

"Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,"
hissed the tempter. "I'll help you up, sir."

How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of
the Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with
an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical
assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The
second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel
inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments
were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old
soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes
fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the
lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for
once it was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for
the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the
sentence:

DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN

A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown
looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had
suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible
inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown
did not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military
exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person,
but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again,
might have thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke,
but Brown could not easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint
learning that the garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one;
he thought it extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money
like water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to
offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and
waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six legs.

At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and
the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the
gravel path.

"Who on earth are you?" he gasped, trembling violently.

"I am Major Brown," said that individual, who was always cool in the
hour of action.

The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
stammered wildly, "Come down--come down here!"

"At your service," said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.

The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide
led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed
house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man
turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.

"For heaven's sake," he said, "don't mention jackals."

Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
downstairs with a clatter.

The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in
the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to
see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking
out.

"Madam," he said, bowing simply, "I am Major Brown."

"Sit down," said the lady; but she did not turn her head.

She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour
of Bedford Park. "You have come, I suppose," she said mournfully, "to
tax me about the hateful title-deeds."

"I have come, madam," he said, "to know what is the matter. To know why
my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either."

He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene,
the frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was
still, and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he
studied cried to heaven for his blood.

"You know I must not turn round," said the lady; "every afternoon till
the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street."

Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.

"It is almost six," he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper
clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth
the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and
yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet
tantalising, the face of an elf.

"That makes the third year I have waited," she cried. "This is an
anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
happen once and for all."

And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From
low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a
voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:

"Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?"

Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door
and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the
street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon
sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green trembling.

"It is the end," she cried, with shaking lips; "it may be death for both
of us. Whenever--"

But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse
proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.

"Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?"

Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too
long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational
Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the
drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:

"Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--"

Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time--in
time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries
appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.

The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man
thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again,
it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. "Where's your
coal-cellar?" he said, and stepped out into the passage.

She looked at him with wild grey eyes. "You will not go down," she
cried, "alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?"

"Is this the way?" replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in,
feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied,
a pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly
belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of
the head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a
brutal image of destiny. But the Major's head, though upside down, was
perfectly clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure
until he had slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the
knees of the invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out
one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a
muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with a
crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a
cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now
no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to get past
the Major to the door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the
coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At length there came
a strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown
expected his hand to rend and part from the arm. But something else
rent and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the
cellar, leaving the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his
adventure and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out
at the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole equipment
of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed
walls.

"The lady was in the conspiracy, of course," said Rupert, nodding. Major
Brown turned brick red. "I beg your pardon," he said, "I think not."

Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
nothing. When next he spoke he asked:

"Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?"

"There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit," said
the Major carefully; "there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string,
and this letter," and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:

Dear Mr Plover,

I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow
The coal-cellar, of course.

Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.

Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut
in:

"Is it dated from anywhere?"

"No--oh, yes!" replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; "14 Tanner's
Court, North--"

Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.

"Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
revolver."

Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was
some time before he answered:

"I don't think you'll need it."

"Perhaps not," said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. "One never knows.
But going down a dark court to see criminals--"

"Do you think they are criminals?" asked his brother.

Rupert laughed stoutly. "Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
experiment, but--"

"Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?" asked Basil, in the
same distant and monotonous voice.

"My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter."

"I am looking at the letter," said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. "I don't think it's the sort
of letter one criminal would write to another."

"My dear boy, you are glorious," cried Rupert, turning round, with
laughter in his blue bright eyes. "Your methods amaze me. Why, there
is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You
might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of
thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square."

Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
otherwise move.

"That's rather good," he said; "but, of course, logic like that's not
what is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere. It's not
a criminal letter."

"It is. It's a matter of fact," cried the other in an agony of
reasonableness.

"Facts," murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
animals, "how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly--in fact, I'm
off my head--but I never could believe in that man--what's his name,
in those capital stories?--Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to
something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in
all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.
It's only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up--only the
green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars."

"But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?"

"We have eternity to stretch our legs in," replied the mystic. "It can
be an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them--I've only seen the
letter. I look at that, and say it's not criminal."

"Then what's the origin of it?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea."

"Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?"

Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed
collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:

"Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and
deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as
a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and
saw it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was
Lord Kitchener. What would you think?"

He paused a moment, and went on:

"You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation
of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would
not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of
ordinary personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that
he inherited a dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been
hypnotised at a seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if
he refused the ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet--but
not with Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days
I knew him quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals
quite well. It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres." And he
closed his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.

Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
pity. The former said,

"Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think--until your
spiritual mystery turns up--that a man who sends a note recommending a
crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at
least tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral
tastes. Can I have that revolver?"

"Certainly," said Basil, getting up. "But I am coming with you." And he
flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
corner.

"You!" said Rupert, with some surprise, "you scarcely ever leave your
hole to look at anything on the face of the earth."

Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.

"I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
"hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at
once, without going to see it."

And he led the way out into the purple night.

We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major
Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop
and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest
among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and
poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly
to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.

Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight
at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.

"Shall we go in now?" he asked.

"Not get police?" asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
street.

"I am not sure," answered Rupert, knitting his brows. "Of course, it's
quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and--"

"I shouldn't get the police," said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert
glanced at him and stared hard.

"Basil," he cried, "you're trembling. What's the matter--are you
afraid?"

"Cold, perhaps," said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
was shaking.

At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.

"You're laughing," he cried. "I know that confounded, silent, shaky
laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all
three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians--"

"But I shouldn't call the police," said Basil. "We four heroes are quite
equal to a host," and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.

Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the
rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned
abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.

"Stand close," he said in the voice of a commander. "The scoundrel may
be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and
rush in."

The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for
the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.

"Now," hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
suddenly over his shoulder, "when I say 'Four', follow me with a rush.
If I say 'Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say
'Stop', stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If
they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your
sword-stick ready. Now--one, two three, four!"

With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the
room like an invasion, only to stop dead.

The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared,
at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful
glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and
drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed
moustache, and the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked
up as we came to a standstill.

"Did you knock?" he asked pleasantly. "I am sorry if I did not hear.
What can I do for you?"

There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.

The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.

"Is your name P. G. Northover?" he asked.

"That is my name," replied the other, smiling.

"I think," said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
face, "that this letter was written by you." And with a loud clap he
struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man
called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely
nodded.

"Well, sir," said the Major, breathing hard, "what about that?"

"What about it, precisely," said the man with the moustache.

"I am Major Brown," said that gentleman sternly.

Northover bowed. "Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?"

"Say!" cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want this
confounded thing settled. I want--"

"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of
the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair for a moment." And he pressed
an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room
beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but
stood chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.

The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young
man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.

"Mr Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you please
finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?"

"Yes, sir," said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.

"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover, with his
radiant smile, "if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have
some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday
tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!"

The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence
ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a
raging silence on the part of everybody else.

At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled
with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity,
placed a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.

The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him.
He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered
something, muttering--"Careless." Then he read it again with the same
impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown,
whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.

"I think you will find that all right, Major," he said briefly.

The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
later, but he found it like this:

  Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    L s. d.
   January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
   May 9, to potting and embedding of zoo pansies                    2  0 0
   To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
   To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
   To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
   To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
   To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
   To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
                                                                 ----------
                                                             Total L14  6 0
  A Remittance will oblige.

"What," said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly
rising out of his head, "What in heaven's name is this?"

"What is it?" repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
"It's your account, of course."

"My account!" The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. "My
account! And what have I got to do with it?"

"Well," said Northover, laughing outright, "naturally I prefer you to
pay it."

The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into
the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.

The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the
empty floor.

"Let me go, you scamps," he shouted. "Let me--"

"Stand still," cried Rupert authoritatively. "Major Brown's action is
excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted--"

"A customer has a perfect right," said Northover hotly, "to question an
alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture."

"What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?"
shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain
or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
exasperating mystery. "Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent
tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me--"

"Mad," said Northover, gazing blankly round; "all of them mad. I didn't
know they travelled in quartettes."

"Enough of this prevarication," said Rupert; "your crimes are
discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though
only a private detective myself, I will take the responsibility of
telling you that anything you say--"

"Mad," repeated Northover, with a weary air.

And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.

"Major Brown," he said, "may I ask you a question?"

The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.

"You?" he cried; "certainly, Mr Grant."

"Can you tell me," said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow,
as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, "can you tell
me what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?"

The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and
futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:

"Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something--a name with a
hyphen--Gurney-Brown; that was it."

"And when did the house change hands?" said Basil, looking up sharply.
His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.

"I came in last month," said the Major.

And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.

"Oh! it's too perfect--it's too exquisite," he gasped, beating the arms
with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
weathercocks in a whirlwind.

"Confound it, Basil," said Rupert, stamping. "If you don't want me to go
mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means."

Northover rose.

"Permit me, sir, to explain," he said. "And, first of all, permit me to
apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand
the loss." And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the
waste-paper basket and bowed.

Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. "But I don't even
begin to understand," he cried. "What bill? what blunder? what loss?"

Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration,
there were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.

"Do you know where you are, Major?" he said.

"God knows I don't," said the warrior, with fervour.

"You are standing," replied Northover, "in the office of the Adventure
and Romance Agency, Limited."

"And what's that?" blankly inquired Brown.

The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his
dark eyes on the other's face.

"Major," said he, "did you ever, as you walked along the empty street
upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to
happen--something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something
pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life;
something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its
anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever feel that?"

"Certainly not," said the Major shortly.

"Then I must explain with more elaboration," said Mr Northover, with a
sigh. "The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear
of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us
and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for
a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and
Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes
to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his
front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot
against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he
receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately
in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first
written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at
present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed
by our Mr Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is
almost a pity you did not see the end of it. I need scarcely explain
further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor in your present house,
Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks,
ignoring alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military rank,
positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same
person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of another man's
story."

"How on earth does the thing work?" asked Rupert Grant, with bright and
fascinated eyes.

"We believe that we are doing a noble work," said Northover warmly. "It
has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that
is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all
artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into
fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of
battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a
book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We
give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the
necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen,
of running down long streets from pursuers--all healthy and pleasant
exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin
Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the
splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we
can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and
dream."

Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased
speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.

Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good
humour.

"Of course; awfully dense, sir," he said. "No doubt at all, the scheme
excellent. But I don't think--" He paused a moment, and looked dreamily
out of the window. "I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow, when
one's seen--seen the thing itself, you know--blood and men screaming,
one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible,
you know, 'There remaineth a rest'."

Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:

"Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire,
at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's view of the
matter--"

"I should be obliged for your card, sir," said the Major, in his abrupt
but courteous voice. "Pay for chair."

The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.

It ran, "P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14
Tanner's Court, Fleet Street."

"What on earth is 'C.QT.'?" asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major's
shoulder.

"Don't you know?" returned Northover. "Haven't you ever heard of the
Club of Queer Trades?"

"There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard
of," said the little Major reflectively. "What's this one?"

"The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of
the earliest members."

"You deserve to be," said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.

When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer
smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. "A fine chap,
that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance
of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all
people getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales," and he laughed
out aloud in the silence.

Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
somewhat absurd inquiry.

"What! back again, Major?" cried Northover in surprise. "What can I do
for you?"

The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.

"It's horribly absurd," he said. "Something must have got started in
me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate
desire to know the end of it all."

"The end of it all?"

"Yes," said the Major. "'Jackals', and the title-deeds, and 'Death to
Major Brown'."

The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.

"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask is impossible.
I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules
of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an
outsider; I am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help.
I do hope you understand--"

"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline better than I
do. Thank you very much. Good night."

And the little man withdrew for the last time.

He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in
her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly
that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades
provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who
went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a
murderer.

The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa,
and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged--except,
perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine
unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of
abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by
the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the
title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so
many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realize
the rest of those purple adventures in a better world.



Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top
of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave
us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you
do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed
its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going
through a criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals." But
here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway
engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by their
common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were
the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here,
above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines
and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one
never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing
we knew we should not see--anything really great, central, of the
first class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion
indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and
crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums
which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real
possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the
great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.

"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy
abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very vileness of
the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory
of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live
in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate
civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of
people here are good people. And being good is an adventure far more
violent and daring than sailing round the world. Besides--"

"Go on," I said.

No answer came.

"Go on," I said, looking up.

The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he
was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.

"What is the matter?" I asked, peering over also.

"It is very odd," said Grant at last, grimly, "that I should have been
caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England."

"Where?" I asked, leaning over further, "where?"

"Oh, I was right enough," he went on, in that strange continuous and
sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, "I was
right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes;
they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two;
they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the
same; they are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings
and haloes--at any rate compared to that man."

"Which man?" I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.

He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to
attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious
consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black
top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the
decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something
as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was
curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of
grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather
Oriental; he had two black tufts of moustache.

"What has he done?" I asked.

"I am not sure of the details," said Grant, "but his besetting sin is
a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has
adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan."

"What plan?" I asked. "If you know all about him, why don't you tell me
why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?"

Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.

"I think you've made a mistake in my meaning," he said. "I don't know
his name. I never saw him before in my life."

"Never saw him before!" I cried, with a kind of anger; "then what in
heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
England?"

"I meant what I said," said Basil Grant calmly. "The moment I saw
that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid
innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were
being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in
these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest
sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be
evil."

"But if you never saw him before--" I began.

"In God's name, look at his face," cried out Basil in a voice that
startled the driver. "Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal
pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he
was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so
grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at
his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat."

I stirred uncomfortably.

"But, after all," I said, "this is very fanciful--perfectly absurd. Look
at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you--"

"Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair. "The mere
facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions, so
clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do
you not trust an immediate impression?"

"Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little less practical
than facts."

"Bosh," he said. "On what else is the whole world run but immediate
impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of
this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual
impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you
measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may
save your business--you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely
upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which
I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that
man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some
kind."

"You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such things
cannot immediately be put to the test."

Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.

"Let us get off and follow him," he said. "I bet you five pounds it will
turn out as I say."

And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.

The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him.
Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down
an ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.

"This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take," I said.

"A man of what kind?" asked my friend.

"Well," I said, "a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part
of the world at all."

"Ah, yes," said Basil, and said no more.

We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the
glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The
intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the
whole city. Our pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between
the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined
horse; I stopped also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of
the solid darkness in front of us was the darkness of his body.

At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on
a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas
cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the
interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could
be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card
and said:

"At once. Take a cab."

A heavy, deep voice from inside said:

"Right you are."

And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just
helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it
like midnight.

"This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots," I
repeated.

"I don't know," said Basil humbly. "It leads to Berkeley Square."

As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and
tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I
wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right.
We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London--more
dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.

"This is very extraordinary!" said Basil Grant, as we turned into
Berkeley Square.

"What is extraordinary?" I asked. "I thought you said it was quite
natural."

"I do not wonder," answered Basil, "at his walking through nasty
streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do
wonder at his going to the house of a very good man."

"What very good man?" I asked with exasperation.

"The operation of time is a singular one," he said with his
imperturbable irrelevancy. "It is not a true statement of the case to
say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man.
I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But
fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and
a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps
of old Beaumont's house."

"Who is old Beaumont?" I asked irritably.

"A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood--don't you know his
name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know what;
anyhow, he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight
disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that
real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress
and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If
you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree
with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a
cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it
seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the
stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession
of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is
romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on
their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands
for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons
are generally fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself,
good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there."

"My good fellow," I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, "the
truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language,
you have the 'slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a
total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories
about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an
honest man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil,
and come home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet
with the distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner."

Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.

"I thought," he said, "that I had outlived vanity."

"What do you want now?" I cried.

"I want," he cried out, "what a girl wants when she wears her new frock;
I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a
monitor--I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right
about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say
it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend
Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know."

"Do you really mean--?" I began.

"I will apologize," he said calmly, "for our not being dressed for a
call," and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark
stone steps and rang at the bell.

A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving
my friend's name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to
respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly
but that our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out
quickly to meet us.

"My dear fellow," he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again,
"I have not seen you for years. Have you been--er--" he said, rather
wildly, "have you been in the country?"

"Not for all that time," answered Basil, smiling. "I have long given
up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a
deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment."

"An inopportune moment," cried the ardent gentleman. "You come at the
most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?"

"I do not," answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
laughter came from the inner room.

"Basil," said Lord Beaumont solemnly, "I have Wimpole here."

"And who is Wimpole?"

"Basil," cried the other, "you must have been in the country. You must
have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?"

"As to who Shakespeare was," answered my friend placidly, "my views go
no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was
Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is--" and his speech also was
cloven with a roar of laughter from within.

"Wimpole!" cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. "Haven't you heard
of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation,
I do not say into an art--for that, perhaps, it always was but into a
great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo--an art of masterpieces.
His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They
are final; they are--"

Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of
the inner house into the hall where we were standing.

"Now, my dear chap," began Lord Beaumont hastily.

"I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it," exploded the large old
gentleman. "I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer
like that. I won't be made a guy. I won't--"

"Come, come," said Beaumont feverishly. "Let me introduce you. This is
Mr Justice Grant--that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of
Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh."

"Who has not?" asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing
him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger,
but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his
face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart
though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a
magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show
an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity;
so much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.

"I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont," he said gruffly, "to fail
in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in
your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but
that flashy half-caste jackanapes--"

At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre
air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly
enjoying the intellectual banquet within.

"I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond," said
Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, "even if you only remember him as a
schoolboy."

"Perfectly," said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
Cholmondeliegh, he said:

"I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going
yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you."

The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of
obeisance and a vague utterance of, "If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of
course," he followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely
been deposited there half a minute before another peal of laughter told
that he had (in all probability) been scored off again.

"Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh," said Beaumont, as he
helped us off with our coats. "He has not the modern mind."

"What is the modern mind?" asked Grant.

"Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces the facts
of life seriously." At this moment another roar of laughter came from
within.

"I only ask," said Basil, "because of the last two friends of yours who
had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if I remember
right."

"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can never
quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and
sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?"

"No," said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
drawing-room.

This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon.
Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the
house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and
with the intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal
amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who
looked at him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw
him out of the window.

He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything
from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a
man--the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking
in North London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.

"What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole," said Muriel Beaumont eagerly,
"is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm
sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came."

"I agree with Miss Beaumont," said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
indignation. "If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
difficult to keep my countenance."

"Difficult to keep your countenance," cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
alarm; "oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum."

Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:

"Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?"

"I never talk tomfooleries," said the other, "without first knowing my
audience."

Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding
the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very
particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house
rapturously listening to Wimpole.

"May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?" asked Grant. "It is
about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us."

I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room
out of the hall.

"Drummond," said Basil sharply, "there are a great many good people, and
a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind
of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people
are wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has
also some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?"

Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
became suddenly as red as his moustache.

"I am not a fair judge of him," he said.

"Why not?" asked Grant.

"Because I hate him like hell," said the other, after a long pause and
violently.

Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
quietly:

"But before--before you came to hate him, what did you really think of
him?"

"I am in a terrible difficulty," said the young man, and his voice told
us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. "If I spoke about him
as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to
be able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But
again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that is my private affair. But
I also disapprove of him--really I do believe I disapprove of him quite
apart from my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much
quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then
that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this
fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the
way he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be
bad to fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap
savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if
you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate
the man because a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart
from that I should hate the man because old Sir Walter hates him."

This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I
was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could
not help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however
nobly disguised from himself.

In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.

"In the name of God, let's get away."

I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected
me. I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I
was, within a few minutes, in the street outside.

"This," he said, "is a beastly but amusing affair."

"What is?" I asked, baldly enough.

"This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at
which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very
extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not
going."

"Well, really," I said, "it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we
could get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that
we are not going."

"Don't you?" said Grant. "I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in
what we're doing instead."

I looked at him blankly.

"Doing instead?" I asked. "What are we doing instead?"

"Why," said he, "we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house
on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is
only to show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this
cigar, wait until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole
have left this house?"

"Certainly," I said. "But I do not know which is likely to leave first.
Have you any notion?"

"No," he said. "Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again,
Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to
be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some
time to analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave
within reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come
back to dinner here tonight."

As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we
really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came
out at the same moment.

They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
Walter smile and say: "The night is foggy. Pray take my cab."

Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in
my ear:

"Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog--run."

We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we
are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at
the fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away
rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more generous among the
rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after
giving and receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to
forgiveness or a duel--at least so it seemed as we watched it from ten
yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down one
fork of the road and one down another.

Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.

"Run after that scoundrel," he cried; "let us catch him now."

We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.

"Stop!" I shouted wildly to Grant. "That's the wrong turning."

He ran on.

"Idiot!" I howled. "Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped
us. He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong... Are you deaf?
You're wrong!"

"I don't think I am," he panted, and ran on.

"But I saw him!" I cried. "Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's
the old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?"

"Keep running," said Grant.

Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet,
whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was
utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.

"Charlie," said Basil hoarsely, "can you believe in my common sense for
four minutes?"

"Of course," I said, panting.

"Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at
once when I say 'Now'. Now!"

We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got
him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and
full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him;
when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's
arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
waited. As I say, I had no notion why.

"I am sorry to incommode you," said Basil calmly out of the darkness;
"but I have made an appointment here."

"An appointment!" I said blankly.

"Yes," he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged
on the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. "I
have made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow.
An old friend. Jasper Drummond his name is--you may have met him
this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
Beaumonts' dinner is over."

For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness.
By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that
the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of
a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine
no other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old
country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of
wood.

After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
Jasper Drummond.

"Mr Grant," he said blankly, "the thing is incredible. You were right;
but what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him,
that extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny
thing. He didn't say anything at all. What does it mean?"

Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.

"That is what it means," he said.

Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place,
jumped back, as from a mouse.

"What?" he said weakly, "... what?"

Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state,
seemed to make some effort to retain.

It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as
he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or
at least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism.
The greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the
struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:

C. Says... Keep countenance.

W. Keep... British Museum.

C. Know whom talk... absurdities.

W. Never talk absurdities without

"What is it?" cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
fury.

"What is it?" replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid
chant. "What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A
trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy."

"A new profession!" said the young man with the red moustache vaguely;
"a new trade!"

"A new trade," repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, "a new
profession! What a pity it is immoral."

"But what the deuce is it?" cried Drummond and I in a breath of
blasphemy.

"It is," said Grant calmly, "the great new trade of the Organizer of
Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I
have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character.
He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really
at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and
his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of
a perfectly delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at
dinner-parties to lead up to other people's repartees. According to a
preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says
the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the
clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be scored
off for a guinea a night."

"And this fellow Wimpole--" began Drummond with indignation.

"This fellow Wimpole," said Basil Grant, smiling, "will not be an
intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the
floor."

"That fellow," cried Drummond furiously, "that fellow ought to be in
gaol."

"Not at all," said Basil indulgently; "he ought to be in the Club of
Queer Trades."



Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit

The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than
the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The
bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the
tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts
of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and
eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar
studs. The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as
I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce
into my shirt collar when a loud knock came at the door.

My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me.
He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in
the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head
to come my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a
small and confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional
political lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a
third guest, a Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was
an authority on chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess
and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he
(with his usual social sagacity) might have decided to take me along in
order to break the ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete;
but as a fact it was not Basil.

I was handed a visiting card inscribed: "Rev. Ellis Shorter", and
underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry
could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, "Asking the
favour of a few moments' conversation on a most urgent matter."!

I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of
God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on
my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at
my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He
flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic
black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration,
that he flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed,
white-haired, white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy
type. He said:

"I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come--I
can only say--I can only say in my defence, that I come--upon an
important matter. Pray forgive me."

I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.

"What I have to say," he said brokenly, "is so dreadful--it is so
dreadful--I have lived a quiet life."

I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air
of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger
and more tragic than my own.

I said gently: "Pray go on."

Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old,
noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.

"I'm so sorry," he said meekly; "I wouldn't have come--but for--your
friend Major Brown recommended me to come here."

"Major Brown!" I said, with some interest.

"Yes," said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid
shawl about. "He told me you helped him in a great difficulty--and my
difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death."

I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. "Will it take long, Mr
Shorter?" I asked. "I have to go out to dinner almost at once."

He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.

"I have no right, Mr Swinburne--I have no right at all," he said. "If
you have to go out to dinner, you have of course--a perfect right--of
course a perfect right. But when you come back--a man will be dead."

And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.

The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and
a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this
dear, doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.

"Will you have a cigar?" I said.

"No, thank you," he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
smoking cigars was a social disgrace.

"A glass of wine?" I said.

"No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now," he repeated with that
hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often
try to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all
night drinking rum-punch. "Not just now, thank you."

"Nothing else I can get for you?" I said, feeling genuinely sorry for
the well-mannered old donkey. "A cup of tea?"

I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:

"I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these
excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex'--he threw this in with
an indescribable airiness of vanity--'I have never known such things
happen."

"What things happen?" I asked.

He straightened himself with sudden dignity.

"As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex," he said, "I have never been forcibly
dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It
may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before."

"I have never heard of it," I said, "as among the duties of a clergyman.
But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
follow you correctly. Dressed up--as what?"

"As an old woman," said the vicar solemnly, "as an old woman."

I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make
an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic,
and I said respectfully:

"May I ask how it occurred?"

"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will tell my
story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past
eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and
pay certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the
matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a
very earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author
of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine."

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation.
He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the
detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be
kept back.

"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening
conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course;
Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having
consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I
cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ
pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss
Brett. The Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife
being unwell, Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in
church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society
is entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss
Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members of it.
I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.

"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of
course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in
these matters of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and
repeat the actual details of a conversation, particularly a conversation
which (though inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good
work) was one which did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the
time and was in fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with
a woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she
was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very
changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted,
I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with
white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention
was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners,
silver hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic
member of the party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though
expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong
and advanced. Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply
in black) it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what
you men of the world would call dowdy.

"After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so
I heard something which--I cannot describe it--something which seemed
to--but I really cannot describe it."

"What did you hear?" I asked, with some impatience.

"I heard," said the vicar solemnly, "I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl),
the following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the
spot, and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them
down on a piece of paper. I believe I have it here." He fumbled in
his breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and
programmes of village concerts. "I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James,
the following words: 'Now's your time, Bill.'"

He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely
and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his
facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.

"This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand
it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should
address another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said,
may be incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in
exclusively spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But
it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not
misunderstand the phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to
maintain at the time that the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by
no means pronounced with that upper-class intonation which, as I have
already said, had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation.
In fact, the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', would have been, I fancy,
unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.

"I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was
only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended
departure.

"I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the words she
had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I
think, natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have
not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render
them phonetically. But she said," and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly
at his papers, "she said: 'Chuck it, fat 'ead,' and she added something
that sounded like 'It's a kop', or (possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the
last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped
suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the
mantelpiece, said: 'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up
before you start jawin'. You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days
with this way of coin' things, har lar theater.'

"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but
now, alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their
strange female freemasonry. I remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was
just, in my absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse
about Diana's nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from
behind. The moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.

"Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in front of
me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an
attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a
shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her
cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo--no, that is I saw
that instead of being a woman she--he, I mean--that is, it was a man."

Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to
arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
with a higher fever of nervousness:

"As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I mean--and I
could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr something
who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at me. The other two
ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag in the background.
It was all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women, to
kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to
be Nonconformists?

"The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ''Urry up,
'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'

"'Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett--I mean the man with the
revolver--'why should we show 'im the game?'

"'If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the
door, whom they called Bill. 'A man wot knows wet 'e's doin' is worth
ten wot don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'

"'Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
had been Miss Mowbray's). 'Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'

"The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other
two women--I mean men--were turning over baggage, and asked them for
something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room
and held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that
display, all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.

"It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands
of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise;
but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was
an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the
conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and
was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious
that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this
photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a
photograph. It was a photograph that I had never had taken.

"I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
posed so for any photographer.

"'Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with
ill-timed facetiousness. 'Parson, prepare to meet your God.' And with
this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that
part of the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair
of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait
of an old lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand
against the woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin
is like another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to
make it me in every hair.

"'Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot
the glass back again. 'Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the
lady. Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us,
as bein' the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel
Hawker, the man who's come to live in these parts, don't you?'

"I nodded.

"'Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, 'that's 'is
mother. 'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung his
fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who
was exactly like me.

"'Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out
Bill from the door. 'Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't goin' to do
you no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as
for the old woman's clothes--why, you'll look lovely in 'em.'

"'You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind
me. 'Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man Hawker
tonight. Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees
us. Maybe on the other 'and--'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes
away. Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now as you know, 'e shuts
'isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why
and we does. The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother.
Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the
penultimate, 'it's a very unusual piece of good luck, but you're 'is
mother.'

"'When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in
a ruminant manner, 'when I first saw it I said--old Shorter. Those were
my exact words--old Shorter.'

"'What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. 'What am I to do?'

"'That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver,
good-humouredly; 'you've got to put on those clothes,' and he pointed to
a poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.

"I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I
had no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded
pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an
old woman--as somebody else's mother, if you please--and was dragged out
of the house to take part in a crime.

"It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards
the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that
ever straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every
external, we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in
black dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really
five criminals and a clergyman.

"I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as
I walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long
as we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for
the ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the
other hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was
impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long
before I had persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a
story, my companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had
the misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the
Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.

"I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and
keeping pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like
step, until at length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under
it. I had made up my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally
demure and silent and swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung
myself against the railings and roared out: 'Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!
Rule Britannia! Get your 'air cut. Hoop-la! Boo!' It was a condition of
no little novelty for a man in my position.

"The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he began
gruffly.

"'Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear
hoarsely. 'Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the words
and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.

"I yelled, and yelled--I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains
that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I
rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.

"'If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, 'I
shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.'

"I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of
thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had
ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.

"'When we get you past,' whispered Bill, 'you'll howl louder; you'll
howl louder when we're burning your feet off.'

"I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting
and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their
poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils.
I cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.

"For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions
and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the
policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one
can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched
suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I
remember correctly), 'Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment
that I remembered most dearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in
Essex.

"My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of
the neck.

"'You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.

"'Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a
lady--only eccentric.'

"'She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.

"'Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.

"'Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character
of Miss James, 'she wants looking after.' 'She does,' said the
policeman, 'but I'll look after her.'

"'That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. 'She wants her friends. She
wants a particular medicine we've got.'

"'Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, 'no other medicine any
good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'

"'I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame,
the Vicar of Chuntsey.

"'Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, 'I don't like the
eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er 'ead in
my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you
I've seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong 'uns. Who are you?'

"'We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
dignity. 'Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If
you choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend,
no doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have
any legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'

"The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment.
Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant
on me faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the
darkness. When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions
on to them, I had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face
saying that only retreat was possible now.

"By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the
role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the
real case, the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly
recovered and would have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however,
if I liked I might safely undeceive him.

"But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of
the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but
such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be
drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!

"I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that
I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly
and easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure.
At the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
them in clean earth."

The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair.
Both the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on,
impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind
these things he was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed
courage and a sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told
his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very
convincing realism.

"And now--" I began.

"And now," said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
servile energy, "and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man
Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said
was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for
reasons that you perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me.
What is to be done?"

I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.

"My friend Basil Grant," I said, "is the best man we can go to. He and I
were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?"

"Not at all," he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
plaid shawl.

A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden
staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and
scrappy interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirt-front and the lustre
of his fur coat flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He
was drinking a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come
back from the dinner-party.

He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter
with the genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit
in dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:

"Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?"

I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy
collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening,
that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at
Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, "No."

Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer
or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the
old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more
and more from his head.

"You are quite sure, Mr Shorter," he repeated, "that you don't know
Captain Fraser?"

"Quite," answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his
tone when he first entered my presence.

Basil sprang smartly to his feet.

"Then our course is clear," he said. "You have not even begun your
investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
together to see Captain Fraser."

"When?" asked the clergyman, stammering.

"Now," said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.

The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.

"I really do not think that it is necessary," he said.

Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again,
and put his hands in his pockets.

"Oh," he said, with emphasis. "Oh--you don't think it necessary; then,"
and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation, "then, Mr
Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your
whiskers."

And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my
life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact
with an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that
splendour and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived
perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose
their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of
friends with heart disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a
hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now.
At the very moment of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a
fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.

"Your whiskers," he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. "Give me your
whiskers. And your bald head."

The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.

"Sit down, Basil," I implored, "you're a little excited. Finish your
wine."

"Whiskers," he answered sternly, "whiskers."

And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for
the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was
the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a
pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables
were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery
scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed
after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.

And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed
him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have
expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting
would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old
vicar looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not
seem to be so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of
something like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil.
In fact, the unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.

At length Shorter was cornered.

"Come, come, Mr Grant," he panted, "you can't do anything to me. It's
quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's only a
social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant."

"I don't blame you, my man," said Basil coolly. "But I want your
whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?"

"No, no," said Mr Shorter, laughing, "we provide them ourselves. They
don't belong to Captain Fraser."

"What the deuce does all this mean?" I almost screamed. "Are you all
in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head belong to
Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to
do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him,
Basil."

"No," said Grant, "I didn't."

"Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?" I asked, staring. "Why
not?"

"Well," said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, "the fact is I was
detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom."

"In your bedroom?" I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.

Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner,
and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white
whiskers and a plaid shawl.

"Sit down, gentlemen," cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. "Sit
down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm
in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have
saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have
liked that, eh?"

The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.

"Basil," I said, "if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?"

He laughed again.

"Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking)
are Professional Detainers."

"And what on earth's that?" I asked.

"It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne," began he who had once been
the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no
longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of
a young city man. "It is really nothing very important. We are paid by
our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people
whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--" and
with that he hesitated and smiled.

Basil smiled also. He intervened.

"The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted
us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa,
and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is--er--what is I
believe described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours
with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our
houses so as to let him have the field to himself."

"And of course," said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, "as I
had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady,
I had to come with something rather hot and strong--rather urgent. It
wouldn't have done to be tame."

"Oh," I said, "I acquit you of tameness."

"Thank you, sir," said the man respectfully, "always very grateful for
any recommendation, sir."

The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil's
admirable Burgundy.

"It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked up against
us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you
with hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody,
he's from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours,
just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The
Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen."

"There is one thing I don't understand," I said. "Why you are both
vicars."

A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in
Essex.

"That may have been a mistake, sir," he said. "But it was not our fault.
It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the
highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain
you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who
impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain.
We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to
satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars.
Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in our scale.
Colonels are four guineas."



Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst
like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many
separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore
light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he
was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.

He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a
degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of
the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There
are inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial
civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that
restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant
officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in
his time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants,
but his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that "the moon" had been
not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is
a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed
spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a
green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big
game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These
always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in
quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight
of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old
regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim
and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was
quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its
blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety.
To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank
of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the
more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the
mysterious gentleman no good.

Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange
smoke from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which
discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If
Keith's tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at
any rate, every opportunity of being a scamp.

He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his
brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was
invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was
a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish
incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound to say
that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil's
opposing him, however banteringly.

I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I
could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.

"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that that
fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
Mullah and--"

"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you may
happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style;
he is too veracious."

"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert contemptuously,
"be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all
his life in one ancestral manor."

"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil
dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his
chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is
that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort
of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they
are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if
he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking."

"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather like a
sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
that truth is stranger than fiction?"

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil placidly.
"For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is
congenial to it."

"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. "Do
you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?"

"I believe Keith's words," answered the other. "He is an honest man."

"I should like to question a regiment of his landladies," said Rupert
cynically.

"I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely
in himself," I said mildly; "his mode of life--"

Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and
Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his
head.

"I say, Grant," he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the
door, "I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me
a hundred pounds? There's a good chap."

Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked
up a quill-pen.

"Shall I cross it?" he asked, opening a cheque-book.

"Really," began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, "since
Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before
his family, I--"

"Here you are, Ugly," said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction
of the quite nonchalant officer. "Are you in a hurry?"

"Yes," replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. "As a matter of fact I
want it now. I want to see my--er--business man."

Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on
the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, "Receiver of stolen goods,
perhaps." What he did say was:

"A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith."

Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like
ill-temper:

"He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him."

"Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?" said Rupert Grant
grimly. "Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go
with you?"

Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a
little; his brow blackened sharply.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "What did you say?"

Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony,
and he answered:

"I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along
with you to this house-agent's."

The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.

"Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom. Look
under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!" And with a furious
energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.

Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation
was certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable
unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil
and I tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other
that we had both noticed this.

Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or
fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a
halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a
sort of sulky desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all
indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for
a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: "P. Montmorency, House-Agent."

"This is the office of which I spoke," said Keith, in a cutting voice.
"Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about
my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
business adviser?"

Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.

"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind his back,
"I think I should feel myself justified in--"

"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture
of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at
his heels.

P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind
a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black
frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical
angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as
anything could look, short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch
Highlander.

We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was
a ferret.

The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for
hours together in his bedroom. He said:

"Mr Montmorency, I think?"

The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers
pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:

"Sir."

"You are a house-agent, are you not?" asked Rupert.

To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that
he knew.

"A house-agent," cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
"burglar'.

"Yes... oh, yes," said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
smile. "I am a house-agent... oh, yes."

"Well, I think," said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, "that
Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request."

Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.

"I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine."

"Yes, sir," said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
"It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your suggestions er--about
the br--"

"Right," cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness
of a gunshot. "We needn't bother about all that. If you've done what I
told you, all right."

And he turned sharply towards the door.

Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
stammering a moment he said: "Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
matter... about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the
heating apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter...
at that elevation..."

"Can't expect much, eh?" said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
sudden skill. "No, of course not. That's all right, Montmorency. There
can't be any more difficulties," and he put his hand on the handle of
the door.

"I think," said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, "that Mr
Montmorency has something further to say to you, lieutenant."

"Only," said the house-agent, in desperation, "what about the birds?"

"I beg your pardon," said Rupert, in a general blank.

"What about the birds?" said the house-agent doggedly.

Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.

"Before you go, Lieutenant Keith," he said. "Come now. Really, what
about the birds?"

"I'll take care of them," said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long
back turned to us; "they shan't suffer."

"Thank you, sir, thank you," cried the incomprehensible house-agent,
with an air of ecstasy. "You'll excuse my concern, sir. You know I'm
wild on wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you,
sir. But there's another thing..."

The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an
indescribable laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the
purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which one cannot
exactly express. As near as it said anything, verbally speaking, it
said: "Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But you don't know what
you're spoiling."

"There is another thing," continued Mr Montmorency weakly. "Of course,
if you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house green, but--"

"Green!" shouted Keith. "Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have
a house of another colour. Green!" and before we could realize anything
the door had banged between us and the street.

Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he
spoke before the echoes of the door died away.

"Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited," he said.
"What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?"

"Oh, I should think not," said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. "The
negotiations have been somewhat difficult--the house is rather--"

"Green," said Rupert calmly. "That appears to be a very important point.
It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin
my companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a
pink house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green
house?"

"Only," said Montmorency, trembling, "only to be inconspicuous."

Rupert had his ruthless smile. "Can you tell me any place on earth in
which a green house would be inconspicuous?"

The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing
out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:

"No; I can't."

"You can't suggest an explanation?"

"No," said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
suggest a sudden situation, "I can't. And may I, as a busy man, be
excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in
connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to
get for you, sir?"

He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
answered:

"I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly
delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
impertinence."

"Not at all, sir," said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his
desk. "Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again."

Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious
to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was
deserted.

"What do you say now?" cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
nothing now.

We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey
street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely
meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.

In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly
to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then
into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a
knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a
crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the
heart and core of the mob. It soon became evident that something really
important had happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our
way to the front, with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and
once there we soon learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been
a brawl concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead
on the stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting matters
were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact.
One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was
the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to ribbons, his eyes
blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him
in a worse manner. A short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out
of his elegant walking-stick, and lay in front of him upon the stones.
It did not, however, appear to be bloody.

The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with
his incontrollable and intolerable secret.

"That is the man, constable," he shouted, pointing at the battered
lieutenant. "He is a suspicious character. He did the murder."

"There's been no murder done, sir," said the policeman, with his
automatic civility. "The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be able to
take the names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good
eye kept on them."

"Have a good eye kept on that one," said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
pointing to the ragged Keith.

"All right, sir," said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round
of the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed
his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately
connected with the examination had gone away. He still found, however,
one eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It
was Rupert Grant.

"Constable," he said, "I have a very particular reason for asking you
a question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?"

"Yes, sir," said the policeman, after a reflective pause; "yes, he gave
me his address."

"My name is Rupert Grant," said that individual, with some pomp. "I
have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you
would tell me, as a special favour, what address?"

The constable looked at him.

"Yes," he said slowly, "if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
Common, near Purley, Surrey."

"Thank you," said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as
fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.

Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to
breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the
attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when
Basil and I came down we found him ready and restless.

"Well," he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
meal. "What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?"

"What do I think of him?" inquired Basil slowly. "I don't think anything
of him."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy
that was somewhat exultant. "I thought you'd come round to my view, but
I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man
is a translucent liar and knave."

"I think," said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, "that I did
not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that
he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of
him, since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good
myself."

"I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake," said Rupert,
breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. "What the deuce is the
sense of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common
agreement, dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who
doesn't conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest
scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his
appointments, and if ever two human beings were plotting together and
lying to every one else, he and that impossible house-agent were doing
it. We followed him home, and the very same night he is in the thick
of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed.
Really, if this is being glaringly good, I must confess that the glare
does not dazzle me."

Basil was quite unmoved. "I admit his moral goodness is of a certain
kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and
experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are
mere coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk
about his house business in front of us. No man would. It's true that he
carries a sword-stick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock
of a street fight. Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in
all this. There's nothing to confirm--"

As he spoke a knock came at the door.

"If you please, sir," said the landlady, with an alarmed air, "there's a
policeman wants to see you."

"Show him in," said Basil, amid the blank silence.

The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as
soon as he appeared there.

"I think one of you gentlemen," he said, curtly but respectfully, "was
present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention
very strongly to a particular man."

Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.

"A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith."

"This is amusing," said Basil, laughing. "I was in the very act of
clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful aspersions.
What about him?"

"Well, sir," said the constable, "I took all the men's addresses and had
them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than that. All the
other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.
The place doesn't exist."

The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
both his thighs.

"Well, by all that's good," he cried. "This is a sign from heaven."

"It's certainly very extraordinary," said Basil quietly, with knitted
brows. "It's odd the fellow should have given a false address,
considering he was perfectly innocent in the--"

"Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer," cried Rupert, in a sort of
rapture, "I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one
as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean
streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false
address. That's what we call glaring goodness."

"It's certainly very extraordinary," repeated Basil. And he strolled
moodily about the room. Then he said: "You are quite sure, constable,
that there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have
really gone to it and found it was a fraud?"

"It was very simple, sir," said the policeman, chuckling. "The place
he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were
down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no
such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is
so near London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to
say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right
enough. He was a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost
England that people know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that
there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But
as a fact, there isn't."

Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for
the first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather
wondered at the almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his
original prejudice in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At
length he said:

"You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in
the district--by the way, what was the address?"

The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with
the sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.

"Why, I can tell you that, Basil," he said graciously as he idly plucked
leaves from a plant in the window. "I took the precaution to get this
man's address from the constable last night."

"And what was it?" asked his brother gruffly.

"The constable will correct me if I am wrong," said Rupert, looking
sweetly at the ceiling. "It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
Surrey."

"Right, sir," said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.

There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly
that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his
lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic
laughter struck and shook the ceiling--laughter that shook the laughter,
laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not stop.

Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill
almost with terror.

"Excuse me," said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet.
"I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also
unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down
to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to
know. It's quite out of proportion to the comparatively small distance."

"Get down to that place?" I repeated blankly. "Get down to what place?"

"I have forgotten its name," said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in
his pockets as he rose. "Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
timetable?"

"You don't seriously mean," cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
of confusion of emotions. "You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton
Common, do you? You can't mean that!"

"Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?" asked Basil, smiling.

"Why should you?" said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of
the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.

"To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course," said Basil Grant. "I
thought you wanted to find him?"

Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently
on the floor. "And in order to find him," he said, "you suggest the
admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth
where we know he can't be."

The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on
with a reiterated gesture:

"He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of
St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be
in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store
cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only
one where he has just been systematically looked for and where we know
that he is not to be found--and that, if I understand you rightly, is
where you want us to go."

"Exactly," said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; "I thought
you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly
here till I come back."

It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if
they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I
cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished
decisively with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with
a considerable flurry of rationality.

"My dear chap," he cried, "do you really mean that you see any good in
going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place
that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying
reference in a scrape?"

"Yes," said Basil, taking out his watch, "and, what's worse, we've lost
the train."

He paused a moment and then added: "As a matter of fact, I think we may
just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and
I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But
if we get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we
shall just catch him."

"Catch him!" cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. "I wish we
could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?"

"I keep forgetting the name of the common," said Basil, as he buttoned
up his coat. "The Elms--what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That's
where we shall find him."

"But there is no such place," groaned Rupert; but he followed his
brother downstairs.

We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and
do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the
fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared
the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from
our breakfast table and said: "I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten
Tails," we should have followed him to the end of the world.

I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if
ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the
human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or
Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops
into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It
seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by
God--such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.

There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself.
But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our
expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional
wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more
useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin
to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which
has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed
men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew
was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to
look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.

Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the
gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell
of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly
Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the
dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable
success.

"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
slapping them together, "here we are at last."

The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked
above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign
of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of
that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
innkeeper standing at an open door.

"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization. That notion
that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till
you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and
the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red
star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red
river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I
have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in
enormous quantities."

Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
wind died in the dreary trees.

"You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth,
and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good
fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said originally."

"What do you mean?" I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort
of sanity. "What is his greatest virtue?"

"His greatest virtue," replied Basil, "is that he always tells the
literal truth."

"Well, really," cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger,
and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to have been very
literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I
ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?"

"He was too truthful, I confess," said Basil, leaning against the tree;
"too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in
a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time
we went in. We shall be late for dinner."

Rupert whispered to me with a white face:

"Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
house?"

"I suppose so," I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be
a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as
strange as the wind:

"Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?"

"Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above
our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.

"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of
a schoolboy. "Come up. You'll be late for dinner."

The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a
yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them.
Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of
footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I
supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.

Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of
the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly
mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's
staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious
voice above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after
him.

Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw
three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer
and all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all
probability, laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty
to laugh at us about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when
I thought what his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that
moment, I nearly let go of the tree and fell.

"Swinburne," said Rupert suddenly, from above, "what are we doing? Let's
get down again," and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too
felt the shock of wakening to reality.

"We can't leave poor Basil," I said. "Can't you call to him or get hold
of him by the leg?"

"He's too far ahead," answered Rupert; "he's nearly at the top of the
beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks' nests, I
suppose."

We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind.
Then I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far
from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe.
I saw that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a
little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines
taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me
feel lost in space, like a falling star.

"Can nothing be done to stop Basil?" I called out.

"No," answered my fellow climber. "He's too far up. He must get to the
top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself."

"Perhaps he's talking to us," I said.

"No," said Rupert, "he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk
to himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's a known
sign of the brain going."

"Yes," I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding
above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which
he had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now
and then, up there among the leaves and stars.

After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said,
"My God!" with a violent voice.

"What's the matter--are you hurt?" I cried, alarmed.

"No. Listen to Basil," said the other in a very strange voice. "He's not
talking to himself."

"Then he is talking to us," I cried.

"No," said Rupert simply, "he's talking to somebody else."

Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a
sudden burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the
conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.

Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before:
"Come up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith."

And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in our
chambers more than once. It called out:

"Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in."

Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce
moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly
Southern air that belonged to him.

Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily
into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned,
tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table,
and a circular seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was
Basil, who, in the instant after alighting there, had fallen into an
attitude of marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was
smoking a cigar with a slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond
Keith, who looked happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with
his granite guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with
the wild whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the
green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The
sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle
in the corner. In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne.
Glasses were already set for us.

The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot
of a light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild
sea.

Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then
Basil spoke.

"You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
question about the cold veracity of our injured host."

"I don't quite grasp it all," said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden
glare. "Lieutenant Keith said his address was--"

"It's really quite right, sir," said Keith, with an open smile. "The
bobby asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived
in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses
of this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It's being kept
rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don't
want them to get too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow
like myself, racketing about in all sorts of queer corners of London,
naturally knocks up against."

"Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?" asked Rupert eagerly,
recovering his ease with the romance of reality.

Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.

"W-well, yes, sir," he said. "The fact was--er--my people wanted me very
much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared myself for
anything but natural history and botany and things like that. My poor
parents have been dead some years now, but--naturally I like to respect
their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa agency was
a sort of--of compromise between being a botanist and being a
house-agent."

Rupert could not help laughing. "Do you have much custom?" he asked.

"N-not much," replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who
was (I am convinced) his only client. "But what there is--very select."

"My dear friends," said Basil, puffing his cigar, "always remember two
facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one
who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing
about any one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the
most likely. The second is to remember that very plain literal fact
always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house
in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The
Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic
about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you
would have believed it."

"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for this confounded
wind will upset it."

We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.



Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was
the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and
talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for
that person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he
were always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of
these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his
life. A few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became
his lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of
them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen
from a goods train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would
be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey;
another, a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another,
a young captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains
in the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable
certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major
Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his
acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right
hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of
masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor
and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab
together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I
myself was another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the
balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about
the weather. Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and
God; for men always talk about the most important things to total
strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself;
the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest,
if not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language.
He was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a
bearded man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face
of an unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He
went to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless
tea-shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He
was never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his
little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There
he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister
demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical
students, but one would not have called it exhilarating. His only hours
of exhilaration occurred when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the
house, late at night, a tornado of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly
in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember
vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with
them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange
calamity fell upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of
his particular class and type (the class that is at once academic and
middle-class), a Radical of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was
a Radical himself, but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon
type of Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical
party. Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu
Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise scientific
report of his study of the customs of the people of T'Chaka was
reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferences with these
customs both by the British and the Germans. He-was sitting with the
magazine in front of him, the lamplight shining on his spectacles, a
wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant
strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high
spirits and his heavy tread.

"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he was
saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for
all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way
of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but
for all that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know
an assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more
Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always
championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are
sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you
are not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the
glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum.
Look at this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable
article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you
have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt
that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to
you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin--thus--"

And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head,
so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase
rocking.

Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to
the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.

"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too fast. And they
are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency"--and
no words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the
word--"between valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their
stage in the evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial
and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this
concession which I have just described to you and the view that the
evolutionary stage in question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form
any estimate of values in the variety of cosmic processes, definable in
some degree as an inferior evolutionary stage."

Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
like two pallid moons.

Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.

"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear.
But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far
from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage,
whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything
stupid or ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils
in the dark. It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man
be thought a sort of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of
existence itself? Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the
idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?"

Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.

"Beyond all question," he said, "it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude
to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our
civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I
apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from states identical with
or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined
to concede that such a proposition is of the nature, in some degree at
least, of a primary proposition, and cannot adequately be argued, in the
same sense, I mean, that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the
primary proposition of the non-existence of matter, cannot adequately
be argued. But I do not conceive you to be under the impression that you
have demonstrated anything more concerning this proposition than that it
is tenable, which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement
that it is not a contradiction in terms."

Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.

"You don't understand," he said, "but, on the other hand, as a
compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it
when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was
that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a
scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For
instance, your theory of the origin of language, something about its
having come from the formulated secret language of some individual
creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its
favour, still does not convince me, because I have a feeling that that
is not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think so I can
only answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly
will) what is my definition of a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one
who has climbed a Sussex apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost
in an English lane."

"Your process of thought--" began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm
and said:

"James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again."

The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in
such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but
practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out
of the room.

"I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd," said Basil
Grant, "but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the
men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it
not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic
manuscripts?"

The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a
great deal of pathos also. "I believe it's true," she said. "If it is,
it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great
deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a
lot of things. James' health has never been good, and while we are as
poor as we are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his
own dreadful grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than
man, woman, or child. I have often been afraid that unless something of
this kind occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But
I believe it is practically settled."

"I am delighted," began Basil, but with a worried face, "but these
red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't advise
you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've
known men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be
disappointed. Of course, if it is true--"

"If it is true," said the woman fiercely, "it means that people who have
never lived may make an attempt at living."

Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
look in his eyes.

"Is it true?" asked Basil, with burning eyes.

"Not a bit true," answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. "Your
argument was in three points fallacious."

"What do you mean?" demanded Grant.

"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you could possess a
knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--"

"Oh! confound Zulu life," cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. "I
mean, have you got the post?"

"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said,
opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that. But the
real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me
since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose
a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it
is absolutely impeded by the facts."

"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely
long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may
be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with
Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal,
a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal
we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular,
seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by
his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there
had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern
carelessness in being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he
opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and
drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but
something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure
had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack
guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been
for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was
scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his
seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and
came round to me in two strides.

"What do you make of that?" he said, and flattened out the wire in front
of me.

It ran: "Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd."

"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause, irritably. "Those
women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he
was born."

"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It is true that all sensible
women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that,
all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put
it in telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or
God all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at
that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman
in a post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly
certain that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and
she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly."

"It will force us of course," I said, smiling.

"Oh, yes," he replied; "there is a cab-rank near."

Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,
through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road.
Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.

"I think you will take my word for it, my friend," he said; "this is
one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization."

"I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite
see it," I said. "Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a
dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of
the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so
very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul
like a spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding
change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James
Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?"

"It would not be extraordinary in the least," answered Basil, with
placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in the least," he repeated,
"if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary
circumstance to which I referred."

"What," I asked, stamping my foot, "was the extraordinary thing?"

"The extraordinary thing," said Basil, ringing the bell, "is that he has
not gone mad from excitement."

The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three
black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the
catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.

"Sit down, won't you?" said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
rigid with pain. "I think you had better be told first what has
happened."

Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
continued, in an even and mechanical voice:

"I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out
of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however,
without it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said,
'Were you looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but
this constantly happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my
question, and still he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up
in his studies that nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him
aware of one's presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really
do not know how to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems
simply silly, but at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting
one's brain. The fact is, James was standing on one leg."

Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.

"Standing on one leg?" I repeated.

"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. "He was
standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the
toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only
answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as
if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking
quite gravely at the fireplace.

"'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the
other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a
teetotum the other way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer
me?' He had come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he
always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When
I had spoken he remained a second or two motionless, and then his only
reply was to lift his left foot slowly from the floor and describe
circles with it in the air. I rushed to the door and shouted for
Christina. I will not dwell on the dreadful hours that followed. All
three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with appeals that
might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop
and dance and kick with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs
belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never
spoken to us from that time to this."

"Where is he now?" I said, getting up in some agitation. "We ought not
to leave him alone."

"Doctor Colman is with him," said Miss Chadd calmly. "They are in the
garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
scarcely go into the street."

Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden.
It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a
little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this
shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something
natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and
verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a
small, sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I
presume Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with
a nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend,
listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong
sunlight gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the
night before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious
decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been
the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that while the
face listened reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the
legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of
the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to
the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a
harlequin. For miracles should always happen in broad daylight. The
night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
drearily to the window.

"You know, Adelaide," she said, "that Mr Bingham from the Museum is
coming again at three."

"I know," said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. "I suppose we shall have to tell
him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
us."

Grant suddenly turned round. "What do you mean?" he said. "What will you
have to tell Mr Bingham?"

"You know what I shall have to tell him," said the professor's sister,
almost fiercely. "I don't know that we need give it its wretched name.
Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to
go on like that?" And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the
garden, the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.

Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. "When did you
say the British Museum man was coming?" he said.

"Three o'clock," said Miss Chadd briefly.

"Then I have an hour before me," said Grant, and without another word
threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden
path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood
a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his
trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the
broad brim of his hat.

Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a
loud familiar voice, "Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our
inferiors?"

The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.

"Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?" Basil continued, still in
the same loud and lucid tone.

Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg,
his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather
sharply. "Shall we go inside, professor?" he said. "Now you have shown
me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go
in," and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the
same time whispering to Grant: "I must ask you not to trouble him with
questions. Most risky. He must be soothed."

Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:

"Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will
endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if
you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour.
I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very
little to him, and that little shall be as soothing as--as syrup."

The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.

"It is rather dangerous for him," he said, "to be long in the strong sun
without his hat. With his bald head, too."

"That is soon settled," said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did
not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.

The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for
some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and then saying,
shortly, "All right," strutted away into the house, where the three
Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the
garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without
moving, and they saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness
itself.

Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding
in making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done
this slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil
out of another.

He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from
him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again.
Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of
turf, the one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a
problem, the other leaping and playing like a child.

After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put
the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and
walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of
him.

Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild
morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil
in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and
then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his
sister had described as being the first of all his antics. And the
moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out
rigid before him, confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The
professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked
out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like
a saltire cross, and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into
the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or even
entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort
of jig or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two
madmen instead of one.

They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the
garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor
Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed
about to turn a cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by
the steely voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, "Mr Bingham of the British
Museum."

Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was
of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some
credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.

The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them
to the other.

"Dr Colman," said Basil, turning to him, "will you entertain Professor
Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My
name is Grant."

Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful
but a trifle bewildered.

"Miss Chadd will excuse me," continued Basil easily, "if I know my way
about the house." And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the
back door into the parlour.

"Mr Bingham," said Basil, setting a chair for him, "I imagine that Miss
Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence."

"She has, Mr Grant," said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort
of compassionate nervousness. "I am more pained than I can say by this
dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should
have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend
a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of
course--really, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of
course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his extraordinarily valuable
intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that it would not do to
have the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts--er--dancing about."

"I have a suggestion to make," said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
chair, drawing it up to the table.

"I am delighted, of course," said the gentleman from the British Museum,
coughing and drawing up his chair also.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:

"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800 a year until he
stops dancing."

"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted
his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he raised them
with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
year?"

Grant shook his head resolutely.

"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought
to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely
say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him L800 Surely you
have some general fund for the endowment of research."

Mr Bingham looked bewildered.

"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you are talking
about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a
year for life?"

"Not at all," cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. "I never said for
life. Not at all."

"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
to tear his hair. "How long is this endowment to run? Not till his
death? Till the Judgement day?"

"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he has stopped
dancing." And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his
pockets.

Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and
kept them there.

"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you to suggest
that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary
simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he
should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he
is flinging his boots about in the back yard?"

"Precisely," said Grant composedly.

"That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?"

"One must stop somewhere," said Grant. "Of course."

Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.

"There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant," he said coldly.
"What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke--a slightly
unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your
pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite
irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of
Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure
to speak of it. But it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if
the Archangel Gabriel went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry
to say, with the British Museum Library."

He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in
dramatic warning, arrested him.

"Stop!" said Basil sternly. "Stop while there is yet time. Do you want
to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the
glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head
in the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in
a great discovery? Do you want--"

Bingham cut in sharply:

"And if I do want this, Mr Grant--"

"Then," said Basil lightly, "your task is easy. Get Chadd L800 a year
till he stops dancing."

With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently
to the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was
coming in.

"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, "the
fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing discovery about Mr
Chadd."

Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.

"I was afraid so," he said. "Drink, I imagine."

"Drink!" echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. "Oh, no,
it's not drink."

Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and
vague. "Homicidal mania--" he began.

"No, no," said the medical man impatiently.

"Thinks he's made of glass," said Bingham feverishly, "or says he's
God--or--"

"No," said Dr Colman sharply; "the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of
a different character. The awful thing about him is--"

"Oh, go on, sir," cried Bingham, in agony.

"The awful thing about him is," repeated Colman, with deliberation,
"that he isn't mad."

"Not mad!"

"There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy," said the doctor
shortly; "he hasn't got any of them."

"But why does he dance?" cried the despairing Bingham. "Why doesn't he
answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?"

"The devil knows," said Dr Colman coolly. "I'm paid to judge of
lunatics, but not of fools. The man's not mad."

"What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?" said Mr Bingham.
"Can none get into any kind of communication with him?"

Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:

"I shall be very happy," he said, "to give him any message you like to
send."

Both men stared at him.

"Give him a message?" they cried simultaneously. "How will you give him
a message?"

Basil smiled in his slow way.

"If you really want to know how I shall give him your message," he
began, but Bingham cried:

"Of course, of course," with a sort of frenzy.

"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a foot into the
air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.

His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact
that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.

"You drive me to it," he said. "You drive me to betray my friend. And I
will, for his own sake, betray him."

The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. "Anything painful, of
course--" he began.

Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck
them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.

"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James
Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable
library, with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never
seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck
casually behind his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face
of a man who might have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's
stone? It is all my fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly
faith. I argued against him on the score of his famous theory about
language--the theory that language was complete in certain individuals
and was picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him
about not understanding things in rough and ready practice. What has
this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked out a system
of language of his own (it would take too long to explain); he has made
up, I say, a language of his own. And he has sworn that till people
understand it, till he can speak to us in this language, he will not
speak in any other. And he shall not. I have understood, by taking
careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be
blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year
from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an
infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution."

Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.

"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to answer for
the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my
cab?"

"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily. "I think I
will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden."

The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
friendly. They were still dancing when I left.



Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he
was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of
London. His brother Basil said of him: "His reasoning is particularly
cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes
in abruptly and leads him right." Whether this was true of Rupert as a
whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about
him which I think worth telling.

We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight
in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out
of the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to
prove to me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective
theories. He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain,
seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy
milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which
afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten
what were the main outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had
something to do with the fact that he had only one small can of milk to
carry, and that of that he had left the lid loose and walked so quickly
that he spilled milk on the pavement. This showed that he was not
thinking of his small burden, and this again showed that he anticipated
some other than lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken
in conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed something else
that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I derided this detailed
revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert Grant, who,
though the best of fellows, had a good deal of the sensitiveness of the
artistic temperament, slightly resented my derision. He endeavoured to
take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity which he associated with
his profession, but the cigar, I think, was nearly bitten through.

"My dear fellow," he said acidly, "I'll bet you half a crown that
wherever that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something
curious."

"My resources are equal to that risk," I said, laughing. "Done."

We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of
the mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some
ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of
milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it,
he disappeared down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really
believed that the milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept
him as having vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took
no hold on my mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared
himself into the area.

I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his
can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.

"My friend," he said, rubbing his hands, "so much for all your
scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities
of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your
prosaic good nature will have to express itself."

"What?" I said incredulously, "do you mean to say that you really did
find anything the matter with the poor milkman?"

His face fell.

"Oh, the milkman," he said, with a miserable affectation at having
misunderstood me. "No, I--I--didn't exactly bring anything home to the
milkman himself, I--"

"What did the milkman say and do?" I said, with inexorable sternness.

"Well, to tell the truth," said Rupert, shifting restlessly from
one foot to another, "the milkman himself, as far as merely physical
appearances went, just said, 'Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That
is not to say, of course, that he did not make some secret sign or
some--"

I broke into a violent laugh. "You idiot," I said, "why don't you own
yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?"

His face grew grave.

"Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that
the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong
about him."

"Then come along with you," I said, with a certain amicable anger, "and
remember that you owe me half a crown."

"As to that, I differ from you," said Rupert coolly. "The milkman's
remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been.
But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I
think, as follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came
to a real stop I should find out something curious."

"Well?" I said.

"Well," he answered, "I jolly well have. You just come with me," and
before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through
the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost
before I made any decision.

When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally,
as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door,
shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous
well in which I found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me
there, and who stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn
back when Rupert caught me by the elbow.

"Just listen to that," he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the
basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined
my head for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
unmistakable human voice.

"Have you been talking to somebody inside?" I asked suddenly, turning to
Rupert.

"No, I haven't," he replied, with a grim smile, "but I should very much
like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?"

"No, of course not," I replied.

"Then I recommend you to listen," said Rupert sharply.

In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a
moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there
was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which
took the form of the words: "When shall I get out? When shall I get out?
Will they ever let me out?" or words to that effect.

"Do you know anything about this?" I said, turning upon Rupert very
abruptly.

"Perhaps you think I am the criminal," he said sardonically, "instead
of being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or
three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny
going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a
woman) was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do
not know anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my
disinherited daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when
I hear a human being wailing that she can't get out, and talking to
herself like a mad woman and beating on the shutters with her fists,
as she was doing two or three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning,
that is all."

"My dear fellow," I said, "I apologize; this is no time for arguing.
What is to be done?"

Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.

"First of all," he said, "house-breaking." And he forced the blade into
the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap
and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead
and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization
which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our
breath. Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window
itself seemed suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed
against the glass within, and with increased distinctness, with the
increase of the opening came the words:

"When shall I get out?"

"What can all this be?" I said.

Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller
and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he
had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.

"Can't you get out, madam?" I said, drawing near the hole in some
perturbation.

"Get out? Of course I can't," moaned the unknown female bitterly. "They
won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I'd call the
police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me
as long as they liked only--"

I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to
stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment,
and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting
wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness
like that of Rupert, for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of
the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out from between
the doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted
lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt
darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his face
beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I
thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly,
and went on talking to me with the easy end of a conversation which had
never had any beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did
not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another moment
the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was opened
suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid stood in it.

"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
somehow or other at once affable and underbred, "but we thought perhaps
that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect--"

"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of
the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.

"Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people," said the
philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did
so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.

"Well, what do you make of that?" asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
together when we got into the street.

I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such
conditions I had but one thought.

"Don't you think," I said a trifle timidly, "that we had better tell
your brother?"

"Oh, if you like," said Rupert, in a lordly way. "He is quite near, as
I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him."

Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted
look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his
great head and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I
thought at first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an
astonishingly long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing
religion with the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head
through the hole in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was
some time before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental
fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the
official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get
him to understand that we had made an astounding discovery. When he
did listen, he listened attentively, walking between us up and down
the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a rather feverish duet of the
great house in South Kensington, of the equivocal milkman, of the lady
imprisoned in the basement, and the man staring from the porch. At
length he said:

"If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice on
the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would
look worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman
who looked at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak,
your portraits next to his heart. If you want to find out if there
is anything in this without a police raid I fancy you had better wait
outside. I'll go in and see them."

His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of
twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.

"Do you think it's safe, Basil," said his brother, pausing, a little
pale, under the lamp, "to go into that place alone? Of course we
shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do
something--something sudden--or odd. I can't feel it's safe."

"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly, "except,
possibly--death," and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When
the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of
gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying
our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder. It had been like
the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A
freshening night breeze began to blow up the street, and we turned up
the collars of our coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which we
had scarcely moved or spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I
think, from apprehension than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an
abrupt movement towards the house.

"I can't stand this," he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into
the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house
front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming
out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you
could have heard every syllable across the street. Another voice, or,
possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.

"No, no, no," Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
"That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the
soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When
you see a cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But I must
really be off."

"Come and pitch into us again," came the laughing voice from out of the
house. "We still have some bones unbroken."

"Thanks very much, I will--good night," shouted Grant, who had by this
time reached the street.

"Good night," came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.

"Basil," said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, "what are we to do?"

The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

"What is to be done, Basil?" I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.

"I'm not sure," said Basil doubtfully. "What do you say to getting some
dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
those fellows to come, but they couldn't."

We stared blankly.

"Go to the Court Theatre?" repeated Rupert. "What would be the good of
that?"

"Good? What do you mean?" answered Basil, staring also. "Have you turned
Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course."

"But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!" cried
Rupert. "What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go
for the police?"

Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.

"Oh, that," he said. "I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some
mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm sorry
those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green
omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane Square."

"I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us," I said irritably.
"How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawing-room, would
you think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded
dado or an infernal etching?"

Basil laughed heartily.

"That's very forcible," he said. "As a matter of fact, though, I know
it's all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus."

"How do you know it's all right in this ease?" persisted his brother
angrily.

"My dear chap, the thing's obvious," answered Basil, holding a return
ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket.
"Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not
the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a
paper before the omnibus comes."

"Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury. "Do you mean to tell
me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch
darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with
the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?"

"Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking the ticket
out of his mouth. "But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of
crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?"

The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the
dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it
and been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.

"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I simply won't
leave this street and this house."

"Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
"There's some black work going on there. If I left it I should never
sleep again."

Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.

"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate further.
You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford
fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this
pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and all that."

"I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we shall
enlighten you further about their ethics."

"And may I ask," said Basil gloomily, "what it is that you propose to
do?"

"I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this house;
secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to
knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house."

Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
instant with one of his sudden laughs.

"Poor little boys," he said. "But it almost serves them right for
holding such silly views, after all," and he quaked again with amusement
"there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it."

"I suppose you mean to help us?" said Rupert.

"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to prevent your
doing the poor chaps any harm."

He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking
indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door
opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.

"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said. "I met two friends outside
who very much want to know you. May I bring them in?"

"Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable voice
of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the
decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was
a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a
square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some
incredible college purple.

"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase. This house is
more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish
exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really."

"That," said Rupert, with a savage smile, "I can quite believe."

We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines
and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who
stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly,
with dead brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that
particular type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and
clumsy, and yet who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.

"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been effected. "I
must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet."

"Bosh," answered Grant. "I never said a word against eminent men of
science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new
religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall
of man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't
understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they
think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion,
they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The
Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that,
instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk
unscientifically about science."

"That is all very well," said the big young man, whose name appeared
to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or
the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the
rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood here," indicating the little
man in the blazer, "doesn't know one note of music from another. Still,
he knows something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play
'God save the King'. He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play
'Oh, dem Golden Slippers'. Just in the same way science--"

Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
throat, and bent the giant backwards.

"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and before I
knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple
blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but
I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of
his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and
then we fell with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.

My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's
voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the
beginning.

"... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and
I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old friends
against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying
you up in this antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can
reasonably be while..."

I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows;
how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by
Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An
instant after his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant
was slung head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in
front of him. Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest,
bringing him also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a
Berserker roar, leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the
room, smashing the waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang
furiously to his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it
now.

Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and
before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments,
could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room.
Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered.
Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me
back into the corner upon the wreck of the paper basket. The other two
flew at Basil, and pinned him against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on
his elbow, but he was still dazed.

In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil
come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.

"Now this," he said, "is what I call enjoying oneself."

I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child
heated by a favourite game.

I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of
me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The
latter's head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship,
as his enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought
him falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I
afterwards discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood
bounded across the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous
tome bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the
air, so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and
he sank, his enemies closing over him.

Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor
was a sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense
waste-paper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the
knees in them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg
stuck right through a sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it
ludicrously, like some fantastic trouser frill.

Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of
Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in
it as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad
back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil,
somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the
footman were battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing
could get the giant's ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his
own head was forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right
leg of his captor was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and
fro with a purple face. Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the
ceiling shook together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to
fill the floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows
like battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another
in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly
that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom
Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between them they secured him
easily. The man who had hold of me let go and turned to his rescue, but
I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my infinite satisfaction,
knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding at the mouth
and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the room. My late captor,
without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won.
Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the
pinioned Mr Burrows.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.

"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own way, perhaps
you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?"

"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
"this is what we call the survival of the fittest."

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he
sang out quite coolly:

"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs."

"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured
way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us," he said, glancing round at the
litter of the room, "we have all the illustrated papers."

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even
more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed
through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice
continuing conversationally:

"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
"there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument.
I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the
floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there
than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however,
can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were
saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that
the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public."

"Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. "I hold
that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science
can be..."

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings
with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all
philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank
deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which,
perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was,
owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human
secret locked below.

The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry,
the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a
bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted
room.

Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
abyss:

"Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are
free."

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.

"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly. "I fancy we have come
pretty near the end of this business."

I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare,
yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of
it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped,
leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical--an
iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the
gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of
the captive.

At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room
sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling
silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair
of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare
of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
wood about an hour before.

"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit me
to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your
complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and
we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue."

The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for
a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she
said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:

"Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had
rescued me?"

"Yes, madam," said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. "We have very
satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled
affairs with them very satisfactorily."

The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.

"What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?" she cried.

"We persuaded them, my dear madam," said Rupert, laughing, "by knocking
them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?"

To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
by the window.

"Do I understand," she said, with the air of a person about to begin
knitting, "that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?"

"We have," said Rupert proudly; "we have resisted their oppression and
conquered it."

"Oh, thanks," answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.

A considerable pause followed.

"The road is quite clear for you, madam," said Rupert pleasantly.

The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
for an instant.

"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said. "What did I understand
you to say had become of them?"

"They are lying on the floor upstairs," said Rupert, chuckling. "Tied
hand and foot."

"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang
into her seat again, "I must stop where I am."

Rupert looked bewildered.

"Stop where you are?" he said. "Why should you stop any longer where you
are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?"

"The question rather is," said the old lady, with composure, "what power
can force me to go anywhere else?"

We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.

At last I said, "Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you
here?"

"I suppose you don't intend to tie me up," she said, "and carry me off?
I certainly shall not go otherwise."

"But, my dear madam," cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, "we
heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out."

"Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things," replied the captive
grimly. "I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that."

"Some sense of honour?" repeated Rupert, and the last light of
intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with
rolling eyes.

He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once
more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. "Can we do nothing for
you, madam?" I said forlornly.

"Why," said the lady, "if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs."

Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his
vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the
sitting-room and scene of battle.

"Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true," Mr Burrows was saying,
lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; "but we must consider
the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality..."

"Basil," cried Rupert, gasping, "she won't come out."

"Who won't come out?" asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted
in an argument.

"The lady downstairs," replied Rupert. "The lady who was locked up. She
won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
fellows loose."

"And a jolly sensible suggestion," cried Basil, and with a bound he was
on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds
with hands and teeth.

"A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood."

In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the
purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as
particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other
hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.

"Well," said Basil, in his cheeriest way, "I think we must be getting
away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to
stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made ourselves at
home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert."

"Basil," said Rupert desperately, "for God's sake come and see what you
can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort out of my
mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
gentlemen won't mind perhaps..."

"No, no," cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. "No,
no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you."

This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil
Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to
have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the
end of the day and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the
sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned
upon me. But this day's work was destined to end in confusion worse
confounded. Before we left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one
half-witted touch was added which rolled all our minds in cloud. If
Rupert's head had suddenly fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun
to sprout out of Greenwood's shoulders, we could scarcely have been more
suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go
to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and
let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be seen, it
was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in another
way it was explained. For the present I only state what happened.

When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison
again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as
pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she
seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.

Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady
turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong
gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up
and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked
quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this
subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in
this subservience, and desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they
received it. To my surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all:
Burrows was paring his nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the
back of the group and had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing
fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the
group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His
face wore an expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of
a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It
was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he, beyond
any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.

"So I hear," he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, "I hear,
madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
success."

"No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you," answered the lady
with a high colour. "But you have not found me guilty of treachery."

"I willingly attest it, madam," replied Basil, in the same level tones,
"and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of
loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large
discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of
these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine."

The captive made another reverence. "I have never complained of
your injustice," she said. "I need scarcely say what I think of your
generosity."

And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
Basil holding the door open for her.

He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. "This will be a
relief to you," he said.

"Yes, it will," replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like
a sphinx.

We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as
if we had fallen into it from some high tower.

"Basil," said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, "I always thought you
were my brother. But are you a man? I mean--are you only a man?"

"At present," replied Basil, "my mere humanity is proved by one of the
most unmistakable symbols--hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes
the green omnibus!" and he had leaped on it before we could speak.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my
room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having
jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the
latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less
a thing than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and
headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrows--the Club of
Queer Trades. I should expand this story for ever if I explained how
ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a
hundred interesting things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of
a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the
finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the
finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer
Trades.

I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger
one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and
seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and
hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces
that I knew. There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated
between the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented
the dancing Language.

As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their
chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat
gaped at us like a missing tooth.

"The president's not here," said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
Professor Chadd.

"N--no," said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. "I
can't imagine where he is."

"Good heavens," said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, "I really feel a little
nervous. I'll go and see." And he ran out of the room.

An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.

"He's there, gentlemen--he's there all right--he's coming in now,"
he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who
was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought
indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic
was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an
expectation?

Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled
and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and
in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.

How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But
on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.
Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort
of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was
over. The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon
being made of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was
made of the moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and
eating and drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he
was there, the king of these capering idiots.

At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the
time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his
feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.

"Gentlemen," he said, "it is a custom in this society that the
president for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast
of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of
his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It
is my business, as the senior member, to open by stating my claim to
membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my
best in that capacity to do justice and to administer the law. But it
gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it was, I was not touching
even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of the mighty, I
was robed in scarlet and ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly
and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and
my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me
taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend
to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the
time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have
been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of
explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this
grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous
frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed
more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time
when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and
melted from public life."

Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I
who were listening with intensity to this statement.

"Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences.
Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly
secret) had spread over the whole of society. People were tried before
me not for the practical trifles for which nobody cares, such as
committing a murder, or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals
were tried for the faults which really make social life impossible. They
were tried before me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or
for scandalmongering, or for stinginess to guests or dependents. Of
course these courts had no sort of real coercive powers. The fulfilment
of their punishments rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and
gentlemen involved, including the honour of the culprits. But you would
be amazed to know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only
lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington
whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of
breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused
to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been
inopportune enough to rescue her."

Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of
the old lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with
her lot. She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court.
She was one of the clients of his Queer Trade.

We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health
of Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything
having been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the
presence of God. We dimly heard Basil say:

"Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance Agency."

And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made
long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun, like a
true cycle.





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Project Gutenberg's What's Wrong With The World, by G.K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: What's Wrong With The World

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Posting Date: December 9, 2008 [EBook #1717]
Release Date: April, 1999

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD ***




Produced by Georges Allaire, and Martin Ward





WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

By G.K. Chesterton


CONTENTS

     PART ONE:  THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN

      I      The Medical Mistake
      II     Wanted: An Unpractical Man
      III    The New Hypocrite
      IV     The Fear of the Past
      V      The Unfinished Temple
      VI     The Enemies of Property
      VII    The Free Family
      XIII   The Wildness of Domesticity
      IX     History of Hudge and Gudge
      X      Oppression by Optimism
      XI     The Homelessness of Jones

     PART TWO:  IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN

      I      The Charm of Jingoism
      II     Wisdom and the Weather
      III    The Common Vision
      IV     The Insane Necessity

     PART THREE:  FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN

      I      The Unmilitary Suffragette
      II     The Universal Stick
      III    The Emancipation of Domesticity
      IV     The Romance of Thrift
      V      The Coldness of Chloe
      VI     The Pedant and the Savage
      VII    The Modern Surrender of Woman
      VIII   The Brand of the Fleur-de-Lis
      IX     Sincerity and the Gallows
      X      The Higher Anarchy
      XI     The Queen and the Suffragettes
      XII    The Modern Slave

     PART FOUR:  EDUCATION, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD

      I      The Calvinism of To-day
      II     The Tribal Terror
      III    The Tricks of Environment
      IV     The Truth About Education
      V      An Evil Cry
      VI     Authority the Unavoidable
      VII    The Humility of Mrs. Grundy
      VIII   The Broken Rainbow
      IX     The Need for Narrowness
      X      The Case for the Public Schools
      XI     The School for Hypocrites
      XII    The Staleness of the New Schools
      XIII   The Outlawed Parent
      XIV    Folly and Female Education

     PART FIVE:  THE HOME OF MAN

      I      The Empire of the Insect
      II     The Fallacy of the Umbrella Stand
      III    The Dreadful Duty of Gudge
      IV     A Last Instance
      V      Conclusion

     THREE NOTES

      I      On Female Suffrage
      II     On Cleanliness in Education
      III    On Peasant Proprietorship


DEDICATION

To C. F G. Masterman, M. P.

My Dear Charles,

I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would
have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social
misunderstandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady
visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, "I have been doing
'What is Wrong' all this morning." And one minister of religion moved
quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I
had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in
a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot
conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having
written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy
to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what is
wrong and no mistake.

It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition
to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of
the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can
make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable
accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even
if it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can only be a
thundering gallop of theory?

Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none the worse
for a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise the
many arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderful
ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, you
will agree with me that the thread of comradeship and conversation must
be protected because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it
must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It
is exactly because argument is idle that men (I mean males) must take it
seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack of doom, shall we have so
delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you because
there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called
friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,
please God, will never break.

Yours always,

G. K. Chesterton.




PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN




I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply
defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables
of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of
hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a
chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due
to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never
found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder;
the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the
disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and
dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure
before we find the disease.

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern
madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak
of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British
Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The
moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal,
we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are
not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity
of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as
if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say
that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that
Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should
soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon
grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation
may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar
applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing
size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature,
and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in
subtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether
an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its
old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical
fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively
describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.

Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and
that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about
the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about
the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to
produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The
hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but
it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra.
Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to
restore it.

But social science is by no means always content with the normal human
soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist
will say "I am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan," or
"Beyond this dark probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise
of Collectivism." Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference
about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but
he certainly wants health.  No one says "I am tired of this headache; I
want some toothache," or "The only thing for this Russian influenza is
a few German measles," or "Through this dark probation of catarrh I see
the shining paradise of rheumatism." But exactly the whole difficulty in
our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other
men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions
as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of
disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea
of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is
not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to
introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German
measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would
rather have rheumatics.

This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion;
that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the
aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear
each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad
thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy
would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood;
but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one.
Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who
would be even more indignant if it were strong. The social case is
exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree, like
doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about
the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is
unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half
would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent
that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity.
We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should
differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree
about the bad public house. It would be precisely in front of the good
public-house that our painful personal fracas would occur.

I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite
useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing
prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another
business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We
all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity.
The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social
ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot
of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we
do not ask what is right.

*****




II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless
and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came
first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood,
it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter
on those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the
chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The
evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the
vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ
that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of
thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified
in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by
a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is
to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a
distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our
mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of
our mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun,
but a life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is
this: that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic
occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere
egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means
and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving
the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an
elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the
chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also
exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a
French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable
in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness;
forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life
is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of
nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think
of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to
breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever
we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the
embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes
doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and
our politics are rotten eggs.

Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence.
Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to
poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we
should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before
we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know
that this primary pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of the
aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning.
A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored to
substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the
motive of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social
system which has gained the nick-name of "efficiency." I am not very
certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter. But, as
far as I can make out, "efficiency" means that we ought to discover
everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in
our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong
we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things
go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a
theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice,
to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must
have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at
all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right
to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.

It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy
man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely
that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to
be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be
the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases,
no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could
possibly say what was the matter with it.

"Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men,
will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because
it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no
philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power
of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is
over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.
There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner
when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning
side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation
has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the
murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making people
lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck
is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it
all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being
a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an
orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they
have been effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who
thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he
must be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always
come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but
idealism.

This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands
what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really
wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he
forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests,
a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely
prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical
compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if
the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two
litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much
prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it
were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer
should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of
us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse
unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor
for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us
have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable
women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion
through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that
so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are
bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular
education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total
prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret
compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant
proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed
and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our
statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask
for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete.
As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is
impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly
like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old
bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word "compromise"
contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word "promise."
Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle
point is as fixed as the extreme point.

If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer,
as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable
distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate
and I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which
the plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the
pirate's common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as
hard as any geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.

*****




III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE

But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old
English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement
merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary
that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done,
and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than
no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a
loaf is better than a whole loaf.

As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our
everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new
kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man
whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that
they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really
religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. The
Rev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares
nothing for creeds, but only for education; meanwhile, in truth, the
wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Church
of England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only
question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while
in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It
is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend
gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they
will admit. Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It
is merely concealed, like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological
atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr.
Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly
for Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, one
hopes, imaginative enough to recognize the dignity and distinctness of
another religion, like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite ready
to respect another man's faith; but it is too much to ask that I should
respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political
bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for
English history could see something poetic and national about the
Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when
he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get
annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could
admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is
simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him.

But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that
used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved
us from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it
creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself.
This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's
attention to it with a little more precision.

Some people do not like the word "dogma." Fortunately they are free, and
there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things
only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages
were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a
poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a
prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should
not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything
should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal.
Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would
rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general
recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel
must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might
walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and
one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away
from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of
our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of
creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary
unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been
nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two
homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is
One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a
good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds
into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as
such (because it was his "temperament"), and he would turn up later with
three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it
would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It
would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there
was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for
a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong)
they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a
Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other
than before.

It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides
men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in
clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a
Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is
Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime
atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its
way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but
healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I
am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly
pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for
disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the
very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard
to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that
always yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal
prejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against
this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a
resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.

In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in
an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of
logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and
unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices
are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump
into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed
is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a
private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our
existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paper
and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other.
Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has
become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist
is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never
interrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy
would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual
argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no
medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer
except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear
that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is
called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing
journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole
object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.

The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is
consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some
doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution
may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to
maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now
consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants
will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl;
evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail,
and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a
Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal,
like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the
deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to
alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be
beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off
the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this
plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is,
that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused
or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who
is not there. The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate
sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human
truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but
simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the
measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick
and the dead.

Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions; rather a doctrine alone
can cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly,
what abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human
hunger; and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not.
But when we come to ask what is the need of normal men, what is the
desire of all nations, what is the ideal house, or road, or rule, or
republic, or king, or priesthood, then we are confronted with a strange
and irritating difficulty peculiar to the present time; and we must call
a temporary halt and examine that obstacle.

*****




IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of
the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to
misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to
stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern
man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but
is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his
great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead,
we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is
apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance.
Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the
novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth
century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was
supposed to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two horsemen might have
been seen--." The new story has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening
two aviators will be seen--." The movement is not without its elements
of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so
many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened;
of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in
advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the
age is really rather odd.

But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of
poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to
maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but
a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even
its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible
not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why
modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and
emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical
ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and
many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric
ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that
evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a
charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout,
a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is
impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer
French lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and
larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the "Blue
Funk School" uttered a psychological truth which that school itself
would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be
a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more
alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact
that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a
world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored
not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by
the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong;
driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said
that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue,
not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled
towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular
phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives
it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not
exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a
fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past
also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind.
There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many
harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of
monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once
sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition
of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking
at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street
of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to
play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank
wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes;
the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato,
Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as
narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as
humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that
men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They
look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among
the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing
eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in
history who have really done anything with the future have had their
eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very
word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare
began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of
poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great
mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation
looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic
movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement
which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the
most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than
it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics
of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.
The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to
simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call
it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant
his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.
Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face
turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as
he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future
itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some
call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored
in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned
to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate
and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological
scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
somewhat amusing, statues.

But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies
and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless
future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and
sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy
to a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange
silence about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They
keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of
their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their
praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States
of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away
from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally
in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the
international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent,
the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they
will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great
rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that
France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the
world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that
nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals
in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets
advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes
or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays
and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise
the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal
ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the
valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished
cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident,
but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien
philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to
have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to
do

It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of
all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human
experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the
reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern
man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two
starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the
other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth
with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint
to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by
the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong enough
to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos
contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we
decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a
barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to
sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and
passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the
sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed
the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.

This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new
ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism
is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination.
We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old
things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all
the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not
got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the
good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for
restoration as well as revolution.

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel
attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not
really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any
more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous
man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions
fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose
intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares
as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for
what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this
abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of
the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern
assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one
metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying,
"You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You
can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by
the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a
piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has
ever existed.

There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on
it"; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the
stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might
be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as
bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first
freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose
as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that
should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold
and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right
to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian
towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles;
we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous
illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great
national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city
state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado,
any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the
village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman.
Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths
should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose
that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my
independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they
have been used.

*****




V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by
the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated
it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other
way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.
If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy,
it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England
happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is
always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who
was smothered. Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it
a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we
cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the
facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and
come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the
two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern
growth rooted in the French Revolution.

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black
admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his
brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise
what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were
distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval
conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to
a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was
simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest.
The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in the
dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies or
prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms
of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we
cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church.
We only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the
saints. What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it
a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply
because the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had
not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no
wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral; a performance which I
recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the
discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket's bones as easily as
Tracy had scattered his brains.

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics
were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire
of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not
for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity
was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of
Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the
churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to
end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of
things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet
the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long
before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The
huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in
moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began
to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull
it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to
Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told
to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent
conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case
of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by
being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived
enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;
and left untried.

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was
the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have,
indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free
peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we
shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal
relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory
of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things
which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed
to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these
was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it
was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best
answer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they might
have been rich.

No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the
theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to
financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy,
from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines,
entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly
it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political
corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born
with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in
this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our
empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either
blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree;
they hand on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern
statesman to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is
at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his
mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is
perilous for a politician.

It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about
with the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic
doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of
State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly
against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses,
that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English
politics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) will
really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even
attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The
French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and
making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not
in sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might
have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have
been legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far we
fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test
it is to note how far we fall short even of the republican element
in the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton and
Condorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul and
Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy
middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And
in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely more
democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybody
who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his
children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the
people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can
sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent
principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free
for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference
comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny
meant that you could say "The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate." Twentieth
century liberty really means that you are allowed to say "The King of
Brentford is a model family man."

But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not
that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of
ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas,
these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and
crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by
a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
deserted cemetery.


*****




VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary
on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that
historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will
expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I
have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal
imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything
like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day
that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an
earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done
under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a
blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their
ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the
ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and
its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning
thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both
the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored
purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began
defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and
rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of
the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella
to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise.
The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia
quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that
the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all
true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but
its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New
Jerusalem.

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the
extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they
have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they
have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never
wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these
old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle
of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of
history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like
the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have
never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless
modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they
have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the
workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the
cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as
the working class is shouting to be let into it.

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay
the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make
something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can
make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God
be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the
combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is
to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to
be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The
excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions
will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet
on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking
a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero
out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics.
This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy
entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But
the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of
invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic
creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present
discussions--the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into
the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and
though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate
straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The
average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he can
paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it
pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his
choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every
man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is
shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a
graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly
with limits that are strict and even small.

I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by
the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people
talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of
property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they
are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land;
but other people's. When they remove their neighbor's landmark, they
also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought
to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by
giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with
the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden
meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He
cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his
neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland
should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the
negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

*****




VII. THE FREE FAMILY

As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take
the institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of
the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as
they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice
for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the
speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social
reconstruction; I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It
is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for
mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any
one contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love were an episode like
lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a
cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed
him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune
he "drew an angel down" and had to walk about forever with a seraph on
a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the
earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is
perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he
is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates
the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the
cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence
arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and
thence arises the family in its full educational sense.

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside
the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable
forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning
that the State has no authority over families; that State authority
is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most
normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry.
It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law
cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are
fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own
backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast
and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form
a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
cannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so
close to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have
powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public
coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it
would not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain
lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he
only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect
mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such
relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where
the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a
bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by
taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart
because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections
of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
between them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they
are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic
intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or
unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the
republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.

The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has
not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less
lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on
which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to
be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this
book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in
which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made
marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and
Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally
to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a
principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It
is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
in walking.

The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after
the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore
of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of
the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of
the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
surrender.

In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when
no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people
must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty
minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the
point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on
and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and
anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because
it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like
bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It
would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was
floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each
other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for
"incompatibility of temper" I cannot conceive why they are not all
divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant
when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as
such, are incompatible.

*****




VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the
difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth.
It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
Some experience of modern movements of the sort called "advanced" has
led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience
peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I
have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That
implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor
car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for
maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own
wife, let alone other people's. And the success with which nuptial
estrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays" is due to the fact
that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is a
hard day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic
assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic
assumption behind the phrase "Why should woman be economically dependent
upon man?" The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't;
except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to
tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has
to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite
clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere "pretty clinging
parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through the somber contemplation
of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the
city and pretended to do something, while the banker's wife went to the
Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his
wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers
interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of
them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to
Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?

But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is
this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home
(they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and
variety. This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that
his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by
regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand,
every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets
outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His
wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest
adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can
pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the
millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And
because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all
"advanced" and "progressive" thought, we have almost forgotten what a
home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot
on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an
experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept
the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to
enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes.
I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic
feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in
an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his
house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy,
though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant
you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you
insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden
you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a
plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world
of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set
tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the
ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends
every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall,
we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living
a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of
such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may
be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may
be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only
picnic at home.

Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this
possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working
model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man
a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it; and he
desires it. For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house; he does not
want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race
to share one wall with another man. Similarly he might be forced in a
three-legged race to share one leg with another man; but it is not so
that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again,
he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a
flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a
railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a
flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An idea of
earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and
independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.

I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man
desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires
a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof
above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible
kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can
open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I
do not say there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need
and philanthropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got
used to more than this; and when he was a convict may have got used
to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly
everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I
assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out)
it is very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so; I merely
set up the desideratum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there
while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the
social wars of our time.

*****




IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE

There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with
disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us
say, two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you
prefer it) noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us
say, is of a bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all
costs be got out of this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he
finds (despite the large financial interests of the Hudges) that the
thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot.
He therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and
soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells,
which are certainly better than their old quarters, in so far as they
are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied with clean water. But
Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking
in the little brick boxes; he raises numberless objections; he even
assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and
by the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the
people were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve
in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very
difficult to find out which is right. But at least one might safely say
that no people ever liked stench or starvation as such, but only some
peculiar pleasures en tangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive
Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge
has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really
very nice things; that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is
what has made our England great; and that the smell of open drains is
absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.

But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up
as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more
and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed
of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens
or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him,
merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the
aid of eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in
a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total
strangers out of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the
necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare
say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is
this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more
indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as
divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge
is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if
you mention poverty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice
something that is conjectured to be "Do 'em good!" Nor is Hudge more
happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an
unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we
shall all sleep in one universal bedroom; and he lives in a Garden City,
like one forgotten of God.

Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery
men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as
possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But
I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mistakes of these
two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact. They
arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for
an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.
In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not
practical politicians.

We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the
praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own
being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need
as typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got it; and whether it is
in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in
some philosophical sense it is his own fault, I think in a yet more
philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what
I have now to attempt to explain.

Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think,
that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining;
for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose
house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of
peasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is
only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same
person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent,
while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the
defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists
almost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this
estate of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never
existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We
have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally,
and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the
natural human creation, especially in this country.

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he
always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has
a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist
deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has
always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this
book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he
has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be
chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time
in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the
earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.

Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other
words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has
really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts,
therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home
of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably
Christian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the
streets--which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--which
is called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more
carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or
the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern
phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse
the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if
they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him
the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the
cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence
that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are,
I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.
It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep
some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week
over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same
people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan,
an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an
Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine
what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic
coincidences.

*****




X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the
last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no
very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is
simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy
often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions.
The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel
or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong.
Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad
traditions; it does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream
of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might
as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not
tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you
wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it
in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the aristocrats never have customs;
at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has
customs.

The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the
opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes
is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is
called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite
easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances
of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a
luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the
past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for
the future.

But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was
their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most
talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were
on the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against
the Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of
the manufacturing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the
increased power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business. But the
immediate effect of this fact upon the question we are studying is
somewhat singular.

In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for
some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning
and discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years
he had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and
savagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven
men. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places
he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the
army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the
soldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told
him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a
seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence and
stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I
or James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and
thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords
created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved
their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money,
by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were
doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized
this easy aristocratic habit--

You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.

But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can
only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they
reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed
to get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great
nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured
everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a
newly discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with
their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in
public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at
by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism.
For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the
pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
to live to-morrow.

*****




XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at
least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been
duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the
name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and
gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white
pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his original
rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce
inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away the
little that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of a
family, promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropriately
enough) "Anticipations" or "News from Nowhere." We come back, in fact,
to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The past is
communal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all the
evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is
pure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was
a human fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.

The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually
kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had
meant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has
always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he
has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready
to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving
in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly
debars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front
garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the
man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings,
explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of
nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in
the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean
lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out),
happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of
raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real
life of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the
landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the
wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and
goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at
that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is
now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is
in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State
and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime
future.

Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams
at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so
little, and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes
of worlds and systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New
Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.

Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English
history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house
on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of
progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern
wage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way to
wealth and civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the
convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved
with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he
entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch
of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the
future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into
darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven.
And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to
enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen
hands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of his
fathers.

Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But
there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is
imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by
an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and
partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to "administer"
Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in
some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive
to them. It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to
suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as
well as the stamp supply--at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw
has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils
because they are free from "financial timidity." Now, the English ruling
class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be
quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William
Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. "We" (that
is, the aristocracy) "are all Socialists now."

But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main
contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and
Collectivism have been accepted as necessities--not as naked ideals or
desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only
way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured
as the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in the
idea of preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old woman
from cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody's real heart was
in the heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapter
is sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pis
aller, a desperate second best--like teetotalism. I do not propose to
prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that
it is a medicine and not a wine.

The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families
free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic,
of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet of
mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less
human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman
who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one;
Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's
desire.




PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN




I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM

I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
that the word "Imperialism" is a clumsy version of my meaning. But
no other word came nearer; "Militarism" would have been even more
misleading, and "The Superman" makes nonsense of any discussion that he
enters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word "Caesarism" would have been
better; but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will
perceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean
to discuss.

This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory
of the patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in
England has very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism
I wish to sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes' and
Kipling; but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is
an insolent creation of English harshness and rapacity. Imperialism,
I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness, but by English
softness; nay, in a sense, even by English kindness.

The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the
most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales
is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from
troubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles
who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British
Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic and
irrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strange
optimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to show
that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to
say that no one shared it more than that gigantic English
sentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end of "David
Copperfield" is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending,
but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British
happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be
embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily,
or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and
Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them
with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes
contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of
a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.

To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only
objection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose
heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me
no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should
still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and
apathy of England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness in
distant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven
Dials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the
veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel
that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
Surbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer to nature,"
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only
objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not
young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing
with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies
when you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys
who have lost their last music of real things by getting out of the
sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decadent
genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr.
Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the exception that
proves the rule. For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind,
but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely
because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a
past--an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River" if he
had been born in Melbourne.

I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak
and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind
of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which
it can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors. The
notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a
dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape
and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and
conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire
in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people, and
therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The
English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and therefore
their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distant
and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the
uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them;
much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If
ever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should
leave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting
Australian armies against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculpture
against French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me of
concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism as
commonly understood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other
peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own. But it
is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiable
delusion partly in order to show how different it is from the deeper,
more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced to
call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get to
the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast
back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of
human intercourse.

*****




II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering
and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to
everybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But while
this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true
that these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that they
are subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found to
be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the
difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will
call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct
of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of
describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That
there is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento
Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly
intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was
colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for
irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how
far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions
touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are
animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties
begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and
go home to their tea.

It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore
it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room
song of my youth which began "In the gloaming, O, my darling," was
vulgar enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and
the twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing.
Or to take another obvious instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law
are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely
delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the
twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things--law and a
mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real
human enigma. "Comic Cuts" deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it
would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty
rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not
that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.

But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have
all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument,
the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very
nadir and scoff of good conversationalists." Now there are very deep
reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well
as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of
all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and
to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning
everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so
do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea
in politeness--equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek
for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policeman: a
charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite
than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and
elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with
the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an
umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share
the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.
"For He maketh His sun to shine...." This is the second element in the
weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats
under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of
this is the third wholesome strain in the custom; I mean that it begins
with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true
friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of
rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are
already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has
in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation.
Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

Briefly, in the mere observation "a fine day" there is the whole great
human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those
broad and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to
talk about it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly because we suppose
it to be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct; but it is
by no means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half
of human life; the other half is Love, a thing so different that one
might fancy it had been made for another universe. And I do not mean
mere sex love; any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or
even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien to pure
comradeship. Both sides are essential to life; and both are known in
differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very broadly
speaking it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love
and men for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution
would hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard
over it. The affections in which women excel have so much more authority
and intensity that pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not
rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments.
Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband
not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love,
seeking to destroy Comradeship.

All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have
remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has
a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are
all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the
"winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond
as the essential one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that
one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirely
wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very
wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they
are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poetical
see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do not
understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men
(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the
breath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even
begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool
camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, the
insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No one
has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a
certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious
materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the
thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at
root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its
very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of
the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that
are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and
comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
"affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members,
men and women, call each other "Comrade." I have no serious emotions,
hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only
to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call
them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word
daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if
you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable
prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him,
the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and
innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who
has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is
impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is
strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it "speaking to the
question." Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are
speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five
best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he
explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are
all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men
are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after
a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a
visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.

It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to
the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these
things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree
ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils
are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be
physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt
sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left
entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the
strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and
living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the
wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without
women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of
artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army
also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without
chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These
have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the
savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort
of man that is not afraid of women.

*****




III. THE COMMON VISION

Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life
within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it the
republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit
of democracy frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse
is often a better test than a Parliament. Democracy in its human sense
is not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by
everybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I
mean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total stranger for
granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourself
and him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the
full authority of democracy. Look out of the window and notice the
first man who walks by. The Liberals may have swept England with an
over-whelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man is
a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law
courts; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But
you would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing
clothes. You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine
thing, or that parents have authority over children. Of course, he might
be the millionth man who does not believe these things; if it comes
to that, he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a man. But these
prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculation
of numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority, but a
monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democratic
authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observe
before any newcomer in a tavern--that is the real English law. The first
man you see from the window, he is the King of England.

The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of
democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I
remember that a roomful of Socialists literally laughed when I told them
that there were no two nobler words in all poetry than Public House.
They thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke, since they
want to make all houses public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone
wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to
males, at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in the great
old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as Boswell's
Johnson. It is worth while to mention that one name especially because
the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice.
The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was "harsh and despotic." It was
occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in the
least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting
crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that
other people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was
based on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that of football. It
is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he was
a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even
overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his
company; he was polite to everybody; but superior to everybody;
therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult of
Pope--

"Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive to his own
applause."

Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish
Member in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was
hated. Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who
knew him, and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere
miracles of love.

This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation; so much may be
admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once arguing at a
table in a tavern the most famous man on earth would wish to be
obscure, so that his brilliant remarks might blaze like the stars on the
background of his obscurity. To anything worth calling a man nothing can
be conceived more cold or cheerless than to be king of your company. But
it may be said that in masculine sports and games, other than the great
game of debate, there is definite emulation and eclipse. There is
indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort of equality. Games are
competitive, because that is the only way of making them exciting. But
if anyone doubts that men must forever return to the ideal of equality,
it is only necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap.
If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to see how far such
superiority could go; they would be glad when one strong runner came
in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men like is not the triumph of
superiors, but the struggle of equals; and, therefore, they introduce
even into their competitive sports an artificial equality. It is sad
to think how few of those who arrange our sporting handicaps can be
supposed with any probability to realize that they are abstract and even
severe republicans.

No; the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with
any of these free and festive aspects of mankind; all men are democrats
when they are happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would
substantially sum up his position by saying that it "will not work."
Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the
assumption that working is the one test of humanity. Heaven does not
work; it plays. Men are most themselves when they are free; and if I
find that men are snobs in their work but democrats on their holidays,
I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is this
question of work which really perplexes the question of equality; and
it is with that that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth can be put
most pointedly thus: that democracy has one real enemy, and that is
civilization. Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are
anti-democratic, not so much in their perversion, or even in
their practical result, as in their primary shape and purpose. The
Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not perhaps in thinking that machines
would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in thinking that machines
would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean fewer handles;
fewer handles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science must be
individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace; but a mob
cannot shout down a telephone. The specialist appears and democracy is
half spoiled at a stroke.

*****




IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY

The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that
men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state
of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the
opposite. All men have normally and naturally begun with the idea of
equality; they have only abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always
for some material reason of detail. They have never naturally felt that
one class of men was superior to another; they have always been driven
to assume it through certain practical limitations of space and time.

For example, there is one element which must always tend to
oligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the
house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee
cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give
the order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question
of the physical limitations of time and space; not at all of any mental
limitations in the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house
were men of destiny it would still be better that they should not
all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that the
silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually
consisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be
better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders
together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the
orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from
resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men.
Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always
right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that
somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully
rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is not
everybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied)
obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military
spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man,
obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men.
Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is
only servility.

Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe
is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a
system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the
caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction
between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military
organization, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly
to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simply
means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief.
The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman
Empire, which merely means officers in the European army against
the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of
supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral
reality. Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very humorous
and energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorous
and yet more energetic." No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room
conversation, "Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally
inferior to Captain Smith." The essence of an army is the idea of
official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is not
obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such
was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first
arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. With
the decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to have
meaning as a military organization, and become honeycombed with unclean
plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy--it is not so bad
as all that. It is simply an army without an enemy--billeted upon the
people.

Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the
case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission.
The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a
certain rigidity of rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not
organized that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The
tinker and tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe: the
Gipsy and the Jew; but the Jew alone has influence because he alone
accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the
specialist side where he must have subordination, and the social side
where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that ten
tailors go to make a man; but we must remember also that ten Poets
Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too. Ten million
tradesmen go to make Man himself; but humanity consists of tradesmen
when they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar peril of our time,
which I call for argument's sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the
complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by specialism and
domination.

There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal
government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not
have rules--they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at
least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by
the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and
ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other,
or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of
equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and complicate
them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions
in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is
a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole
system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis
Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly
silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it
on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on
to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father
"my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham." These are,
perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine
appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men
feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild
fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.

Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases
as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where
the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop,
and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one
respect in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If
they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that
they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the
virile virtues of the pothouse.

The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we
spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense
of counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure,
laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in our
hall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called
specialism or cut-throat competition--Business. Business will
have nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck with
comradeship; business will pretend to no patience with all the legal
fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its
egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable
and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer
to him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton.
Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting
itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to
fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and
anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against
which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the
possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is
rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does not
alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is
"Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot have
equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot
have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. We
must have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy."
I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such
examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine
freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. One
anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a
vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain. It
might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, for
instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boy
could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacy
is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all
born in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our great
British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like
a diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for
promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in
the vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and
the popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the
modern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it
at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it
says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking,
"too old at forty" and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run,
and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend
to do such dirty work.

Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge
modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead
of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling
is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for
soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civilization really cannot get on
with democracy, so much the worse for civilization, not for democracy.
Certainly, it would be far better to go back to village communes, if
they really are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without
soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice
all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and
frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come
to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will
be necessary; I only say it will be easy.




PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN




I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE

It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that
appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on
the feminine question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve;
and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the
current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first
that I was not in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular
sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in
its practical and popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to
state, however hurriedly, the superficial objection to the Suffragettes
before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.

Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection
to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the
contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a
military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that
it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under
certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the
government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of
all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in
this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and,
secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something
else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create
revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between
these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and
finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only
produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about
the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that
Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone
conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King's
head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times.
Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion
takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new
order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew
itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only
wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any
government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a
proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.

It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes
their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of
the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is
a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and
unanswerably--numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two
urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are
ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may
maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of
these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is
false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his
muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes and
his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that; it is that
bodily outbreak is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the
horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the
woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons
that she could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for
a vote they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember,
it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to
the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection
to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of
women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women
ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is
surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the
destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide
if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people
practically say that females may vote about everything except about
Female Suffrage.

But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and
possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the
matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real
roots of woman's position in the western state, and the causes of our
existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this
purpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the
mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much
more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.

*****




II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK

Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or
four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at
least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let
me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner,
or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one
speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral
things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and
while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some
old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut
throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick
is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to
point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing
pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a
club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an
extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which
the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be
current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to
light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins,
to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their
children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their
hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and that
hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always
proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always
answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man
will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with
a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even
boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have
my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about
hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other
requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the
whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a
world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where
a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to
toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the
surface of hot water pipes.

The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison
between the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialist
things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a
stick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of
liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing,
gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing
instrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light (a
despicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos stove... I wonder
what is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of rope
in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done
with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could
tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum.
He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her
boxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he
could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller
who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a
telephone; you cannot do anything else with it. And though this is
one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full
delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in
brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before you
uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with great
difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that
any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has
four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are
quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.

Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of
a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six
purposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and
there is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we
will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or
inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any
day thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant and
narrow inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might
not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most
austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old,
many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality which
may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually,
at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to
equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry
the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the
immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant
of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
unalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told
fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the
nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets
were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing
ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have
been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance
of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of
all trades, modern art (the sort called art for art's sake), and men are
in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as
they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried
up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for
decency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic
flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology,
has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from
everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of
specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground
that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly
advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one
wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in
their souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
joined let no man sunder.

This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious
and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many
purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our
lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked.
This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of
men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the
jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; the
august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir William
Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our
time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible
music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman.
But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this
literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world.
Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo
da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a
government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do
(to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the
Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man
to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he
has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold
him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males
from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not
merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter
before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is
outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the
human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the
main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed
can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but
in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go
beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer
cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and
seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different
paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind
be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has
decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism
shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and
wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
sad and certain things.

But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the
frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be
partly a one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is
flung naked into the fight. The world's demand comes to him direct; to
his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say)
give "his best"; and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His
second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth
bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand
at whist, a gun, and an image of God.

*****




III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY

And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to
develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called
our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally
conceivable kind of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly
ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric
lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that
he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was
only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any
telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to
keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you
can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he
earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that
high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision
of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected
half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles
indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in
every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who
does not "give her best," but gives her all.

Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need
not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is
that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is
like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire
is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to
excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is
earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the
fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original
and artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably be
told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to
illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the
wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking
stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything
like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty
of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not
a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive
schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;
a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not
one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her
second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in
what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary,
they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse
of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman
that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come
almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and
almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her
universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the
substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.
I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I
doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the
absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but
I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do
not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
general servant.

The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its
way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way
back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves
and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes
a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns
hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the
center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience,
and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of
a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She
has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the
happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote--

     "Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"

but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be
in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal
morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete
moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of
that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a
sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that
a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger
side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
and romantic trade.

The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing
it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of
special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult
to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the
line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became
the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.
Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who
frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially
prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural
operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be
taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught
a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time
when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there
aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a
specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more
spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and
oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race
has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to
keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this
domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply
give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination
conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called
drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges
in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul,
then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be
Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area,
teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how
this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about
the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and
narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious,
but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs.
Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its
smallness.

But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does
not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely
wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than
man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if
one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three
things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in
parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has
arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason
that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman
was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a
matter of principle--or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the
other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or
a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent
inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show
that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it,
too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their
office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk
and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish
wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they
do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

*****




IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT

The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter;
and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed
the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But
these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of
the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within
small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she
really misunderstands the man's position, it is almost entirely in order
to preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of
herself, is most tenacious may be roughly summarized as the ideal of
thrift and the ideal of dignity.

Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two
qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But
if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make
an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women
toward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in
the thing called thrift; we men have so much encouraged each other in
throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort
of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader
and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I
was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the
more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic
because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is
prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of
indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic
thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the
new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral
menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could
undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader
genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when
science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her
greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human
soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in
other words, to rummage in the dustbin.

A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house
on a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally run with such
rigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of
potential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He
comes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four
walls; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a
tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber
and cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enough
bandboxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of
thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with
ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on the
contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creative
mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be
destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile
complete.

The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and
other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet
come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and
liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between
two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the
collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be
first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that
female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have
already attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or timid or
provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching
on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for
everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which
money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with
the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess
of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true
that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual
breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into
conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic
feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. The
very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more
into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other
for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral
weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the
male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he
always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always
thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor
districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their
husbands home, simple minded "social workers" always imagine that every
husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It
never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser
conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries
to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the
teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money
that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time
that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They
will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the
ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted
to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick.
But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the
real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality
of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but
there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and
where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to
crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another
coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound
of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of
masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about
the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought
plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the
Public House--that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to
prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of
waste. In the upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that makes
no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and
low, the woman's objection to the Public House is perfectly definite and
rational, it is that the Public House wastes the energies that could be
used on the private house.

As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is about
feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed
and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners
nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity,
and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are
many very polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either
fascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of
dignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily
be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual
isolation; the same that makes women religious. They do not like being
melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we
have remarked in the club conversation would be common impertinence in
a case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her
grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between
the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and
sincere answer "Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a
comrade you would turn me out of the house." The only certain rule on
this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. "Women"
is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter; but
it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and
hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of women is
only a harem broken loose.

I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women
I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
individually; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests
them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own
sex, but because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity
and separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea
of dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity.

*****




V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham and what is
real. But it is worth while to remember that with unfamiliar things
we often mistake what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very
young man may think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally
true that a child yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig.
Just because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems to be
unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed the same thing in
the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamiliar things, tropic
birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of
a toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers,
like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not
unconnected with divinity; but anyhow it is the truth that when we
see things for the first time we feel instantly that they are fictive
creations; we feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly
used to them and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and
objectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is
the design in Nature that strikes us first; the sense of the crosses and
confusions in that design only comes afterwards through experience and
an almost eerie monotony. If a man saw the stars abruptly by accident he
would think them as festive and as artificial as a firework. We talk of
the folly of painting the lily; but if we saw the lily without warning
we should think that it was painted. We talk of the devil not being
so black as he is painted; but that very phrase is a testimony to the
kinship between what is called vivid and what is called artificial. If
the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he would say that
grass was not as green as it was painted; that sky was not as blue as it
was painted. If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look
like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks
like a bright-colored toy. And so they are--both of them, I mean.

But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about
all strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to
history, that we should not be surprised if things wrought in fashions
remote from ours seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine
times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest.
You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille or of the
powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century, but all these phrases
are very superficial. There never was an artificial epoch. There never
was an age of reason. Men were always men and women women: and their two
generous appetites always were the expression of passion and the
telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of
expression, just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint
in our coarsest slum sketch or our most naked pathological play. But
men have never talked about anything but important things; and the next
force in femininity which we have to consider can be considered best
perhaps in some dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality.

The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in
externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In
modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of
deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive.
It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. Its
fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice;
as in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with
the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility
that concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride
that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people did
not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same
applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions; they were
freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as
she is painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched.

But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and
franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment
with a certain element which is very common in the decoration and
literature of that age and of the two centuries preceding it. It is
necessary to mention it in such a connection because it is exactly one
of those things that look as superficial as powder, and are really as
rooted as hair.

In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach
against woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes
that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom
to snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterant
phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold
wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the
coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all
the realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetually
represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the
floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoning
the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what
they call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer
to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would
agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship,
courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being
unemotional.

There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of
a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation
there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the
female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and
at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality
in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost
immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant
of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live
in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we
will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever
else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers
have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is
at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here
chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of
the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is
highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for
emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an "advanced"
woman to claim the right to wear trousers; a right about as grotesque as
the right to wear a false nose. Whether female liberty is much advanced
by the act of wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish
women might offer some information on the point. But if the western
woman walks about (as it were) trailing the curtains of the harem
with her, it is quite certain that the woven mansion is meant for
a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison. It is quite
certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it
can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately
dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would appear
covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as
judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes
of female dignity The whole world is under petticoat government; for
even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.


*****




VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE

We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two
pillars of civilization; we say also that she could do neither, but for
her position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universality
on a small scale. The first element is thrift; not the destructive
thrift of the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant; the second
element is dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personality
and privacy. Now I know the question that will be abruptly and
automatically asked by all that know the dull tricks and turns of the
modern sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to argue
about whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable in woman
or whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history and
education. Now I do not propose to discuss whether woman could now be
educated out of her habits touching thrift and dignity; and that for two
excellent reasons. First it is a question which cannot conceivably ever
find any answer: that is why modern people are so fond of it. From the
nature of the case it is obviously impossible to decide whether any of
the peculiarities of civilized man have been strictly necessary to his
civilization. It is not self-evident (for instance), that even the habit
of standing upright was the only path of human progress. There might
have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city gentleman put on
four boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might have been
a reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to the office on his
stomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not have
developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is
walks upright; and that woman is something almost more upright than
uprightness.

And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women
(nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble
lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second
reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these
peculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them; nor does
she. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which
mankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and the
art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the
ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those
formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded
in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage
countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated
their women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons
barbaric; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these
people's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as
ours. Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across
an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is
playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of
creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might
see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because
women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are
at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be
in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work
because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the
woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. I
do not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have
too little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it
is untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface
science, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find
all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects
some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from
him. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival of
Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over
the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever were
married by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still.

It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift
and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness,
the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine
companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to
crush it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many
a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is
reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money.
The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be
strictly understood that the king has captured the honey in some heroic
wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carvings and in
crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age, in every land, in every tribe
and village, has been waged the great sexual war between the Private
House and the Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval
English poems, divided into sections such as "Religious Carols,"
"Drinking Songs," and so on; and the section headed, "Poems of Domestic
Life" consisted entirely (literally, entirely) of the complaints
of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the English was
archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as those which
I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea, protests on
behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests against the nervous
impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say,
is the quarrel; it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the aim of
all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.

*****




VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN

But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance,
this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two
sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public
surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the
man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is
really more important than the private house; that politics are not
(as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are
a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the
talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable;
that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence,
surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used
to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all
pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party
politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning
that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly
imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she
may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters
had so thoughtlessly scorned.

Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males,
like females, in the course of that old fight between the public and
private house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling
that they must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that
Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed
our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must
have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must
have a pipe in the drawing room. In both cases the idea was the same.
"It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there
is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely
necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary
to the country except that the men should be men and the women women.
We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we
thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women
have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed
when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes;
the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a
pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose
in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but
we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected
that they might leave us a little more margin for our nonsense; we never
expected that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am
all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know whether to be
relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture
for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and
candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate
and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken
us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and
collect our wits about what she is really saying.

As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;
these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the
modern women. This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of very
little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic
modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference
is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might
be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any
minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in
this state of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for the
moment; and we are bound to take the prominent minority, merely
because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the
thousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who
have hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself
is not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere of
practical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that these
particular women want a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. If
we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a very
vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not
prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere
fact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement,
it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut of
the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of
thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this
odd business called voting.

*****




VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS

Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and
all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious
than to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and
punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were
always regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliation
of mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was
never anything but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The
doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece
of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very
pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so
much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not
put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly
institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were
never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary
evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern
business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very
horrible; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic
regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern
business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:
"It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?" It
is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the
question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. It
is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may
reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot.
The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savor
of science, a method which it calls "the third degree." This is simply
the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly
close to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and
scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns
people alive in broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But
though some punishments are more inhuman than others there is no such
thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in
any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even
mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating
one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always
felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the
jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but
with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
weapon. But the executioner was always masked.

This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say
that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the
foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on
force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of
justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal,
evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his
tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever
reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the
coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the
use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since
all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that.
It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
of humanity is kept out of it.

All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds
of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective
kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of
aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental
virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of
aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as
despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created
the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With
the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or
chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned.
We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankind
has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic
field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The
abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked
by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man
is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning of
democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables
and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high
responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to
be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a
republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.

*****




IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS

When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us
a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does
keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out of the collective act
of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob. The human tradition does
say that, if twenty men hang a man from a tree or lamp-post, they
shall be twenty men and not women. Now I do not think any reasonable
Suffragist will deny that exclusion from this function, to say the least
of it, might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto. No
candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea of
having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be
connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman, a
hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer (as is
so often answered to this contention) that in modern civilization women
would not really be required to capture, to sentence, or to slay; that
all this is done indirectly, that specialists kill our criminals as they
kill our cattle. To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote,
but to urge its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way
of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we are
all jailers, so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners. If it is
really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber or a tyrant, it ought to
be no softening of the situation that the woman does not feel as if she
were doing the thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that
men can only associate on paper who could once associate in the street;
it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction. It
is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause it is
a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact. If votes for
women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant
to mean. A woman can make a cross on a paper as well as a man; a child
could do it as well as a woman; and a chimpanzee after a few lessons
could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it merely
as making a cross on paper; everyone ought to regard it as what it
ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow,
signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully
the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing
them.

On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly
unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in
broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting
heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the
manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions
there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory
and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in
actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as
well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I
do not like the public executioner being turned into the private
executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of
business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum
and the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the
social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of
the bowstring.

Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order
to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else
from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the
fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make
the situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving the
suffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or in
other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No
suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragists
will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties is
an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may
have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in
these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as
well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I
noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the
same way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman,
like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood.

*****




X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY

But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget
that there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly,
not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a
wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine
and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not
be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the
remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power
of dogma and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it
it would have been simply true; a woman does treat each person as a
peculiar person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient
and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs
in one's life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of
having no rules for one's mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all
those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those
of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking
for being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This
unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes
motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever
called it fatherwit.

Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy
when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of
the world--the private house--it does work well. We modern men are
perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties
is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the
benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale;
in short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is
called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant. And they have
always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than
ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not governed at
all. "Whenever you have a real difficulty," they say, "when a boy is
bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody,
or a wicked man won't marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and
British Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a
slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight."
So, at least, rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the
recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher
anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.

It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man
must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic
alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth.
All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a
reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always
coming from a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all
places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly
as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect
called Materialists declared for a short time that there was no
soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is
now maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way
the unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School has
produced, not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonable
neglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk to-day one would
fancy that every important human function must be organized and avenged
by law; that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to the
foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal
and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross
is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and
independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters
a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge
fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex
and childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always
outside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of
killing people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them
born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is
an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with
providing for the old age of people who have never been infants. I will
not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists have
in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to control
marriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for this
inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with
later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections:
ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people who
swear they never meant it--nor anything else. But if it be conceded
(by a breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage to
remain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it to
remain free from everything. If man does not control the marriage market
by law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that man
does not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does control
it by sympathy and prejudice. There was until lately a law forbidding
a man to marry his deceased wife's sister; yet the thing happened
constantly. There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife's scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did not
happen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the
authority of women; and women are generally conservative where classes
are concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by
which ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)
to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procure
those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de
lis, the turnkey's chains or the hangman's halter. You need not strangle
a man if you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective and
final than the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man in
when you can lock him out.

The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call
infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can
ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male
child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring
at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of
the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy;
but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of
femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house;
and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being
born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but
nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong
to such a monster as man that was born of a man.

*****




XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES

But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil
myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be about
the child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother. In this
place I have systematically insisted on the large part of life that is
governed, not by man with his vote, but by woman with her voice, or more
often, with her horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be added.
In a sprawling and explanatory style has been traced out the idea
that government is ultimately coercion, that coercion must mean cold
definitions as well as cruel consequences, and that therefore there
is something to be said for the old human habit of keeping one-half of
humanity out of so harsh and dirty a business. But the case is stronger
still.

Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think Queen
Victoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she had
never signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stood
out as more solid and splendid in history if she had not earned (among
those who happen to know her history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. I
think, in short, that the great historic woman is more herself when she
is persuasive rather than coercive. But I feel all mankind behind
me when I say that if a woman has this power it should be despotic
power--not democratic power. There is a much stronger historic argument
for giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a vote. She might
have a crown, or at least a coronet, like so many of her supporters;
for these old powers are purely personal and therefore female. Miss
Pankhurst as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria, and she
certainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess, but the
point is that, good or bad, she would be irresponsible--she would not be
governed by a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing:
by a rule and by a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in
education and domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appears
to be necessary to her. She is never responsible until she is
irresponsible. In case this sounds like an idle contradiction, I
confidently appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despotic
or oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely one
democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights The reason is very
simple: that something female is endangered much more by the violence
of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand
Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie, a Witches Sabbath. For in
all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible
in a herd.

*****




XII. THE MODERN SLAVE

Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it is
topical and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a political
proposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with my
view of woman as universalist and autocrat in a limited area; and still
thinking that she would be none the worse for a ballot paper. The real
question is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur is
admitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it much
more than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women,
even in the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there be
something against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing,
there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame women
being governed. And there are elements in human psychology that make
this situation particularly poignant or ignominous. The ugly exactitudes
of business, the bells and clocks the fixed hours and rigid departments,
were all meant for the male: who, as a rule, can only do one thing and
can only with the greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If clerks
do not try to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system breaks
down. It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting
the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously
and doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of their
slavery. It is generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very much
by one's employers. And if the evasive clerks have a look of being
blackguards, the earnest ladies are often something very like blacklegs.
But the more immediate point is that the modern working woman bears a
double burden, for she endures both the grinding officialism of the
new office and the distracting scrupulosity of the old home. Few men
understand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty, which
generally means one duty; but conscientiousness is the duty of the
universalist. It is limited by no work days or holidays; it is a
lawless, limitless, devouring decorum. If women are to be subjected to
the dull rule of commerce, we must find some way of emancipating them
from the wild rule of conscience. But I rather fancy you will find it
easier to leave the conscience and knock off the commerce. As it is, the
modern clerk or secretary exhausts herself to put one thing straight in
the ledger and then goes home to put everything straight in the house.

This condition (described by some as emancipated) is at least the
reverse of my ideal. I would give woman, not more rights, but more
privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously
prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in
which she can be free. And with that we come to the last point of all;
the point at which we can perceive the needs of women, like the rights
of men, stopped and falsified by something which it is the object of
this book to expose.

The Feminist (which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief feminine
characteristics) has heard my loose monologue, bursting all the time
with one pent-up protest. At this point he will break out and say, "But
what are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is
the modern family with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected
everywhere; female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and
supplied. What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer
the old human and housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden of
Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have trades unions.
Since women work in factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts. If
they are unmarried they must be commercial; if they are commercial they
must be political. We must have new rules for a new world--even if it
be not a better one." I said to a Feminist once: "The question is not
whether women are good enough for votes: it is whether votes are good
enough for women." He only answered: "Ah, you go and say that to the
women chain-makers on Cradley Heath."

Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of
Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must
grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some
time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost
our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal,
we must forget it. "There are numbers of excellent people who do not
think votes unfeminine; and there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful
modern industry who do not think factories unfeminine." But if these
things are unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each
other. I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must have
unwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs. Industrial soot and
political printer's ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Most
of the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under
shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the
tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference.

Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower with
many windows, the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the
specialists, go forth; whether we can preserve the tradition of a
central thing which is even more human than democracy and even
more practical than politics; whether, in word, it is possible to
re-establish the family, freed from the filthy cynicism and cruelty of
the commercial epoch, I shall discuss in the last section of this book.
But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley
Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged
in a very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They
are making chains.




PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD




I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is
needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer
and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial
standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was
not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little
obvious; for an obvious joke is only a successful joke; it is only the
unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real
reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was this: that one
simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or
could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that
he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He admitted
that this was true, and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of
the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding
that "if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him." That is
the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell.

The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether
some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about
whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic
every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good
or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity,
because the person doing it has been dedicated from eternity, and is
merely filling up his time until the crack of doom. The difference
is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals; the
difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life
is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is
confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years
and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession)
they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the
vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is
the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the
ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things
clear.

Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in
educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a
singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined
with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity.
These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more
liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an
intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and
his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death,
they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is
born.

In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of
to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal.
All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief,
because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is
very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current
modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a
life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as
much to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from
God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous
existences. But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those
very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology always
imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of
argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from
parents; and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our
ignorance.

*****




II. THE TRIBAL TERROR

Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
as old wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained
to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of
blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the
child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as
well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two
legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question
of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached
"qualities," like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of
the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it
will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow
beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green,
a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live
in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the "Edinburgh Review"; a
man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire
sky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If
you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the
blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing
in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green
is not a mental combination, like addition; it is a physical result
like birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands
parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents,
we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force
works in a different way; each time the constituent colors combine into
a different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from
her mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his
father's strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must
remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists
and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary
debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about
it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.

On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that
is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases,
say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character
as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps
sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no
cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will
have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with
heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of
dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; but
not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams
and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but
a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself
a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of
tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and
the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized
freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic
novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and
superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written.
But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not
irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that
make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take
it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in
the madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", a
gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The
students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare
back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice
no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical
inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except
for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the
oppression of the poor.

*****




III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with
the born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not
eugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome
terminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity but of
environment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging
at length that environment also is open to some of the objections and
hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely
suggest in passing that even about the effect of environment modern
people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings
will mold a man is always mixed up with the totally different idea that
they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case,
landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is
quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving
pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously
mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of
these or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here
lacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book; on the
contrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and the
atlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit
mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It
may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did the
Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn't? Personally I should
think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as
positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild
skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of
it.

I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters
admittedly within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast,
and drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working
reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is,
for all practical purposes, environment; or, to use the older word,
education. When all such deductions are made, education is at least
a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a
department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the
barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly
make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy. But we
shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular
definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine; but not
of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver
magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it
will not always be the nightmare's.

*****




IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by
the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened
of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
irritation against "dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess of
such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up
a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the
word "education" will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as
the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought
it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference
between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion." The time will come when
somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian
Education and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence and
position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also
for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather
alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do
not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to
be the Latin for faith.

Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and
even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and
indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I
was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether
hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was
inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this
recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively
late in life that I saw the main fact about it.

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.
It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word
like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may
be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with
definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an
object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views
or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial
facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities;
but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are
education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior
or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.
Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the
General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong;
in practice probably more educational. It is giving something--perhaps
poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can
be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored
in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a
little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast,
to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to
wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would
teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme
and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would
abolish the boy's breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine;
Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford
would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically
denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of
these advanced views, not even Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the
lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is
not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus
Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education
plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between
these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they
share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of
authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from
education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated
from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply
a teacher who is not teaching.

*****




V. AN EVIL CRY

The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people
something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think
it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious
hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and
freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can
create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other
general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good
until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in the
matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of
environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing
but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of
the children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into
the heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents,
or, indeed, anywhere else.

There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of
the confusion. I mean the cry, "Save the children." It is, of course,
part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which
is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic.
This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other
schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in
a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men
do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a
condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This
cry of "Save the children" has in it the hateful implication that it is
impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of
grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private
houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work;
called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers
if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to
maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the
children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save
ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot
free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is
only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if
it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of
all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save
children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching
them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to
others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?

I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does
not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not
from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy.
Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the
dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish
soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean
collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this
imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn.
The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long
division; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk
pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have
heard the disgraceful suggestion that "educator," if applied to a Roman
schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but
only meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain
that I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as
sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the
baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature
a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing
these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or
it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the
whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the
child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel
pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and
watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out
of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the
matter.

*****




VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE

But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say)
that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be
destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming
a child's mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
for he hates something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned
educere and the drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that
even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or
scholastic authority. The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and
coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses.
He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be
developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of
forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a
shy talent for torture. The only result of all this pompous and
precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the
instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is
poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this
intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative.
It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the
fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.
In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with
life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question
whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he
puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like
a dentist.

The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take
his mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make
his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative
authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call
civilization wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at
root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it
is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw
and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral
responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild
step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth
of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an
unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough
that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this
high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only
excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so
half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough
to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the
decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it
to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean
that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should
do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State,
being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments
to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through
the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the
marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught
to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put
first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to
a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four
actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than
the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having
the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea;
for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn
something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere
fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes
that men who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we all
use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I could
use it as meaning education by the people.

The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do
not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school
masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The old
village schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him
out into the playground to play anything he liked; or at nothing, if he
liked that better. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him into
the playground and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is so
good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as
well as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of exercise is
self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot
really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this
is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the
free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned
educationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless
creature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning
all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and its
replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has not
been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less
beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyed
images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically
issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard of
modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I
remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soiree
or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)
against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for
blood. But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse.
I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation,
are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments
were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a country
like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment
and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer
popular tradition--such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted
by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in
practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a
few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) was
sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having picked
up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely
on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against
this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a little
unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who
understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden
spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To
sum it up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might have
understood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and
unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.

*****




VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is
as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with
authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that
they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that
the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would
be simply this: "If your father is a Methodist you must not play with
soldiers on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play
with them even on week days." All educationists are utterly dogmatic and
authoritarian. You cannot have free education; for if you left a child
free you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction
or difference between the most hide-bound conventionalists and the most
brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between the
heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt?
Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy
way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to his
fancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable republican
formula) "Everybody does it." The conventional authority does claim some
popular mandate; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan who
forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion;
not merely his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a
tyrannical democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one that
could do and has done the two ultimate virile things--fight and appeal
to God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of
the House of Lords; it does not pretend to be representative. These
innovators are always talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy.
I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are; but I am
sure she is more humble.

But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again
attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be
an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity.
Light (he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted
existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to
perceive and expand; in short, enlightenment should be shed over
darkest London. Now here is just the trouble; that, in so far as this
is involved, there is no darkest London. London is not dark at all; not
even at night. We have said that if education is a solid substance, then
there is none of it. We may now say that if education is an abstract
expansion there is no lack of it. There is far too much of it. In fact,
there is nothing else.

There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only
most people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the first
schools, but among the last schools to be established; and London had
been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error
is a highly practical one. It is persistently assumed that unless
a child is civilized by the established schools, he must remain a
barbarian. I wish he did. Every child in London becomes a highly
civilized person. But here are so many different civilizations, most of
them born tired. Anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor is
not so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that the young
are already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy would
be educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated.
The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest
complexity as solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerable
idealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor;
but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge. Real
educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of culture. The
truant is being taught all day. If the children do not look at the large
letters in the spelling-book, they need only walk outside and look at
the large letters on the poster. If they do not care for the colored
maps provided by the school, they can gape at the colored maps provided
by the Daily Mail. If they tire of electricity, they can take to
electric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink. If
they will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they may work
to get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about law
and citizenship to please the teacher, they learn enough about them to
avoid the policeman. If they will not learn history forwards from the
right end in the history books, they will learn it backwards from the
wrong end in the party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of the whole
affair: that the London poor, a particularly quick-witted and civilized
class, learn everything tail foremost, learn even what is right in the
way of what is wrong. They do not see the first principles of law in a
law book; they only see its last results in the police news. They do not
see the truths of politics in a general survey. They only see the lies
of politics, at a General Election.

But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing to do with
being uneducated. So far from being without guidance, they are guided
constantly, earnestly, excitedly; only guided wrong. The poor are not
at all neglected, they are merely oppressed; nay, rather they are
persecuted. There are no people in London who are not appealed to by the
rich; the appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout
from every hustings. For it should always be remembered that the queer,
abrupt ugliness of our streets and costumes are not the creation of
democracy, but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the
Embankment being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who
disfigure the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House
of Lords. The peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town
streets hideous. This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the
poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered
with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a
shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are
shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the
new medicines and new theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and
brass of modern times--it is against these that the national school must
bear up if it can. I will not question that our elementary education is
better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I
do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys. But
there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London school ought not merely
to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and
darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than
a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than
the tavern. The school, in fact, has the responsibility of universal
rivalry. We need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must
conquer darkness. But here we demand a light that can conquer light.

*****




VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW

I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the
case of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking
about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever
the poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted,
piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be
monochrome; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a
matter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of
color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him
now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest; now black
like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a
field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understand
the irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "that
bluer blue, that greener green." There is no blue much bluer than
Reckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no more
emphatic yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos
of color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not
exactly intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does not
lie in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies in
the fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection, on the
wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors he
lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with
Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to
Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to
the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very
large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the
iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury;
a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special
irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to
such very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent
pleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who
should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the
taste of mustard altogether.

Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings
with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded
their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than
a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold.
The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more
hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient
artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the
lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that
colors really were significant and precious things, like jewels and
talismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was always
authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was
silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these
colors were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hot
and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching
color which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to
give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It
is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort
of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a
green field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away gold
leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or
crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood.
That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they
have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy
business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentieth
century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the
twelfth.

The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the
merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time
of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with
a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real
distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be
purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple
lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against
white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real difference
is this: that the brown earth-color of the monk's coat was instinctively
chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the
clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say
that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as
the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a
triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not
intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy;
far from it. White ermine was meant to express moral purity; white
waistcoats were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold
watch chains do not. The point is not that we have lost the material
hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best
advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint box and
are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children who have
mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the paper of
instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.

Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and
especially with our modern education. It is the same with ethical
education, economic education, every sort of education. The growing
London child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers who
will teach him that geography means painting the map red; that economics
means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the peculiarly
un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning these
examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar
crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mention
them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the
situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;
but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative
no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current
defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against
the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them;
because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the
House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave like
one.

*****




IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS

Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main
conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion,
but very decidedly of selection--and rejection. The educationist must
find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it
must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must
be orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide
precisely between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas
and of Swedenborg; but he still has to choose between the faith of
Kipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of General
Booth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child shall
be brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You
have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly civilized
question, of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by
Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary
with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie
S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he shall end up in the
mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose
League. They say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it, but
at least the sects are increasing; and education must now be sectarian
education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng of
theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering
voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching
battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it
must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.

I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and
vast and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens
there is in England something to compare it with. There is an
institution, or class of institutions, which began with the same popular
object, which has since followed a much narrower object, but which had
the great advantage that it did follow some object, unlike our modern
elementary schools.

In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive,
or, as silly people say, "optimistic." I should set my face, that is,
against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist.
Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the
poor man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to
drink; for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink
that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like
some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public
schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we
should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working,
but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to
open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of
property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly
universal and property decently proper.

In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going
back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It
would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It
is incontrovertibly true that to mediaevalize the public schools would
be to democratize the public schools. Parliament did once really mean
(as its name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk.
It is only lately that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of
the Speaker, has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from
talking. The poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the
ancient church all right; and if the common man in the past had a grave
respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes
had some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of
innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions. Certainly
I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out
of the list; a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal
reasons for being friendly and grateful: I mean the great Tudor
foundations, the public schools of England. They have been praised for a
great many things, mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and
their children. And yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the
one really convincing reason.

*****




X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used
with reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose,
as of a wheel going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing
adding to the general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery.
It is one thing to say that Smith's flying machine is a failure, and
quite another to say that Smith has failed to make a flying machine.
Now this is very broadly the difference between the old English public
schools and the new democratic schools. Perhaps the old public schools
are (as I personally think they are) ultimately weakening the country
rather than strengthening it, and are therefore, in that ultimate sense,
inefficient. But there is such a thing as being efficiently inefficient.
You can make your flying ship so that it flies, even if you also make
it so that it kills you. Now the public school system may not work
satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve what we
want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools do
not in that sense achieve anything at all. It is very difficult to point
to any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal
for which popular education has been working, in the sense that the
fresh-faced, foolish boy in "Etons" does embody the ideal for which the
headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working. The aristocratic
educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen, and
they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular
educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning
out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the
citizens? I know that the boy in "Etons" is stiff with a rather silly
and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not
fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that
is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh
and innocent hauteur, "I am an English gentleman." I cannot so easily
picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering,
"Romanus civis sum." Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are
teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters
are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted
that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being
learned.

It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage
to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never
fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real
sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange
inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for,
but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much
longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he
attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he
thought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be
unattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are
not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten
or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed so
business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a
fixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea
of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and
minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality
of the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator of
social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail,
all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his
concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; he
shall have nothing but his heart's desire.

Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say
that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same
sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics.
At least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted
and fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic
education. Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout
the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive
and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the
central and supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools
did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they
got something; instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and
wanting everything and getting nothing.

The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There
is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern
people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always
attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public
schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted
themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can
understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those
thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is
the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be
considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has
a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound
impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been
killed. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch,
or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to
people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty.
Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all
the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical
party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat
is Greek?

A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking
the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and
brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of
the English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the
general lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These
schools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not
merely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result
of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even
endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden
in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our present
plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old
aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight
who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also
have the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage,
then it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as
that they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on the
whole, support; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. The
one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if
a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Now
it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is
connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at
one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian
quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned
because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that
cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all,
thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid
or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him
spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that perpetual
praise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) that
this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the public
schools. English public school life is extremely like English public
life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it specially in
this, that things are either very open, common and conventional, or else
are very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public schools, just as
there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name.
But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common
consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio
of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly
business always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning
of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this
stage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are
always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy.

As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public
schools, I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a
double implication. To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if
aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy and the
English public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families
or flawless blood, England has not got aristocracy, and the public
schools systematically destroy it. In these circles real aristocracy,
like real democracy, has become bad form. A modern fashionable host
dare not praise his ancestry; it would so often be an insult to half the
other oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he has
not the moral courage to wear his uniform; still less has he the moral
courage to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague
hotch-potch of nice and nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers
to anyone else's father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own.
That is the only difference, the rest is the public-school manner. But
Eton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because they consist so largely
of parvenues. The public school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats,
like an asylum, a place where they go in and never come out. It is a
factory for aristocrats; they come out without ever having perceptibly
gone in. The poor little private schools, in their old-world,
sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, "For the Sons of
Gentlemen only." If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be
inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they
can do the trick.

*****




XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

These are the false accusations; the accusation of classicism, the
accusation of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on
perfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants,
they are not torturers; and they are not, in the vast majority of
cases, people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any
ancestry to be proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good
tempered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense;
they are generally kind to animals, generally civil to servants, and to
anyone in any sense their equal, the jolliest companions on earth. Is
there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we all
feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding network of
newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard to
trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phrases, the faults in this
great English achievement.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public
school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of
telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies
in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to
tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment.
Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell
lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the
obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a
lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize
to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without
ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the
truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the
truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about
whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can
be used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game." He takes
sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to
have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with
which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or
Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion
of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that
Charles I is a matter of what did happen--or did not. He is Liberal or
Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the
boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a
notion that politics should deal with the known. If anyone really
doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely
discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think
would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it
has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out
of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its
conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people
particularly fond of truth?

The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a
man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself
is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that
all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official
explanation, that he said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth.
When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians
on their reputed indifference to veracity, to actuality and intellectual
honor. A great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals
deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed in a
position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I
should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give
it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a
politician who might have belonged to either party. Being such a person,
he must again and again, at every twist and turn of party strategy,
either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself. I do not know
the East; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to believe that
when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere. I only say
it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was
falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English
Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity. The
public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable;
but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.

This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the
English political system, and to some extent in the English
character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of
superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through
low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school
superstitions that I have here only space for one of them, which may be
called the superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared by
the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school
aristocrats in so many respects: in their care about club rules and
traditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people,
and above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worst
interests of their country. Now the old human common sense about washing
is that it is a great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid
thing, like wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink
water; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing
being a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can afford it
more than poor people, and as long as this was recognized all was
well; and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poor
people, as they might offer any other agreeable thing--a drink or a
donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the
nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off)
the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and
therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do.
And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like
the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school
tradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it
is pleasant. Baths are represented as a part of the decay of the Roman
Empire; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and
rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished public
school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who,
in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon
themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral
purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is
clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can
afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did
not know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to
captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business
to clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks
above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck
cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath.

There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the
pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like
soap, is an admirable thing, but, like soap, it is an agreeable thing.
And it does not sum up all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the
game in a world where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the
work. By all means let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has
not lost his natural love of pleasure, as against the blase, and
unchildlike. But when one has the childlike joy it is best to have also
the childlike unconsciousness; and I do not think we should have special
affection for the little boy who ever lastingly explained that it was
his duty to play Hide and Seek and one of his family virtues to be
prominent in Puss in the Corner.

Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards
mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of
cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and
intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious
thing about soap is that it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about
beggars is that they are an inconvenience. The rich would deserve very
little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with
beggars, because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal
directly with beggars; or if not impossible, at least very difficult.
But these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such
charity is difficult. They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground
that such charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity,
"Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny; but
we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over the poor man's
troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory,
workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to."
This is all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get
home, and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their
motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that
beggars are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this
or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as
genuinely difficult as is the case of mendicity. But there is something
quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the
plea that it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to
the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is
really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.

*****




XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS

For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide
us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics
to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is
working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in
this, as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage
over all the other educational schemes of our time. You can pick out a
public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray,
from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt
if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by
undenominational religion and which by secular education. The great
English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really,
in this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and
therefore it has produced a reality.

We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing:
that progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress
is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in
theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why
the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited
person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were
ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for
it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations
that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a
reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform
the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of
armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties
is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon
have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed
by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they
must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they
are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of
reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of
any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of
mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution.
By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the
Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather
told him to stand by one stile. We meet another hoary old lunatic who
says his grandfather told him only to walk along one lane.

I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because
we have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and
strongly shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have no
definite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the
ideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the
ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied
for people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same
wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness
on moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare,
amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the
squabbles about moral and religious training. It would really seem that
so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he
is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore. We have the
same grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of
honor, when we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have the
same great upperclass assumption that things are done best by large
institutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about;
and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible.
As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world does not want piety, but soap--and
Socialism." Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and
Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.

These "healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and
schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied
to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an
impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and
a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into
the lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and
honor means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either into
discouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is a
daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have no
money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of
athletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they did
not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so
much to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great
deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for
the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric
about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class
cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is
expected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more
discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to
be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot
than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he
is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-school
tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the
present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the
poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off
clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's clothes as he
moves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists are
not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers,
when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand
ideas.

*****




XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT

There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The
only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of
the children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony;
and those psychologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very
strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the
traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity,
a thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance,
workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it
is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be
seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also, until the
Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea,
that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long
words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most
jesting about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only
the humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of
the world; they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph,
Stiggins and Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have
adopted a hideous and heathen custom of considering death as too
dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person,
like some private malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great
gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold
of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs
of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it.
The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a
crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important.
In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization;
and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of
the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of
Patroclus.

The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life
of the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all
the greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as
Shakespeare or as garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talks
nearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks
nearly as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man without
historic support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing which
Christ dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking which
Christ specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man of
to-day and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classes
separates the common man who can feel things from the great man who can
express them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man. Now nobody
expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be complete
instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and
tea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be
an educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is
in loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. The
vague politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the
soul and spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable
practice, conveyed to the children of these people at the English public
schools. But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Can
anyone alive even pretend to point out any way in which these special
virtues and traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education of
the poor? I do not wish the coster's irony to appeal as coarsely in the
school as it does in the tap room; but does it appear at all? Is
the child taught to sympathize at all with his father's admirable
cheerfulness and slang? I do not expect the pathetic, eager pietas of
the mother, with her funeral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be
exactly imitated in the educational system; but has it any influence at
all on the educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster accord
it even an instant's consideration or respect? I do not expect the
schoolmaster to hate hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as the
schoolboy's father; but does he hate them at all? Does he sympathize
in the least with the poor man's point of honor against official
institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementary
schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientious
to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and on
principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In
the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but
against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of
the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of
their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high
Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere
pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think
a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must
swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of English cudgels;
and they must get over their prejudice against being fed by the parish,
because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation.

*****




XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION

It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what
I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new
ideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, even
the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask
what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they
asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young
chimney sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong
place. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football; boys
have school colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors; boys go
in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds to
day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford--in
short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches--that is
about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing
at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that,
and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but
plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case
of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless
inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least,
which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet
there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have
not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already
in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there
must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he
wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.

It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would you
prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling
a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar
albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which
I answer, "Emphatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female
education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design,
while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in
point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more
than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was
stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain
she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could
do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only
smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who
were scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much
more weak-minded than the modern duchesses who paint only their own
faces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was the
theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and their
shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expressed
itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, in
a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of the
poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that
the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and
perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may
conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must
not be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female with
her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum
woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are few
perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new
woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it
is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal.
The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of
Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady
talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great
and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a
barrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the
sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their
original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still
bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing,
still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and
her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be
everything in the country.

There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a
flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and
certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features
of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of
life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes
the woman--she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me;
save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering
levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as
run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful
sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human
soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is
that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female,
drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it.
She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining
the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining
the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth
doing, it is worth doing badly.




PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN




I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress
because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need
scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision;
it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious
cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God,
like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth
which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the
French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode
of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution
appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all
local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there
must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did
not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of
jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he
attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short,
the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere
molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that
each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the
tyrant it ought to have. "I know nothing of the rights of men," he said,
"but I know something of the rights of Englishmen." There you have the
essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by
natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond
it, for all the world as if we were the images of God! We are born under
a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves; we live under a
monarchy as niggers live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault if
they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long
before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the
Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution.
Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an
animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel. The last
weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the
eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, "God tempers
the wind to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron evolutionist,
essentially answered, "No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind."
It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or
becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.

The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere
offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage
in the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and
many other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts
of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their
forefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable.
It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and
alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist
him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular
instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and
hunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has
a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and
systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost
solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids
and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells's "Island of
Dr. Moreau." The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs to be
his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms might
be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged; perfumers might have
long, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent; and
professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of one
tasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image
one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when
once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If
some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an
octopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred
trotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis,
that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evil
shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one
nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of
adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far
from the reality.

It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we
should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me,
that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some
of the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent
history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the
future--which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who
live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look
for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite
adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is
not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes
bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as
he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a
charming occupation--for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a
very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless
intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should
study the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merely
took the virtues of man and distributed them quite decoratively and
arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of
industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the
pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that a
lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept the
courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the
worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to
enforce and typify man's morality; they never allowed the ant to upset
it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they
looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a
homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down
at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially to
bow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians.

Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always
carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have
seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies
and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers
and creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science,
and one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwig
striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper
coming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from
Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of
enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something
wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the
half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is
a starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern
works of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear
of the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved
architecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny
Tube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as
if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift
their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit
of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man.

But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers
like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an
ethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book on
bees is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collective
spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which
he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal
morality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various
quarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only for
the evolutionary future of our race, and in the great interest of some
Socialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose,
because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred
evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured
by modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of which
it has been said that "Patriotism is its only religion"; or, in other
words, that it lives only for the Soul of the Hive. When at long
intervals of the centuries Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical,
and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and to
pour them westward like a dark movement of matter, in such cases it
has been very common to compare the invasion to a plague of lice
or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed like
insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism
of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life
and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic
courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the
East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never
before, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant it
as a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and
trace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out
of Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures
hung over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder and
discoloring the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.

In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of
Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the
essential and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an
end in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who like
such biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs
and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose
cognizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual
mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic
chivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity of cats, the affection of
the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point,
however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in
the social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of the
outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and
confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is
finally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become
larger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the
locust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house and
garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way.

*****




II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND

When Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended
or ended, he used a phrase which has caused some confusion; because
it might seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar
things. I wish specially to insist on the fact that mending and ending
are opposite things. You mend a thing because you like it; you end a
thing because you don't. To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance,
disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords
than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do believe in the
family; therefore I would mend the family as I would mend a chair; and
I will never deny for a moment that the modern family is a chair that
wants mending. But here comes in the essential point about the mass of
modern advanced sociologists. Here are two institutions that have always
been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I
believe, disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists
believe in the state, but do not believe in the family; thousands of
Socialists believe more in the family than any Tory. But it is true
to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially
engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and
they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family.
They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother,
and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they
are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With
the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery,
they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere
government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before.
While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially
the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently
advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting
the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble.
Apparently, progress means being moved on--by the police.

The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus:
that Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly
conscious of the line between the kind of things that belong to the
state and the kind of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible
nature; they may force children to go to school before the sun rises,
but they will not try to force the sun to rise; they will not, like
Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline
of the state their lines are confused, and entities melt into each
other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its
nature private and another public, of one thing being necessarily
bond and another free. That is why piece by piece, and quite silently,
personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land has
been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.

I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist
means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because
they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a
battle-ax and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth
and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and,
partly, attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but
it is a shield against another and more nameless enemy--the hostile but
anonymous universe. More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof;
it is a kind of collapsible house. But the vital difference goes far
deeper than this; it branches off into two kingdoms of man's mind, with
a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is a shield
against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the
stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure
pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a
thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in
any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick
in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a sword at his side.
But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is
a convenience, like a door scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A
walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real
explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of
people losing walking sticks. For a walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece
of real personal property; it is missed even when it is not needed. When
my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody
may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he has stood
up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a necessary thing.

If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the
whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men
can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick.
Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings
covering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothing
but nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one
spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is a
frank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me
if they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of confusion
of sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated
suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when
they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of
common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the
fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods
that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses
are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and
function of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one way
of washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is no
taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, "Tompkins likes five
holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes."
Nobody says, "This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now
if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up." The
ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no
means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked.
Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for
the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be
perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common
sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages
fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to
rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high
importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to
them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their
existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly
public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept
communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept
communal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his
ease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they
were the same kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at the
start that he misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three
men singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the
same piano.

*****




III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE

In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and
the obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between
Hudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment
acute. The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown;
the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown
at present there isn't any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the
Socialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he
would preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will try
to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The
Tory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that
do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do
not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them is
the original ideal question, "Do you want to keep the family at all?" If
Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the
natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family.
He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a
preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must
manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does
not mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very
humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who
shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of
independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information
and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more
in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur;
and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the
family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing
up all children as the children of the state--like Oliver Twist. But if
these stern words must be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape
a somewhat severe admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty
sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain,
if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our
essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and
try to equalize property. The overwhelming mass of the English people at
this particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They are
as domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic than the
governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally
meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough
money. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfully
expressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstances
he can only do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is not
magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom
which is well expressed in valuing things rightly and guarding money
sensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard?
The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and
poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains,
is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and
functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman
is out working and the man isn't; and the child is forced by law to
think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's?
No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club
must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If
they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill,
decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old
game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let
them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists
who will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must
"shell out," as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any
Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens
much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death
duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the
distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now
only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save
property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly
as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must
revolutionize the nation.

*****




IV. A LAST INSTANCE

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the
reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the
suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the
quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that
the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not
an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic
industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of
anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls
the woman's work "freedom to live her own life." Gudge wants steady
and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism--to workmen, not to
Gudge--Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms
against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take
arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed
gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washing
to people who can't practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and
cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally
inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy
it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a
prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall
soon gloriously outgrow.

I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious
or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common
man homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in
the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red
goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his
because he has never been in it.

*****




V. CONCLUSION

Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have
said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly
or slowly be broken up, if even the idea of property is to remain
among Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, a
cold administration by quite detached officials, which is called
Collectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is
called Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter solution the finer and
more fully human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebody
for saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turf
tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than
is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this
vista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed
to prove the case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case
against modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this
book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical
fact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still some
who do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plain
parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact.

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern
law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that
all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course,
all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are
common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors
interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular
interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into
such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people
must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean
lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It
never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could
be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing
is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man
(that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to
a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet
Minister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter
of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not
ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the
excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use,
for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument
would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor
people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced
(against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes)
to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of
public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there
may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the
great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has
to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after
the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the
workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting
(literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on
his head, the workingman must allow his little girl's hair, first to be
neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly,
to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl's
hair. But he does not count.

Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the
dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear.
It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants;
it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if
it should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache,
disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to
pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly
dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently
blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler
fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done
with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a
doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's hair may
be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never
seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the
wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least
of it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental
armies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it
is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing
institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man's
head off when he enters it, it is built wrong.

The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to
have conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought
in all our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom
would not be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the
clean, popular customs from which they came. The insult that brought
down the hammer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medical examination.
That which Virginius loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be
praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon, "Let them eat grass,"
might now be represented as the dying cry of an idealistic vegetarian.
Those great scissors of science that would snip off the curls of the
poor little school children are ceaselessly snapping closer and closer
to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts and honors of the
poor. Soon they will be twisting necks to suit clean collars, and
hacking feet to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them that the
body is more than raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man; that all
institutions shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted the
normal flesh and spirit. It is the test of political sanity to keep your
head. It is the test of artistic sanity to keep your hair on.

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all
these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over
again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair.
That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the
pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one
of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age
and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If
landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and
sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter
I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have
long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean
hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have
an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because
she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord;
because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a
redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution
of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the
gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she
shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut
short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be
hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred
image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall;
the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come
rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.




THREE NOTES




I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE

Not wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart
from its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on
points of detail that may possibly be misunderstood.

The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I
dismiss too curtly the contention that all women should have votes,
even if most women do not desire them. It is constantly said in this
connection that males have received the vote (the agricultural laborers
for instance) when only a minority of them were in favor of it. Mr.
Galsworthy, one of the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has
talked this language in the "Nation." Now, broadly, I have only to
answer here, as everywhere in this book, that history is not a toboggan
slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced. If we really
forced General Elections upon free laborers who definitely disliked
General Elections, then it was a thoroughly undemocratic thing to do;
if we are democrats we ought to undo it. We want the will of the people,
not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will
is to make voting more valuable than the democracy it declares.

But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many
voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most
voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless
men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most
stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his
sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care
about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did
not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if
it existed, was merely negative. His indifference to a vote was really
indifference.

But the female sentiment against the franchise, whatever its size, is
positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such
women as are opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as
unfeminine. That is, as insulting certain affirmative traditions to
which they are attached. You may think such a view prejudiced; but
I violently deny that any democrat has a right to override such
prejudices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he would not have
a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they had a
prejudice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted,
democracy is a farce we need scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the
Suffragists have not merely to awaken an indifferent, but to convert a
hostile majority.

*****




II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION

On re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, against
our heathen idolatry of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly be
misread. I hasten to say that I think washing a most important thing to
be taught both to rich and poor. I do not attack the positive but the
relative position of soap. Let it be insisted on even as much as now;
but let other things be insisted on much more. I am even ready to admit
that cleanliness is next to godliness; but the moderns will not even
admit godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their talk about Thomas
Becket and such saints and heroes they make soap more important than
soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. If we resent
this about remote saints and heroes, we should resent it more about the
many saints and heroes of the slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the
world. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth; but the fact remains
that the classes that wash most are those that work least. Concerning
these, the practical course is simple; soap should be urged on them and
advertised as what it is--a luxury. With regard to the poor also the
practical course is not hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we want
to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them
luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then
emphatically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence
them for being dirty.

*****




III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP

I have not dealt with any details touching distributed ownership, or
its possibility in England, for the reason stated in the text. This book
deals with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This
wrong is, I say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back.
Thus the Socialist says that property is already concentrated into
Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the
State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent
and return; the only step forward is the step backward.

But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to
another potential mistake. In speaking of a sweeping redistribution,
I speak of decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the
means. It is not at all too late to restore an approximately rational
state of English possessions without any mere confiscation. A policy of
buying out landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it has already
been adopted in Ireland (notably in Mr. Wyndham's wise and fruitful
Act), would in a very short time release the lower end of the see-saw
and make the whole plank swing more level. The objection to this course
is not at all that it would not do, only that it will not be done. If
we leave things as they are, there will almost certainly be a crash of
confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have to hurry. But if we
start doing it quickly we have still time to do it slowly.

This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge
between these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and
that I dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so
like that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object
to Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it
will leave it so horribly the same.





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Title: Manalive

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: August 3, 2005 [EBook #1718]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANALIVE ***




Electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993 by Jim Henry III
Edited by Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)







                          Manalive

                     by G. K. Chesterton







First published 1912 by Thomas Nelson and Sons

Electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993 by Jim Henry III
Edited by Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)


PLEASE report any typos you may happen to notice, such as misplaced
punctuation and the like, to

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                           Table of Contents


   Part I: The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
      I.   How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
      II.  The Luggage of an Optimist
      III. The Banner of Beacon
      IV.  The Garden of the God
      V.   The Allegorical Practical Joker


  Part II: The Explanations of Innocent Smith
      I.   The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
      II.  The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
      III. The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
      IV.  The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
      V.   How the Great Wind went from Beacon House



                           Part I

                The Enigmas of Innocent Smith



                          Chapter I

                   How the Great Wind Came
                       to Beacon House


A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent
of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea.  In a million holes
and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him
like a blow.  In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered
houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with
some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive,
or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island"
and wrapping him in roaring dark.  But everywhere it bore drama into
undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world.
Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five
dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy;
it was as if she had hanged her five children.  The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent
the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon,
and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures
of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.
Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars,
thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed
them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
that blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh.  It was round
about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished
at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers
and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has
never been able to shake off.  At some stage of those heights a terrace
of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians,
curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding
establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high,
narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.

The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.  The proprietor
of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless
persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both
before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt.
But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece
she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young
but listless folks.  And there were actually five inmates
standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale
broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.

All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with
cold cloud.  Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray
and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.
When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.  The burst of light
released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously;
and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence.
The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.
Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar,
and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.
Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist.
The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against
a wall.  The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly,
they were blown into the house.  Their two frocks, blue and white,
looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale.
Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something
oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long,
leaden and unlifting day.  Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.
It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore
a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous.
On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking;
but she had not married, perhaps because there was always
a crowd of men around her.  She was not fast (though some
might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths
an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra,
or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door.
Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm,
she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose
like the curtain of some long-expected pantomime.

Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic
and practical creatures alive.  She was, indeed, no other than
the strenuous niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay.
But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory
stirred in her that was almost romance--a memory of a dusty volume
of _Punch_ in an aunt's house in infancy:  pictures of crinoline hoops
and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part.
This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly,
and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake.
The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel.  It would
be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork,
it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands.
She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness.
She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it.  People talk
of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible
thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

"It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman in white,
going to the looking-glass.

The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves,
and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon
cloth for tea.

"Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund Hunt,
with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches
had always been safe for an encore.

"Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke, "but I dare say that is
sometimes more important."

Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be a big
wind to blow your head off."

There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull
walls with ruby and gold.

"Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's easier
to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."

"Oh, don't talk such rubbish," said Diana with savage sharpness.

Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour;
but the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men
who stood their ground might also have considered the problem
of hats and heads.  And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
was somewhat typical of them.  The tallest of the three abode
the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge
as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him.
The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles,
and ultimately held it in his hand.  The third had no hat, and,
by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life.
Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women,
for there was much of the three men in this difference.

The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and solidity.
He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with flat
fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor
by the name of Warner.  But if his blondness and blandness seemed
at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool.
If Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money,
he was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms"
had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid
and daring.  In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was
not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire
to analyze with a poker.

The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness.
It was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor
was present; for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house,
but in a professional palace in Harley Street.  This young
man was really the youngest and best-looking of the three.
But he was one of those persons, both male and female,
who seem doomed to be good-looking and insignificant.
Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose
the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown
and red as he stood blushing and blinking against the wind.
He was one of those obvious unnoticeable people:
every one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral,
decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his own,
and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling.
Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the
glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct,
like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.

The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely
sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look
all the leaner.  He had a long ironical face, blue-black hair,
the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue chin of an actor.
An Irishman he was, an actor he was not, except in the old
days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as a matter of fact,
an obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon.  He had
once been hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar;
but (as Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit)
it was mostly at another kind of bar that his friends found him.
Moon, however, did not drink, nor even frequently get drunk;
he simply was a gentleman who liked low company.
This was partly because company is quieter than society:
and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently
he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid did the talking.
Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist her.
He shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and
without ambition--the trick of going about with his mental inferiors.
There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same
boarding-house, a man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused
Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar,
like the owner of a performing monkey.

The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.
One felt one might at last find something lighter than light.
In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their
colours again:  the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold.
One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another,
and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.

"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird,
"have you any friends?"

Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad
beaming face, said,--

"Oh yes, I go out a great deal."

Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant,
who spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young,
as coming out of that brown and even dusty interior.

"Really," answered Inglewood, "I'm afraid I've lost touch with
my old friends.  The greatest friend I ever had was at school,
a fellow named Smith.  It's odd you should mention it, because I
was thinking of him to-day, though I haven't seen him for seven
or eight years.  He was on the science side with me at school--
a clever fellow though queer; and he went up to Oxford when I
went to Germany.  The fact is, it's rather a sad story.
I often asked him to come and see me, and when I heard nothing I
made inquiries, you know.  I was shocked to learn that poor Smith
had gone off his head.  The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course,
some saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that.
About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself.  The telegram,
I'm sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt."

"Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly; "insanity is generally incurable."

"So is sanity," said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary eye.

"Symptoms?" asked the doctor.  "What was this telegram?"

"It's a shame to joke about such things," said Inglewood, in his honest,
embarrassed way; "the telegram was Smith's illness, not Smith.  The actual
words were, `Man found alive with two legs.'"

"Alive with two legs," repeated Michael, frowning.  "Perhaps a version
of alive and kicking?  I don't know much about people out of their senses;
but I suppose they ought to be kicking."

"And people in their senses?" asked Warner, smiling.

"Oh, they ought to be kicked," said Michael with sudden heartiness.

"The message is clearly insane," continued the impenetrable Warner.
"The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type.
Even a baby does not expect to find a man with three legs."

"Three legs," said Michael Moon, "would be very convenient in this wind."

A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them
off their balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden.
Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects could be seen scouring
the wind-scoured sky--straws, sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance,
a disappearing hat.  Its disappearance, however, was not final;
after an interval of minutes they saw it again, much larger and closer,
like a white panama, towering up into the heavens like a balloon,
staggering to and fro for an instant like a stricken kite,
and then settling in the centre of their own lawn as falteringly
as a fallen leaf.

"Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr. Warner shortly.

Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall,
flying after the fluttering panama.  It was a big green umbrella.
After that came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag,
and after that came a figure like a flying wheel of legs,
as in the shield of the Isle of Man.

But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs,
it alighted upon two, like the man in the queer telegram.
It took the form of a large light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes.
He had bright blonde hair that the wind brushed back like a German's,
a flushed eager face like a cherub's, and a prominent pointing nose,
a little like a dog's. His head, however, was by no means cherubic
in the sense of being without a body.  On the contrary, on his vast
shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his head looked oddly
and unnaturally small.  This gave rise to a scientific theory
(which his conduct fully supported) that he was an idiot.

Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward.
His life was full of arrested half gestures of assistance.
And even this prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the wall
like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that small
altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost hat.
He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman's
head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull's.

"Unsportsmanlike!" bellowed the big man.  "Give it fair play,
give it fair play!"  And he came after his own hat quickly
but cautiously, with burning eyes.  The hat had seemed at first
to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn;
but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down
the garden with the devilry of a ~pas de quatre~. The eccentric went
bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech,
of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread:
"Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns...
quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats... old
English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at bay...
mangled hounds... Got him!"

As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky
on his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat,
missed it, and pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass.
The hat rose over him like a bird in triumph.  But its triumph
was premature; for the lunatic, flung forward on his hands,
threw up his boots behind, waved his two legs in the air
like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought again
of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet.
A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end.
The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast,
as by a strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between
them and all objects about them.  But as the large man fell back
in a sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he had been
holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.

While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy,
another short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending
very quick, swallowed in abrupt silence.  The shiny black cylinder
of Dr. Warner's official hat sailed off his head in the long,
smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost cresting a garden
tree was caught in the topmost branches.  Another hat was gone.
Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy
of things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next.
Before they could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter
was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork
with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth
his gasping, mysterious comments.

"Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls nesting
in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers... gone
to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs
to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!"

The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering
wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire.
The green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did
not break with the weight of his big body.  He was up there among the last
tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still talking
to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps.
He might well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football,
swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket.
The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on incident--
a wild world where one thing began before another thing left off.
All three had the first thought.  The tree had been there for the five years
they had known the boarding-house. Each one of them was active and strong.
No one of them had even thought of climbing it.  Beyond that,
Inglewood felt first the mere fact of colour.  The bright brisk leaves,
the bleak blue sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally
of something glowing in his infancy, something akin to a gaudy man
on a golden tree; perhaps it was only painted monkey on a stick.
Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of a humourist, was touched on
a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old, young theatricals with Rosamund,
and was amused to find himself almost quoting Shakespeare--

        "For valour.  Is not love a Hercules,
         Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?"


Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation
that the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward
with rather rattling rapidity.

He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next.
The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs.
It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage,
a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it in every direction,
a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a concertina; nor can it
be said that the obliging gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate
tenderness for its structure when he finally unhooked it from its place.
When he had found it, however, his proceedings were by some counted singular.
He waved it with a loud whoop of triumph, and then immediately appeared
to fall backwards off the tree, to which, however, he remained
attached by his long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his tail.
Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded
to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows.  "Every man a king,"
explained the inverted philosopher, "every hat (consequently) a crown.
But this is a crown out of heaven."

And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away
with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely enough,
to wish for his former decoration in its present state.

"Wrong, wrong!" cried the obliging person hilariously.
"Always wear uniform, even if it's shabby uniform!
Ritualists may always be untidy.  Go to a dance with soot on
your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front. Huntsman wears old coat,
but old pink coat.  Wear a topper, even if it's got no top.
It's the symbol that counts, old cock.  Take your hat,
because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off
by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit curled;
but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile
in the world."

Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed
the shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician,
and fell on his feet among the other men, still talking,
beaming and breathless.

"Why don't they make more games out of wind?" he asked in some excitement.
"Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites?  Why, I thought
of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that tree.
Here's one of them:  you take a lot of pepper--"

"I think," interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness,
"that your games are already sufficiently interesting.
Are you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour,
or a travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim?  How and why do you
display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing trees
in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?"

The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it,
appeared to grow confidential.

"Well, it's a trick of my own," he confessed candidly.
"I do it by having two legs."

Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly,
started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes screwed up
and his high colour slightly heightened.

"Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried with his fresh, almost boyish voice;
and then after an instant's stare, "and yet I'm not sure."

"I have a card, I think," said the unknown, with baffling solemnity--"a card
with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this earth."

He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet
card-case, and as slowly produced a very large card.
Even in the instant of its production, they fancied it was
of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen.
But it was there only for an instant; for as it passed from
his fingers to Arthur's, one or another slipped his hold.
The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away
the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the universe;
and that great western wind shook the whole house and passed.




                         Chapter II

                 The Luggage of an Optimist


We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion
of small ones.  If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could
(I suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
trumpeting upon Primrose Hill.  If a whale could leap from the sea
like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above
Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa.  Such natural energy,
though sublime, might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this
inconvenience attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green.
He was too large for everything, because he was lively as well as large.
By a fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures
are also reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser
parts of London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable
as a kitten.

When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house,
he found him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately)
to the helpless Mrs. Duke.  That fat, faint lady could only
goggle up like a dying fish at the enormous new gentleman,
who politely offered himself as a lodger, with vast gestures
of the wide white hat in one hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag
in the other.  Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more efficient niece
and partner was there to complete the contract; for, indeed,
all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room.
This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.
The visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from
the time he came into the house to the time he left it, he somehow
got the company to gather and even follow (though in derision)
as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.  An hour ago,
and for four years previously, these people had avoided
each other, even when they had really liked each other.
They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search
of particular newspapers or private needlework.  Even now they
all came casually, as with varying interests; but they all came.
There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow;
there was the unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance.
There was Michael Moon offering like a riddle the contrast
of the horsy crudeness of his clothes and the sombre sagacity
of his visage.  He was now joined by his yet more comic crony,
Moses Gould.  Swaggering on short legs with a prosperous
purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs;
but like a dog also in this, that however he danced and
wagged with delight, the two dark eyes on each side of his
protuberant nose glistened gloomily like black buttons.
There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with the fine white hat
framing her square, good-looking face, and still with her native
air of being dressed for some party that never came off.
She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so far as this
narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a protegee.
This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way
notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape
somehow gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked,
appearance which was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich
ruff of the Elizabethan beauties.  Her surname seemed to be Gray,
and Miss Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone
applied to a dependent who has practically become a friend.
She wore a small silver cross on her very business-like
gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who went
to church.  Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke,
studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening
carefully to every idiotic word he said.  As for Mrs. Duke,
she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of listening to him.
She had never really listened to any one in her life; which, some said,
was why she had survived.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest's
concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke
seriously to her any more than she listened seriously to any one.
And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet wider and almost
whirling gestures of explanation with his huge hat and bag,
apologized for having entered by the wall instead of the front door.
He was understood to put it down to an unfortunate family tradition
of neatness and care of his clothes.

"My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,"
he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke.  "She never liked
me to lose my cap at school.  And when a man's been taught
to be tidy and neat it sticks to him."

Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother;
but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.

"You've got a funny idea of neatness," she said, "if it's
jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees.
A man can't very well climb a tree tidily."

"He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael Moon; "I saw him do it."

Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment.
"My dear young lady," he said, "I was tidying the tree.  You don't want
last year's hats there, do you, any more than last year's leaves?
The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind,
I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness
is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants.
You can't tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.
Don't you know that?  Haven't you ever had a spring cleaning?"

"Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly.  "You will find
everything of that sort quite nice."  For the first time she
had heard two words that she could understand.

Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm
of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said
that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked:
and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through
these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his head
against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that the tall
house was much shorter than it used to be.

Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend--or his new friend,
for he did not very clearly know which he was.  The face looked
very like his old schoolfellow's at one second and very unlike
at another.  And when Inglewood broke through his native
politeness so far as to say suddenly, "Is your name Smith?"
he received only the unenlightening reply, "Quite right;
quite right.  Very good.  Excellent!"  Which appeared to Inglewood,
on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting
a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.

Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood
watched the other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all
the impotent attitudes of the male friend.  Mr. Smith unpacked
with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which he climbed
a tree--throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish,
yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round
him on the floor.

As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style
of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still
a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.

"Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy;
not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag
is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then."

Here he stopped, literally for breath--throwing a shirt to the other end
of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it.
Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with
an increasing doubt.

In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday luggage,
the less one could make anything of it.  One peculiarity of it
was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason;
what is secondary with every one else was primary with him.
He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking
assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary,
and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious.
He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained
with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork.
He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages.
He was therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham
claret from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice)
do not drink.  It was only then that he observed that all six
bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints,
and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the three
primary and three secondary colours:  red, blue, and yellow;
green, violet and orange.  There grew upon Inglewood an almost
creepy sense of the real childishness of this creature.
For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be, innocent.
He had the sensualities of innocence:  he loved the stickiness of gum,
and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake.
To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced;
it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window.
He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation;
but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play.
He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party.
He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood,
and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.

As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials
I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had
been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as a formal
Christian name or a moral description he could not remember.
He was just about to venture another question, when there was a knock
at the door, and the short figure of Mr. Gould offered itself,
with the melancholy Moon, standing like his tall crooked shadow,
behind him.  They had drifted up the stairs after the other two
men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.

"Hope there's no intrusion," said the beaming Moses with a glow
of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.

"The truth is," said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy,
"we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable.
Miss Duke is rather--"

"I know," cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
"magnificent, isn't she?  Go close to her--hear military music going by,
like Joan of Arc."

Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has
just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains
one small and forgotten fact.  For he remembered how he had
himself thought of Jeanne d'Arc years ago, when, hardly more
than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long
since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had
crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams.
Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless
human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as
a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type, who would never marry;
to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant;
and to regard his first fancy for her as the small,
dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady's daughter.
And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly,
as if he had heard those distant drums.

"She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural," said Moon,
glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling,
like the conical hood of a dwarf.

"Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr. Gould.

"Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
head inside his Gladstone bag.  "I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
like Gothic.  By the way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
"where does that door lead to?"

"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon, staring up at
a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
"I don't think there's a loft there; and I don't know what else it
could lead to."  Long before he had finished his sentence the man
with the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling,
swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after
a struggle, and clambered through it.  For a moment they saw the two
symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across
it like a whole county upside down.

"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
apparently from some remote pinnacle.  "Come up here;
and bring some of my things to eat and drink.  It's just the spot
for a picnic."

With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
bottles of wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger.
The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture,
like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them
off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out of the window.
They were both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was
not quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman.
Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when
the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky,
and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.
They were both men who had long been unconsciously imprisoned in
the commonplace, though one took it comically, and the other seriously.
They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died.
But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics
and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed
at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.

When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature
forced him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade;
and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green
ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their
backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other.
Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity,
and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom. One definition
occurred to both of them--that he had come out into the light
of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.
The sky above them was full of mythology.  Heaven seemed deep
enough to hold all the gods.  The round of the ether turned
from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it
was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole
had still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were
shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed
falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective.
One of them really had the character of some many-mitred,
many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards,
hurled out of heaven--a sort of false Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan.
All the other clouds had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's
palaces had been flung after him.

And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height
of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tiny trivial
noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below
a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel.  They could also hear
talk out of the garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith
must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents
could be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke
and the full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt.  The air had
that cold kindness that comes after a storm.  Michael Moon drank it in with
as serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret,
which he had emptied almost at a draught.  Inglewood went on eating ginger
very slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.
There was still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them
almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn.
Suddenly there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which
told them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
After the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like laughter.

"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, "have you ever heard that I
am a blackguard?"

"I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it," answered Inglewood,
after an odd pause.  "But I have heard you were--what they
call rather wild."

"If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,"
said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; "I am tame.
I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls.
I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time
every night.  I even drink about the same amount too much.
I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned
women with mauve faces.  I hear the same number of dirty stories--
generally the same dirty stories.  You may assure my friends,
Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization
has thoroughly tamed."

Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly
fall off the roof, for indeed the Irishman's face, always sinister,
was now almost demoniacal.

"Christ confound it!" cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
claret bottle, "this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine
I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I have really enjoyed
for nine years.  I was never wild until just ten minutes ago."
And he sent the bottle whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond
the garden into the road, where, in the profound evening silence,
they could even hear it break and part upon the stones.

"Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, "you mustn't be
so bitter about it.  Everyone has to take the world as he finds it;
of course one often finds it a bit dull--"

"That fellow doesn't," said Michael decisively; "I mean that
fellow Smith.  I have a fancy there's some method in his madness.
It looks as if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking
one step out of the plain road.  Who would have thought of that trapdoor?
Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste quite
nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland.
Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought only to
be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort.  Perhaps Mrs. Duke's
cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.
Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill Whisky--"

"Don't be so rough on yourself," said Inglewood, in serious distress.
"The dullness isn't your fault or the whisky's. Fellows who don't--
fellows like me I mean--have just the same feeling that it's all rather
flat and a failure.  But the world's made like that; it's all survival.
Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and some people are
made to stick quiet, like me.  You can't help your temperament.
I know you're much cleverer than I am; but you can't help having
all the loose ways of a poor literary chap, and I can't help
having all the doubts and helplessness of a small scientific chap,
any more than a fish can help floating or a fern can help curling up.
Humanity, as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists
of quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men."

In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken
by Miss Hunt's musical instrument banging with the abruptness
of artillery into a vulgar but spirited tune.

Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
fashionable coon song:-

        "Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
         Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by."


Inglewood's brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune.
But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light
that Inglewood did not understand.  Many centuries, and many villages
and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood's countrymen
had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first blink that it
was the battle star of Ireland.

"Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the universe,"
went on Inglewood, in a low voice:  "some men are weak and some strong,
and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.
I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything,
for I remembered my own fickleness.  I have formed opinions, but I
haven't the cheek to push them, because I've so often changed them.
That's the upshot, old fellow.  We can't trust ourselves--
and we can't help it."

Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven.  Their gyration made
the dark figure seem yet dizzier.

"Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.

"Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat
more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.

"Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them
the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to
them that they must come down as the "concert" was in full swing,
and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite "Young Lochinvar."

As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled over its
entertaining impedimenta again.  Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery.
He was therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell
on a large well-polished American revolver.

"Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back
from a serpent; "are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal
death out of that machine gun?"

"Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I deal life
out of that," and he went bounding down the stairs.





                         Chapter III

                    The Banner of Beacon


All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
everybody's birthday.  It is the fashion to talk of institutions
as cold and cramping things.  The truth is that when people are in
exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention,
they always must, and they always do, create institutions.
When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay
and vigorous they invariably make rules.  This, which is true of all
the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most
trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp.
We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty
cannot exist till it is declared by authority.  Even the wild
authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it
produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions.
He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not
expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction.
Each person with a hobby found it turning into an institution.
Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera;
Michael's jests and paragraphs into a magazine.  His pipe and her
mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert.
The bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his
own growing importance.  He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and offices,
for they followed each other in wild succession like the topics
of a rambling talker.

Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of
pleasant obstacles.  Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag
reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer.  Nothing could be more shy
and impersonal than poor Arthur's photography.  Yet the preposterous
Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours,
and an indefensible sequence described as "Moral Photography"
began to unroll about the boarding-house. It was only a version of the old
photographer's joke which produces the same figure twice on one plate,
making a man play chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on.
But these plates were more hysterical and ambitious--as, "Miss Hunt
forgets Herself," showing that lady answering her own too
rapturous recognition with a most appalling stare of ignorance;
or "Mr. Moon questions Himself," in which Mr. Moon appeared as one
driven to madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was
conducted with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious waggery.
One highly successful trilogy--representing Inglewood recognizing
Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before Inglewood,
and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella--
Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall,
like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,--

        "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control--
         These three alone will make a man a prig."

                                                -- Tennyson.


Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than
the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke.  But Innocent had somehow
blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went
with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing
that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith
pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously)
that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw
light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again.
He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens,
a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana
actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on
which to exercise the talents of a modiste.  He promptly produced
for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.
And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle
(with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up;
and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one
flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden
in the "Arabian Nights."  A pang too swift to be named pain
or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was
ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering
a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.
At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it)
the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly
in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
liked it.  For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or
inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers
than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
of Moon.  Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody
can understand, and Smith's manners were as courteous as they
were unconventional.  She said he was "a real gentleman," by which she
simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.
She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat,
folded smile for hours and hours, while every one else was talking at once.
At least, the only other exception was Rosamund's companion,
Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort.  Though she
never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.
Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.  Innocent Smith
seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure
of making her talk.  He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed;
if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure,
and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.
But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh
and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring.
Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth,
which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money,
and Diana in the mere guarding of it.  Smith looked at her again and again.
Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way--which was really
the right way.  She had the knack of saying everything with her face:
her silence was a sort of steady applause.

But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's)
one experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier
or more successful than the others, but because out of this
particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to follow.
All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves, and left vacancy;
all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and were finished
like a song.  But the string of solid and startling events--
which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol,
and a marriage licence--were all made primarily possible
by the joke about the High Court of Beacon.

It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon.  He was
in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman.
He used his old useless knowledge as a barrister to talk
entertainingly of a tribunal that was a parody on the pompous
anomalies of English law.  The High Court of Beacon, he declared,
was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution.
It had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna Carta,
and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences,
ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing
and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened in the town of
Market Bosworth.  The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court
of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the intervals
(as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the institution were vested
in Mrs. Duke.  Tossed about among the rest of the company, however,
the High Court did not retain its historical and legal seriousness,
but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail.
If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite
sure it was a rite without which the sittings and findings of the Court
would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a window to remain shut,
he would suddenly remember that none but the third son of the lord
of the manor of Penge had the right to open it.  They even went
to the length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal;
but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel,
and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were admitted
to be in the best tradition of the Court.

But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not more and
more flippant like Michael Moon.  This proposal of a private court of justice,
which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist,
Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an abstract philosopher.
It was by far the best thing they could do, he declared, to claim sovereign
powers even for the individual household.

"You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule
for homes," he cried eagerly to Michael.  "It would be better
if every father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans;
it would be better, because nobody would be killed.
Let's issue a Declaration of Independence from Beacon House.
We could grow enough greens in that garden to support us,
and when the tax-collector comes let's tell him we're self-supporting,
and play on him with the hose....  Well, perhaps, as you say,
we couldn't very well have a hose, as that comes from the main;
but we could sink a well in this chalk, and a lot could be
done with water-jugs....  Let this really be Beacon House.
Let's light a bonfire of independence on the roof, and see house
after house answering it across the valley of the Thames!  Let us begin
the League of the Free Families!  Away with Local Government!  A fig
for Local Patriotism!  Let every house be a sovereign state as this is,
and judge its own children by its own law, as we do by the Court
of Beacon.  Let us cut the painter, and begin to be happy together,
as if we were on a desert island."

"I know that desert island," said Michael Moon; "it only
exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.'  A man feels a strange
desire for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes down
some unexpected cocoa-nut from some undiscovered monkey.
A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet, and at once
an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and shoots out
one of his quills."

"Don't you say a word against the `Swiss Family Robinson,'"
cried Innocent with great warmth.  "It mayn't be
exact science, but it's dead accurate philosophy.
When you're really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want.
When you're really on a desert island, you never find it a desert.
If we were really besieged in this garden, we'd find a hundred
English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.
If we were snowed up in this room, we'd be the better for reading
scores of books in that bookcase that we don't even know are there;
we'd have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall
go to the grave without guessing; we'd find materials for everything--
christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation--
if we didn't decide to be a republic."

"A coronation on `Swiss Family' lines, I suppose," said Michael, laughing.
"Oh, I know you would find everything in that atmosphere.  If we wanted
such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we should
walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom.
If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn.
And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm
would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale
on the premises."

"And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,"
asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion.
"I bet you've never examined the premises!  I bet you've
never been round at the back as I was this morning--
for I found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
There's an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
it's got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's broken,
so it's not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy--" And his
voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy;
then he went on with controversial eagerness:  "You see I
take every challenge as you make it.  I believe every blessed
thing you say couldn't be here has been here all the time.
You say you want a whale washed up for oil.  Why, there's oil
in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don't believe
anybody has touched it or thought of it for years.
And as for your gold crown, we're none of us wealthy here,
but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own
pockets to string round a man's head for half an hour;
or one of Miss Hunt's gold bangles is nearly big enough to--"

The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter.
"All is not gold that glitters," she said, "and besides--"

"What a mistake that is!" cried Innocent Smith,
leaping up in great excitement.  "All is gold that glitters--
especially now we are a Sovereign State.  What's the good
of a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign?
We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning
of the world.  They didn't choose gold because it was rare;
your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.
They chose gold because it was bright--because it was
a hard thing to find, but pretty when you've found it.
You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits;
you can only look at it--and you can look at it out here."

With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open
the doors into the garden.  At the same time also, with one of his
gestures that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were,
he stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn
as if for a dance.

The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier than that
of the day before.  The west was swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort
of sleepy flame lay along the lawn.  The twisted shadows of the one or two
garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as in common daylight,
but like arabesques written in vivid violet ink on some page of Eastern gold.
The sunset was one of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in
which common things by their colours remind us of costly or curious things.
The slates upon the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock,
in every mysterious blend of blue and green.  The red-brown bricks of
the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines.
The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame,
like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather
colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.

"What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it did not glitter?
Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a
black sun at noon?  A black button would do just as well.
Don't you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel?
And will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel
except that it looks like a jewel?  Leave off buying and selling,
and start looking!  Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in
the New Jerusalem.

        "All is gold that glitters--
           Tree and tower of brass;
         Rolls the golden evening air
           Down the golden grass.
         Kick the cry to Jericho,
           How yellow mud is sold;
         All is gold that glitters,
           For the glitter is the gold."


"And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.

"No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared the rockery
with a flying leap.

"Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be sent to an asylum.
Don't you think so?"

"I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or mood,
he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the social
extravagance of the garden.

"I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum," repeated the lady.

The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was
unmistakably sneering.  "No," he said; "I don't think it's
at all necessary."

"What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly.  "Why not?"

"Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly voice.
"Why, didn't you know?"

"What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice;
for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost creepy.
With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine
he looked like the devil in paradise.

"I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh humility.
"Of course we don't talk about it much... but I thought we
all really knew."

"Knew what?"

"Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
sort of house--a house with the tiles loose, shall we say?  Innocent Smith
is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before?
As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery.
Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us.
Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree--that's his bedside manner."

"You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a rage.
"You daren't suggest that I--"

"Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more than the rest of us.
Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still--a notorious sign?
Haven't you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands--
a known mark of mental disease?  I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."

"I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not without agitation.
"I've heard you had some bad habits--"

"All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly calm.
"Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down
in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
YOU went mad about money, because you're an heiress."

"It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously.  "I never was mean about money."

"You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently.
"You thought that other people were.  You thought every man who came near
you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."

"You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white.  "And is this true?"

With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable
when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for
some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow.
"Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true.
An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."

"And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund Hunt,
letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone,
and speaking every word to wound.  "I despise it as I despise
your rank tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling,
and your Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty
little newspaper, and your rotten failure at everything.
I don't care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like
life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action.
You won't frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."

"Victrix causa deae--" said Michael gloomily; and this angered
her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it
to be witty.

"Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful inaccuracy;
"you haven't done much with that either."  And she crossed the garden,
pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.

In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly,
and with a thought-clouded brow.  He was one of those men who are
quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick.  As he came back
out of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke
slipped swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things.
But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique
that he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera.
For Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin
on her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.

"You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen,
and wishing to ignore it.

"There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered the young lady
with her back to him.

"I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low voice,
"that there's no time for waking up."

She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.

"I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly,
"because I think they're drugs.  And yet I fancy all hobbies,
like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too.  Getting under a
black hood, getting into a dark room--getting into a hole anyhow.
Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air.
Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself.
That's the matter with all of us.  We're too busy to wake up."

"Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up to?"

"There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
excitement--"there must be something to wake up to!
All we do is preparations--your cleanliness, and my healthiness,
and Warner's scientific appliances.  We're always preparing
for something--something that never comes off.  I ventilate
the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN
in the house?"

She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes,
and seemed to be searching for some form of words which she
could not find.

Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt,
in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway.
She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of
the most infantile astonishment.

"Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting.  "What am I to do now,
I wonder?  I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's all I can think of doing."

"What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving
forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.

"It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray:
that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her
in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he wants
to go off with her now for a special licence."

Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked
out on the garden, still golden with evening light.
Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and twittering;
but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside
the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow
Gladstone bag on top of it.




                         Chapter IV

                    The Garden of the God


Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance
and utterance of the other girl.

"Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she
doesn't want to marry him."

"But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in exasperation.
"She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be parted from her."

"Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what we can do."

"But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend angrily.
"I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's balmy!
You or somebody MUST stop it!--Mr. Inglewood, you're a man;
go and tell them they simply can't."

"Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said Inglewood,
with a depressed air.  "I have far less right of intervention
than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral
force than she."

"You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund,
the last stays of her formidable temper giving way;
"I think I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.
I think I know some one who will help me more than you do,
at any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man,
and has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the garden,
with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over
the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down
his long blue chin.  The very hardness of his expression pleased her,
after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying
of her other friends.

"I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly.  "I hated you
for being a cynic; but I've been well punished, for I want a cynic
just now.  I've had my fill of sentiment--I'm fed up with it.
The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon--all except the cynics, I think.
That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she--
and she--doesn't seem to mind."

Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,
"I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside.  He swears he'll
take her off now to his aunt's, and go for a special licence.
Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon."

Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand
for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side
of the garden.  "My practical advice to you is this," he said:
"Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get another
one for you and me."

"Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady.
"Do say what you really mean."

"I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,"
said Moon with ponderous precision--"a plain, practical man:
a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight.
He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly
on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.
We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this
very sunlight.  We have had a little nap for five years or so,
but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see
why that cab..."

"Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you mean."

"What a lie!" cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes.
"I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but don't you see that to-night
they won't do?  We've wandered into a world of facts, old girl.
That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door,
are facts.  You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I
was after your money, and didn't really love you.  But if I stood
here now and told you I didn't love you--you wouldn't believe me:
for truth is in this garden to-night."

"Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.

He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face.
"Is my name Moon?" he asked.  "Is your name Hunt?  On my honour,
they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names.
It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name was `Sunrise.' But our
real names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."

"It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;
"one can never go back."

"I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can carry
you on my shoulder."

"But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"
cried the girl earnestly.  "You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,
soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that.
These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they--
they do attract women, I don't deny it.  As you say, we're all
telling the truth to-night. They've attracted poor Mary, for one.
They attract me, Michael.  But the cold fact remains:
imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment--
you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't be
pretty much longer--"

"Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael.  "And pray where in earth
or heaven are there any prudent marriages?  Might as well talk
about prudent suicides.  You and I have dawdled round each other
long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray,
who met last night?  You never know a husband till you marry him.
Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy.  Who the devil are you
that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed.  I, for one,
don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute--
a tower with all the trumpets shouting."

"You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face,
"and do you really want to marry me?"

"My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman.  "What other
occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to
marry you?  What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep?
It's not liberty, Rosamund.  Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland,
you must marry Man--that is Me.  The only third thing is to marry yourself--
yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--
and never satisfactory."

"Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much,
I'll marry you."

"It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing is the only thing.
Can't you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?"

"Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.

The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished;
then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered
shoes out of the Greek fairy tale.  He cleared three yards
and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity;
but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows,
his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead;
he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling.  The events
of that enchanted evening were not at an end.

Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious
thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit
of Rosamund.  It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour,
seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels,
the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor.  No words can express
how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens.
Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of
paper or a sheet of steel.  It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the most
effeminate man can grow a beard.  It is a separate sexual power,
and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character.
But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke
crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.

He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it)
any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent.  He acted
as men do when a theatre catches fire--very differently from how they
would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse.
He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress
was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs
(in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own
conduct except by the protests it evoked.

"Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood--leave me alone; that's not the way to help."

"But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding certainty;
"I can, I can, I can..."

"Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much weaker than me."

"So I am weaker than you," said Arthur, in a voice that went
vibrating through everything, "but not just now."

"Let go my hands!" cried Diana.  "I won't be bullied."

In one element he was much stronger than she--the matter of humour.
This leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying:  "Well, you are mean.
You know quite well you'll bully me all the rest of my life.
You might allow a man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."

It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry,
and for the first time since her childhood Diana was entirely
off her guard.

"Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.

"Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood, springing up
with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors
that led into the garden.

As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
that the house and garden were on a steep height over London.  And yet,
though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:
it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the
turrets of heaven.

Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring
all sorts of details with a senseless delight.  He noticed for
the first time that the railings of the gate beyond the garden
bushes were moulded like little spearheads and painted blue.
He noticed that one of the blue spears was loosened in its place,
and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh.  He thought it
somehow exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing should
be crooked; he thought he should like to know how it happened,
who did it, and how the man was getting on.

When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized
that they were not alone.  Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon,
both of whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment,
were standing together on the lawn.  They were standing in quite
an ordinary manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.

"Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"

"I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive
that it rang out like a complaint.  "It's just like that horrid,
beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy."

"Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana, breathing deeply.
"Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels like fire."

"Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,"
said Mr. Moon.  "Balmy--especially on the crumpet."
And he fanned himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.
They were all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectless
and airy energy.  Diana stirred and stretched her long arms rigidly,
as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating restfulness;
Michael stood still for long intervals, with gathered muscles,
then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still again;
Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when they
fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot
as she moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood,
leaning quite quietly against a tree, had unconsciously
clutched a branch and shaken it with a creative violence.
Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statues
and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs.
Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting like
batteries with an animal magnetism.

"And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each side,
"let's dance round that bush!"

"Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking round with a sort
of radiant rudeness.

"The bush that isn't there," said Michael--"the Mulberry Bush."

They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,
like a demon spinning the world for a top.  Diana felt, as the circle of
the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring
of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child;
she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate,
or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.

The circle broke--as all such perfect circles of levity must break--
and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
against the blue rails of the gate.  When reeling there he suddenly
raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.

"Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms.  "It's jolly old Warner--
with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!"

"Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a
burst of memory, amusement, and distress.  "Oh, I'm so sorry!
Oh, do tell him it's all right!"

"Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon.  For indeed,
while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind
the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion
in the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.

Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by
an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when,
as you come in through the garden to the house, the heiress
and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join hands
and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's all right! it's
all right!" you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.
Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained
to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure,
was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round
by a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore--
even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.

"Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,
"are you mad?"

Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered,
easily and quietly enough, "Not now.  The truth is, Warner, I've just
made a rather important medical discovery--quite in your line."

"What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly--"what discovery?"

"I've discovered that health really is catching, like disease,"
answered Arthur.

"Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said Michael,
performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression.
"Twenty thousand more cases taken to the hospitals;
nurses employed night and day."

Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly moving
legs with an unfathomed wonder.  "And is THIS, may I ask,"
he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"

"You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt heartily.
"I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake.
I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now
it all seems like a dream--and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest,
most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed,
and he may marry any one he likes--except me."

"I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.

The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased.  He took a slip
of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale
blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.
He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.

"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very reassuring.
You sent me this wire only half an hour ago:  `Come at once,
if possible, with another doctor.  Man--Innocent Smith--gone mad
on premises, and doing dreadful things.  Do you know anything of him?'
I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor
who is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy;
he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab.  Now you calmly
tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing,
with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity.
I hardly comprehend the change."

"Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?"
cried Rosamund, in despair.  "Must I confess we had got so morbid
as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we
didn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?
We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're happy enough."

"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.

Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce,
who had not been visible for an hour or more.

"I--I think he's on the other side of the house, by the dustbin," he said.

"He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he must be found."
And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house
by the sunflowers.

"I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with Mr. Smith."

"Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
"A man can't be locked up for falling in love--at least
I hope not."

"No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of him.
He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you know?
I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well.  I believe Innocent Smith
is simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary."

It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass
with the point of her white shoe.

"I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
He's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace.
Don't you know what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts
and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?
That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.
This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any
schoolboy would have climbed.  Yes, that's the thing that has
haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my
old schoolfellows.  He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
animal that we have all been."

"That is only you absurd boys," said Diana.  "I don't believe
any girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was ever
so happy, except--" and she stopped.

"I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said Michael Moon in a
low voice.  "Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain.  He is not there.
Haven't you noticed that we never saw him since we found ourselves?
He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only our own
youth returned.  Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab,
the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn.
Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing,
but the man we shall never see.  In a spring garden before breakfast
we shall smell the smell called Smith.  In the snapping of brisk twigs
in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith.  Everything insatiable
and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like babies at a bun feast,
in the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood,
we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity;
but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things
not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and heavens; he--"

He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road.  He clutched the blue railings
of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.
He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face that seemed
made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and resplendent
as Warner's, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder part of his head.

"Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating voice.
"Stop that murderer there!"

Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows
of the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came
flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit.  Yet before
he had reached the group a third discharge had deafened them,
and they saw with their own eyes two spots of white sky drilled
through the second of the unhappy Herbert's high hats.
The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot,
and came down on all fours, staring like a cow.  The hat with
the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him,
and Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train.
He was looking twice his proper size--a giant clad in green,
the big revolver still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine
and in shadow, his eyes blazing like all stars, and his yellow
hair standing out all ways like Struwelpeter's.

Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness,
Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had felt when
he saw the other lovers standing on the lawn--the sensation
of a certain cut and coloured clearness that belongs rather
to the things of art than to the things of experience.
The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the green
bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked
railings behind, clutched by the stranger's yellow vulture
claws and peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat
on the gravel, and the little cloudlet of smoke floating
across the garden as innocently as the puff of a cigarette--
all these seemed unnaturally distinct and definite.
They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.
Indeed, every object grew more and more particular
and precious because the whole picture was breaking up.
Things look so bright just before they burst.

Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,
Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.
Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and taken
the other.  Smith went into peals of laughter, and surrendered
his pistol with perfect willingness.  Moon raised the doctor
to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the garden gate.
The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women mostly
are in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,
somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky.
The doctor himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits,
and dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to
them in brief apology.  He was very white with his recent panic,
but he spoke with perfect self-control.

"You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend and
Mr. Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways.
I think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate
with you later."

And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smith
was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.

From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant
boom of mirth could again be heard through the half-open window;
but there came no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians.
The girls walked about the garden together, rubbing up each other's
spirits as best they might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against
the gate.  Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner
came out of the house with a face less pale but even more stern,
and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear.
And if the face of Warner in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge,
the face of the little man behind was more like a death's head.

"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to offer you my warm
thanks and admiration.  By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending
for us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out
of mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity--
a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before
combined in flesh."

Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes.
"What do you mean?" she asked.  "You can't mean Mr. Smith?"

"He has gone by many other names," said the doctor gravely,
"and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him.  That man,
Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world.
Whether he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests
of science, to discover.  In any case, we shall have to take him
to a magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum.
But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will have to be
sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with guns like a fortress,
or he will break out again to bring forth carnage and darkness
on the earth."

Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.
Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate;
but he continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turned
away towards the darkening road.




                          Chapter V

               The Allegorical Practical Joker


The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat
more urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when
clutching the railings and craning his neck into the garden.
He even looked comparatively young when he took his hat off,
having fair hair parted in the middle and carefully curled
on each side, and lively movements, especially of the hands.
He had a dandified monocle slung round his neck by a broad black ribbon,
and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had alighted on him.
His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy's; it was only
when you looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld something
acrid and old.  His manners were excellent, though hardly English,
and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people who only met
him once remembered him.  One was a trick of closing his eyes
when he wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of
lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if holding
a pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering over a word.
But those who were longer in his company tended to forget these
oddities in the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation
and really singular views.

"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Warner, "this is Dr. Cyrus Pym."

Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he were
"playing fair" in some child's game, and gave a prompt little bow,
which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.

"Dr. Cyrus Pym," continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), "is perhaps
the first criminological expert of America.  We are very fortunate to be able
to consult with him in this extraordinary case--"

"I can't make head or tail of anything," said Rosamund.  "How can
poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?"

"Or by your telegram," said Herbert Warner, smiling.

"Oh, you don't understand," cried the girl impatiently.
"Why, he's done us all more good than going to church."

"I think I can explain to the young lady," said Dr. Cyrus Pym.  "This criminal
or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of his own,
a method of the most daring ingenuity.  He is popular wherever he goes,
for he invades every house as an uproarious child.  People are
getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel;
so he always uses the disguise of--what shall I say--the Bohemian,
the blameless Bohemian.  He always carries people off their feet.
People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct.
He goes in for eccentric good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress
up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you're not prepared
when he dresses up as Don Quixote.  You expect a humbug to behave like
Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep,
tear-moving tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison
so often behaved like a humbug.  But no real red-blooded citizen is quite
ready for a humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison
but on Sir Roger de Coverly.  Setting up to be a good man a little cracked
is a new criminal incognito, Miss Hunt.  It's been a great notion,
and uncommonly successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel.
I can forgive Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can't forgive
him when he impersonates Dr. Johnson.  The saint with a tile loose
is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied."

"But how do you know," cried Rosamund desperately, "that Mr. Smith
is a known criminal?"

"I collated all the documents," said the American, "when my friend Warner
knocked me up on receipt of your cable.  It is my professional affair
to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there's no more doubt about them
than about the Bradshaw down at the depot.  This man has hitherto escaped
the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.
But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated notes
of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this manner.
He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand popularity.
He makes things go.  They do go; when he's gone the things are gone.
Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man's life or a man's spoons, or more often a woman.
I assure you I have all the memoranda."

"I have seen them," said Warner solidly, "I can assure you
that all this is correct."

"The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings," went on the American
doctor, "is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a wild simulation
of innocence.  From almost every house where this great imaginative devil
has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say he's got
a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and that they go like automata.
What's become of all those poor girls nobody knows.  Murdered, I dare say;
for we've lots of instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand
to murder, though none ever brought him under the law.  Anyhow, our most
modern methods of research can't find any trace of the wretched women.
It's when I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt.  And I've
really nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has said."

"Quite so," said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in marble--"that
we all have to thank you very much for that telegram."

The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident
sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner--
the falling eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised
finger and thumb--which were at other times a little comic.
It was not so much that he was cleverer than Warner;
perhaps he was not so clever, though he was more celebrated.
But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected seriousness--
the great American virtue of simplicity.  Rosamund knitted
her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening house
that contained the dark prodigy.

Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to silver,
and was changing from silver to gray.  The long plumy shadows of the one or
two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead background of dusk.
In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the entrance to the house
by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a hurried consultation
between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of the mysterious captive)
and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from without.  After a few minutes
and gestures they went inside, shutting the glass doors upon the garden;
and the garden seemed to grow grayer still.

The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move
in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a
flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity,
and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult,
pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.

"I'm vurry sorry, Miss Hunt," he said; "but Dr. Warner and I,
as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith
away in that cab, and the less said about it the better.
Don't you agitate yourself, Miss Hunt.  You've just got to think
that we're taking away a monstrosity, something that oughtn't to be
at all--something like one of those gods in your Britannic Museum,
all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes, and no shape.
That's what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit of him."

He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about
to follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke
came out with more than her usual quickness across the lawn.
Her face was aquiver with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest
eyes fixed only on the other girl.

"Rosamund," she cried in despair, "what shall I do with her?"

"With her?" cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump.  "O lord,
he isn't a woman too, is he?"

"No, no, no," said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness.
"A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that."

"I mean your friend Mary Gray," retorted Diana with equal tartness.
"What on earth am I to do with her?"

"How can we tell her about Smith, you mean," answered Rosamund, her face
at once clouded and softening.  "Yes, it will be pretty painful."

"But I HAVE told her," exploded Diana, with more than her
congenital exasperation.  "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind.
She still says she's going away with Smith in that cab."

"But it's impossible!" ejaculated Rosamund.  "Why, Mary is
really religious.  She--"

She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively
close to her on the lawn.  Her quiet companion had come down very
quietly into the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel.
She had a neat but very ancient blue tam-o'-shanter on her head,
and was pulling some rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands.
Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair;
the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness:  for a woman's clothes
never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by accident.

But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive.
In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light.
A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass,
will be full of the fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth.
The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was like some
triangular piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour
of hours before.  Mary, though she was always graceful,
could never before have properly been called beautiful; and yet
her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful as to make
a man catch his breath.

"O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
"but how did you tell her?"

"It is quite easy to tell her," answered Diana sombrely;
"it makes no impression at all."

"I'm afraid I've kept everything waiting," said Mary Gray apologetically,
"and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is taking me to his aunt's
over at Hampstead, and I'm afraid she goes to bed early."

Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort
of sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness;
she was like one speaking absently with her eye on some
very distant object.

"Mary, Mary," cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, "I'm so sorry about it,
but the thing can't be at all.  We--we have found out all about Mr. Smith."

"All?" repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
"why, that must be awfully exciting."

There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that
the silent Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head,
as it might be to listen.  Then Rosamund remaining speechless,
Dr. Pym came to her rescue in a definite way.

"To begin with," he said, "this man Smith is constantly attempting murder.
The Warden of Brakespeare College--"

"I know," said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile.
"Innocent told me."

"I can't say what he told you," replied Pym quickly, "but I'm very much
afraid it wasn't true.  The plain truth is that the man's stained
with every known human crime.  I assure you I have all the documents.
I have evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most eminent
English curate.  I have--"

"Oh, but there were two curates," cried Mary, with a certain gentle eagerness;
"that was what made it so much funnier."

The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more,
and Inglewood appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal.
The American doctor bowed, the English doctor did not,
but they both set out stolidly towards the house.
No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate;
but the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable
indication that he was listening to every word.

"But don't you understand, Mary," cried Rosamund in despair; "don't you
know that awful things have happened even before our very eyes.
I should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots upstairs."

"Yes, I heard the shots," said Mary almost brightly; "but I was busy packing
just then.  And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at Dr. Warner;
so it wasn't worth while to come down."

"Oh, I don't understand what you mean," cried Rosamund Hunt,
stamping, "but you must and shall understand what I mean.
I don't care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save you.
I mean that your Innocent Smith is the most awfully wicked
man in the world.  He has sent bullets at lots of other men
and gone off in cabs with lots of other women.  And he seems
to have killed the women too, for nobody can find them."

"He is really rather naughty sometimes," said Mary Gray,
laughing softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.

"Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something," said Rosamund,
and burst into tears.

At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out
of the house with their great green-clad captive between them.
He made no resistance, but was still laughing in a groggy
and half-witted style.  Arthur Inglewood followed in the rear,
a dark and red study in the last shades of distress and shame.
In this black, funereal, and painfully realistic style the exit
from Beacon House was made by a man whose entrance a day before
had been effected by the happy leaping of a wall and the hilarious
climbing of a tree.  No one moved of the groups in the garden
except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally,
calling out, "Are you ready, Innocent?  Our cab's been waiting
such a long time."

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr. Warner firmly, "I must insist on asking
this lady to stand aside.  We shall have trouble enough as it is,
with the three of us in a cab."

"But it IS our cab," persisted Mary.  "Why, there's Innocent's yellow
bag on the top of it."

"Stand aside," repeated Warner roughly.  "And you, Mr. Moon,
please be so obliging as to move a moment.  Come, come! the sooner
this ugly business is over the better--and how can we open the gate
if you will keep leaning on it?"

Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed
to consider and reconsider this argument.  "Yes," he said at last;
"but how can I lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?"

"Oh, get out of the way!" cried Warner, almost good-humouredly.
"You can lean on the gate any time."

"No," said Moon reflectively.  "Seldom the time and the place
and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you
come of an old country family.  My ancestors leaned on gates
before any one had discovered how to open them."

"Michael!" cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, "are you going to get
out of the way?"

"Why, no; I think not," said Michael, after some meditation,
and swung himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company,
while still, in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.

"Hullo!" he called out suddenly; "what are you doing to Mr. Smith?"

"Taking him away," answered Warner shortly, "to be examined."

"Matriculation?" asked Moon brightly.

"By a magistrate," said the other curtly.

"And what other magistrate," cried Michael, raising his voice,
"dares to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient
and independent Dukes of Beacon?  What other court dares to try
one of our company, save only the High Court of Beacon?  Have you
forgotten that only this afternoon we flew the flag of independence
and severed ourselves from all the nations of the earth?"

"Michael," cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, "how can you stand
there talking nonsense?  Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself.
You were there when he went mad.  It was you that helped the doctor
up when he fell over the flower-pot."

"And the High Court of Beacon," replied Moon with hauteur,
"has special powers in all cases concerning lunatics,
flower-pots, and doctors who fall down in gardens.
It's in our very first charter from Edward I:  `Si medicus
quisquam in horto prostratus--'"

"Out of the way!" cried Warner with sudden fury, "or we will force
you out of it."

"What!" cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness.
"Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale?  Will you paint
these blue railings red with my gore?" and he laid hold of one
of the blue spikes behind him.  As Inglewood had noticed earlier
in the evening, the railing was loose and crooked at this place,
and the painted iron staff and spearhead came away in Michael's
hand as he shook it.

"See!" he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air,
"the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it.
Ah, in such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!"
And in a voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard--

"Ou pour l'honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince, Navre,
poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province."


"Sakes alive!" said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
Then he added, "Are there two maniacs here?"

"No; there are five," thundered Moon.  "Smith and I are the only
sane people left."

"Michael!" cried Rosamund; "Michael, what does it mean?"

"It means bosh!" roared Michael, and slung his painted spear
hurtling to the other end of the garden.  "It means that doctors
are bosh, and criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh--
much more bosh than our Court of Beacon.  It means, you fatheads,
that Innocent Smith is no more mad or bad than the bird
on that tree."

"But, my dear Moon," began Inglewood in his modest manner, "these gentlemen--"

"On the word of two doctors," exploded Moon again,
without listening to anybody else, "shut up in a private hell
on the word of two doctors!  And such doctors!  Oh, my hat!
Look at 'em!--do just look at 'em!  Would you read a book,
or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty such?
My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics.  What would
you say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?"

"But it isn't only their word, Michael," reasoned Rosamund;
"they've got evidence too."

"Have you looked at it?" asked Moon.

"No," said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; "these gentlemen
are in charge of it."

"And of everything else, it seems to me," said Michael.  "Why, you
haven't even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke."

"Oh, that's no use," said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund; "Auntie can't
say `Bo!' to a goose."

"I am glad to hear it," answered Michael, "for with such a flock of geese
to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her lips.
For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
and airy style.  I appeal to Mrs. Duke--it's her house."

"Mrs. Duke?" repeated Inglewood doubtfully.

"Yes, Mrs. Duke," said Michael firmly, "commonly called the Iron Duke."

"If you ask Auntie," said Diana quietly, "she'll only be for doing nothing
at all.  Her only idea is to hush things up or to let things slide.
That just suits her."

"Yes," replied Michael Moon; "and, as it happens, it just suits
all of us.  You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke;
but when you are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew--
that half one's letters answer themselves if you can only refrain
from the fleshly appetite of answering them."

He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow
on the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time;
just as it had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant,
it now changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving
good legal advice.

"It isn't only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if
she can," he said; "we all want to keep it quiet if we can.
Look at the large facts--the big bones of the case.  I believe
those scientific gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake.
I believe Smith is as blameless as a buttercup.  I admit
buttercups don't often let off loaded pistols in private houses;
I admit there is something demanding explanation.
But I am morally certain there's some blunder, or some joke,
or some allegory, or some accident behind all this.
Well, suppose I'm wrong.  We've disarmed him; we're five men
to hold him; he may as well go to a lock-up later on as now.
But suppose there's even a chance of my being right.
Is it anybody's interest here to wash this linen in public?

"Come, I'll take each of you in order.  Once take Smith outside that gate,
and you take him into the front page of the evening papers.  I know;
I've written the front page myself.  Miss Duke, do you or your aunt want
a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house--`Doctors shot here.'?
No, no--doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don't want the rubbish
shot here.  Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am wrong.
Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours.  Mark my words,
if he's proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you
introduced him.  If he's proved innocent, they will say you helped
to collar him.  Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong.
If he's proved guilty, they'll say you engaged your companion to him.
If he's proved innocent, they'll print that telegram.
I know the Organs, damn them."

He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more
breathless than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation.
But he was plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid;
as was proved by his proceeding quickly the moment he had
found his breath.

"It is just the same," he cried, "with our medical friends.
You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance.  I agree.
But does he want specially to be snapshotted by all the
journalists ~prostratus in horto~? It was no fault of his,
but the scene was not very dignified even for him.
He must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice,
not only on his knees, but on his hands and knees?
Does he want to enter the court of justice on all fours?
Doctors are not allowed to advertise; and I'm sure no
doctor wants to advertise himself as looking like that.
And even for our American guest the interest is the same.
Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents.
Let us assume that he has revelations really worth reading.
Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter)
ten to one he won't be allowed to read them.  He'll be tripped
up every two or three minutes with some tangle of old rules.
A man can't tell the truth in public nowadays.  But he can
still tell it in private; he can tell it inside that house."

"It is quite true," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout
the speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
through such a scene.  "It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
hampered in private inquiries."

"Dr. Pym!" cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger.
"Dr. Pym! you aren't really going to admit--"

"Smith may be mad," went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue
that seemed as heavy as a hatchet, "but there was something
after all in what he said about Home Rule for every home.
Yes, there is something, when all's said and done, in the High Court
of Beacon.  It is really true that human beings might often get
some sort of domestic justice where just now they can only get
legal injustice--oh, I am a lawyer too, and I know that as well.
It is true that there's too much official and indirect power.
Often and often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing
a family could settle.  Scores of young criminals have been fined
and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.
Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they
only wanted a week at Brighton.  There IS something in Smith's
notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it
into practice.  You have the prisoner; you have the documents.
Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people,
such as might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island.
Let us do this thing ourselves.  Let us go into that house there
and sit down and find out with our own eyes and ears whether this
thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a man or a monster.
If we can't do a little thing like that, what right have we to put
crosses on ballot papers?"

Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool,
saw in that glance that Moon was gaining ground.  The motives that led
Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those
which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym.  All Arthur's instincts were on the side
of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often
endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric.
To play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend,
would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official
part he had played that afternoon was very painful.  He was not likely
to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
sleeping dogs lie.

On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
possible that seem crazy to the English.  Regulations and authorities exactly
like one of Innocent's pranks or one of Michael's satires really exist,
propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men.
Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and fanciful;
each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and as
unexpected as an apple-pie bed.  States where no man may have a cigarette,
States where any man may have ten wives, very strict prohibition States,
very lax divorce States--all these large local vagaries had prepared
Cyrus Pym's mind for small local vagaries in a smaller country.
Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or Italian,
utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are,
he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon.  It is
firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very
end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be
some Britannic institution.

Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this
being moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy
and humane flippancy.

"Why, here's little Nosey Gould," he exclaimed.  "Isn't the mere
sight of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?"

"Really," replied Dr. Warner, "I really fail to see how Mr. Gould
affects the question; and I once more demand--"

"Hello! what's the funeral, gents?" inquired the newcomer with the air
of an uproarious umpire.  "Doctor demandin' something?  Always the way
at a boarding-house, you know.  Always lots of demand.  No supply."

As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his position,
and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain dangerous
and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an allegation that
he was insane.

"Well, of course he is," said Moses Gould equably; "it don't
need old 'Olmes to see that.  The 'awk-like face of 'Olmes,"
he added with abstract relish, "showed a shide of disappointment,
the sleuth-like Gould 'avin' got there before 'im."

"If he is mad," began Inglewood.

"Well," said Moses, "when a cove gets out on the tile the first night
there's generally a tile loose."

"You never objected before," said Diana Duke rather stiffly,
"and you're generally pretty free with your complaints."

"I don't compline of him," said Moses magnanimously, "the poor chap's
'armless enough; you might tie 'im up in the garden here and 'e'd
make noises at the burglars."

"Moses," said Moon with solemn fervour, "you are the incarnation
of Common Sense.  You think Mr. Innocent is mad.  Let me introduce you
to the incarnation of Scientific Theory.  He also thinks Mr. Innocent
is mad.--Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.--Moses, this is the celebrated
Dr. Pym."  The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and bowed.
He also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded
like "Pleased to meet you."

"Now you two people," said Michael cheerfully, "who both think our poor
friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and prove him mad.
What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific Theory
with Common Sense?  United you stand; divided you fall.  I will not be
so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I confine myself
to recording the chronological accident that he has not shown us any so far.
I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my shirt that Moses has no
scientific theory.  Yet against this strong coalition I am ready to appear,
armed with nothing but an intuition--which is American for a guess."

"Distinguished by Mr. Gould's assistance," said Pym, opening his
eyes suddenly.  "I gather that though he and I are identical
in primary di-agnosis there is yet between us something that
cannot be called a disagreement, something which we may perhaps
call a--" He put the points of thumb and forefinger together,
spreading the other fingers exquisitely in the air, and seemed
to be waiting for somebody else to tell him what to say.

"Catchin' flies?" inquired the affable Moses.

"A divergence," said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief; "a divergence.
Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not necessarily
be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac--"

"Has it occurred to you," observed Moon, who was leaning on the gate again,
and did not turn round, "that if he were a homicidal maniac he might have
killed us all here while we were talking."

Something exploded silently underneath all their minds,
like sealed dynamite in some forgotten cellars.  They all
remembered for the first time for some hour or two that the monster
of whom they were talking was standing quietly among them.
They had left him in the garden like a garden statue; there might
have been a dolphin coiling round his legs, or a fountain pouring out
of his mouth, for all the notice they had taken of Innocent Smith.
He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair thrust somewhat forward,
his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face looking patiently
downwards at nothing in particular, his huge shoulders humped,
and his hands in his trousers pockets.  So far as they could guess
he had not moved at all.  His green coat might have been cut out
of the green turf on which he stood.  In his shadow Pym had expounded
and Rosamund expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged.
He had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden.
A sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then,
after correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.

"Why," cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, "the Court of Beacon
has opened--and shut up again too.  You all know now I am right.
Your buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has
told me.  Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless.
Back we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion.
For the High Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision,
is just about to begin its inquiry."

"Just a goin' to begin!" cried little Mr. Moses in an extraordinary
sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during music
or a thunderstorm.  "Follow on to the 'Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon;
'ave a kipper from the old firm!  'Is Lordship complimented
Mr. Gould on the 'igh professional delicacy 'e had shown,
and which was worthy of the best traditions of the Saloon Bar--
and three of Scotch hot, miss!  Oh, chase me, girls!"

The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a
sort of waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit
of the garden before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming.
Moon had known his man when he realized that no people presented
to Moses Gould could be quite serious, even if they were
quite furious.  The glass doors stood open on the side nearest
to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the feet of that festive idiot were
evidently turned in the same direction, everybody else went
that way with the unanimity of some uproarious procession.
Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the thing that had
been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few hours.
Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as unsympathetic.
"In that case," she said sharply, "these cabs can be sent away."

"Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know," said Mary with a smile.
"I dare say the cabman would get it down for us."

"I'll get the bag," said Smith, speaking for the first time in hours;
his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.

Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility
were left breathless by his precipitance.  With a run and spring
he was out of the garden into the street; with a spring and
one quivering kick he was actually on the roof of the cab.
The cabman happened to be standing by the horse's head, having just
removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to be
rolling about on the cab's back in the embraces of his Gladstone bag.
The next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck,
into the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and scampering
down the street.

His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it
was all the other people who were turned into garden statues.
Mr. Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally
for the purposes of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before
the rest, and, turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily
with a stranger on an omnibus, "Tile loose, eh?  Cab loose anyhow."
There followed a fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer
like a club of stone,--

"This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon.  You have let
loose a maniac on the whole metropolis."

Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent
of continuous houses.  The little garden that shut it in ran out into
a sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly
most of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again.
At the apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the group.
With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him,
but they soon had reason to duck and recoil.  Even as he vanished up
street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his hand,
so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering the company
like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner's hat for the third time.
Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a
shriek that went into a whisper.

"Well," said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
"you may as well all go inside anyhow.  We've got two relics
of Mr. Smith at least; his fiancee and his trunk."

"Why do you want us to go inside?" asked Arthur Inglewood,
in whose red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed
to have reached its limit.

"I want the rest to go in," said Michael in a clear voice,
"because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you."

There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder,
and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight.
Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.

"I refuse to listen to any such proposal," he said; "you have lost
this ruffian, and I must find him."

"I don't ask you to listen to any proposal," answered Moon quietly;
"I only ask you to listen."

He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately
the whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side
of the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness,
and coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine
attitude as before.

"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with the air
of one shooing a company of cats.  "Come, come, be quick about it!
Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?"

How they were all really driven into the house again it would
have been difficult afterwards to say.  They had reached the point
of being exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce
are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among
the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable
exasperation, "I say, do you really want to speak to me?"

"I do," said Michael, "very much."

Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed
to promise.  While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very
large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees,
proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed.
A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across
the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.

"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed Court
of Beacon, and to clear him too--clear him of both crime and lunacy.
Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit."  They walked up
and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.

"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old
hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it
up at all."

Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless
a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was
asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could
not conceive.  Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.

"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly,
"even if they've forgotten the answers?  Riddles are easy to remember
because they are hard to guess.  So were those stiff old symbols
in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard
to guess.  Their colours were plain.  Their shapes were plain.
Everything was plain except the meaning."

Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking
faster and faster.  "Dances, too," he said; "dances were not frivolous.
Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"

"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
"have I noticed anything else?"

"Have you noticed this about him," asked Moon, with unshaken persistency,
"that he has done so much and said so little?  When first he came he talked,
but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he wasn't used to it.
All he really did was actions--painting red flowers on black gowns or throwing
yellow bags on to the grass.  I tell you that big green figure is figurative--
like any green figure capering on some white Eastern wall."

"My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which increased
with the rising wind, "you are getting absurdly fanciful."

"I think of what has just happened," said Michael steadily.
"The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking
all the time.  He fired three shots from a six-shooter and then
gave it up to us, when he might have shot us dead in our boots.
How could he express his trust in us better than that?
He wanted to be tried by us.  How could he have shown it better
than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it?
He wanted to show that he stood there willingly,
and could escape if he liked.  How could he have shown it
better than by escaping in the cab and coming back again?
Innocent Smith is not a madman--he is a ritualist.  He wants to
express himself, not with his tongue, but with his arms and legs--
with my body I thee worship, as it says in the marriage service.
I begin to understand the old plays and pageants.  I see why
the mutes at a funeral were mute.  I see why the mummers were mum.
They MEANT something; and Smith means something too.
All other jokes have to be noisy--like little Nosey Gould's jokes,
for instance.  The only silent jokes are the practical jokes.
Poor Smith, properly considered, is an allegorical practical joker.
What he has really done in this house has been as frantic
as a war-dance, but as silent as a picture."

"I suppose you mean," said the other dubiously, "that we have got to find out
what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured picture-puzzles.
But even supposing that they do mean something--why, Lord bless my soul!--"

Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted
his eyes to the moon, by this time risen big and luminous,
and had seen a huge, half-human figure sitting on the garden wall.
It was outlined so sharply against the moon that for the first flash
it was hard to be certain even that it was human:  the hunched
shoulders and outstanding hair had rather the air of a colossal cat.
It resembled a cat also in the fact that when first startled it
sprang up and ran with easy activity along the top of the wall.
As it ran, however, its heavy shoulders and small stooping head
rather suggested a baboon.  The instant it came within reach
of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was lost in the branches.
The gale, which by this time was shaking every shrub in the garden,
made the identification yet more difficult, since it melted
the moving limbs of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
limbs of the tree.

"Who is there?" shouted Arthur.  "Who are you?  Are you Innocent?"

"Not quite," answered an obscure voice among the leaves.
"I cheated you once about a penknife."

The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it
had on the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.

"But are you Smith?" asked Inglewood as in an agony.

"Very nearly," said the voice out of the tossing tree.

"But you must have some real names," shrieked Inglewood in despair.
"You must call yourself something."

"Call myself something," thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree
so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once.
"I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand
Homer Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare--"

"But, manalive!" began Inglewood in exasperation.

"That's right! that's right!" came with a roar out of the rocking tree;
"that's my real name."  And he broke a branch, and one or two autumn
leaves fluttered away across the moon.




                           Part II

             The Explanations of Innocent Smith




                          Chapter I

                      The Eye of Death;
                    or, the Murder Charge


The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court
of Beacon with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow
to increase its cosiness.  The big room was, as it were,
cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist high--the sort
of separation that children make when they are playing at shops.
This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael Moon
(the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry)
with the ordinary furniture of the place.  At one end of the long
mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair, which was
surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself
had suggested as a coronation canopy.  Inside this erection
could be perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions
and a form of countenance that already threatened slumber.
At the other end sat the accused Smith, in a kind of dock;
for he was carefully fenced in with a quadrilateral of light
bedroom chairs, any of which he could have tossed out the window
with his big toe.  He had been provided with pens and paper,
out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts,
and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings.
He never spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious
as a child on the floor of an empty nursery.

On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat
the three young ladies with their backs up against the window,
and Mary Gray in the middle; it was something between a jury
box and the stall of the Queen of Beauty at a tournament.
Down the centre of the long table Moon had built a low barrier
out of eight bound volumes of "Good Words" to express the moral
wall that divided the conflicting parties.  On the right side
sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould;
behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the case
of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology.  On the other side,
Moon and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified
with books and papers; but as these included several old yellow
volumes by Ouida and Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon
seemed to have been somewhat careless and comprehensive.
As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at first
to have him kept entirely behind a high screen in the corner,
urging the indelicacy of his appearance in court, but privately
assuring him of an unofficial permission to peep over the top
now and then.  Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry
of such a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion
he was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the table
in a line with his legal advisers.

It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym,
after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear,
rose to open the case.  His statement was clear and even restrained,
and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention
by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers
of American speech.

He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany,
closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.  "The time has gone by,"
he said, "when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act,
important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered.
Science has profoundly..." here he paused, poising his compressed
finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea
very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said
"modified," and let it go--"has profoundly Modified our view of death.
In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life,
catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.
Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal
and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding
average which we call for convenience the order of nature.
In the same way we have come to consider murder SOCIALLY.
Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly
deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole,
to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings
the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return
for ever of the slayers and the slain."

He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly,
putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners
of Boston, and continued:  "There is but one result of this happier
and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.
It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor,
our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work,
`The Destructive Type.'  We do not denounce Smith as a murderer,
but rather as a murderous man.  The type is such that its very life--
I might say its very health--is in killing.  Some hold that it is
not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature.
My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets--" (here Moon
suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah!" but so instantaneously
resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere
else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly--"who,
in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature's
ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself.
However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner.
In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac;
but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.
But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements--a cruel,
an evil sanity.  As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin
West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay.
No environment, however scientific, could have softened him.
Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest cloister,
and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb.
Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy,
and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope
or brain with the brick.  Circumstances may be favourable,
training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental
hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season
burst like a well-timed bomb."

Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature
at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat,
and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.

"It only remains for us," he said, "to bring forward actual evidence
of his previous attempts.  By an agreement already made with the Court
and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence authentic
letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to examine.
Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided to select one--
the clearest and most scandalous.  I will therefore, without further delay,
call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two letters--one from the Sub-Warden and
the other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University."

Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face.
He began in a loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt
as a cock-crow:--


"Sir,--Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge--"


"Lord have mercy on us," muttered Moon, making a backward movement as men
do when a gun goes off.


"Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,"
proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, "and I can endorse the description
you gave of the un'appy Smith.  It was not alone my unfortunate duty
to rebuke many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period,
but I was actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated
that period.  Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend
the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College
and connected with it by two or three very ancient arches or props,
like bridges, across a small strip of water connected with the river.
To my grive astonishment I be'eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air
and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and
attitude indicatin' that he suffered from the grivest apprehensions.
After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly perceived
the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden's
window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver.
Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which
impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared to desist.
I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in detaching
the Warden from his painful position.  Smith was sent down.
The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club
prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.--
Hi am, your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.


"The other letter," continued Gould in a glow of triumph, "is from the porter,
and won't take long to read.


"Dear Sir,--It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare College,
and that I 'elped the Warden down when the young man was shooting at him,
as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter.  The young man who was shooting at
him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends.--
Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker."


Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them.
But for the vocal divergences in the matter of h's and a's,
the Sub-Warden's letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it;
and both that and the porter's letter were plainly genuine.
Moon handed them to Inglewood, who handed them back in silence
to Moses Gould.

"So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is concerned,"
said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, "that is my case."

Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner.
He did not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the
abstract questions.  "I do not know enough to be an agnostic,"
he said, rather wearily, "and I can only master the known and admitted
elements in such controversies.  As for science and religion,
the known and admitted facts are plain enough.  All that the parsons
say is unproved.  All that the doctors say is disproved.
That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been,
or will be.  Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow," he said,
looking down sorrowfully at his boots.  "They remind me of a dear
old great-aunt of mine who used to enjoy them in her youth.
It brings tears to my eyes.  I can see the old bucket by the garden
fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind--"

"Hi! here, stop the 'bus a bit," cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a sort
of perspiration.  "We want to give the defence a fair run--like gents,
you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering poplars."

"Well, hang it all," said Moon, in an injured manner, "if Dr. Pym
may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn't I have an old
aunt with poplars?"

"I am sure," said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost
like a shaky authority, "Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes."

"Why, as to liking her," began Moon, "I--but perhaps,
as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question.
I repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculations.
For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete.
Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder.
If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural
tendency to murder, is it not equally true"--here he lowered
his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness--"is
it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has
a natural tendency to get murdered?  Is it not at least
a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is such a man?
I do not speak without the book, any more than my learned friend.
The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein's monumental work,
`The Destructible Doctor,' with diagrams, showing the various ways
in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his elements.
In the light of these facts--"

"Hi, stop the 'bus! stop the 'bus!" cried Moses, jumping up and down and
gesticulating in great excitement.  "My principal's got something to say!
My principal wants to do a bit of talkin'."

Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious.
"I have strictly CON-fined myself," he said nasally,
"to books to which immediate reference can be made.
I have Sonnenschein's `Destructive Type' here on the table,
if the defence wish to see it.  Where is this wonderful work
on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about?  Does it exist?
Can he produce it?"

"Produce it!" cried the Irishman with a rich scorn.
"I'll produce it in a week if you'll pay for the ink and paper."

"Would it have much authority?" asked Pym, sitting down.

"Oh, authority!" said Moon lightly; "that depends on a fellow's religion."

Dr. Pym jumped up again.  "Our authority is based on masses
of accurate detail," he said.  "It deals with a region in which
things can be handled and tested.  My opponent will at least
admit that death is a fact of experience."

"Not of mine," said Moon mournfully, shaking his head.
"I've never experienced such a thing in all my life."

"Well, really," said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle of papers.

"So we see," resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, "that a
man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution,
doomed to such attacks.  My client's onslaught, even if it occurred,
was not unique.  I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance
of Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way.
Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two of them.
The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the Harrow Road.


"Mr. Moon, Sir,--Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him.  Wot then?
It was all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned,
and if your Docter Warner doesn't like having sorsepans thrown at him,
don't let him wear his hat in a respectable woman's parler, and tell
him to leave orf smiling or tell us the joke.--Yours respectfully,
                                               Hannah Miles.


"The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin,
with whom Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation.
He writes as follows:--


"Dear Sir,--The incident to which you refer is one which I regret,
and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain.
My own branch of medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have
the view of a mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed
almost automatic action.  To say that I `pulled Dr. Warner's nose,'
is, however, inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important.
That I punched his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with
what regret); but pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective
with which I cannot reproach myself.  In comparison with this, the act
of punching was an outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.--
Believe me, yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.


"I have numberless other letters," continued Moon, "all bearing witness
to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I therefore think
that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in his survey.
We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural force.
As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as stay
the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
Place that man in a Quakers' meeting, among the most peaceful of Christians,
and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of chocolate.
Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned
to death with precious stones.  Circumstances may be beautiful and wonderful,
the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be golden-bearded,
the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt,
the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and above
all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to get
murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and triumphantly
succeeds at last."

He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion.
But even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other
side of the table.  Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across
the little figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers
to Dr. Pym.  That expert nodded a great many times and finally started
to his feet with a sincere expression of sternness.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried indignantly, "as my colleague has said,
we should be delighted to give any latitude to the defence--if there
were a defence.  But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there to make jokes--
very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his client.
He picks holes in science.  He picks holes in my client's social popularity.
He picks holes in my literary style, which doesn't seem to suit his high-toned
European taste.  But how does this picking of holes affect the issue?
This Smith has picked two holes in my client's hat, and with an inch better
aim would have picked two holes in his head.  All the jokes in the world
won't unpick those holes or be any use for the defence."

Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the evident
fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a dreamy way.
"The defence?" he said vaguely--"oh, I haven't begun that yet."

"You certainly have not," said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of applause
from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
"Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from
the very beginning--"

"While you're standing up," said Moon, in the same almost sleepy style,
"perhaps I might ask you a question."

"A question?  Certainly," said Pym stiffly.  "It was distinctly
arranged between us that as we could not cross-examine
the witnesses, we might vicariously cross-examine each other.
We are in a position to invite all such inquiry."

"I think you said," observed Moon absently, "that none of the prisoner's
shots really hit the doctor."

"For the cause of science," cried the complacent Pym, "fortunately not."

"Yet they were fired from a few feet away."

"Yes; about four feet."

"And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close
to him too?" asked Moon.

"That is so," said the witness gravely.

"I think," said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, "that your Sub-Warden
mentioned that Smith was one of the University's record men for shooting."

"Why, as to that--" began Pym, after an instant of stillness.

"A second question," continued Moon, comparatively curtly.
"You said there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people.
Why have you not got evidence of them?"

The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again.
"In those cases," he said precisely, "there was no evidence from outsiders,
as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual victims."

"Why didn't you get their evidence?"

"In the case of the actual victims," said Pym, "there was some difficulty
and reluctance, and--"

"Do you mean," asked Moon, "that none of the actual victims would
appear against the prisoner?"

"That would be exaggerative," began the other.

"A third question," said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
"You've got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
where's the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at?
The Warden of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman."

"We did ask for a statement from him," said Pym a little nervously;
"but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out
of deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science
have been great."

Moon leaned forward.  "You mean, I suppose," he said, "that his statement
was favourable to the prisoner."

"It might be understood so," replied the American doctor;
"but, really, it was difficult to understand at all.
In fact, we sent it back to him."

"You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of Brakespeare."

"No."

"I only ask," said Michael quietly, "because we have.
To conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood,
to read a statement of the true story--a statement attested
as true by the signature of the Warden himself."

Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though
he looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did,
the spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was,
upon the whole, more efficient and sufficing than his leader's. He was,
in truth, one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told
to speak; and then can speak well.  Moon was entirely the opposite.
His own impudences amused him in private, but they slightly
embarrassed him in public; he felt a fool while he was speaking,
whereas Inglewood felt a fool only because he could not speak.
The moment he had anything to say he could speak;
and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite natural.
Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.

"As my colleague has just explained," said Inglewood, "there are
two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence.
The first is a plain physical fact.  By the admission of everybody,
by the very evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear
that the accused was celebrated as a specially good shot.
Yet on both the occasions complained of he shot from a distance of four
or five feet, and shot at him four or five times, and never hit him once.
That is the first startling circumstance on which we base our argument.
The second, as my colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot
find a single victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself.
Subordinates speak for him.  Porters climb up ladders to him.
But he himself is silent.  Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain
on the spot both the riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence.
I will first of all read the covering letter in which the true account
of the Cambridge incident is contained, and then that document itself.
When you have heard both, there will be no doubt about your decision.
The covering letter runs as follows:--


"Dear Sir,--The following is a very exact and even vivid account of the
incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College.  We, the undersigned,
do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to any
isolated authorship.  The truth is, it has been a composite production;
and we have even had some difference of opinion about the adjectives.
But every word of it is true.--We are, yours faithfully,

                                     "Wilfred Emerson Eames,
                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

                                            "Innocent Smith.


"The enclosed statement," continued Inglewood, "runs as follows:--


"A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river,
that it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched
with all sorts of bridges and semi-detached buildings.
The river splits itself into several small streams and canals,
so that in one or two corners the place has almost the look
of Venice.  It was so especially in the case with which we
are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy ribs of stone
sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare College
with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.

"The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not
seem flat when one is thus in the midst of the colleges.
For in these flat fens there are always wandering lakes and lingering
rivers of water.  And these always change what might have been
a scheme of horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical lines.
Wherever there is water the height of high buildings is doubled,
and a British brick house becomes a Babylonian tower.
In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head
downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney.
The coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far
below the world as its original appears above it.
Every scrap of water is not only a window but a skylight.
Earth splits under men's feet into precipitous aerial perspectives,
into which a bird could as easily wing its way as--"

Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest.  The documents he had put
in evidence had been confined to cold affirmation of fact.
The defence, in a general way, had an indubitable right to put
their case in their own way, but all this landscape gardening
seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the business.
"Will the leader of the defence tell me," he asked, "how it can
possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor'l-coloured,
or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Michael, lifting himself lazily;
"you see, you don't know yet what our defence is.
Till you know that, don't you see, anything may be relevant.
Why, suppose," he said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him,
"suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden colour-blind.
Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when he
thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair!
To ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured
might be of the most massive importance."

He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared,
and continued with the same fluency:  "Or suppose we wanted to
maintain that the Warden committed suicide--that he just got Smith
to hold the pistol as Brutus's slave held the sword.  Why, it would
make all the difference whether the Warden could see himself plain
in still water.  Still water has made hundreds of suicides:
one sees oneself so very--well, so very plain."

"Do you, perhaps," inquired Pym with austere irony, "maintain that
your client was a bird of some sort--say, a flamingo?"

"In the matter of his being a flamingo," said Moon with sudden severity,
"my client reserves his defence."

No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat
and Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:--


"There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors.
For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one.
In the highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.

"This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able
to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle.
This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat)
the inmost thing of human philosophy.  There is a mystical, even a
monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one.
But they ought both to grow on the same body."


"I know it's a little transcendental at first," interposed Inglewood,
beaming round with a broad apology, "but you see this document was written
in collaboration by a don and a--"

"Drunkard, eh?" suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.

"I rather think," proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled
and critical air, "that this part was written by the don.
I merely warn the Court that the statement, though indubitably accurate,
bears here and there the trace of coming from two authors."

"In that case," said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing,
"I cannot agree with them that two heads are better than one."


"The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform:
the question of whether dons see double because they are drunk,
or get drunk because they see double.  It is enough for them
(the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar
and profitable theme--which is puddles.  What (the undersigned
persons ask themselves) is a puddle?  A puddle repeats infinity,
and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively,
a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
The two great historic universities of England have all this large
and level and reflective brilliance.  Nevertheless, or, rather, on the
other hand, they are puddles--puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles.
The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable
from strong conviction."


Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present,
and continued with eminent cheerfulness:--


"Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of
the undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes
of canal and the glittering rainy gutters into which the water
broke up round the back of Brakespeare College.  Had these thoughts
crossed his mind he would have been much happier than he was.
Unfortunately he did not know that his puzzles were puddles.
He did not know that the academic mind reflects infinity and is full
of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
In his case, therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil
about the infinity implied.  It was half-way through a starry
night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and below.
To young Smith's sullen fancy the skies below seemed even hollower
than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he counted
the stars he would find one too many in the pool.

"In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping
on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower.  For to him,
and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things.
Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous
and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse
of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes.  For the young men
of that sad time thought that the god always comes from the machine.
They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god.
In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--
atrocious because it was true.  All their universe was black with white spots.

"Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below
to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college.
The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green
curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where
Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received
his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night.
Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.
Smith had been at Dr. Eames's lecture for the first half of the morning,
and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half.
He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon
and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy
Smith was melancholy still.  Then, as he was going home to his
diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master,
the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn
in to that gentleman's private house.

"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne
in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence;
the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover,
a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough
to make them a part of the British Constitution.  The bad habits
of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student
of Schopenhauer.  Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man,
with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his
pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries
in the two essential respects of having a European reputation
and a bald head.

"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,' said Smith, who was
nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small,
`because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise--bishops,
and agnostics, and those sort of people.  And knowing you were the greatest
living authority on the pessimist thinkers--'

"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'

"After a patch of pause, not the first--for this depressing conversation
had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence--
the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy:  `It's all a question
of wrong calculation.  The moth flies into the candle because he doesn't
happen to know that the game is not worth the candle.  The wasp gets
into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.
IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want
to enjoy gin--because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big
a price for it.  That they never find happiness--that they don't even know
how to look for it--is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness
of everything they do.  Their discordant colours are cries of pain.
Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.
There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!'

"`Of course,' he went on dreamily, `one or two men see the sober
fact a long way off--they go mad.  Do you notice that maniacs mostly
try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful)
to destroy themselves?  The madman is the man behind the scenes,
like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater.
He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place.
He sees things at the right angle.  But the common world--'

"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith, letting his fist
fall on the table in an idle despair.

"`Let's give it a bad name first,' said the Professor calmly,
`and then hang it.  A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle
for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it.
So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain.
He would strike us dead.'

"`Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked the undergraduate abstractedly,
plunging his hands into his pockets.

"`He is dead himself,' said the philosopher; `that is where
he is really enviable.'

"`To any one who thinks,' proceeded Eames, `the pleasures of life,
trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture chamber.
We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What
are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.'

"Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder,
and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a
six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top.
It fixed him like an iron eye.  Through those eternal instants during
which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was.
Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of
a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith,
apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.

"`I'll help you out of your hole, old man,' said Smith,
with rough tenderness.  `I'll put the puppy out of his pain.'

"Emerson Eames retreated towards the window.  `Do you mean
to kill me?' he cried.

"`It's not a thing I'd do for every one,' said Smith with emotion;
`but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow.
I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.'

"`Put that thing down,' shouted the Warden.

"`It'll soon be over, you know,' said Smith with the air of a
sympathetic dentist.  And as the Warden made a run for the window
and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step
and a compassionate expression.

"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white
of early daybreak had already come.  One of them, however,
had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise.  Brakespeare College
was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament,
and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps
been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts
and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this
antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.
He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his
long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that
impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little
lakes round Brakespeare.  Looking down and seeing the spires
and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole
and seeing the South Pole below.

"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.
"He has hanged the world upon nothing," says the Bible.  Do you like being
hanged upon nothing?  I'm going to be hanged upon something myself.
I'm going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
`never true till this moment.  I am going to swing for you.
For you, dear friend.  For your sake.  At your express desire.'

"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'

"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
`the poor puppy struggles.  How fortunate it is that I am wiser
and kinder than he,' and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover
the upper part of Eames's bald head.

"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'

"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed Smith,
sighing gently.  `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best,
a drug.  The only cure is an operation--an operation that is
always successful:  death.'

"As he spoke the sun rose.  It seemed to put colour into everything,
with the rapidity of a lightning artist.  A fleet of little
clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink.
All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings
took on different tints:  here the sun would pick out the green
enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa;
here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there
the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof.
All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly
individual and significant about them, like crests of famous
knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield:  they each
arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames
as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.
Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big
gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the
sunshine set on fire.  He stared at it as though hypnotized;
and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply.
As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry:
all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow.
The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college.
The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep
skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden
and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods.
Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch,
were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa
with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night.
He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.

"Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority,
as he might have called to a student to shut a door.

"`Let me come off this place,' he cried; `I can't bear it.'

"`I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said Smith critically;
`but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains,
or let you back into this room (on which complex points I
am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up.
Do I understand that you want to get back to life?'

"`I'd give anything to get back,' replied the unhappy professor.

"`Give anything!' cried Smith; `then, blast your impudence,
give us a song!'

"`What song do you mean?' demanded the exasperated Eames; `what song?'

"`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,' answered the other gravely.
`I'll let you off if you'll repeat after me the words--

        "`I thank the goodness and the grace
            That on my birth have smiled.
          And perched me on this curious place,
            A happy English child.'


"Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
told him to hold his hands up in the air.  Vaguely connecting this
proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers,
Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise.
A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him
than of a comic statue.

"`You are now engaged in public worship,' remarked Smith severely,
`and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks
on the pond.'

"The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.

"`Not forgetting the drakes,' said Smith sternly.
(Eames weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything, please.
You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas
and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks
and rags and bones and spotted blinds.'

"`All right, all right,' repeated the victim in despair;
`sticks and rags and bones and blinds.'

"`Spotted blinds, I think we said,' remarked Smith with a
rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him
like a long metallic finger.

"`Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames faintly.

"`You can't say fairer than that,' admitted the younger man,
`and now I'll just tell you this to wind up with.
If you really were what you profess to be, I don't see that it
would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff
neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-worshipping brains.
But in strict biographical fact you are a very nice fellow,
addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a brother.
I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head
so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear),
and then we will go in and have some breakfast.'

"He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor
endured with singular firmness, and then said, `But don't fire
them all off.'

"`Why not' asked the other buoyantly.

"`Keep them,' asked his companion, `for the next man you meet
who talks as we were talking.'

"It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek
with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.

"It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from
the ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself
from the Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively,
he rejoined his companion in the late extraordinary scene.
He was astonished to find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken,
and sitting with his shaggy head on his hands.  When addressed,
he lifted a very pale face.

"`Why, what is the matter?' asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this
time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.

"`I must ask your indulgence,' said Smith, rather brokenly.
`I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.'

"`YOU have had an escape from death?' repeated the Professor
in not unpardonable irritation.  `Well, of all the cheek--'

"`Oh, don't you understand, don't you understand?' cried the pale
young man impatiently.  `I had to do it, Eames; I had to prove
you wrong or die.  When a man's young, he nearly always has
some one whom he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of man--
some one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.

"`Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority,
and not as the scribes.  Nobody could comfort me if YOU
said there was no comfort.  If you really thought there was
nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see.
Don't you see that I HAD to prove you didn't really mean it?--
or else drown myself in the canal.'

"`Well,' said Eames hesitatingly, `I think perhaps you confuse--'

"`Oh, don't tell me that!' cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance
of mental pain; `don't tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence
with the Will to Live!  That's German, and German is High Dutch,
and High Dutch is Double Dutch.  The thing I saw shining in your eyes
when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not "the
Will to Live."  What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle
was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and
beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute.
I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack
between the houses.  It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life,
whatever that is.  Eames, we've been to the brink of death together;
won't you admit I'm right?'

"`Yes,' said Eames very slowly, `I think you are right.
You shall have a First!'

"`Right!' cried Smith, springing up reanimated.  `I've passed
with honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.'

"`You needn't be sent down,' said Eames with the quiet confidence
of twelve years of intrigue.  `Everything with us comes from
the man on top to the people just round him:  I am the man on top,
and I shall tell the people round me the truth.'

"The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window,
but he spoke with equal firmness.  `I must be sent down,' he said,
`and the people must not be told the truth.'

"`And why not' asked the other.

"`Because I mean to follow your advice,' answered the massive youth,
`I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state
you and I were in last night--I wish we could even plead drunkenness.
I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists--pills for pale people.
And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise--
to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise;
not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be
recalled any more than the dying breeze.  I don't want people to
anticipate me as a well-known practical joke.  I want both my gifts
to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man.  But I
shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life.
I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.'

"`You can scarcely be called a skeleton,' said Dr. Eames, smiling.

"`That comes of being so much at the feast,' answered the massive youth.
`No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out.
But that is not quite what I meant:  what I mean is that I caught
a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull
and cross-bones, the ~memento mori~. It isn't only meant to remind
us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too.
With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept
young by death.  Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us,
as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.'

"Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality,
`But I know something now, Eames.  I knew it when I saw
the clouds turn pink.'

"`What do you mean?' asked Eames.  `What did you know?'

"`I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.'

"He gripped Dr. Eames's hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily
to the door.  Before he had vanished through it he had added,
`It's very dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second
that he understands death.'

"Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his
late assailant had left.  Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella,
and went for a brisk if rotatory walk.  Several times,
however, he stood outside the villa with the spotted blinds,
studying them intently with his head slightly on one side.
Some took him for a lunatic and some for an intending purchaser.
He is not yet sure that the two characters would be widely different.

"The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is,
in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters.
Each of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other.
But the undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude
of the story; and if their version of the thing be questioned, they,
the undersigned persons, would deucedly well like to know who does
know about it if they don't.

"The undersigned persons will now adjourn to `The Spotted Dog'
for beer.  Farewell.

                              "(Signed) James Emerson Eames,
                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

                                           "Innocent Smith."





                         Chapter II

                      The Two Curates;
                   or, the Burglary Charge


Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders
of the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together.
Both the Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks,
and they revealed by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the
yellow that nothing could be done in the way of denial of the document.
The letter from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and social tone.

"Very few words," said Inglewood, "are required to conclude
our case in this matter.  Surely it is now plain that our client
carried his pistol about with the eccentric but innocent
purpose of giving a wholesome scare to those whom he regarded
as blasphemers.  In each case the scare was so wholesome
that the victim himself has dated from it as from a new birth.
Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor--
he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing them.
That is the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I
put to the prosecutors.  That is why they dared not produce
a line by any one who had actually confronted the pistol.
All who had actually confronted the pistol confessed that they
had profited by it.  That was why Smith, though a good shot,
never hit anybody.  He never hit anybody because he was a good shot.
His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood.
This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts
and of all the other facts.  No one can possibly explain
the Warden's conduct except by believing the Warden's story.
Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of ingenious theories,
could find no other theory to cover the case."

"There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality,"
said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; "the science of criminology is in
its infancy, and--"

"Infancy!" cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture
of enlightenment; "why, that explains it!"

"I repeat," proceeded Inglewood, "that neither Dr. Pym nor any one else
can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden's signature,
for the shots missed and the witnesses missing."

The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return
of a cock-fighting coolness.  "The defence," he said,
"omits a coldly colossal fact.  They say we produce none of
the actual victims.  Wal, here is one victim--England's celebrated
and stricken Warner.  I reckon he is pretty well produced.
And they suggest that all the outrages were followed
by reconciliation.  Wal, there's no flies on England's Warner;
and he isn't reconciliated much."

"My learned friend," said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet,
"must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy.
Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to startle
into any recognition of the glory of God.  We admit that our client,
in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not successful.
But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a proposal
for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest convenience,
and without further fees."

"'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite serious for the first time
in his life, "you might give us a bit of bally sense for a chinge."

"What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?"
asked Moon sharply.

"The creature," said Dr. Warner superciliously, "asked me,
with characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday."

"And you answered, with characteristic swank," cried Moon, shooting out
a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
"that you didn't keep your birthday."

"Something like that," assented the doctor.

"Then," continued Moon, "he asked you why not, and you said it was because you
didn't see that birth was anything to rejoice over.  Agreed?  Now is there
any one who doubts that our tale is true?"

There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, "Pax populi
vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of God.  Or in
Dr. Pym's more civilized language, it is up to him to open the next charge.
On this we claim an acquittal."


It was about an hour later.  Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented
time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air.
It almost seemed as if he had been "struck so," as the nurses say;
and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve
the strain with some remark.  For the last half-hour or so the eminent
criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view
of offences against property as it did of offences against life.
"Most murder," he had said, "is a variation of homicidal mania,
and in the same way most theft is a version of kleptomania.
I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite
adequately con-ceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment
more tol'rant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes.
They will doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning,
so thought-arresting, so--" It was here that he paused and indulged
in the delicate gesture to which allusion has been made; and Michael
could bear it no longer.

"Yes, yes," he said impatiently, "we admit the chasm.
The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him
to prison for ten years.  The tolerant and humane ticket
accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever.
We pass the chasm."

It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances
of verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only
of his opponent's interruption, but even of his own pause.

"So stock-improving," continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, "so fraught
with real high hopes of the future.  Science therefore
regards thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards murderers.
It regards them not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period,
but as patients to be detained and cared for," (his first two digits
closed again as he hesitated)--"in short, for the required period.
But there is something special in the case we investigate here.
Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself--"

"I beg pardon," said Michael; "I did not ask just now because,
to tell the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical,
was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers
of scentless and delicate dust.  But now that things are moving
a little more, there is something I should really like to know.
I have hung on Dr. Pym's lips, of course, with an interest that it
were weak to call rapture, but I have so far been unable to form
any conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance,
is supposed to have been and gone and done."

"If Mr. Moon will have patience," said Pym with dignity, "he will find
that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction
to certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man
than Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict
specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals.
One will have an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl
sleeve-links, while he passes over the most elegant and celebrated
diamond sleeve-links, placed about in the most conspicuous locations.
Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots,
while elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.
The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity
than of any brightness of business habits; but there is one kind
of depredator to whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply.
I allude to our fellow-citizen the housebreaker.

"It has been maintained by some of our boldest young
truth-seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden
wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a fork
that is insulated in a locked box under the butler's bed.
They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point.
They declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous
locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were
in the great test experiment of Calypso College.  We hope this
experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge,
and will bring the burglar once more into line and union
with his fellow criminals."

Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment
for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table
in explosive enlightenment.

"Oh, I see!" he cried; "you mean that Smith is a burglar."

"I thought I made it quite ad'quately lucid," said Mr. Pym,
folding up his eyelids.  It was typical of this topsy-turvy private
trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression
on either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other.
Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization.
Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.

"All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,"
continued the American doctor, "are cases of burglary.
Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select
the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most
correct cast-iron evidence.  I will now call on my colleague,
Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest,
unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins."

Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from
the earnest and unspotted Hawkins.  Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well,
Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the
new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists.
But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense
of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when,
a little later, it was handed across the table.


"Dear Sir,--I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident
you mention, private as it was, should have filtered through
our omnivorous journals to the mere populace; for the position
I have since attained makes me, I conceive, a public character,
and this was certainly the most extraordinary incident
in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant career.
I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult.
I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League
days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set,
have spent many a night at the Christian Social Union.  But this
other experience was quite inconceivable.  I can only describe
it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me,
as a clergyman, to mention.

"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say
profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom
of God.  I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely
of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
and their opinions extreme.

"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest
respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little.
No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of politics
in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any advice
about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly that they
are likely to make an erroneous selection.  But, while I do
not mean to touch at all upon political or social problems,
I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism
or Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal
of a sacred trust.  Far be it from me to say a word against
the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in question.
He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating;
but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his hair
like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration
of the good and wise.  Nor is it for me to utter my personal
judgements of the appearance of the people in the hall.
Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased
and envious faces--"

"Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive--"adopting
the reverend gentleman's favourite figure of logic, may I say that
while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect,
he is a blasted old jackass."

"Really!" said Dr. Pym; "I protest."

"You must keep quiet, Michael," said Inglewood; "they have a right
to read their story."

"Chair!  Chair!  Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his own;
and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
the authority of the Court of Beacon.

"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
good-humour. "I apologize.  I won't interrupt again."

Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading
of the clergyman's letter was already continuing.

"The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
will say nothing.  It was deplorable.  Many of the audience
were Irish, and showed the weakness of that impetuous people.
When gathered together into gangs and conspiracies they seem
to lose altogether that lovable good-nature and readiness to accept
anything one tells them which distinguishes them as individuals."


With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly,
and sat down again.


"These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the speech
of Mr. Percy.  He descended to their level with witticisms about rent
and a reserve of labour.  Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such
words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly.  Some hours
afterward the storm broke.  I had been addressing the meeting for some time,
pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient
attendance at evening service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and of
many other things that might materially help them to improve their lot.
It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary interruption occurred.
An enormous, powerful man, partly concealed with white plaster,
arose in the middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a foreign language.
Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended to his level by entering into
a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the victor.  The meeting
began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve
sentences more the rush was made for the platform.  The enormous plasterer,
in particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant;
and I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving
them back.  I don't know what he said, but, what with shouting and shoving
and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people
went roaring down another passage.

"Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story.  When he had got
us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
`You're well out of that, sir; now you'd better come along with me.
I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've all
been talking about.  Come along!'  And turning his big back abruptly,
he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamp-post,
we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him.  He had certainly
helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I could
not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds.
Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all
his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also.  In fact,
he comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house
and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family.
I cannot but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal
advantages with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation,
and certainly--but I digress.

"A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post
faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind.
The large man in front of us looked larger and larger in the haze.
He did not turn round, but he said with his huge back to us,
`All that talking's no good; we want a little practical Socialism.'

"`I quite agree,' said Percy; `but I always like to understand things
in theory before I put them into practice.'

"`Oh, you just leave that to me,' said the practical Socialist,
or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness.
`I have a way with me.  I'm a Permeator.'

"I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed,
so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey
for the present.  It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane,
where we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage,
at the end of which we passed through a wooden gate left open.
We then found ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour,
crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered
obscurely that it was a short cut.

"I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading
to a higher level of road.  My thoughtless colleague ran up it so
quickly that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could.
The path on which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow.
I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous.
Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of air,
I first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs.  Then I saw
that they were not short shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees.
I, an English gentleman and clergyman of the Church of England--I was
walking along the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.

"I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps,
and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I
could all the time.

"`It's a right-of-way,' declared my indefensible informant.
`It's closed to traffic once in a hundred years.'

"`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!'  I called out; `you are not going
on with this blackguard?'

"`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
`I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is,
whatever he is.'

"`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite calmly.
`I am a member of the Fabian Society.  I take back the wealth stolen
by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
fitted to the special occasion--here a little and there a little.
Do you see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof?
I'm permeating that one to-night.'

"`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire to be quit of it.'

"`The ladder is just behind you,' answered the creature
with horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give
you my card.'

"If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I
should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind
would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall.
As it was, in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my
waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder,
landed in the respectable streets once more.  Not before, however,
I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts--
that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards
the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and,
what was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him.
I have never seen either of them since that day.

"In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
connection with the wild set.  I am far from saying that every
member of the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar.
I have no right to bring any such charge.  But it gave me a hint
of what such courses may lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.

"I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a
Mr. Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question.
When I got home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed
there under the name of Innocent Smith.--Yours faithfully,
                                     "John Clement Hawkins."


Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper.  He knew that
the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses Gould
(for one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like one.
After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary charge.

"We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable facilities to
the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all
those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym.  I know how they
are made.  Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say
one thing instead of another.  Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp,
forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own.
Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is
unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny.
Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all.

"I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement,
and ask the prosecution two or three questions."

Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.

"In the first place," continued Moon, "have you the date of Canon Hawkins's
last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs?"

"Ho, yus!" called out Gould smartly.  "November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."

"Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in Hoxton up
which they climbed?"

"Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.

"Well," said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, "was there any burglary
in that terrace that night?  Surely you could find that out."

"There may well have been," said the doctor primly, after a pause,
"an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."

"Another question," proceeded Michael.  "Canon Hawkins, in his
blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment.
Why don't you produce the evidence of the other clergyman,
who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present
at the crime?"

Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table,
as he did when he was specially confident of the clearness
of his reply.

"We have entirely failed," he said, "to track the other clergyman,
who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had
seen him as-cending the gutters and the leads.  I am fully aware
that this may strike many as sing'lar; yet, upon reflection,
I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker.
This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon's evidence,
a minister of eccentric ways.  His con-nection with England's proudest
and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is,
by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible fascination.
I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime
and forced him to hide his head in the real crim'nal class.
That would fully account for his non-appearance, and the failure
of all attempts to trace him."

"It is impossible, then, to trace him?" asked Moon.

"Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.

"You are sure it's impossible?"

"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably.  "We'd 'ave found
'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary.  Don't YOU
start looking for 'im. Look for your own 'ead in the dustbin.
You'll find that--after a bit," and his voice died away in grumbling.

"Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting down, "kindly read
Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court."

"Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much
as possible," began Inglewood, "I will not read the first part
of the letter sent to us.  It is only fair to the prosecution
to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies,
as far as facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman.
We concede, then, the canon's story so far as it goes.
This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient
to the court.  I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point
when all three men were standing on the garden wall:--


"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
not to waver.  A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud
of copper fog on the houses and gardens round.  My decision was
violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so
complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.
I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have
given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.
That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--
rose against me like a towering blasphemy.

"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly;
and artists love to be limited.  I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
discipline was mere decoration.  I delighted in mere divisions of time;
I liked eating fish on Friday.  But then I like fish; and the fast
was made for men who like meat.  Then I came to Hoxton and found men
who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because
they could not get meat--and fish-bones when they could not get fish.
As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated
the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant.  Hoxton cures that.
Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
had not been a pageant, but a riot--and a suppressed riot.
There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom
the tremendous promises had been made.  In the face of that I had
to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.
In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist--
and a pessimist.  Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.

"On the top of all this comes Hawkins.  If he had cursed all the Hoxton men,
excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should
have rather admired him.  If he had ordered them all to be burned
in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.
But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins--nor any other kind of craft.
He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter
or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer.  He is a perfect gentleman;
that is his complaint.  He does not impose his creed, but simply his class.
He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address.
He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said.
A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this
brother is a major.

"When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body
and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body
and soul together, the stampede against our platform began.
I took part in his undeserved rescue, I followed his
obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together
on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog.
Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm
of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two.
The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was--
and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to
it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class,
for I had lived with it a long time.  Many old texts about
the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought
that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class.
About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was crawling
up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
leaping in front of me like a gorilla.

"This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs,
broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here
and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.
The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat
swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.
The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
overpowered by sinister spirits.  Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.
I thought dimly of illustrations to the `Arabian Nights'
on brown paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii
gathering round the Seal of Solomon.  By the way, what was
the Seal of Solomon?  Nothing to do with sealing-wax really,
I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour,
poured out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.

"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.
But the scene grew subtler with familiarity.  We stood above the average
of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
great cities creates the strange thing called fog.  Beneath us rose
a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.
The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.
And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural,
like fumes from a witch's pot.  It was as if the shameful and ugly
shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.
Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift
from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might
be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.
But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green,
as clear and crooked as Arabic--"

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the 'bus.
He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten
the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.  Mrs. Duke,
who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice,
and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue,
and by Michael with a red pencil.  Inglewood then resumed
the reading of the document.


"Then I read the writing of the smoke.  Smoke was like the modern
city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always
wicked and vain.

"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain.  It was our
weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.
These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it,
and seen it as a whirlpool.  And then we had used it as a sink.
It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
Only our worst things were going to heaven.  Only our criminals
could still ascend like angels.

"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped
by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals
like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.
He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
emptied palaces of Italy.  Indeed, some little time later,
when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.

"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole
chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.
I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt
sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.

"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense
of comedy and even of comfort.  I could not recall what connected this
abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.
Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys
in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally
comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses
were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.  The law-breaking of my companion
seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable.
Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their
foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they
should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them?
One would suppose that property was a serious thing.  I had reached,
as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions,
the heaven of a higher levity.

"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced
chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for,
tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.
Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way
of invading the houses of men.  I thought of little chimney-sweeps,
and `The Water Babies;' but I decided that it was not that.
Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy
trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.

"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black hole;
but I heard a voice calling to me from below.  A second or two afterwards,
the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog,
and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me
to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends.
I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking
of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.

"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was
the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
but there was also the top door for the gods.  The chimney is,
so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven.
By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark--
to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack
of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
But Santa Claus's door was really the front door:
it was the door fronting the universe.

"I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below
the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet
larger loft below.  Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps,
as my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall.
The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.
I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.

"I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
their horror of offences against property.  I had heard all
the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong;
I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.
And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way
down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar,
I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all,
is really wrong.

"It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed
the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across
the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part
of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts,
lifted a sort of trapdoor.  This released a light from below,
and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room,
of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom,
and is an adjunct to it.  Light thus breaking from beneath
our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor
just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless
been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend.
But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining
room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness.
To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle,
by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one's psychology.
It was like having found a fourth dimension.

"My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly
and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him;
though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless.
Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar
had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and stood looking
down the staircase and listening.  Then, leaving the door
still half open, he came back into the middle of the room,
and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.
The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human
way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full,
but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked
for the purposes of reading in bed.  One of those stunted
German stoves that look like red goblins stood in a corner,
and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part.
There were three windows, high but narrow.  After another glance round,
my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside.
He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely
handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port.
Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little
luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation
and revulsion I had felt above.

"`Don't do it!'  I cried quite incoherently, `Santa Claus--'

"`Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table
and stood looking at me, `you've thought about that, too.'

"`I can't express a millionth part of what I've thought of,' I cried,
`but it's something like this... oh, can't you see it?  Why are children
not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?
He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery--because there are
more toys where he has been.  What should we feel if there were less?
Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take
away the children's balls and dolls while they slept?  Could a Greek
tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?
Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer--can you think of anything
so base as a toy-stealer?'

"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid
it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes
fixed on my face.

"`Man!' I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why
it's really wrong.  The goods of the unhappy children of men
should be really respected because of their worthlessness.
I know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark.  I know
Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand.
That is why I could not take them away.  I did not mind so much,
as long as I thought of men's things as their valuables;
but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.'

"After a moment I added abruptly, `Only saints and sages ought to be robbed.
They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people
of the things that are their poor little pride.'

"He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both,
and lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.

"`Don't do it!'  I cried.  `It might be the last bottle of some rotten
vintage or other.  The master of this house may be quite proud of it.
Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of such things?'

"`It's not the last bottle,' answered my criminal calmly;
`there's plenty more in the cellar.'

"`You know the house, then?'  I said.

"`Too well,' he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
something eerie about it.  `I am always trying to forget what I know--
and to find what I don't know.'  He drained his glass.
`Besides,' he added, `it will do him good.'

"`What will do him good?'

"`The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange person.

"`Does he drink too much, then?'  I inquired.

"`No,' he answered, `not unless I do.'

"`Do you mean,' I demanded, `that the owner of this house approves
of all you do?'

"`God forbid,' he answered; `but he has to do the same.'

"The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows
unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror,
about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky.
I had once more the notion about the gigantic genii--
I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds
and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our
little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes.
My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him,
and talking with the same rather creepy confidentialness.

"`I am always trying to find him--to catch him unawares.
I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him;
but whenever I find him--he is doing what I am doing.'

"I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear.  `There is some one coming,'
I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it.  Not from
the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber
(which seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were
coming nearer.  I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster,
or double, I expected to see when the door was pushed open from within.
I am only quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.

"Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity,
a rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic--
her dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves,
with a face which, though still comparatively young,
conveyed experience as well as intelligence.  All she said was,
`I didn't hear you come in.'

"`I came in another way,' said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely.
`I'd left my latchkey at home.'

"I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania.
`I'm really very sorry,' I cried.  `I know my position is irregular.
Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is?'

"`Mine,' said the burglar, `May I present you to my wife?'

"I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat;
and I did not get out of it till nearly morning.  Mrs. Smith
(such was the prosaic name of this far from prosaic household)
lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly.
She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture
of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well,
but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it.
Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband
had left her a little nervous.  Anyhow, when she had retired
to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured
forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine.

"He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical
and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career.
A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools;
and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit,
but one in which the members were right.  While his brain
accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it.
As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things.
As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately,
it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded
firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving
him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout.
He had done it solely because the poor don had professed
in theory a preference for non-existence. For this
very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down.
Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had
quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic
of the joy of life.  He cut across all the associations
of serious-minded men.  He was gay, but by no means careless.
His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.
Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that
life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain
that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it.
`What is more immortal,' he would cry, `than love and war?
Type of all desire and joy--beer.  Type of all battle
and conquest--skittles.'

"There was something in him of what the old world called
the solemnity of revels--when they spoke of `solemnizing'
a mere masquerade or wedding banquet.  Nevertheless he was not
a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker.
His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith,
in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.

"`I don't deny,' he said, `that there should be priests to remind
men that they will one day die.  I only say that at certain
strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests,
called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough
to fear death.  They hadn't enough blood in them to be cowards.
Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never
even knew they had been born.  For ages looking up an eternal
perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die.
But for these little white rats it was just as true that death
was their only chance of learning to live.'

"His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.
He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger.
He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong
speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive.
He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once
reminded him of the awful subconscious reality.  When the don
had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs,
vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire
of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers.
The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head,
which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved
by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect.
Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording this,
except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a
total stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs;
and that the man was alive.

"The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
when he suddenly fell in love.  He happened to be shooting a high
and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself
that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt
about the continuance of the fact.  What was worse, he found he had
equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one
who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring
her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have
proposed to her on the bank.  Anyhow, with the same impetuosity
with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her;
and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently said `good-night.'

"They had settled down in these high narrow houses
near Highbury.  Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word.
One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very
happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman
but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home;
but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down.
`I am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with gravity,
`and have often come in through a broken window rather than be
late for tea.'

"He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.
He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at
the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there
and what kind of a man he was.  The London general servant is not
used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies.
And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order
to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt
in other people's.

"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his rather
weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.
I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.'

"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed
politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.
Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture;
would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase
as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
of reality.  Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense,
and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep
the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway
of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.

"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?
A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!
A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor's! On
this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it,
though no one understands.  I believe the maniac was one of those who
do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships
by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.
This, at least, I know for certain.  Whether such men have laughed
or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping.
Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it.
It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist
as if from the sting of an adder.  But it is equally true that men flee
from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.
Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.
For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things,
is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.
We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than
the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations,
the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates
and loves the world.--I am, yours faithfully,
                                            "Raymond Percy."


"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.

The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been
in an almost religious state of submission and assent.
Something had bound them together; something in the sacred tradition
of the last two words of the letter; something also in the touching
and boyish embarrassment with which Inglewood had read them--
for he had all the thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic.
Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way as ever lived;
far kinder to his family than more refined men of pleasure,
simple and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly wholesome
animal and a thoroughly genuine character.  But wherever there
is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism,
looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile.
It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin
for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.

"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Moses Gould.

Finding that this was not well received, he explained further,
exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant features.

"Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when 'e's corfin' up a fly,"
he said pleasantly.  "Don't you see you've bunged up old Smith anyhow.
If this parson's tale's O.K.--why, Smith is 'ot.  'E's pretty 'ot.
We find him elopin' with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab.
Well, what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her
blarsted shyness--transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness?
Miss Gray ain't been very sharp, but I reckon she'll be pretty shy."

"Don't be a brute," growled Michael Moon.

None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
along the table at Innocent Smith.  He was still bowed above his paper toys,
and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame.
He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it
in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.





                         Chapter III

                       The Round Road;
                  or, the Desertion Charge


Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American,
and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.

"Ignoring," he said, "the delicate and considerable knightly protests
that have been called forth by my colleague's native sense of oration,
and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable
to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague's question
by no means devoid of rel'vancy. The last charge against the accused was
one of burglary; the next charge on the paper is of bigamy and desertion.
It does without question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut
this last charge, have really admitted the next.  Either Innocent Smith
is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else that is exploded;
but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy.  It all depends on
what view we take of the alleged letter from Curate Percy.  Under these
conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions.
May I ask how the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy?  Did it
come direct from the prisoner?"

"We have had nothing direct from the prisoner," said Moon quietly.
"The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us
from another quarter."

"From what quarter?" asked Dr. Pym.

"If you insist," answered Moon, "we had them from Miss Gray.

"Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead,
opened them very wide.

"Do you really mean to say," he said, "that Miss Gray was in possession
of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?"

"Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat down.

The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.

"Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy's narrative
is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents
in our own possession.  Of these the principal and most certain is
the testimony of Innocent Smith's gardener, who was present at the most
dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity.
Mr. Gould, the gardener, please."

Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener.
That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith
when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon.
From the gardener's tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew
certain he had seen the place.  It was one of those corners of town
or country that one does not forget, for it looked like a frontier.
The garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was steep
and sharp, like a fortress.  Beyond was a roll of real country,
with a white path sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches
of great gray trees writhing and twisting against the sky.
But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban,
were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland
a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar-box
that stood exactly at the corner.  Inglewood was sure of the place;
he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle;
he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur.
But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his
frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared
over the garden bushes above.  The gardener's account,
unlike the curate's, was quite free from decorative adjectives,
however many he may have uttered privately when writing it.
He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out
and began to play about with a rake, as he often did.  Sometimes he
would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children);
sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree,
and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of
a giant frog in its final agony.  Never, apparently, did he think
of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener,
in consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he
(the gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying
the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped
red and white jacket (which might have been his smoking-jacket,
but was quite as like a part of his pyjamas), and had heard him then
and there call out to his wife, who was looking out of the bedroom
window on to the garden, these decisive and very loud expressions--

"I won't stay here any longer.  I've got another wife and much
better children a long way from here.  My other wife's got redder
hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much finer situation;
and I'm going off to them."

With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down
in the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat.
Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental
memory of the place.  He could see with his mind's eye that big
bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked
woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind.
But the gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear
to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance
of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the man up
the road.  Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond some
local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast,
nothing was known of him again.

This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few
but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge.
So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on
the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
"I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect
the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener.
By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will hear the French innkeeper."

Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
reading the account in question.  It was in French.  It seemed to them
to run something like this:--


"Sir,--Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
rather north of Dunquerque.  I am willing to write all I know
of the stranger out of the sea.

"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets.  A man of sense
looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette.  One does not permit
beauty to pervade one's whole life, just as one does not pave
all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums.
My faith, but we should miss the onions!

"But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
I felt like a poet--like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe
in the mad Montmartre.

"Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter
and poisonous.  I had never known it look so unfamiliar before.
In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to
the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk
where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore.
There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from
the sea.  It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man
of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up
to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.
He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him
look like a Triton.  Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging
to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded.
Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to partake
of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.
He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private
bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an
easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats.
He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.  When I
naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know;
it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed
it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, `over there.'

"I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he
saw it.  Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute.
He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer.
I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were
that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box
at the corner.

"`A red pillar-box!' I cried in astonishment.  `Why, the place must
be in England!'

"`I had forgotten,' he said, nodding heavily.  `That is the island's name.'

"`But, ~nom du nom~,' I cried testily, `you've just come
from England, my boy.'

"`They SAID it was England,' said my imbecile, conspiratorially.
`They said it was Kent.  But Kentish men are such liars one can't
believe anything they say.'

"`Monsieur,' I said, `you must pardon me.  I am elderly,
and the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me.
I go by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension
of applied common sense called science.'

"`Science!' cried the stranger.  `There is only one good thing
science ever discovered--a good thing, good tidings of great joy--
that the world is round.'

"I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression
to my intelligence.  `I mean,' he said, `that going right round
the world is the shortest way to where you are already.'

"`Is it not even shorter,' I asked, `to stop where you are?'

"`No, no, no!' he cried emphatically.  `That way is long and very weary.
At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find
the wife I really married and the house that is really mine.
And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box.
Do you,' he asked with a sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush
out of your house in order to find it?'

"`No, I think not,' I replied; `reason tells a man from
the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life.
I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man.
All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and--'

"`And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost terrific height,
`you made the French Revolution!'

"`Pardon me,' I said, `I am not quite so elderly.
A relative perhaps.'

"`I mean your sort did!' exclaimed this personage.
`Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made
the French Revolution.  Oh!  I know some say it was no good,
and you're just back where you were before.  Why, blast it all,
that's just where we all want to be--back where we were before!
That is revolution--going right round!  Every revolution,
like a repentance, is a return.'

"He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again,
and then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck
the tiny table with his colossal fist and went on.

"`I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
English Revolution.  God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone.  But I am going to turn
the world upside down, too.  I'm going to turn myself upside down.
I'm going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes,
where trees and men hang head downward in the sky.  But my revolution,
like yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy place--
the celestial, incredible place--the place where we were before.'

"With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason,
he leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight,
swinging his pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment,
which also pointed to some loss of mental balance.
This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the
fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice.--
Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high consideration,
with which I have the honour to be your obedient servant,
                                            "Jules Durobin."


"The next document in our dossier," continued Inglewood,
"comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia,
and runs as follows:--


"Sir,--My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch:  I am the stationmaster
at the station near Crazok.  The great trains go by across
the plains taking people to China, but very few people get
down at the platform where I have to watch.  This makes my life
rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have.
But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours,
for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia
so much as in other parts.  Many of the peasants round here
have never heard of Bernard Shaw.

"I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since
the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult.
The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles
of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
they were ill acquainted.  I did not approve of these cruel acts,
though provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there
is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them.
This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.

"It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains
came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching
a train that had come in.  Only one person got out of the train,
far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train.
It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky.  A little snow had fallen,
but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort
of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops
of some distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes.
As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train
he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a man.
But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his
shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little.
From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull
red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested
on a huge pole such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.

"Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in one
of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution,
though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side.
I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid
out right and left with such energy that he came through them without scathe
and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.

"Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim,
he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.

"`There are not many houses to be had round here,' I answered
in the same language, `the district has been very disturbed.
A revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed.
Any further building--'

"`Oh! I don't mean that,' he cried; `I mean a real house--a live house.
It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.'

"`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture
moved me profoundly.  We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere
of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can still be seen
in the bright colours of the children's dolls and of the ikons.
For an instant the idea of a house running away from a man gave
me pleasure, for the enlightenment of man moves slowly.

"`Have you no other house of your own?'  I asked.

"`I have left it,' he said very sadly.  `It was not the house that grew dull,
but I that grew dull in it.  My wife was better than all women, and yet I
could not feel it.'

"`And so,' I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out of the front door,
like a masculine Nora.'

"`Nora?' he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian word.

"`I mean Nora in "The Doll's House,"' I replied.

"At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an Englishman;
for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but `ukases.'

"`"The Doll's House"?' he cried vehemently; `why, that is just where Ibsen
was so wrong!  Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house.
Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows
WERE windows, while the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house,
and shrieks when a front door opens inwards.  A banker has a real house,
yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek
when their real front doors open inwards.'

"Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly silent;
and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was saying
in a sort of loud whisper, `I have found out how to make a big thing small.
I have found out how to turn a house into a doll's house.  Get a long
way off it:  God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift
of distance.  Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite
little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again.
I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate,
and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window.
For the windows really open in my doll's house.'

"`But why?'  I asked, `should you wish to return to that particular
doll's house?  Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against convention,
having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having dared
to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom?
As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your
marriage was only your mood.  You have a right to leave it all behind,
like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
Having once escaped, you have the world before you.  Though the words
may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.'

"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains,
where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke
out of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline,
the one hot and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.

"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia.  You are right.
I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again,
and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could
ever find me.  Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'

"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask
him what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.

"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy eye,
`why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away
from his wife.'

"`And why is it dangerous?'  I inquired.

"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd person,
`and we all want to be found.'

"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked,
`Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we
want most is to be lost:  to find ourselves in untrodden paths,
and to do unprecedented things:  to break with the past and belong
to the future.'

"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene--the dark purple plains,
the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents.
`I shall not find the house here,' he said.  `It is still eastward--
further and further eastward.'

"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
of his pole upon the frozen earth.

"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be locked up in a
madhouse before I reach my own house.  I have been a bit unconventional
in my time!  Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old
Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs;
but the things I do are unprecedented things.  This round road I
am treading is an untrodden path.  I do believe in breaking out;
I am a revolutionist.  But don't you see that all these real leaps
and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden--
to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?
Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order
to get HOME?'

"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I should accept that.'

"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained a second
thing to me.'

"`What do you mean?'  I asked; `what thing?'

"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking across quite
suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last.
And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats.

"I saw no more of him.  But though his views were adverse to the best
advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person:  I should
like to find out if he has produced any literary works.--Yours, etc.,
                                      "Paul Nickolaiovitch."


There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept
the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again
without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.
"The Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks the special
ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way:--


"The Celestial Principles are permanent:  Greeting.--I am Wong-Hi,
and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest
of Fu.  The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it
must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought.
I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this
temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.
But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.
The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees,
like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas.  But the skies
are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade,
and sometimes red like garnet.  But the night is always ebony
and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.

"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly
seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look
as over a sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning.
And yet when he came, it was as if an elephant had strayed
from the armies of the great kings of India.  For palms snapped,
and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before
the temple one taller than the sons of men.

"Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival,
and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners,
so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke
our speech brokenly.

"He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.'
And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house
was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.

"`I have not seen your house nor any houses,' I answered.
`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'

"`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in his eyes,
like the hunger of dogs.  And this seemed to me a strange question
to ask, for what should a man do except what men have done?

"`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up their hands even
if the skies are empty.  For if there are gods, they will be pleased,
and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes
ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all.
So the great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things
with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our
heads we may think many things:  yes, my Lord, and doubt many things.
So long as men offer rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns
at the right hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no.
For these things are not to appease gods, but to appease men.'

"He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous;
yet his look was very gentle.

"`Break your temple,' he said, `and your gods will be freed.'

"And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered:  `And so, if there be no gods,
I shall have nothing but a broken temple.'

"And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was
withheld threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him.
And when I asked him for what he should be forgiven he answered:
`For being right.'

"`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,'
he cried, `it is a shame that they should be wrong.
We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so many iniquities--
it is a shame we should be right after all.'

"And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought
that he and his people were right.

"And he answered:  `We are right because we are bound where
men should be bound, and free where men should be free.
We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and customs--
but we do not doubt our own right to destroy them.  For you live
by customs, but we live by creeds.  Behold me!  In my country I
am called Smip.  My country is abandoned, my name is defiled,
because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me.
You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe.
I am as fickle as the tempest because I do believe.
I do believe in my own house, which I shall find again.
And at the last remaineth the green lantern and the red post.'

"I said to him:  `At the last remaineth only wisdom.'

"But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout,
and rushing forward disappeared among the trees.
I have not seen this man again nor any other man.
The virtues of the wise are of fine brass.
                                                  "Wong-Hi."


"The next letter I have to read," proceeded Arthur Inglewood, "will probably
make clear the nature of our client's curious but innocent experiment.
It is dated from a mountain village in California, and runs as follows:--


"Sir,--A person answering to the rather extraordinary
description required certainly went, some time ago,
over the high pass of the Sierras on which I live and
of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant.
I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut,
on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass.
My name is Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you
about my nationality.  Well, it puzzles me a great deal.
When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard
to have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it
is difficult to invent a nation.  My father was an Irishman of
the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind.
My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old
Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that
of some admixture of Red Indian blood.  I was well educated
and fond of music and books.  But, like many other hybrids,
I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting
many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though
a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains.
In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore
in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a
great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun.
I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm;
and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few
peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place.
But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did.
Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.

"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.  These terraces and towers
of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world.
Rather they seem to be its awful beginning:  its huge foundations.
We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree
of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.
For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth
than planets circling placidly about it.

"All this may have driven me mad;  I am not sure.  I know there is one
angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little,
and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks--
yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.
Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass.
But I had never seen one like this one before.

"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses,
so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him
were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air
of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves.
The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes
as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon.
I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had,
and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket.
`But THAT,' he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.'
I have no notion what he meant.

"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine
from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one
who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last
something that he knew.  Then he sat staring rather foolishly at
the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door.
It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago:
she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude
picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.  He seemed
so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and
the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing,
which I had not done for fourteen years.

"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
where the road fell away below us.  The sunset sky was a vault
of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges
of the dark mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below
rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight
solitary rock we call Green Finger.  Of a queer volcanic colour,
and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing,
it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.

"The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction,
and before he spoke I knew what he meant.  Beyond the great green
rock in the purple sky hung a single star.

"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our
ancient eagles'. `The wise men followed the star and found the house.
But if I followed the star, should I find the house?'

"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.'
I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look it.

"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered.  `I am a man who left his own
house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.'

"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.

"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving
about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I knew
they were walking and talking in another house thousands
of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond
the series of the seas.  I loved them with a devouring love,
because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable:
but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off
their dust from my feet for a testimony.  Nay, I did more.
I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle
like a treadmill.'

"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world?
Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'

"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly.
`I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'

"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
not looked for fourteen years.

"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we
were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
home-sickness that forbids us rest.'

"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift
out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.

"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up
leaning on his grassy pole.  `I think that must be the reason,'
he said--`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
But I think there is more to be said.  I think God has given us
the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land,
for a good reason.'

"`I dare say,' I said.  `What reason?'

"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss,
`we might worship that.'

"`What do you mean?'  I demanded.

"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols--
the mightiest of the rivals of God.'

"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.

"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house
for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge,
or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post
and a hedge.  I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it,
and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot
might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything.
And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had
a real green lamp-post after all.'

"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down
the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles.
But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me.
I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have
never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.--
Yours faithfully, Louis Hara."


After a short silence Inglewood said:  "And, finally, we desire
to put in as evidence the following document:--


"This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to
Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels' in Croydon for the last six months.
When I came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow,
but her husband was away.  She was left with plenty of money and did not
seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good.
One evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn
when I nearly dropped them.  The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck
over the hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge,
just like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy
and ragged like Robinson Crusoe.  I screamed out, but my mistress didn't
even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving.
Then he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup
of tea, and then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself.
He has stopped here ever since and does not really give much trouble,
though I sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head.
                                                "Ruth Davis.

"P.S.--I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said,
very loud and strong:  `Oh, what a lovely place you've got;'
just as if he'd never seen it before."


The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women
had left the court before the more recent of the investigations.
Mrs. Duke was still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large
hunchback in the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys.
But the five men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not
to convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round
the table like the Committee of Public Safety.

Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair
backwards so far as to be in direct danger of falling over,
emitted a startling and prolonged whistle like a steam engine,
and asserted that it was all his eye.

When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind
the books again and answered with considerable excitement,
throwing his papers about.  "All those fairy-tales you've
been reading out," he said.  "Oh! don't talk to me!
I ain't littery and that, but I know fairy-tales when I hear 'em.
I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits
and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we're living
in West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell; and the long and the short
of it is that some things 'appen and some things don't 'appen.
Those are the things that don't 'appen."

"I thought," said Moon gravely, "that we quite clearly explained--"

"Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained," assented Mr. Gould
with extraordinary volubility.  "You'd explain an elephant
off the doorstep, you would.  I ain't a clever chap like you;
but I ain't a born natural, Michael Moon, and when there's
an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no explanations.
`It's got a trunk,' I says.--`My trunk,' you says:
`I'm fond of travellin', and a change does me good.'--`But
the blasted thing's got tusks,' I says.--`Don't look a gift 'orse
in the mouth,' you says, `but thank the goodness and the graice
that on your birth 'as smiled.'--`But it's nearly as big as
the 'ouse,' I says.--`That's the bloomin' perspective,' you says,
`and the sacred magic of distance.'--`Why, the elephant's trumpetin'
like the Day of Judgement,' I says.--`That's your own conscience
a-talking to you, Moses Gould,' you says in a grive and
tender voice.  Well, I 'ave got a conscience as much as you.
I don't believe most of the things they tell you in church
on Sundays; and I don't believe these 'ere things any more
because you goes on about 'em as if you was in church.
I believe an elephant's a great big ugly dingerous beast--
and I believe Smith's another."

"Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood, "that you still doubt the evidence
of exculpation we have brought forward?"

"Yes, I do still doubt it," said Gould warmly.  "It's all
a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off.
'Ow can we test all those tales?  'Ow can we drop in and buy
the `Pink 'Un' at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or whatever
it was?  'Ow can we go and do a gargle at the saloon-bar on top
of the Sierra Mountains?  But anybody can go and see Bunting's
boarding-house at Worthing."

Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.

"Any one," continued Gould, "can call on Mr. Trip."

"It is a comforting thought," replied Michael with restraint;
"but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?"

"For just exactly the sime reason," cried the excited Moses,
hammering on the table with both hands, "for just exactly the sime
reason that he should communicate with Messrs.  'Anbury and Bootle
of Paternoster Row and with Miss Gridley's 'igh class Academy
at 'Endon, and with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge."

"Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life," said Michael,
"why is it among the duties of man to communicate with old
Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?"

"It ain't one of the duties of man," said Gould, "nor one of his pleasures,
either, I can tell you.  She takes the crumpet, does Lady Bullingdon
at Penge.  But it's one of the duties of a prosecutor pursuin'
the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
and it's the sime with all the others I mentioned."

"But why do you bring in these people here?" asked Inglewood.

"Why!  Because we've got proof enough to sink a steamboat,"
roared Moses; "because I've got the papers in my very 'and;
because your precious Innocent is a blackguard and 'ome smasher,
and these are the 'omes he's smashed.  I don't set up for a 'oly man;
but I wouldn't 'ave all those poor girls on my conscience for something.
And I think a chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps
killing 'em all is about capable of cracking a crib or shootin'
an old schoolmaster--so I don't care much about the other yarns
one way or another."

"I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough,
"that we are approaching this matter rather irregularly.
This is really the fourth charge on the charge sheet,
and perhaps I had better put it before you in an ordered
and scientific manner."

Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence
of the darkening room.




                         Chapter IV

                     The Wild Weddings;
                   or, the Polygamy Charge


"A modern man," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, "must, if he be thoughtful,
approach the problem of marriage with some caution.
Marriage is a stage--doubtless a suitable stage--in the long
advance of mankind towards a goal which we cannot as yet conceive;
which we are not, perhaps, as yet fitted even to desire.
What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of marriage?
Have we outlived it?"

"Outlived it?" broke out Moon; "why, nobody's ever survived it!
Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve--and all
as dead as mutton."

"This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc'lar in its character,"
said Dr. Pym frigidly.  "I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon's
matured and ethical view of marriage--"

"I can tell," said Michael savagely, out of the gloom.  "Marriage is a duel
to the death, which no man of honour should decline."

"Michael," said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, "you MUST keep quiet."

"Mr. Moon," said Pym with exquisite good temper, "probably regards
the institution in a more antiquated manner.  Probably he would make
it stringent and uniform.  He would treat divorce in some great soul
of steel--the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson--
exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who
scoots from his wife.  Science has views broader and more humane.
Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction,
just as theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition,
so polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct
for variety.  A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy.
Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower--
as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears
to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment.  Our own world-scorning
Winterbottom has even dared to say, `For a certain rare and fine
physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of females,
as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.'
In any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all
authoritative inquirers.  Such a type, if the widower of a negress,
does in many ascertained cases espouse ~en seconde noces~ an albino;
such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling figure of
an Eskimo.  To such a type there can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs.
If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse
for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.

"Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric
ideality in admitting half of our story without further dispute.
We should like to acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted
a style by conceding also that the story told by Curate Percy about
the canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems to be substantially true.
Apparently Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat;
it only remains to be considered whether it would not have been
kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her.
In confirmation of this fact I can now con-cede to the defence
an unquestionable record of such a marriage."

So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the
"Maidenhead Gazette" which distinctly recorded the marriage
of the daughter of a "coach," a tutor well known in the place,
to Mr. Innocent Smith, late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown
at once both tragic and triumphant.

"I pause upon this pre-liminary fact," he said seriously,
"because this fact alone would give us the victory,
were we aspiring after victory and not after truth.
As far as the personal and domestic problem holds us,
that problem is solved.  Dr. Warner and I entered this house at
an instant of highly emotional diff'culty. England's Warner has
entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time
he entered to save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence.
Smith was just about to carry away a young girl from this house;
his cab and bag were at the very door.  He had told her she was
going to await the marriage license at the house of his aunt.
That aunt," continued Cyrus Pym, his face darkening grandly--"that
visionary aunt had been the dancing will-o'-the-wisp
who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom.
Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word?
When he said `aunt' there glowed about her all the merriment
and high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home.  Kettles began to hum,
pussy cats to purr, in that very wild cab that was being
driven to destruction."

Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another
denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was
not only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting--
when the difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.

"It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at
least represented himself to one innocent female of this house
as an eligible bachelor, being, in fact, a married man.  I agree with
my colleague, Mr. Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this.
As to whether what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical
value indeed, science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation.
But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of a citizen
who ventures, by brutal experiments upon living females, to anticipate
the verdict of science on such a point?

"The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith
in Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he married
in Maidenhead.  If one short sweet spell of constancy and heart
repose interrupted the plunging torrent of his profligate life,
we will not deprive him of that long past possibility.
After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have plunged deeper
and deeper into the shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame."

Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more
light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect.
After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued.

"The first instance of the accused's repeated and irregular nuptials,"
he exclaimed, "comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses herself
with the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look
out upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep.
The communication she has sent to us runs as follows:--


"Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference
is made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail.
The girl Polly Green was a perfectly adequate dressmaker,
and lived in the village for about two years.  Her unattached
condition was bad for her as well as for the general morality
of the village.  Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to be
understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman.
The villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon,
came forward in several cases; and all would have been well had it
not been for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl
Green herself.  Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is
a village there must be a village idiot, and in her village,
it seems, there was one of these wretched creatures.
Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware
that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual
idiots and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes.
She noticed, however, the startling smallness of his head
in comparison to the rest of his body; and, indeed, the fact
of his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette
of both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon
to put the matter quite beyond doubt.  Lady Bullingdon was
astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question.
Lady Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point,
telling him that he was a `donkey' to dream of such a thing,
and actually received, along with an imbecile grin,
the answer that donkeys generally go after carrots.
But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she
was actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man
in a far superior position to her own.  Lady Bullingdon could not,
of course, countenance such an arrangement for a moment,
and the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage.
Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man's name,
but thinks it was Smith.  He was always called in the village
the Innocent.  Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he murdered
Green in a mental outbreak."


"The next communication," proceeded Pym, "is more conspicuous for brevity,
but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the upshot.
It is dated from the offices of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, publishers,
and is as follows:--


"Sir,--Yrs.  rcd.  and conts.  noted.  Rumour re typewriter possibly refers
to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police attention.
Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when apparently went mad.
Record was written at the time, part of which I enclose.--
Yrs., etc., W. Trip.


"The fuller statement runs as follows:--


"On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs.
Bernard and Juke, bookbinders.  Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found
to contain the following:  `Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3,
as we wish to know whether it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.'
To this Mr. Juke, a person of a playful mind, returned the answer:
`Sir, I am in a position to give it as my most decided opinion
that it is not really decided that 00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc.,
                                                  `J. Juke.'


"On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the original
letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed substituted
these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to her.
Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an
unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely remarked
that she always went like that when she heard the barrel organ.
Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series of most
improbable statements--as, that she was engaged to the barrel-organ man,
that he was in the habit of serenading her on that instrument,
that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter
(in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the organ man's
musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself so ardent
that he could detect the note of the different letters on the machine,
and was enraptured by them as by a melody.  To all these statements
of course our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of assent
that is paid to persons who must as quickly as possible be put in the
charge of their relations.  But on our conducting the lady downstairs,
her story received the most startling and even exasperating confirmation;
for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a small head and manifestly
a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the office doors
like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his alleged fiancee.
When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his great, ape-like arms about
and reciting a poem to her.  But we were used to lunatics coming and reciting
poems in our office, and we were not quite prepared for what followed.
The actual verse he uttered began, I think,

        `O vivid, inviolate head,
         Ringed --'

but he never got any further.  Mr. Trip made a sharp
movement towards him, and the next moment the giant picked
up the poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat her on top
of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors,
and raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow.
I put the police upon the matter; but no trace of the amazing
pair could be found.  I was sorry myself; for the lady was
not only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position.
As I am leaving the service of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, I put
these things in a record and leave it with them.
                                     (Signed) Aubrey Clarke,
                                        Publishers' Reader.


"And the last document," said Dr. Pym complacently, "is from
one of those high-souled women who have in this age introduced
your English girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics,
and every form of ideality.


"Dear Sir (she writes),--I have no objection to telling you
the facts about the absurd incident you mention; though I would
ask you to communicate them with some caution, for such things,
however entertaining in the abstract, are not always auxiliary
to the success of a girls' school.  The truth is this:
I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a philological
or historical question--a lecture which, while containing
solid educational matter, should be a little more popular and
entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term.
I remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere
or other an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name--
an essay which showed considerable knowledge of genealogy
and topography.  I wrote to him, asking if he would come and
give us a bright address upon English surnames; and he did.
It was very bright, almost too bright.  To put the matter otherwise,
by the time that he was halfway through it became apparent
to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally
and entirely off his head.  He began rationally enough by dealing
with the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said
(quite rightly, I dare say) that the loss of all significance
in names was an instance of the deadening of civilization.
But then he went on calmly to maintain that every man who had
a place name ought to go to live in that place, and that every
man who had a trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade;
that people named after colours should always dress in those colours,
and that people named after trees or plants (such as Beech or Rose)
ought to surround and decorate themselves with these vegetables.
In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the elder girls
the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even eagerly,
pointed out.  It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband
that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part
assigned to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which
no modern views on the sexes could apparently extricate her;
and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be Low, Coward,
and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea.
But all this happened afterwards.  What happened at the crucial
moment was that the lecturer produced several horseshoes and a
large iron hammer from his bag, announced his immediate intention
of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and called on every
one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic revolution.
The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched man,
but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession
produced the worst explosion of his insanity.  He was waving
the hammer, and wildly demanding the names of everybody;
and it so happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers,
was wearing a brown dress--a reddish-brown dress that went quietly
enough with the warmer colour of her hair, as well she knew.
She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know about those things.
But when our maniac discovered that we really had a Miss Brown
who WAS brown, his ~idee fixe~ blew up like a powder magazine,
and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls,
he publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress.
You can imagine the effect of such a scene at a girls' school.
At least, if you fail to imagine it, I certainly fail
to describe it.

"Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can
think of it now as a joke.  There was only one curious detail,
which I will tell you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should
desire you to consider it a little more confidential than the rest.
Miss Brown, who was an excellent girl in every way, did quite
suddenly and surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards.
I should never have thought that her head would be the one
to be really turned by so absurd an excitement.--Believe me,
yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.


"I think," said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and seriousness,
"that these letters speak for themselves."

Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint
of whether his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.

"Throughout this inquiry," he said, "but especially in this its
closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument;
I mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy
women apparently seduced by Smith.  There is no sort of proof
that they were murdered, but that implication is perpetually made
when the question is asked as to how they died.  Now I am not
interested in how they died, or when they died, or whether they died.
But I am interested in another analogous question--that of how they
were born, and when they were born, and whether they were born.
Do not misunderstand me.  I do not dispute the existence of
these women, or the veracity of those who have witnessed to them.
I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of these victims,
the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or parents.
All the rest are boarders or birds of passage--a guest, a solitary
dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting.  Lady Bullingdon,
looking from her turrets, which she bought from the Whartons with
the old soap-boiler's money when she jumped at marrying an unsuccessful
gentleman from Ulster--Lady Bullingdon, looking out from those turrets,
did really see an object which she describes as Green.  Mr. Trip,
of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed
to Smith.  Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest.
She did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded
in decoying away.  We admit that all these women really lived.
But we still ask whether they were ever born?"

"Oh, crikey!" said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.

"There could hardly," interposed Pym with a quiet smile,
"be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process.
The scientist, when once convinced of the fact of vitality
and consciousness, would infer from these the previous
process of generation."

"If these gals," said Gould impatiently--"if these gals were all alive
(all alive O!) I'd chance a fiver they were all born."

"You'd lose your fiver," said Michael, speaking gravely out of the gloom.
"All those admirable ladies were alive.  They were more alive for having
come into contact with Smith.  They were all quite definitely alive,
but only one of them was ever born."

"Are you asking us to believe--" began Dr. Pym.

"I am asking you a second question," said Moon sternly.  "Can the court
now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance?
Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe,
the relations of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave
of a lust for variety which would lead a man first to a negress
and then to an albino, first to a Patagonian giantess and then
to a tiny Eskimo.  But is there any evidence of such variety here?
Is there any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story?
Was the typewriter an Eskimo?  So picturesque a circumstance would not
surely have escaped remark.  Was Lady Bullingdon's dressmaker a negress?
A voice in my bosom answers, `No!' Lady Bullingdon, I am sure,
would think a negress so conspicuous as to be almost Socialistic,
and would feel something a little rakish even about an albino.

"But was there in Smith's taste any such variety as the learned
doctor describes?  So far as our slight materials go,
the very opposite seems to be the case.  We have only
one actual description of any of the prisoner's wives--
the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate.
`Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn leaves.'
Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of
which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance);
but I think such an expression would be most naturally used of
the shades from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their
coppery-coloured hair do frequently wear light artistic greens.
Now when we come to the next wife, we find the eccentric lover,
when told he is a donkey, answering that donkeys always go
after carrots; a remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently
regarded as pointless and part of the natural table-talk of a
village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we suppose
that Polly's hair was red.  Passing to the next wife, the one
he took from the girls' school, we find Miss Gridley noticing
that the schoolgirl in question wore `a reddish-brown dress,
that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair.'
In other words, the colour of the girl's hair was something redder
than red-brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder declaimed
in the office some poetry that only got as far as the words,--

        `O vivid, inviolate head,
         Ringed --'

But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets
will enable us to guess that `ringed with a glory of red,'
or `ringed with its passionate red,' was the line that rhymed
to `head.' In this case once more, therefore, there is good
reason to suppose that Smith fell in love with a girl with
some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair--rather," he said,
looking down at the table, "rather like Miss Gray's hair."

Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids,
ready with one of his more pedantic interpellations;
but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose,
with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence
in his brilliant eyes.

"Mr. Moon's contention at present," interposed Pym, "is not,
even if veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view
of I. Smith, which we have nailed to the mast.  Science has
long anticipated such a complication.  An incurable attraction
to a particular type of physical woman is one of the commonest
of criminal per-versities, and when not considered narrowly,
but in the light of induction and evolution--"

"At this late stage," said Michael Moon very quietly, "I may perhaps
relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me
throughout the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution
may go and boil themselves.  The Missing Link and all that is
well enough for kids, but I'm talking about things we know here.
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing--and he won't
be missed either.  I know all about his human head and his horrid tail;
they belong to a very old game called `Heads I win, tails you lose.'
If you do find a fellow's bones, it proves he lived a long while ago;
if you don't find his bones, it proves how long ago he lived.
That is the game you've been playing with this Smith affair.
Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call
him microcephalous; if it had been large, you'd have called it
water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed
pretty various, variety was the sign of madness:  now, because it's
turning out to be a bit monochrome--now monotony is the sign of madness.
I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person,
and I'm jolly well going to get some of the advantages too;
and with all politeness I propose not to be bullied with long words
instead of short reasons, or consider your business a triumphant
progress merely because you're always finding out that you were wrong.
Having relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to add
that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful
than the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker's Hill, and that I
propose to resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages
of Mr. Innocent Smith.

"Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that
runs through these scattered incidents.  There is something
very peculiar and suggestive about the names of these women.
Mr. Trip, you will remember, said he thought the typewriter's
name was Blake, but could not remember exactly.
I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we
have a curious series:  Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon's village;
Miss Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers.
A chord of colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray
at Beacon House, West Hampstead."

Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition.
"What is the meaning of this queer coincidence about colours?
Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are purely
arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general scheme or joke.
I think it very probable that they were taken from a series of costumes--
that Polly Green only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green,
and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when in gray.
This would explain--"

Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid.
"Do you actually mean to suggest--" he cried.

"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that.  Innocent Smith has had
many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one wife.
She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
in the garden.

"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.
It is odd and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
principle plainly applied in the modern world would be.  His principle
can be quite simply stated:  he refuses to die while he is still alive.
He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.
For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason
he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his
own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement.
He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive
the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run
for her sake.

"So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
not quite so clear.  I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom
of all this.  I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
quite sure that it is worth a man's uttering and defending.

"The idea that Smith is attacking is this.  Living in an entangled
civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are
not wrong at all.  We have come to think outbreak and exuberance,
banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong.  In themselves they
are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable.  There is nothing
wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not
mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more wrong than throwing
a pebble at the sea--less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.
There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking
through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property
of other men.  It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from
the top than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom.
There is nothing wicked about walking round the world and coming back
to your own house; it is no more wicked than walking round the garden
and coming back to your own house.  And there is nothing wicked
about picking up your wife here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking
all others, you keep only to her so long as you both shall live.
It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association,
as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being
seen going) into a pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there
is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection.
You are mistaken.

"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this,
that he has distinguished between custom and creed.
He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell,
and you found that he only played for trouser buttons.
It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment
with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it
was his grandmother.  Everything is ugly and discreditable,
except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that
he has done no wrong.

"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continue far into
his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many
false charges?'  To this I merely answer that he does it because he really
is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man
and alive.  He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing
silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.
And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed
with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that,
though it is one that will not be approved.

"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it.
If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent.  If he can defy
the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.
It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life
that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.
It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet
his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all
long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods.  It is just because
he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex;
it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman,
he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song--
at least, not a comic song."

"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy
to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies.
I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either
of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself.
Speaking singly, I feel as if man was tied to tragedy,
and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt.
But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick,
this is the way out.  If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog,
it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.
Barely and brutally to be good--that may be the road, and he may have
found it.  Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face
of my old friend Moses.  Mr. Gould does not believe that being
perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry."

"No," said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity;
"I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects
would make a man merry."

"Well," said Michael quietly, "will you tell me one thing?
Which of us has ever tried it?"

A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological
epoch which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type;
for there rose at last in the stillness a massive figure
that the other men had almost completely forgotten.

"Well, gentlemen," said Dr. Warner cheerfully, "I've been pretty
well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery
for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin,
and I'm engaged for a city dinner.  Among the hundred flowers
of futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason
why a lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden."

He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to
the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
"But really the bullet missed you by several feet."  And another voice added:
"The bullet missed him by several years."

There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
Moon said suddenly, "We have been sitting with a ghost.
Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago."





                          Chapter V

                   How the Great Wind Went
                      from Beacon House


Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden;
they were silent, and the sun had set.  Such spaces of daylight as remained
open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared
to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran
across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke.
All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like gray,
and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's dark-gray figure until she seemed
clothed with the garden and the skies.  There was something in these last
quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the twilight,
which concealed Diana's statelier figure and Rosamund's braver array,
exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the lady of the garden, and alone.

When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long
fallen silent was being revived.

"But where is your husband taking you?" asked Diana in her practical voice.

"To an aunt," said Mary; "that's just the joke.  There really
is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged
to be turned out of the other boarding-house down the road.
We never take more than a week of this kind of holiday,
but sometimes we take two of them together."

"Does the aunt mind much?" asked Rosamund innocently.  "Of course,
I dare say it's very narrow-minded and--what's that other word?--
you know, what Goliath was--but I've known many aunts who would
think it--well, silly."

"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness.  "Oh, my Sunday hat!
I should think it was silly!  But what do you expect?
He really is a good man, and it might have been snakes or something."

"Snakes?" inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.

"Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him," replied Mary
with perfect simplicity.  "Auntie let him have them in his pockets,
but not in the bedroom."

"And you--" began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.

"Oh, I do as auntie did," said Mary; "as long as we're not away
from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game.
He calls me `Manalive;' and you must write it all one word,
or he's quite flustered."

"But if men want things like that," began Diana.

"Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently;
"why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing.
There aren't any men.  There are no such people.  There's a man;
and whoever he is he's quite different."

"So there is no safety," said Diana in a low voice.

"Oh, I don't know," answered Mary, lightly enough;
"there's only two things generally true of them.
At certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us,
and they're never fit to take care of themselves."

"There is a gale getting up," said Rosamund suddenly.
"Look at those trees over there, a long way off, and the
clouds going quicker."

"I know what you're thinking about," said Mary; "and don't
you be silly fools.  Don't you listen to the lady novelists.
You go down the king's highway; for God's truth, it is God's. Yes,
my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy.  Arthur Inglewood
will be worse--he'll be untidy.  But what else are all the trees
and clouds for, you silly kittens?"

"The clouds and trees are all waving about," said Rosamund.  "There is
a storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow.  Michael is
really rather like a storm:  he frightens me and makes me happy."

"Don't you be frightened," said Mary.  "All over, these men
have one advantage; they are the sort that go out."

A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along
the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.

"I mean," said Mary, "they are the kind that look outwards and get interested
in the world.  It doesn't matter a bit whether it's arguing, or bicycling,
or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old Innocent does.  Stick to
the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world.
Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
When poor old Adam had gone out gardening (Arthur will go out gardening),
the other sort came along and wormed himself in, nasty old snake."

"You agree with your aunt," said Rosamund, smiling:  "no snakes
in the bedroom."

"I didn't agree with my aunt very much," replied Mary simply,
"but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons
and griffins, so long as it got him out of the house."

Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had
sat like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, "Acquitted! acquitted!"
Echoing the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and
wildly swung her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz.
But the company knew Innocent and Michael by this time,
and their extravagances were gaily taken for granted; it was far
more extraordinary that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up to Diana
and kissed her as if it had been his sister's birthday.  Even Dr. Pym,
though he refrained from dancing, looked on with real benevolence;
for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation had disturbed him
less than the others; he half supposed that such irresponsible
tribunals and insane discussions were part of the mediaeval mummeries
of the Old Land.

While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window was
lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with laughter
and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the house again,
they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had clambered
out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again, "Beacon House!"
whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the wood fire below,
of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke drove out on
the deafening air.

He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties;
but when the wind died down, and the party, at the top of
their evening's merriment, looked again for Mary and for him,
they were not to be found.



                           The End










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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man Who Knew Too Much, by G.K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: June 12, 2004 [EBook #1720]
[Date last updated: November 13, 2004]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH ***




Scanned by Georges Allaire <gall@globetrotter.net>
Etext prepared by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona.





THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
By Gilbert K. Chesterton




CONTENTS

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH:
  I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET
  II. THE VANISHING PRINCE
  III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY
  IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
  V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN
  VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
  VII. THE TEMPLE OF  SILENCE
  VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE




THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET

Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking
vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the
horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous
estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds,
with very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and
sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to
remember his politics and not merely try to forget them. For his
errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it was the place of
appointment named by no less a person than the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his so-called
Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so
promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows
everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also
knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general
culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was
living in.

Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon
a sort of cleft almost narrow enough to be called a crack in the
land. It was just large enough to be the water-course for a small
stream which vanished at intervals under green tunnels of
undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd
feeling as if he were a giant looking over the valley of the
pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, the impression
was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a
cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began
to wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic
curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips between the
great gray boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he
fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as if the
earth had opened and swallowed him into a sort of underworld of
dreams. And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against
the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather
like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions
proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.

The man was apparently fishing; or at least was fixed in a
fisherman's attitude with more than a fisherman's immobility. March
was able to examine the man almost as if he had been a statue for
some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair man,
cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a
highbridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat,
his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But
the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see
that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a
certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even
headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a
short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was
not fishing.

He was holding, instead of a rod, something that might have been a
landing-net which some fishermen use, but which was much more like
the ordinary toy net which children carry, and which they generally
use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was dipping this
into the water at intervals, gravely regarding its harvest of weed
or mud, and emptying it out again.

"No, I haven't caught anything," he remarked, calmly, as if
answering an unspoken query. "When I do I have to throw it back
again; especially the big fish. But some of the little beasts
interest me when I get 'em."

"A scientific interest, I suppose?" observed March.

"Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange
fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena
of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about in
society carrying stinking fish."

"I suppose it would," said March, with a smile.

"Rather odd to enter a drawing-room carrying a large luminous cod,"
continued the stranger, in his listless way. "How quaint it would
be if one could carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats
for candles. Some of the seabeasts would really be very pretty like
lampshades; the blue sea-snail that glitters all over like
starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine like red stars.
But, naturally, I'm not looking for them here."

March thought of asking him what he was looking for; but, feeling
unequal to a technical discussion at least as deep as the deep-sea
fishes, he returned to more ordinary topics.

"Delightful sort of hole this is," he said.  "This little dell and
river here. It's like those places Stevenson talks about, where
something ought to happen."

"I know," answered the other.  "I think it's because the place
itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist.
Perhaps that's what old Picasso and some of the Cubists are trying
to express by angles and jagged lines. Look at that wall like low
cliffs that juts forward just at right angles to the slope of turf
sweeping up to it. That's like a silent collision. It's like a
breaker and the back-wash of a wave."

March looked at the low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and
nodded. He was interested in a man who turned so easily from the
technicalities of science to those of art; and asked him if he
admired the new angular artists.

"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the
stranger. "I mean they're not thick enough. By making things
mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that
landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a
mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of
just the other sort. They stand for the unalterable things; the
calm, eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the
'white radiance of'--"

He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened
almost too quickly and completely to be realized. From behind the
overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train;
and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black
against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in
some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile
gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in a drawing-room.

For the fraction of a flash it seemed to leave the ledge of rock
like a flying ship; then the very sky seemed to turn over like a
wheel, and it lay a ruin amid the tall grasses below, a line of gray
smoke going up slowly from it into the silent air. A little lower
the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled down the steep green
slope, his limbs lying all at random, and his face turned away.

The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward
the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near
there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead
machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a factory,
while the man lay so still.

He was unquestionably dead. The blood flowed in the grass from a
hopelessly fatal fracture at the back of the skull; but the face,
which was turned to the sun, was uninjured and strangely arresting
in itself. It was one of those cases of a strange face so
unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow, that we ought to
recognize it, even though we do not. It was of the broad, square
sort with great jaws, almost like that of a highly intellectual ape;
the wide mouth shut so tight as to be traced by a mere line; the
nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem to gape with an
appetite for the air. The oddest thing about the face was that one
of the eyebrows was cocked up at a much sharper angle than the
other. March thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as
that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its
halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay half fallen out of the pocket,
and from among them March extracted a card-case. He read the name on
the card aloud.

"Sir Humphrey Turnbull. I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere."

His companion only gave a sort of a little sigh and was silent for a
moment, as if ruminating, then he merely said, "The poor fellow is
quite gone," and added some scientific terms in which his auditor
once more found himself out of his depth.

"As things are," continued the same curiously well-informed person,
"it will be more legal for us to leave the body as it is until the
police are informed. In fact, I think it will be well if nobody
except the police is informed. Don't be surprised if I seem to be
keeping it dark from some of our neighbors round here." Then, as if
prompted to regularize his rather abrupt confidence, he said: "I've
come down to see my cousin at Torwood; my name is Horne Fisher.
Might be a pun on my pottering about here, mightn't it?"

"Is Sir Howard Horne your cousin?" asked March.  "I'm going to
Torwood Park to see him myself; only about his public work, of
course, and the wonderful stand he is making for his principles. I
think this Budget is the greatest thing in English history. If it
fails, it will be the most heroic failure in English history. Are
you an admirer of your great kinsman, Mr. Fisher?"

"Rather," said Mr. Fisher.  "He's the best shot I know."

Then, as if sincerely repentant of his nonchalance, he added, with a
sort of enthusiasm:

"No, but really, he's a _beautiful_ shot."

As if fired by his own words, he took a sort of leap at the ledges
of the rock above him, and scaled them with a sudden agility in
startling contrast to his general lassitude. He had stood for some
seconds on the headland above, with his aquiline profile under the
Panama hat relieved against the sky and peering over the countryside
before his companion had collected himself sufficiently to scramble
up after him.

The level above was a stretch of common turf on which the tracks of
the fated car were plowed plainly enough; but the brink of it was
broken as with rocky teeth; broken boulders of all shapes and sizes
lay near the edge; it was almost incredible that any one could have
deliberately driven into such a death trap, especially in broad
daylight.

"I can't make head or tail of it," said March.  "Was he blind? Or
blind drunk?"

"Neither, by the look of him," replied the other.

"Then it was suicide."

"It doesn't seem a cozy way of doing it," remarked the man called
Fisher. "Besides, I don't fancy poor old Puggy would commit suicide,
somehow."

"Poor old who?" inquired the wondering journalist. "Did you know
this unfortunate man?"

"Nobody knew him exactly," replied Fisher, with some vagueness. "But
one _knew_ him, of course. He'd been a terror in his time, in
Parliament and the courts, and so on; especially in that row about
the aliens who were deported as undesirables, when he wanted one of
'em hanged for murder. He was so sick about it that he retired from
the bench. Since then he mostly motored about by himself; but he was
coming to Torwood, too, for the week-end; and I don't see why he
should deliberately break his neck almost at the very door. I
believe Hoggs--I mean my cousin Howard--was coming down specially to
meet him."

"Torwood Park doesn't belong to your cousin?" inquired March.

"No; it used to belong to the Winthrops, you know," replied the
other. "Now a new man's got it; a man from Montreal named Jenkins.
Hoggs comes for the shooting; I told you he was a lovely shot."

This repeated eulogy on the great social statesman affected Harold
March as if somebody had defined Napoleon as a distinguished player
of nap. But he had another half-formed impression struggling in this
flood of unfamiliar things, and he brought it to the surface before
it could vanish.

"Jenkins," he repeated.  "Surely you don't mean Jefferson Jenkins,
the social reformer? I mean the man who's fighting for the new
cottage-estate scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as any
Cabinet Minister in the world, if you'll excuse my saying so."

"Yes; Hoggs told him it would have to be cottages," said Fisher.
"He said the breed of cattle had improved too often, and people were
beginning to laugh. And, of course, you must hang a peerage on to
something; though the poor chap hasn't got it yet. Hullo, here's
somebody else."

They had started walking in the tracks of the car, leaving it behind
them in the hollow, still humming horribly like a huge insect that
had killed a man. The tracks took them to the corner of the road,
one arm of which went on in the same line toward the distant gates
of the park. It was clear that the car had been driven down the long
straight road, and then, instead of turning with the road to the
left, had gone straight on over the turf to its doom. But it was not
this discovery that had riveted Fisher's eye, but something even
more solid. At the angle of the white road a dark and solitary
figure was standing almost as still as a finger post. It was that of
a big man in rough shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with tousled
curly hair that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer approach
this first more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the
figure took on more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman
who happened to have come out without a hat and without very
studiously brushing his hair. But the massive stature remained, and
something deep and even cavernous about the setting of the eyes
redeemed his animal good looks from the commonplace. But March had
no time to study the man more closely, for, much to his
astonishment, his guide merely observed, "Hullo, Jack!" and walked
past him as if he had indeed been a signpost, and without attempting
to inform him of the catastrophe beyond the rocks. It was relatively
a small thing, but it was only the first in a string of singular
antics on which his new and eccentric friend was leading him.

The man they had passed looked after them in rather a suspicious
fashion, but Fisher continued serenely on his way along the straight
road that ran past the gates of the great estate.

"That's John Burke, the traveler," he condescended to explain. "I
expect you've heard of him; shoots big game and all that. Sorry I
couldn't stop to introduce you, but I dare say you'll meet him later
on."

"I know his book, of course," said March, with renewed interest.
"That is certainly a fine piece of description, about their being
only conscious of the closeness of the elephant when the colossal
head blocked out the moon."

"Yes, young Halkett writes jolly well, I think. What?  Didn't you
know Halkett wrote Burke's book for him? Burke can't use anything
except a gun; and you can't write with that. Oh, he's genuine enough
in his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a good deal braver by
all accounts."

"You seem to know all about him," observed March, with a rather
bewildered laugh, "and about a good many other people."

Fisher's bald brow became abruptly corrugated, and a curious
expression came into his eyes.

"I know too much," he said.  "That's what's the matter with me.
That's what's the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know
too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves.
That's why I'm really interested, just now, about one thing that I
don't know."

"And that is?" inquired the other.

"Why that poor fellow is dead."

They had walked along the straight road for nearly a mile,
conversing at intervals in this fashion; and March had a singular
sense of the whole world being turned inside out. Mr. Horne Fisher
did not especially abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable
society; of some of them he spoke with affection. But they seemed to
be an entirely new set of men and women, who happened to have the
same nerves as the men and women mentioned most often in the
newspapers. Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more
utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity. It was like
daylight on the other side of stage scenery.

They reached the great lodge gates of the park, and, to March's
surprise, passed them and continued along the interminable white,
straight road. But he was himself too early for his appointment with
Sir Howard, and was not disinclined to see the end of his new
friend's experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the
moorland behind them, and half the white road was gray in the great
shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars
shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that clear noon,
manufacturing their own midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to
appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the trees thinned and
fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular
copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing
away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on they came to
the first turn of the road.

At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of The
Grapes. The signboard was dark and indecipherable by now, and hung
black against the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as
inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a tavern
for vinegar instead of wine.

"A good phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be if you were silly
enough to drink wine in it. But the beer is very good, and so is the
brandy."

March followed him to the bar parlor with some wonder, and his dim
sense of repugnance was not dismissed by the first sight of the
innkeeper, who was widely different from the genial innkeepers of
romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black mustache, but with
black, restless eyes. Taciturn as he was, the investigator succeeded
at last in extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and minutely on the
subject of motor cars. He evidently regarded the innkeeper as in
some singular way an authority on motor cars; as being deep in the
secrets of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement of motor
cars; holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the
Ancient Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious conversation
there did emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular
motor car, of a given description, had stopped before the inn about
an hour before, and that an elderly man had alighted, requiring some
mechanical assistance. Asked if the visitor required any other
assistance, the innkeeper said shortly that the old gentleman had
filled his flask and taken a packet of sandwiches. And with these
words the somewhat inhospitable host had walked hastily out of the
bar, and they heard him banging doors in the dark interior.

Fisher's weary eye wandered round the dusty and dreary inn parlor
and rested dreamily on a glass case containing a stuffed bird, with
a gun hung on hooks above it, which seemed to be its only ornament.

"Puggy was a humorist," he observed, "at least in his own rather
grim style. But it seems rather too grim a joke for a man to buy a
packet of sandwiches when he is just going to commit suicide."

"If you come to that," answered March, "it isn't very usual for a
man to buy a packet of sandwiches when he's just outside the door of
a grand house he's going to stop at."

"No . . . no," repeated Fisher, almost mechanically; and then
suddenly cocked his eye at his interlocutor with a much livelier
expression.

"By Jove! that's an idea. You're perfectly right. And that suggests
a very queer idea, doesn't it?"

There was a silence, and then March started with irrational
nervousness as the door of the inn was flung open and another man
walked rapidly to the counter. He had struck it with a coin and
called out for brandy before he saw the other two guests, who were
sitting at a bare wooden table under the window. When he turned
about with a rather wild stare, March had yet another unexpected
emotion, for his guide hailed the man as Hoggs and introduced him as
Sir Howard Horne.

He looked rather older than his boyish portraits in the illustrated
papers, as is the way of politicians; his flat, fair hair was
touched with gray, but his face was almost comically round, with a
Roman nose which, when combined with his quick, bright eyes, raised
a vague reminiscence of a parrot. He had a cap rather at the back of
his head and a gun under his arm. Harold March had imagined many
things about his meeting with the great political reformer, but he
had never pictured him with a gun under his arm, drinking brandy in
a public house.

"So you're stopping at Jink's, too," said Fisher.  "Everybody seems
to be at Jink's."

"Yes," replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  "Jolly good
shooting. At least all of it that isn't Jink's shooting. I never
knew a chap with such good shooting that was such a bad shot. Mind
you, he's a jolly good fellow and all that; I don't say a word
against him. But he never learned to hold a gun when he was packing
pork or whatever he did. They say he shot the cockade off his own
servant's hat; just like him to have cockades, of course. He shot
the weathercock off his own ridiculous gilded summerhouse. It's the
only cock he'll ever kill, I should think. Are you coming up there
now?"

Fisher said, rather vaguely, that he was following soon, when he had
fixed something up; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer left the
inn. March fancied he had been a little upset or impatient when he
called for the brandy; but he had talked himself back into a
satisfactory state, if the talk had not been quite what his literary
visitor had expected. Fisher, a few minutes afterward, slowly led
the way out of the tavern and stood in the middle of the road,
looking down in the direction from which they had traveled. Then he
walked back about two hundred yards in that direction and stood
still again.

"I should think this is about the place," he said.

"What place?" asked his companion.

"The place where the poor fellow was killed," said Fisher, sadly.

"What do you mean?" demanded March.

"He was smashed up on the rocks a mile and a half from here."

"No, he wasn't," replied Fisher.  "He didn't fall on the rocks at
all. Didn't you notice that he only fell on the slope of soft grass
underneath? But I saw that he had a bullet in him already."

Then after a pause he added:

"He was alive at the inn, but he was dead long before he came to the
rocks. So he was shot as he drove his car down this strip of
straight road, and I should think somewhere about here. After that,
of course, the car went straight on with nobody to stop or turn it.
It's really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the body would be
found far away, and most people would say, as you do, that it was an
accident to a motorist. The murderer must have been a clever brute."

"But wouldn't the shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?" asked
March.

"It would be heard. But it would not be noticed. That," continued
the investigator, "is where he was clever again. Shooting was going
on all over the place all day; very likely he timed his shot so as
to drown it in a number of others. Certainly he was a first-class
criminal. And he was something else as well."

"What do you mean?" asked his companion, with a creepy premonition
of something coming, he knew not why.

"He was a first-class shot," said Fisher. He had turned his back
abruptly and was walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little more
than a cart track, which lay opposite the inn and marked the end of
the great estate and the beginning of the open moors. March plodded
after him with the same idle perseverance, and found him staring
through a gap in giant weeds and thorns at the flat face of a
painted paling. From behind the paling rose the great gray columns
of a row of poplars, which filled the heavens above them with
dark-green shadow and shook faintly in a wind which had sunk slowly
into a breeze. The afternoon was already deepening into evening, and
the titanic shadows of the poplars lengthened over a third of the
landscape.

"Are you a first-class criminal?" asked Fisher, in a friendly tone.
"I'm afraid I'm not. But I think I can manage to be a sort of
fourth-rate burglar."

And before his companion could reply he had managed to swing himself
up and over the fence; March followed without much bodily effort,
but with considerable mental disturbance. The poplars grew so close
against the fence that they had some difficulty in slipping past
them, and beyond the poplars they could see only a high hedge of
laurel, green and lustrous in the level sun. Something in this
limitation by a series of living walls made him feel as if he were
really entering a shattered house instead of an open field. It was
as if he came in by a disused door or window and found the way
blocked by furniture. When they had circumvented the laurel hedge,
they came out on a sort of terrace of turf, which fell by one green
step to an oblong lawn like a bowling green. Beyond this was the
only building in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed far away
from anywhere, like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in
fairyland. Fisher knew that lonely look of the outlying parts of a
great house well enough. He realized that it is more of a satire on
aristocracy than if it were choked with weeds and littered with
ruins. For it is not neglected and yet it is deserted; at any rate,
it is disused. It is regularly swept and garnished for a master who
never comes.

Looking over the lawn, however, he saw one object which he had not
apparently expected. It was a sort of tripod supporting a large disk
like the round top of a table tipped sideways, and it was not until
they had dropped on to the lawn and walked across to look at it that
March realized that it was a target. It was worn and weatherstained;
the gay colors of its concentric rings were faded; possibly it had
been set up in those far-off Victorian days when there was a fashion
of archery. March had one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy
crinolines and gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting
that lost garden like ghosts.

Fisher, who was peering more closely at the target, startled him by
an exclamation.

"Hullo!" he said.  "Somebody has been peppering this thing with
shot, after all, and quite lately, too. Why, I believe old Jink's
been trying to improve his bad shooting here."

"Yes, and it looks as if it still wanted improving," answered March,
laughing. "Not one of these shots is anywhere near the bull's-eye;
they seem just scattered about in the wildest way."

"In the wildest way," repeated Fisher, still peering intently at the
target. He seemed merely to assent, but March fancied his eye was
shining under its sleepy lid and that he straightened his stooping
figure with a strange effort.

"Excuse me a moment," he said, feeling in his pockets. "I think I've
got some of my chemicals; and after that we'll go up to the house."
And he stooped again over the target, putting something with his
finger over each of the shot-holes, so far as March could see merely
a dull-gray smear. Then they went through the gathering twilight up
the long green avenues to the great house.

Here again, however, the eccentric investigator did not enter by the
front door. He walked round the house until he found a window open,
and, leaping into it, introduced his friend to what appeared to be
the gun-room. Rows of the regular instruments for bringing down
birds stood against the walls; but across a table in the window lay
one or two weapons of a heavier and more formidable pattern.

"Hullo! these are Burke's big-game rifles," said Fisher. "I never
knew he kept them here." He lifted one of them, examined it briefly,
and put it down again, frowning heavily. Almost as he did so a
strange young man came hurriedly into the room. He was dark and
sturdy, with a bumpy forehead and a bulldog jaw, and he spoke with a
curt apology.

"I left Major Burke's guns here," he said, "and he wants them packed
up. He's going away to-night."

And he carried off the two rifles without casting a glance at the
stranger; through the open window they could see his short, dark
figure walking away across the glimmering garden. Fisher got out of
the window again and stood looking after him.

"That's Halkett, whom I told you about," he said.  "I knew he was a
sort of secretary and had to do with Burke's papers; but I never
knew he had anything to do with his guns. But he's just the sort of
silent, sensible little devil who might be very good at anything;
the sort of man you know for years before you find he's a chess
champion."

He had begun to walk in the direction of the disappearing secretary,
and they soon came within sight of the rest of the house-party
talking and laughing on the lawn. They could see the tall figure and
loose mane of the lion-hunter dominating the little group.

"By the way," observed Fisher, "when we were talking about Burke and
Halkett, I said that a man couldn't very well write with a gun.
Well, I'm not so sure now. Did you ever hear of an artist so clever
that he could draw with a gun? There's a wonderful chap loose about
here."

Sir Howard hailed Fisher and his friend the journalist with almost
boisterous amiability. The latter was presented to Major Burke and
Mr. Halkett and also (by way of a parenthesis) to his host, Mr.
Jenkins, a commonplace little man in loud tweeds, whom everybody
else seemed to treat with a sort of affection, as if he were a baby.

The irrepressible Chancellor of the Exchequer was still talking
about the birds he had brought down, the birds that Burke and
Halkett had brought down, and the birds that Jenkins, their host,
had failed to bring down. It seemed to be a sort of sociable
monomania.

"You and your big game," he ejaculated, aggressively, to Burke.
"Why, anybody could shoot big game. You want to be a shot to shoot
small game."

"Quite so," interposed Horne Fisher.  "Now if only a hippopotamus
could fly up in the air out of that bush, or you preserved flying
elephants on the estate, why, then--"

"Why even Jink might hit that sort of bird," cried Sir Howard,
hilariously slapping his host on the back. "Even he might hit a
haystack or a hippopotamus."

"Look here, you fellows," said Fisher.  "I want you to come along
with me for a minute and shoot at something else. Not a
hippopotamus. Another kind of queer animal I've found on the estate.
It's an animal with three legs and one eye, and it's all the colors
of the rainbow."

"What the deuce are you talking about?" asked Burke.

"You come along and see," replied Fisher, cheerfully.

Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are always
seeking for something new. They gravely rearmed themselves from the
gun-room and trooped along at the tail of their guide, Sir Howard
only pausing, in a sort of ecstasy, to point out the celebrated gilt
summerhouse on which the gilt weathercock still stood crooked. It
was dusk turning to dark by the time they reached the remote green
by the poplars and accepted the new and aimless game of shooting at
the old mark.

The last light seemed to fade from the lawn, and the poplars against
the sunset were like great plumes upon a purple hearse, when the
futile procession finally curved round, and came out in front of the
target. Sir Howard again slapped his host on the shoulder, shoving
him playfully forward to take the first shot. The shoulder and arm
he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr. Jenkins was
holding his gun in an attitude more awkward than any that his
satiric friends had seen or expected.

At the same instant a horrible scream seemed to come from nowhere.
It was so unnatural and so unsuited to the scene that it might have
been made by some inhuman thing flying on wings above them or
eavesdropping in the dark woods beyond. But Fisher knew that it had
started and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins, of
Montreal, and no one at that moment catching sight of Jefferson
Jenkins's face would have complained that it was commonplace. The
next moment a torrent of guttural but good-humored oaths came from
Major Burke as he and the two other men saw what was in front of
them. The target stood up in the dim grass like a dark goblin
grinning at them, and it was literally grinning. It had two eyes
like stars, and in similar livid points of light were picked out the
two upturned and open nostrils and the two ends of the wide and
tight mouth. A few white dots above each eye indicated the hoary
eyebrows; and one of them ran upward almost erect. It was a
brilliant caricature done in bright dotted lines and March knew of
whom. It shone in the shadowy grass, smeared with sea fire as if one
of the submarine monsters had crawled into the twilight garden; but
it had the head of a dead man.

"It's only luminous paint," said Burke.  "Old Fisher's been having a
joke with that phosphorescent stuff of his."

"Seems to be meant for old Puggy"' observed Sir Howard.  "Hits him
off very well."

With that they all laughed, except Jenkins. When they had all done,
he made a noise like the first effort of an animal to laugh, and
Horne Fisher suddenly strode across to him and said:

"Mr. Jenkins, I must speak to you at once in private."

It was by the little watercourse in the moors, on the slope under
the hanging rock, that March met his new friend Fisher, by
appointment, shortly after the ugly and almost grotesque scene that
had broken up the group in the garden.

"It was a monkey-trick of mine," observed Fisher, gloomily, "putting
phosphorus on the target; but the only chance to make him jump was
to give him the horrors suddenly. And when he saw the face he'd shot
at shining on the target he practiced on, all lit up with an
infernal light, he did jump. Quite enough for my own intellectual
satisfaction."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand even now," said March, "exactly
what he did or why he did it."

"You ought to," replied Fisher, with his rather dreary smile, "for
you gave me the first suggestion yourself. Oh yes, you did; and it
was a very shrewd one. You said a man wouldn't take sandwiches with
him to dine at a great house. It was quite true; and the inference
was that, though he was going there, he didn't mean to dine there.
Or, at any rate, that he might not be dining there. It occurred to
me at once that he probably expected the visit to be unpleasant, or
the reception doubtful, or something that would prevent his
accepting hospitality. Then it struck me that Turnbull was a terror
to certain shady characters in the past, and that he had come down
to identify and denounce one of them. The chances at the start
pointed to the host--that is, Jenkins. I'm morally certain now that
Jenkins was the undesirable alien Turnbull wanted to convict in
another shooting-affair, but you see the shooting gentleman had
another shot in his locker."

"But you said he would have to be a very good shot," protested
March.

"Jenkins is a very good shot," said Fisher.  "A very good shot who
can pretend to be a very bad shot. Shall I tell you the second hint
I hit on, after yours, to make me think it was Jenkins? It was my
cousin's account of his bad shooting. He'd shot a cockade off a hat
and a weathercock off a building. Now, in fact, a man must shoot
very well indeed to shoot so badly as that. He must shoot very
neatly to hit the cockade and not the head, or even the hat. If the
shots had really gone at random, the chances are a thousand to one
that they would not have hit such prominent and picturesque objects.
They were chosen because they were prominent and picturesque
objects. They make a story to go the round of society. He keeps the
crooked weathercock in the summerhouse to perpetuate the story of a
legend. And then he lay in wait with his evil eye and wicked gun,
safely ambushed behind the legend of his own incompetence.

"But there is more than that. There is the summerhouse itself. I
mean there is the whole thing. There's all that Jenkins gets chaffed
about, the gilding and the gaudy colors and all the vulgarity that's
supposed to stamp him as an upstart. Now, as a matter of fact,
upstarts generally don't do this. God knows there's enough of 'em in
society; and one knows 'em well enough. And this is the very last
thing they do. They're generally only too keen to know the right
thing and do it; and they instantly put themselves body and soul
into the hands of art decorators and art experts, who do the whole
thing for them. There's hardly another millionaire alive who has the
moral courage to have a gilt monogram on a chair like that one in
the gun-room. For that matter, there's the name as well as the
monogram. Names like Tompkins and Jenkins and Jinks are funny
without being vulgar; I mean they are vulgar without being common.
If you prefer it, they are commonplace without being common. They
are just the names to be chosen to _look_ ordinary, but they're
really rather extraordinary. Do you know many people called
Tompkins? It's a good deal rarer than Talbot. It's pretty much the
same with the comic clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins dresses like a
character in Punch. But that's because he is a character in Punch. I
mean he's a fictitious character. He's a fabulous animal. He doesn't
exist.

"Have you ever considered what it must be like to be a man who
doesn't exist? I mean to be a man with a fictitious character that
he has to keep up at the expense not merely of personal talents: To
be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent in a new kind of napkin.
This man has chosen his hypocrisy very ingeniously; it was really a
new one. A subtle villain has dressed up as a dashing gentleman and
a worthy business man and a philanthropist and a saint; but the loud
checks of a comical little cad were really rather a new disguise.
But the disguise must be very irksome to a man who can really do
things. This is a dexterous little cosmopolitan guttersnipe who can
do scores of things, not only shoot, but draw and paint, and
probably play the fiddle. Now a man like that may find the hiding of
his talents useful; but he could never help wanting to use them
where they were useless. If he can draw, he will draw absent-mindedly
on blotting paper. I suspect this rascal has often drawn poor old
Puggy's face on blotting paper. Probably he began doing it in blots
as he afterward did it in dots, or rather shots. It was the same
sort of thing; he found a disused target in a deserted yard and
couldn't resist indulging in a little secret shooting, like secret
drinking. You thought the shots all scattered and irregular, and so
they were; but not accidental. No two distances were alike; but the
different points were exactly where he wanted to put them. There's
nothing needs such mathematical precision as a wild caricature. I've
dabbled a little in drawing myself, and I assure you that to put one
dot where you want it is a marvel with a pen close to a piece of
paper. It was a miracle to do it across a garden with a gun. But a
man who can work those miracles will always itch to work them, if
it's only in the dark."

After a pause March observed, thoughtfully, "But he couldn't have
brought him down like a bird with one of those little guns."

"No; that was why I went into the gun-room," replied Fisher.  "He
did it with one of Burke's rifles, and Burke thought he knew the
sound of it. That's why he rushed out without a hat, looking so
wild. He saw nothing but a car passing quickly, which he followed
for a little way, and then concluded he'd made a mistake."

There was another silence, during which Fisher sat on a great stone
as motionless as on their first meeting, and watched the gray and
silver river eddying past under the bushes. Then March said,
abruptly, "Of course he knows the truth now."

"Nobody knows the truth but you and I," answered Fisher, with a
certain softening in his voice. "And I don't think you and I will
ever quarrel."

"What do you mean?" asked March, in an altered accent. "What have
you done about it?"

Horne Fisher continued to gaze steadily at the eddying stream. At
last he said, "The police have proved it was a motor accident."

"But you know it was not."

"I told you that I know too much," replied Fisher, with his eye on
the river. "I know that, and I know a great many other things. I
know the atmosphere and the way the whole thing works. I know this
fellow has succeeded in making himself something incurably
commonplace and comic. I know you can't get up a persecution of old
Toole or Little Tich. If I were to tell Hoggs or Halkett that old
Jink was an assassin, they would almost die of laughter before my
eyes. Oh, I don't say their laughter's quite innocent, though it's
genuine in its way. They want old Jink, and they couldn't do without
him. I don't say I'm quite innocent. I like Hoggs; I don't want him
to be down and out; and he'd be done for if Jink can't pay for his
coronet. They were devilish near the line at the last election. But
the only real objection to it is that it's impossible. Nobody would
believe it; it's not in the picture. The crooked weathercock would
always turn it into a joke."

"Don't you think this is infamous?" asked March, quietly.

"I think a good many things," replied the other.  "If you people
ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell with
dynamite, I don't know that the human race will be much the worse.
But don't be too hard on me merely because I know what society is.
That's why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish."

There was a pause as he settled himself down again by the stream;
and then he added:

"I told you before I had to throw back the big fish."



II. THE VANISHING PRINCE

This tale begins among a tangle of tales round a name that is at
once recent and legendary. The name is that of Michael O'Neill,
popularly called Prince Michael, partly because he claimed descent
from ancient Fenian princes, and partly because he was credited with
a plan to make himself prince president of Ireland, as the last
Napoleon did of France. He was undoubtedly a gentleman of honorable
pedigree and of many accomplishments, but two of his accomplishments
emerged from all the rest. He had a talent for appearing when he was
not wanted and a talent for disappearing when he was wanted,
especially when he was wanted by the police. It may be added that
his disappearances were more dangerous than his appearances. In the
latter he seldom went beyond the sensational--pasting up seditious
placards, tearing down official placards, making flamboyant
speeches, or unfurling forbidden flags. But in order to effect the
former he would sometimes fight for his freedom with startling
energy, from which men were sometimes lucky to escape with a broken
head instead of a broken neck. His most famous feats of escape,
however, were due to dexterity and not to violence. On a cloudless
summer morning he had come down a country road white with dust, and,
pausing outside a farmhouse, had told the farmer's daughter, with
elegant indifference, that the local police were in pursuit of him.
The girl's name was Bridget Royce, a somber and even sullen type of
beauty, and she looked at him darkly, as if in doubt, and said, "Do
you want me to hide you?" Upon which he only laughed, leaped lightly
over the stone wall, and strode toward the farm, merely throwing
over his shoulder the remark, "Thank you, I have generally been
quite capable of hiding myself." In which proceeding he acted with a
tragic ignorance of the nature of women; and there fell on his path
in that sunshine a shadow of doom.

While he disappeared through the farmhouse the girl remained for a
few moments looking up the road, and two perspiring policemen came
plowing up to the door where she stood. Though still angry, she was
still silent, and a quarter of an hour later the officers had
searched the house and were already inspecting the kitchen garden
and cornfield behind it. In the ugly reaction of her mood she might
have been tempted even to point out the fugitive, but for a small
difficulty that she had no more notion than the policemen had of
where he could possibly have gone. The kitchen garden was inclosed
by a very low wall, and the cornfield beyond lay aslant like a
square patch on a great green hill on which he could still have been
seen even as a dot in the distance. Everything stood solid in its
familiar place; the apple tree was too small to support or hide a
climber; the only shed stood open and obviously empty; there was no
sound save the droning of summer flies and the occasional flutter of
a bird unfamiliar enough to be surprised by the scarecrow in the
field; there was scarcely a shadow save a few blue lines that fell
from the thin tree; every detail was picked out by the brilliant day
light as if in a microscope. The girl described the scene later,
with all the passionate realism of her race, and, whether or no the
policemen had a similar eye for the picturesque, they had at least
an eye for the facts of the case, and were compelled to give up the
chase and retire from the scene. Bridget Royce remained as if in a
trance, staring at the sunlit garden in which a man had just
vanished like a fairy. She was still in a sinister mood, and the
miracle took in her mind a character of unfriendliness and fear, as
if the fairy were decidedly a bad fairy. The sun upon the glittering
garden depressed her more than the darkness, but she continued to
stare at it. Then the world itself went half-witted and she
screamed. The scarecrow moved in the sun light. It had stood with
its back to her in a battered old black hat and a tattered garment,
and with all its tatters flying, it strode away across the hill.

She did not analyze the audacious trick by which the man had turned
to his advantage the subtle effects of the expected and the obvious;
she was still under the cloud of more individual complexities, and
she noticed most of all that the vanishing scarecrow did not even
turn to look at the farm. And the fates that were running so adverse
to his fantastic career of freedom ruled that his next adventure,
though it had the same success in another quarter, should increase
the danger in this quarter. Among the many similar adventures
related of him in this manner it is also said that some days
afterward another girl, named Mary Cregan, found him concealed on
the farm where she worked; and if the story is true, she must also
have had the shock of an uncanny experience, for when she was busy
at some lonely task in the yard she heard a voice speaking out of
the well, and found that the eccentric had managed to drop himself
into the bucket which was some little way below, the well only
partly full of water. In this case, however, he had to appeal to the
woman to wind up the rope. And men say it was when this news was
told to the other woman that her soul walked over the border line of
treason.

Such, at least, were the stories told of him in the countryside, and
there were many more--as that he had stood insolently in a splendid
green dressing gown on the steps of a great hotel, and then led the
police a chase through a long suite of grand apartments, and finally
through his own bedroom on to a balcony that overhung the river. The
moment the pursuers stepped on to the balcony it broke under them,
and they dropped pell-mell into the eddying waters, while Michael,
who had thrown off his gown and dived, was able to swim away. It was
said that he had carefully cut away the props so that they would not
support anything so heavy as a policeman. But here again he was
immediately fortunate, yet ultimately unfortunate, for it is said
that one of the men was drowned, leaving a family feud which made a
little rift in his popularity. These stories can now be told in some
detail, not because they are the most marvelous of his many
adventures, but because these alone were not covered with silence by
the loyalty of the peasantry. These alone found their way into
official reports, and it is these which three of the chief officials
of the country were reading and discussing when the more remarkable
part of this story begins.

Night was far advanced and the lights shone in the cottage that
served for a temporary police station near the coast. On one side of
it were the last houses of the straggling village, and on the other
nothing but a waste moorland stretching away toward the sea, the
line of which was broken by no landmark except a solitary tower of
the prehistoric pattern still found in Ireland, standing up as
slender as a column, but pointed like a pyramid. At a wooden table
in front of the window, which normally looked out on this landscape,
sat two men in plain clothes, but with something of a military
bearing, for indeed they were the two chiefs of the detective
service of that district. The senior of the two, both in age and
rank, was a sturdy man with a short white beard, and frosty eyebrows
fixed in a frown which suggested rather worry than severity.

His name was Morton, and he was a Liverpool man long pickled in the
Irish quarrels, and doing his duty among them in a sour fashion not
altogether unsympathetic. He had spoken a few sentences to his
companion, Nolan, a tall, dark man with a cadaverous equine Irish
face, when he seemed to remember something and touched a bell which
rang in another room. The subordinate he had summoned immediately
appeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Sit down, Wilson," he said.  "Those are the depositions, I
suppose."

"Yes," replied the third officer.  "I think I've got all there is to
be got out of them, so I sent the people away."

"Did Mary Cregan give evidence?" asked Morton, with a frown that
looked a little heavier than usual.

"No, but her master did," answered the man called Wilson, who had
flat, red hair and a plain, pale face, not without sharpness. "I
think he's hanging round the girl himself and is out against a
rival. There's always some reason of that sort when we are told the
truth about anything. And you bet the other girl told right enough."

"Well, let's hope they'll be some sort of use," remarked Nolan, in a
somewhat hopeless manner, gazing out into the darkness.

"Anything is to the good," said Morton, "that lets us know anything
about him."

"Do we know anything about him?" asked the melancholy Irishman.

"We know one thing about him," said Wilson, "and it's the one thing
that nobody ever knew before. We know where he is."

"Are you sure?" inquired Morton, looking at him sharply.

"Quite sure," replied his assistant.  "At this very minute he is in
that tower over there by the shore. If you go near enough you'll see
the candle burning in the window."

As he spoke the noise of a horn sounded on the road outside, and a
moment after they heard the throbbing of a motor car brought to a
standstill before the door. Morton instantly sprang to his feet.

"Thank the Lord that's the car from Dublin," he said. "I can't do
anything without special authority, not if he were sitting on the
top of the tower and putting out his tongue at us. But the chief can
do what he thinks best."

He hurried out to the entrance and was soon exchanging greetings
with a big handsome man in a fur coat, who brought into the dingy
little station the indescribable glow of the great cities and the
luxuries of the great world.

For this was Sir Walter Carey, an official of such eminence in
Dublin Castle that nothing short of the case of Prince Michael would
have brought him on such a journey in the middle of the night. But
the case of Prince Michael, as it happened, was complicated by
legalism as well as lawlessness. On the last occasion he had escaped
by a forensic quibble and not, as usual, by a private escapade; and
it was a question whether at the moment he was amenable to the law
or not. It might be necessary to stretch a point, but a man like Sir
Walter could probably stretch it as far as he liked.

Whether he intended to do so was a question to be considered.
Despite the almost aggressive touch of luxury in the fur coat, it
soon became apparent that Sir Walter's large leonine head was for
use as well as ornament, and he considered the matter soberly and
sanely enough. Five chairs were set round the plain deal table, for
who should Sir Walter bring with him but his young relative and
secretary, Horne Fisher. Sir Walter listened with grave attention,
and his secretary with polite boredom, to the string of episodes by
which the police had traced the flying rebel from the steps of the
hotel to the solitary tower beside the sea. There at least he was
cornered between the moors and the breakers; and the scout sent by
Wilson reported him as writing under a solitary candle, perhaps
composing another of his tremendous proclamations. Indeed, it would
have been typical of him to choose it as the place in which finally
to turn to bay. He had some remote claim on it, as on a family
castle; and those who knew him thought him capable of imitating the
primitive Irish chieftains who fell fighting against the sea.

"I saw some queer-looking people leaving as I came in," said Sir
Walter Carey. "I suppose they were your witnesses. But why do they
turn up here at this time of night?"

Morton smiled grimly.  "They come here by night because they would
be dead men if they came here by day. They are criminals committing
a crime that is more horrible here than theft or murder."

"What crime do you mean?" asked the other, with some curiosity.

"They are helping the law," said Morton.

There was a silence, and Sir Walter considered the papers before him
with an abstracted eye. At last he spoke.

"Quite so; but look here, if the local feeling is as lively as that
there are a good many points to consider. I believe the new Act will
enable me to collar him now if I think it best. But is it best? A
serious rising would do us no good in Parliament, and the government
has enemies in England as well as Ireland. It won't do if I have
done what looks a little like sharp practice, and then only raised a
revolution."

"It's all the other way," said the man called Wilson, rather
quickly. "There won't be half so much of a revolution if you arrest
him as there will if you leave him loose for three days longer. But,
anyhow, there can't be anything nowadays that the proper police
can't manage."

"Mr. Wilson is a Londoner," said the Irish detective, with a smile.

"Yes, I'm a cockney, all right," replied Wilson, "and I think I'm
all the better for that. Especially at this job, oddly enough."

Sir Walter seemed slightly amused at the pertinacity of the third
officer, and perhaps even more amused at the slight accent with
which he spoke, which rendered rather needless his boast about his
origin.

"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you know more about the
business here because you have come from London?"

"Sounds funny, I know, but I do believe it," answered Wilson.  "I
believe these affairs want fresh methods. But most of all I believe
they want a fresh eye."

The superior officers laughed, and the redhaired man went on with a
slight touch of temper:

"Well, look at the facts. See how the fellow got away every time,
and you'll understand what I mean. Why was he able to stand in the
place of the scarecrow, hidden by nothing but an old hat? Because it
was a village policeman who knew the scarecrow was there, was
expecting it, and therefore took no notice of it. Now I never expect
a scarecrow. I've never seen one in the street, and I stare at one
when I see it in the field. It's a new thing to me and worth
noticing. And it was just the same when he hid in the well. You are
ready to find a well in a place like that; you look for a well, and
so you don't see it. I don't look for it, and therefore I do look at
it."

"It is certainly an idea," said Sir Walter, smiling, "but what about
the balcony? Balconies are occasionally seen in London."

"But not rivers right under them, as if it was in Venice," replied
Wilson.

"It is certainly a new idea," repeated Sir Walter, with something
like respect. He had all the love of the luxurious classes for new
ideas. But he also had a critical faculty, and was inclined to
think, after due reflection, that it was a true idea as well.

Growing dawn had already turned the window panes from black to gray
when Sir Walter got abruptly to his feet. The others rose also,
taking this for a signal that the arrest was to be undertaken. But
their leader stood for a moment in deep thought, as if conscious
that he had come to a parting of the ways.

Suddenly the silence was pierced by a long, wailing cry from the
dark moors outside. The silence that followed it seemed more
startling than the shriek itself, and it lasted until Nolan said,
heavily:

"'Tis the banshee. Somebody is marked for the grave."

His long, large-featured face was as pale as a moon, and it was easy
to remember that he was the only Irishman in the room.

"Well, I know that banshee," said Wilson, cheerfully, "ignorant as
you think I am of these things. I talked to that banshee myself an
hour ago, and I sent that banshee up to the tower and told her to
sing out like that if she could get a glimpse of our friend writing
his proclamation."

"Do you mean that girl Bridget Royce?" asked Morton, drawing his
frosty brows together. "Has she turned king's evidence to that
extent?"

"Yes," answered Wilson.  "I know very little of these local things,
you tell me, but I reckon an angry woman is much the same in all
countries."

Nolan, however, seemed still moody and unlike himself. "It's an ugly
noise and an ugly business altogether," he said. "If it's really the
end of Prince Michael it may well be the end of other things as
well. When the spirit is on him he would escape by a ladder of dead
men, and wade through that sea if it were made of blood."

"Is that the real reason of your pious alarms?" asked Wilson, with a
slight sneer.

The Irishman's pale face blackened with a new passion.

"I have faced as many murderers in County Clare as you ever fought
with in Clapham Junction, Mr. Cockney," he said.

"Hush, please," said Morton, sharply.  "Wilson, you have no kind of
right to imply doubt of your superior's conduct. I hope you will
prove yourself as courageous and trustworthy as he has always been."

The pale face of the red-haired man seemed a shade paler, but he was
silent and composed, and Sir Walter went up to Nolan with marked
courtesy, saying, "Shall we go outside now, and get this business
done?"

Dawn had lifted, leaving a wide chasm of white between a great gray
cloud and the great gray moorland, beyond which the tower was
outlined against the daybreak and the sea.

Something in its plain and primitive shape vaguely suggested the
dawn in the first days of the earth, in some prehistoric time when
even the colors were hardly created, when there was only blank
daylight between cloud and clay. These dead hues were relieved only
by one spot of gold--the spark of the candle alight in the window
of the lonely tower, and burning on into the broadening daylight. As
the group of detectives, followed by a cordon of policemen, spread
out into a crescent to cut off all escape, the light in the tower
flashed as if it were moved for a moment, and then went out. They
knew the man inside had realized the daylight and blown out his
candle.

"There are other windows, aren't there?" asked Morton, "and a door,
of course, somewhere round the corner? Only a round tower has no
corners."

"Another example of my small suggestion," observed Wilson, quietly.
"That queer tower was the first thing I saw when I came to these
parts; and I can tell you a little more about it--or, at any rate,
the outside of it. There are four windows altogether, one a little
way from this one, but just out of sight. Those are both on the
ground floor, and so is the third on the other side, making a sort
of triangle. But the fourth is just above the third, and I suppose
it looks on an upper floor."

"It's only a sort of loft, reached by a ladder, said Nolan.  "I've
played in the place when I was a child. It's no more than an empty
shell." And his sad face grew sadder, thinking perhaps of the
tragedy of his country and the part that he played in it.

"The man must have got a table and chair, at any rate," said Wilson,
"but no doubt he could have got those from some cottage. If I might
make a suggestion, sir, I think we ought to approach all the five
entrances at once, so to speak. One of us should go to the door and
one to each window; Macbride here has a ladder for the upper
window."

Mr. Horne Fisher languidly turned to his distinguished relative and
spoke for the first time.

"I am rather a convert to the cockney school of psychology," he said
in an almost inaudible voice.

The others seemed to feel the same influence in different ways, for
the group began to break up in the manner indicated. Morton moved
toward the window immediately in front of them, where the hidden
outlaw had just snuffed the candle; Nolan, a little farther westward
to the next window; while Wilson, followed by Macbride with the
ladder, went round to the two windows at the back. Sir Walter Carey
himself, followed by his secretary, began to walk round toward the
only door, to demand admittance in a more regular fashion.

"He will be armed, of course," remarked Sir Walter, casually.

"By all accounts," replied Horne Fisher, "he can do more with a
candlestick than most men with a pistol. But he is pretty sure to
have the pistol, too."

Even as he spoke the question was answered with a tongue of thunder.
Morton had just placed himself in front of the nearest window, his
broad shoulders blocking the aperture. For an instant it was lit
from within as with red fire, followed by a thundering throng of
echoes. The square shoulders seemed to alter in shape, and the
sturdy figure collapsed among the tall, rank grasses at the foot of
the tower. A puff of smoke floated from the window like a little
cloud. The two men behind rushed to the spot and raised him, but he
was dead.

Sir Walter straightened himself and called out something that was
lost in another noise of firing; it was possible that the police
were already avenging their comrade from the other side. Fisher had
already raced round to the next window, and a new cry of
astonishment from him brought his patron to the same spot. Nolan,
the Irish policeman, had also fallen, sprawling all his great length
in the grass, and it was red with his blood. He was still alive when
they reached him, but there was death on his face, and he was only
able to make a final gesture telling them that all was over; and,
with a broken word and a heroic effort, motioning them on to where
his other comrades were besieging the back of the tower. Stunned by
these rapid and repeated shocks, the two men could only vaguely obey
the gesture, and, finding their way to the other windows at the
back, they discovered a scene equally startling, if less final and
tragic. The other two officers were not dead or mortally wounded,
but Macbride lay with a broken leg and his ladder on top of him,
evidently thrown down from the top window of the tower; while Wilson
lay on his face, quite still as if stunned, with his red head among
the gray and silver of the sea holly. In him, however, the impotence
was but momentary, for he began to move and rise as the others came
round the tower.

"My God! it's like an explosion!" cried Sir Walter; and indeed it
was the only word for this unearthly energy, by which one man had
been able to deal death or destruction on three sides of the same
small triangle at the same instant.

Wilson had already scrambled to his feet and with splendid energy
flew again at the window, revolver in hand. He fired twice into the
opening and then disappeared in his own smoke; but the thud of his
feet and the shock of a falling chair told them that the intrepid
Londoner had managed at last to leap into the room. Then followed a
curious silence; and Sir Walter, walking to the window through the
thinning smoke, looked into the hollow shell of the ancient tower.
Except for Wilson, staring around him, there was nobody there.

The inside of the tower was a single empty room, with nothing but a
plain wooden chair and a table on which were pens, ink and paper,
and the candlestick. Halfway up the high wall there was a rude
timber platform under the upper window, a small loft which was more
like a large shelf. It was reached only by a ladder, and it seemed
to be as bare as the bare walls. Wilson completed his survey of the
place and then went and stared at the things on the table. Then he
silently pointed with his lean forefinger at the open page of the
large notebook. The writer had suddenly stopped writing, even in the
middle of a word.

"I said it was like an explosion," said Sir Walter Carey at last.
"And really the man himself seems to have suddenly exploded. But he
has blown himself up somehow without touching the tower. He's burst
more like a bubble than a bomb."

"He has touched more valuable things than the tower," said Wilson,
gloomily.

There was a long silence, and then Sir Walter said, seriously:
"Well, Mr. Wilson, I am not a detective, and these unhappy
happenings have left you in charge of that branch of the business.
We all lament the cause of this, but I should like to say that I
myself have the strongest confidence in your capacity for carrying
on the work. What do you think we should do next?"

Wilson seemed to rouse himself from his depression and acknowledged
the speaker's words with a warmer civility than he had hitherto
shown to anybody. He called in a few of the police to assist in
routing out the interior, leaving the rest to spread themselves in a
search party outside.

"I think," he said, "the first thing is to make quite sure about the
inside of this place, as it was hardly physically possible for him
to have got outside. I suppose poor Nolan would have brought in his
banshee and said it was supernaturally possible. But I've got no use
for disembodied spirits when I'm dealing with facts. And the facts
before me are an empty tower with a ladder, a chair, and a table."

"The spiritualists," said Sir Walter, with a smile, "would say that
spirits could find a great deal of use for a table."

"I dare say they could if the spirits were on the table--in a
bottle," replied Wilson, with a curl of his pale lip. "The people
round here, when they're all sodden up with Irish whisky, may
believe in such things. I think they want a little education in this
country."

Horne Fisher's heavy eyelids fluttered in a faint attempt to rise,
as if he were tempted to a lazy protest against the contemptuous
tone of the investigator.

"The Irish believe far too much in spirits to believe in
spiritualism," he murmured. "They know too much about 'em. If you
want a simple and childlike faith in any spirit that comes along you
can get it in your favorite London."

"I don't want to get it anywhere," said Wilson, shortly. "I say I'm
dealing with much simpler things than your simple faith, with a
table and a chair and a ladder. Now what I want to say about them at
the start is this. They are all three made roughly enough of plain
wood. But the table and the chair are fairly new and comparatively
clean. The ladder is covered with dust and there is a cobweb under
the top rung of it. That means that he borrowed the first two quite
recently from some cottage, as we supposed, but the ladder has been
a long time in this rotten old dustbin. Probably it was part of the
original furniture, an heirloom in this magnificent palace of the
Irish kings."

Again Fisher looked at him under his eyelids, but seemed too sleepy
to speak, and Wilson went on with his argument.

"Now it's quite clear that something very odd has just happened in
this place. The chances are ten to one, it seems to me, that it had
something specially to do with this place. Probably he came here
because he could do it only here; it doesn't seem very inviting
otherwise. But the man knew it of old; they say it belonged to his
family, so that altogether, I think, everything points to something
in the construction of the tower itself."

"Your reasoning seems to me excellent," said Sir Walter, who was
listening attentively. "But what could it be?"

"You see now what I mean about the ladder," went on the detective;
"it's the only old piece of furniture here and the first thing that
caught that cockney eye of mine. But there is something else. That
loft up there is a sort of lumber room without any lumber. So far as
I can see, it's as empty as everything else; and, as things are, I
don't see the use of the ladder leading to it. It seems to me, as I
can't find anything unusual down here, that it might pay us to look
up there."

He got briskly off the table on which he was sitting (for the only
chair was allotted to Sir Walter) and ran rapidly up the ladder to
the platform above. He was soon followed by the others, Mr. Fisher
going last, however, with an appearance of considerable nonchalance.

At this stage, however, they were destined to disappointment; Wilson
nosed in every corner like a terrier and examined the roof almost in
the posture of a fly, but half an hour afterward they had to confess
that they were still without a clew. Sir Walter's private secretary
seemed more and more threatened with inappropriate slumber, and,
having been the last to climb up the ladder, seemed now to lack the
energy even to climb down again.

"Come along, Fisher," called out Sir Walter from below, when the
others had regained the floor. "We must consider whether we'll pull
the whole place to pieces to see what it's made of."

"I'm coming in a minute," said the voice from the ledge above their
heads, a voice somewhat suggestive of an articulate yawn.

"What are you waiting for?" asked Sir Walter, impatiently. "Can you
see anything there?"

"Well, yes, in a way," replied the voice, vaguely.  "In fact, I see
it quite plain now."

"What is it?" asked Wilson, sharply, from the table on which he sat
kicking his heels restlessly.

"Well, it's a man," said Horne Fisher.

Wilson bounded off the table as if he had been kicked off it. "What
do you mean?" he cried. "How can you possibly see a man?"

"I can see him through the window," replied the secretary, mildly.
"I see him coming across the moor. He's making a bee line across the
open country toward this tower. He evidently means to pay us a
visit. And, considering who it seems to be, perhaps it would be more
polite if we were all at the door to receive him." And in a
leisurely manner the secretary came down the ladder.

"Who it seems to be!" repeated Sir Walter in astonishment.

"Well, I think it's the man you call Prince Michael," observed Mr.
Fisher, airily. "In fact, I'm sure it is. I've seen the police
portraits of him."

There was a dead silence, and Sir Walter's usually steady brain
seemed to go round like a windmill.

"But, hang it all!" he said at last, "even supposing his own
explosion could have thrown him half a mile away, without passing
through any of the windows, and left him alive enough for a country
walk--even then, why the devil should he walk in this direction?
The murderer does not generally revisit the scene of his crime so
rapidly as all that."

"He doesn't know yet that it is the scene of his crime," answered
Horne Fisher.

"What on earth do you mean?  You credit him with rather singular
absence of mind."

"Well, the truth is, it isn't the scene of his crime," said Fisher,
and went and looked out of the window.

There was another silence, and then Sir Walter said, quietly:  "What
sort of notion have you really got in your head, Fisher? Have you
developed a new theory about how this fellow escaped out of the ring
round him?"

"He never escaped at all," answered the man at the window, without
turning round. "He never escaped out of the ring because he was
never inside the ring. He was not in this tower at all, at least not
when we were surrounding it."

He turned and leaned back against the window, but, in spite of his
usual listless manner, they almost fancied that the face in shadow
was a little pale.

"I began to guess something of the sort when we were some way from
the tower," he said. "Did you notice that sort of flash or flicker
the candle gave before it was extinguished? I was almost certain it
was only the last leap the flame gives when a candle burns itself
out. And then I came into this room and I saw that."

He pointed at the table and Sir Walter caught his breath with a sort
of curse at his own blindness. For the candle in the candlestick had
obviously burned itself away to nothing and left him, mentally, at
least, very completely in the dark.

"Then there is a sort of mathematical question," went on Fisher,
leaning back in his limp way and looking up at the bare walls, as if
tracing imaginary diagrams there. "It's not so easy for a man in the
third angle to face the other two at the same moment, especially if
they are at the base of an isosceles. I am sorry if it sounds like a
lecture on geometry, but--"

"I'm afraid we have no time for it," said Wilson, coldly. "If this
man is really coming back, I must give my orders at once."

"I think I'll go on with it, though," observed Fisher, staring at
the roof with insolent serenity.

"I must ask you, Mr. Fisher, to let me conduct my inquiry on my own
lines," said Wilson, firmly. "I am the officer in charge now."

"Yes," remarked Horne Fisher, softly, but with an accent that
somehow chilled the hearer. "Yes. But why?"

Sir Walter was staring, for he had never seen his rather
lackadaisical young friend look like that before. Fisher was looking
at Wilson with lifted lids, and the eyes under them seemed to have
shed or shifted a film, as do the eyes of an eagle.

"Why are you the officer in charge now?" he asked. "Why can you
conduct the inquiry on your own lines now? How did it come about, I
wonder, that the elder officers are not here to interfere with
anything you do?"

Nobody spoke, and nobody can say how soon anyone would have
collected his wits to speak when a noise came from without. It was
the heavy and hollow sound of a blow upon the door of the tower, and
to their shaken spirits it sounded strangely like the hammer of
doom.

The wooden door of the tower moved on its rusty hinges under the
hand that struck it and Prince Michael came into the room. Nobody
had the smallest doubt about his identity. His light clothes, though
frayed with his adventures, were of fine and almost foppish cut, and
he wore a pointed beard, or imperial, perhaps as a further
reminiscence of Louis Napoleon; but he was a much taller and more
graceful man that his prototype. Before anyone could speak he had
silenced everyone for an instant with a slight but splendid gesture
of hospitality.

"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a poor place now, but you are
heartily welcome."

Wilson was the first to recover, and he took a stride toward the
newcomer.

"Michael O'Neill, I arrest you in the king's name for the murder of
Francis Morton and James Nolan. It is my duty to warn you--"

"No, no, Mr. Wilson," cried Fisher, suddenly.  "You shall not commit
a third murder."

Sir Walter Carey rose from his chair, which fell over with a crash
behind him. "What does all this mean?" he called out in an
authoritative manner.

"It means," said Fisher, "that this man, Hooker Wilson, as soon as
he had put his head in at that window, killed his two comrades who
had put their heads in at the other windows, by firing across the
empty room. That is what it means. And if you want to know, count
how many times he is supposed to have fired and then count the
charges left in his revolver."

Wilson, who was still sitting on the table, abruptly put a hand out
for the weapon that lay beside him. But the next movement was the
most unexpected of all, for the prince standing in the doorway
passed suddenly from the dignity of a statue to the swiftness of an
acrobat and rent the revolver out of the detective's hand.

"You dog!" he cried.  "So you are the type of English truth, as I am
of Irish tragedy--you who come to kill me, wading through the blood
of your brethren. If they had fallen in a feud on the hillside, it
would be called murder, and yet your sin might be forgiven you. But
I, who am innocent, I was to be slain with ceremony. There would
be long speeches and patient judges listening to my vain plea of
innocence, noting down my despair and disregarding it. Yes, that is
what I call assassination. But killing may be no murder; there is
one shot left in this little gun, and I know where it should go."

Wilson turned quickly on the table, and even as he turned he twisted
in agony, for Michael shot him through the body where he sat, so
that he tumbled off the table like lumber.

The police rushed to lift him; Sir Walter stood speechless; and
then, with a strange and weary gesture, Horne Fisher spoke.

"You are indeed a type of the Irish tragedy," he said. "You were
entirely in the right, and you have put yourself in the wrong."

The prince's face was like marble for a space then there dawned in
his eyes a light not unlike that of despair. He laughed suddenly and
flung the smoking pistol on the ground.

"I am indeed in the wrong," he said.  "I have committed a crime that
may justly bring a curse on me and my children."

Horne Fisher did not seem entirely satisfied with this very sudden
repentance; he kept his eyes on the man and only said, in a low
voice, "What crime do you mean?"

"I have helped English justice," replied Prince Michael.  "I have
avenged your king's officers; I have done the work of his hangman.
For that truly I deserve to be hanged."

And he turned to the police with a gesture that did not so much
surrender to them, but rather command them to arrest him.

This was the story that Horne Fisher told to Harold March, the
journalist, many years after, in a little, but luxurious, restaurant
near Piccadilly. He had invited March to dinner some time after the
affair he called "The Face in the Target," and the conversation had
naturally turned on that mystery and afterward on earlier memories
of Fisher's life and the way in which he was led to study such
problems as those of Prince Michael. Horne Fisher was fifteen years
older; his thin hair had faded to frontal baldness, and his long,
thin hands dropped less with affectation and more with fatigue. And
he told the story of the Irish adventure of his youth, because it
recorded the first occasion on which he had ever come in contact
with crime, or discovered how darkly and how terribly crime can be
entangled with law.

"Hooker Wilson was the first criminal I ever knew, and he was a
policeman," explained Fisher, twirling his wine glass. "And all my
life has been a mixed-up business of the sort. He was a man of very
real talent, and perhaps genius, and well worth studying, both as a
detective and a criminal. His white face and red hair were typical
of him, for he was one of those who are cold and yet on fire for
fame; and he could control anger, but not ambition. He swallowed the
snubs of his superiors in that first quarrel, though he boiled with
resentment; but when he suddenly saw the two heads dark against the
dawn and framed in the two windows, he could not miss the chance,
not only of revenge, but of the removal of the two obstacles to his
promotion. He was a dead shot and counted on silencing both, though
proof against him would have been hard in any case. But, as a matter
of fact, he had a narrow escape, in the case of Nolan, who lived
just long enough to say, 'Wilson' and point. We thought he was
summoning help for his comrade, but he was really denouncing his
murderer. After that it was easy to throw down the ladder above him
(for a man up a ladder cannot see clearly what is below and behind)
and to throw himself on the ground as another victim of the
catastrophe.

"But there was mixed up with his murderous ambition a real belief,
not only in his own talents, but in his own theories. He did believe
in what he called a fresh eye, and he did want scope for fresh
methods. There was something in his view, but it failed where such
things commonly fail, because the fresh eye cannot see the unseen.
It is true about the ladder and the scarecrow, but not about the
life and the soul; and he made a bad mistake about what a man like
Michael would do when he heard a woman scream. All Michael's very
vanity and vainglory made him rush out at once; he would have walked
into Dublin Castle for a lady's glove. Call it his pose or what you
will, but he would have done it. What happened when he met her is
another story, and one we may never know, but from tales I've heard
since, they must have been reconciled. Wilson was wrong there; but
there was something, for all that, in his notion that the newcomer
sees most, and that the man on the spot may know too much to know
anything. He was right about some things. He was right about me."

"About you?" asked Harold March in some wonder.

"I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate,
to do anything," said Horne Fisher. "I don't mean especially about
Ireland. I mean about England. I mean about the whole way we are
governed, and perhaps the only way we can be governed. You asked me
just now what became of the survivors of that tragedy. Well, Wilson
recovered and we managed to persuade him to retire. But we had to
pension that damnable murderer more magnificently than any hero who
ever fought for England. I managed to save Michael from the worst,
but we had to send that perfectly innocent man to penal servitude
for a crime we know he never committed, and it was only afterward
that we could connive in a sneakish way at his escape. And Sir
Walter Carey is Prime Minister of this country, which he would
probably never have been if the truth had been told of such a
horrible scandal in his department. It might have done for us
altogether in Ireland; it would certainly have done for him. And he
is my father's old friend, and has always smothered me with
kindness. I am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I
was certainly never born to set it right. You look distressed, not
to say shocked, and I'm not at all offended at it. Let us change the
subject by all means, if you like. What do you think of this
Burgundy? It's rather a discovery of mine, like the restaurant
itself."

And he proceeded to talk learnedly and luxuriantly on all the wines
of the world; on which subject, also, some moralists would consider
that he knew too much.



III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY

A large map of London would be needed to display the wild and zigzag
course of one day's journey undertaken by an uncle and his nephew;
or, to speak more truly, of a nephew and his uncle. For the nephew,
a schoolboy on a holiday, was in theory the god in the car, or in
the cab, tram, tube, and so on, while his uncle was at most a priest
dancing before him and offering sacrifices. To put it more soberly,
the schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing
the grand tour, while his elderly relative was reduced to the
position of a courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything
like a patron. The schoolboy was officially known as Summers Minor,
and in a more social manner as Stinks, the only public tribute to
his career as an amateur photographer and electrician. The uncle was
the Rev. Thomas Twyford, a lean and lively old gentleman with a red,
eager face and white hair. He was in the ordinary way a country
clergyman, but he was one of those who achieve the paradox of being
famous in an obscure way, because they are famous in an obscure
world. In a small circle of ecclesiastical archaeologists, who were
the only people who could even understand one another's discoveries,
he occupied a recognized and respectable place. And a critic might
have found even in that day's journey at least as much of the
uncle's hobby as of the nephew's holiday.

His original purpose had been wholly paternal and festive. But,
like many other intelligent people, he was not above the weakness of
playing with a toy to amuse himself, on the theory that it would
amuse a child. His toys were crowns and miters and croziers and
swords of state; and he had lingered over them, telling himself that
the boy ought to see all the sights of London. And at the end of the
day, after a tremendous tea, he rather gave the game away by winding
up with a visit in which hardly any human boy could be conceived as
taking an interest--an underground chamber supposed to have been a
chapel, recently excavated on the north bank of the Thames, and
containing literally nothing whatever but one old silver coin. But
the coin, to those who knew, was more solitary and splendid than the
Koh-i-noor. It was Roman, and was said to bear the head of St. Paul;
and round it raged the most vital controversies about the ancient
British Church. It could hardly be denied, however, that the
controversies left Summers Minor comparatively cold.

Indeed, the things that interested Summers Minor, and the things
that did not interest him, had mystified and amused his uncle for
several hours. He exhibited the English schoolboy's startling
ignorance and startling knowledge--knowledge of some special
classification in which he can generally correct and confound his
elders. He considered himself entitled, at Hampton Court on a
holiday, to forget the very names of Cardinal Wolsey or William of
Orange; but he could hardly be dragged from some details about the
arrangement of the electric bells in the neighboring hotel. He was
solidly dazed by Westminster Abbey, which is not so unnatural since
that church became the lumber room of the larger and less successful
statuary of the eighteenth century. But he had a magic and minute
knowledge of the Westminster omnibuses, and indeed of the whole
omnibus system of London, the colors and numbers of which he knew as
a herald knows heraldry. He would cry out against a momentary
confusion between a light-green Paddington and a dark-green
Bayswater vehicle, as his uncle would at the identification of a
Greek ikon and a Roman image.

"Do you collect omnibuses like stamps?" asked his uncle. "They must
need a rather large album. Or do you keep them in your locker?"

"I keep them in my head," replied the nephew, with legitimate
firmness.

"It does you credit, I admit," replied the clergyman. "I suppose it
were vain to ask for what purpose you have learned that out of a
thousand things. There hardly seems to be a career in it, unless you
could be permanently on the pavement to prevent old ladies getting
into the wrong bus. Well, we must get out of this one, for this is
our place. I want to show you what they call St. Paul's Penny."

"Is it like St. Paul's Cathedral?" asked the youth with resignation,
as they alighted.

At the entrance their eyes were arrested by a singular figure
evidently hovering there with a similar anxiety to enter. It was
that of a dark, thin man in a long black robe rather like a cassock;
but the black cap on his head was of too strange a shape to be a
biretta. It suggested, rather, some archaic headdress of Persia or
Babylon. He had a curious black beard appearing only at the corners
of his chin, and his large eyes were oddly set in his face like the
flat decorative eyes painted in old Egyptian profiles. Before they
had gathered more than a general impression of him, he had dived
into the doorway that was their own destination.

Nothing could be seen above ground of the sunken sanctuary except a
strong wooden hut, of the sort recently run up for many military and
official purposes, the wooden floor of which was indeed a mere
platform over the excavated cavity below. A soldier stood as a
sentry outside, and a superior soldier, an Anglo-Indian officer of
distinction, sat writing at the desk inside. Indeed, the sightseers
soon found that this particular sight was surrounded with the most
extraordinary precautions. I have compared the silver coin to the
Koh-i-noor, and in one sense it was even conventionally comparable,
since by a historical accident it was at one time almost counted
among the Crown jewels, or at least the Crown relics, until one of
the royal princes publicly restored it to the shrine to which it was
supposed to belong. Other causes combined to concentrate official
vigilance upon it; there had been a scare about spies carrying
explosives in small objects, and one of those experimental orders
which pass like waves over bureaucracy had decreed first that all
visitors should change their clothes for a sort of official
sackcloth, and then (when this method caused some murmurs) that they
should at least turn out their pockets. Colonel Morris, the officer
in charge, was a short, active man with a grim and leathery face,
but a lively and humorous eye--a contradiction borne out by his
conduct, for he at once derided the safeguards and yet insisted on
them.

"I don't care a button myself for Paul's Penny, or such things," he
admitted in answer to some antiquarian openings from the clergyman
who was slightly acquainted with him, "but I wear the King's coat,
you know, and it's a serious thing when the King's uncle leaves a
thing here with his own hands under my charge. But as for saints and
relics and things, I fear I'm a bit of a Voltairian; what you would
call a skeptic."

"I'm not sure it's even skeptical to believe in the royal family and
not in the 'Holy' Family," replied Mr. Twyford. "But, of course, I
can easily empty my pockets, to show I don't carry a bomb."

The little heap of the parson's possessions which he left on the
table consisted chiefly of papers, over and above a pipe and a
tobacco pouch and some Roman and Saxon coins. The rest were
catalogues of old books, and pamphlets, like one entitled "The Use
of Sarum," one glance at which was sufficient both for the colonel
and the schoolboy. They could not see the use of Sarum at all. The
contents of the boy's pockets naturally made a larger heap, and
included marbles, a ball of string, an electric torch, a magnet, a
small catapult, and, of course, a large pocketknife, almost to be
described as a small tool box, a complex apparatus on which he
seemed disposed to linger, pointing out that it included a pair of
nippers, a tool for punching holes in wood, and, above all, an
instrument for taking stones out of a horse's hoof. The comparative
absence of any horse he appeared to regard as irrelevant, as if it
were a mere appendage easily supplied. But when the turn came of the
gentleman in the black gown, he did not turn out his pockets, but
merely spread out his hands.

"I have no possessions," he said.

"I'm afraid I must ask you to empty your pockets and make sure,"
observed the colonel, gruffly.

"I have no pockets," said the stranger.

Mr. Twyford was looking at the long black gown with a learned eye.

"Are you a monk?" he asked, in a puzzled fashion.

"I am a magus," replied the stranger.  "You have heard of the magi,
perhaps? I am a magician."

"Oh, I say!" exclaimed Summers Minor, with prominent eyes.

"But I was once a monk," went on the other.  "I am what you would
call an escaped monk. Yes, I have escaped into eternity. But the
monks held one truth at least, that the highest life should be
without possessions. I have no pocket money and no pockets, and all
the stars are my trinkets."

"They are out of reach, anyhow," observed Colonel Morris, in a tone
which suggested that it was well for them. "I've known a good many
magicians myself in India--mango plant and all. But the Indian ones
are all frauds, I'll swear. In fact, I had a good deal of fun
showing them up. More fun than I have over this dreary job, anyhow.
But here comes Mr. Symon, who will show you over the old cellar
downstairs."

Mr. Symon, the official guardian and guide, was a young man,
prematurely gray, with a grave mouth which contrasted curiously with
a very small, dark mustache with waxed points, that seemed somehow,
separate from it, as if a black fly had settled on his face. He
spoke with the accent of Oxford and the permanent official, but in
as dead a fashion as the most indifferent hired guide. They
descended a dark stone staircase, at the floor of which Symon
pressed a button and a door opened on a dark room, or, rather, a
room which had an instant before been dark. For almost as the heavy
iron door swung open an almost blinding blaze of electric lights
filled the whole interior. The fitful enthusiasm of Stinks at once
caught fire, and he eagerly asked if the lights and the door worked
together.

"Yes, it's all one system," replied Symon.  "It was all fitted up
for the day His Royal Highness deposited the thing here. You see,
it's locked up behind a glass case exactly as he left it."

A glance showed that the arrangements for guarding the treasure were
indeed as strong as they were simple. A single pane of glass cut off
one corner of the room, in an iron framework let into the rock walls
and the wooden roof above; there was now no possibility of reopening
the case without elaborate labor, except by breaking the glass,
which would probably arouse the night watchman who was always within
a few feet of it, even if he had fallen asleep. A close examination
would have showed many more ingenious safeguards; but the eye of the
Rev. Thomas Twyford, at least, was already riveted on what
interested him much more--the dull silver disk which shone in the
white light against a plain background of black velvet.

"St. Paul's Penny, said to commemorate the visit of St. Paul to
Britain, was probably preserved in this chapel until the eighth
century," Symon was saying in his clear but colorless voice. "In the
ninth century it is supposed to have been carried away by the
barbarians, and it reappears, after the conversion of the northern
Goths, in the possession of the royal family of Gothland. His Royal
Highness, the Duke of Gothland, retained it always in his own
private custody, and when he decided to exhibit it to the public,
placed it here with his own hand. It was immediately sealed up in
such a manner--"

Unluckily at this point Summers Minor, whose attention had somewhat
strayed from the religious wars of the ninth century, caught sight
of a short length of wire appearing in a broken patch in the wall.
He precipitated himself at it, calling out, "I say, does that
connect?"

It was evident that it did connect, for no sooner had the boy given
it a twitch than the whole room went black, as if they had all been
struck blind, and an instant afterward they heard the dull crash of
the closing door.

"Well, you've done it now," said Symon, in his tranquil fashion.
Then after a pause he added, "I suppose they'll miss us sooner or
later, and no doubt they can get it open; but it may take some
little time."

There was a silence, and then the unconquerable Stinks observed:

"Rotten that I had to leave my electric torch."

"I think," said his uncle, with restraint, "that we are sufficiently
convinced of your interest in electricity."

Then after a pause he remarked, more amiably:  "I suppose if I
regretted any of my own impedimenta, it would be the pipe. Though,
as a matter of fact, it's not much fun smoking in the dark.
Everything seems different in the dark."

"Everything is different in the dark," said a third voice, that of
the man who called himself a magician. It was a very musical voice,
and rather in contrast with his sinister and swarthy visage, which
was now invisible. "Perhaps you don't know how terrible a truth that
is. All you see are pictures made by the sun, faces and furniture
and flowers and trees. The things themselves may be quite strange to
you. Something else may be standing now where you saw a table or a
chair. The face of your friend may be quite different in the dark."

A short, indescribable noise broke the stillness. Twyford started
for a second, and then said, sharply:

"Really, I don't think it's a suitable occasion for trying to
frighten a child."

"Who's a child?" cried the indignant Summers, with a voice that had
a crow, but also something of a crack in it. "And who's a funk,
either? Not me."

"I will be silent, then," said the other voice out of the darkness.
"But silence also makes and unmakes."

The required silence remained unbroken for a long time until at last
the clergyman said to Symon in a low voice:

"I suppose it's all right about air?"

"Oh, yes," replied the other aloud; "there's a fireplace and a
chimney in the office just by the door."

A bound and the noise of a falling chair told them that the
irrepressible rising generation had once more thrown itself across
the room. They heard the ejaculation: "A chimney! Why, I'll be--"
and the rest was lost in muffled, but exultant, cries.

The uncle called repeatedly and vainly, groped his way at last to
the opening, and, peering up it, caught a glimpse of a disk of
daylight, which seemed to suggest that the fugitive had vanished in
safety. Making his way back to the group by the glass case, he fell
over the fallen chair and took a moment to collect himself again. He
had opened his mouth to speak to Symon, when he stopped, and
suddenly found himself blinking in the full shock of the white
light, and looking over the other man's shoulder, he saw that the
door was standing open.

"So they've got at us at last," he observed to Symon.

The man in the black robe was leaning against the wall some yards
away, with a smile carved on his face.

"Here comes Colonel Morris," went on Twyford, still speaking to
Symon. "One of us will have to tell him how the light went out. Will
you?"

But Symon still said nothing. He was standing as still as a statue,
and looking steadily at the black velvet behind the glass screen. He
was looking at the black velvet because there was nothing else to
look at. St. Paul's Penny was gone.

Colonel Morris entered the room with two new visitors; presumably
two new sightseers delayed by the accident. The foremost was a tall,
fair, rather languid-looking man with a bald brow and a high-bridged
nose; his companion was a younger man with light, curly hair and
frank, and even innocent, eyes. Symon scarcely seemed to hear the
newcomers; it seemed almost as if he had not realized that the
return of the light revealed his brooding attitude. Then he started
in a guilty fashion, and when he saw the elder of the two strangers,
his pale face seemed to turn a shade paler.

"Why it's Horne Fisher!" and then after a pause he said in a low
voice, "I'm in the devil of a hole, Fisher."

"There does seem a bit of a mystery to be cleared up," observed the
gentleman so addressed.

"It will never be cleared up," said the pale Symon.  "If anybody
could clear it up, you could. But nobody could."

"I rather think I could," said another voice from outside the group,
and they turned in surprise to realize that the man in the black
robe had spoken again.

"You!" said the colonel, sharply.  "And how do you propose to play
the detective?"

"I do not propose to play the detective," answered the other, in a
clear voice like a bell. "I propose to play the magician. One of the
magicians you show up in India, Colonel."

No one spoke for a moment, and then Horne Fisher surprised everybody
by saying, "Well, let's go upstairs, and this gentleman can have a
try."

He stopped Symon, who had an automatic finger on the button, saying:
"No, leave all the lights on. It's a sort of safeguard."

"The thing can't be taken away now," said Symon, bitterly.

"It can be put back," replied Fisher.

Twyford had already run upstairs for news of his vanishing nephew,
and he received news of him in a way that at once puzzled and
reassured him. On the floor above lay one of those large paper darts
which boys throw at each other when the schoolmaster is out of the
room. It had evidently been thrown in at the window, and on being
unfolded displayed a scrawl of bad handwriting which ran: "Dear
Uncle; I am all right. Meet you at the hotel later on," and then the
signature.

Insensibly comforted by this, the clergyman found his thoughts
reverting voluntarily to his favorite relic, which came a good
second in his sympathies to his favorite nephew, and before he knew
where he was he found himself encircled by the group discussing its
loss, and more or less carried away on the current of their
excitement. But an undercurrent of query continued to run in his
mind, as to what had really happened to the boy, and what was the
boy's exact definition of being all right.

Meanwhile Horne Fisher had considerably puzzled everybody with his
new tone and attitude. He had talked to the colonel about the
military and mechanical arrangements, and displayed a remarkable
knowledge both of the details of discipline and the technicalities
of electricity. He had talked to the clergyman, and shown an equally
surprising knowledge of the religious and historical interests
involved in the relic. He had talked to the man who called himself a
magician, and not only surprised but scandalized the company by an
equally sympathetic familiarity with the most fantastic forms of
Oriental occultism and psychic experiment. And in this last and
least respectable line of inquiry he was evidently prepared to go
farthest; he openly encouraged the magician, and was plainly
prepared to follow the wildest ways of investigation in which that
magus might lead him.

"How would you begin now?" he inquired, with an anxious politeness
that reduced the colonel to a congestion of rage.

"It is all a question of a force; of establishing communications for
a force," replied that adept, affably, ignoring some military
mutterings about the police force. "It is what you in the West used
to call animal magnetism, but it is much more than that. I had
better not say how much more. As to setting about it, the usual
method is to throw some susceptible person into a trance, which
serves as a sort of bridge or cord of communication, by which the
force beyond can give him, as it were, an electric shock, and awaken
his higher senses. It opens the sleeping eye of the mind."

"I'm suspectible," said Fisher, either with simplicity or with a
baffling irony. "Why not open my mind's eye for me? My friend Harold
March here will tell you I sometimes see things, even in the dark."

"Nobody sees anything except in the dark," said the magician.

Heavy clouds of sunset were closing round the wooden hut, enormous
clouds, of which only the corners could be seen in the little
window, like purple horns and tails, almost as if some huge monsters
were prowling round the place. But the purple was already deepening
to dark gray; it would soon be night.

"Do not light the lamp," said the magus with quiet authority,
arresting a movement in that direction. "I told you before that
things happen only in the dark."

How such a topsy-turvy scene ever came to be tolerated in the
colonel's office, of all places, was afterward a puzzle in the
memory of many, including the colonel. They recalled it like a sort
of nightmare, like something they could not control. Perhaps there
was really a magnetism about the mesmerist; perhaps there was even
more magnetism about the man mesmerized. Anyhow, the man was being
mesmerized, for Horne Fisher had collapsed into a chair with his
long limbs loose and sprawling and his eyes staring at vacancy; and
the other man was mesmerizing him, making sweeping movements with
his darkly draped arms as if with black wings. The colonel had
passed the point of explosion, and he dimly realized that eccentric
aristocrats are allowed their fling. He comforted himself with the
knowledge that he had already sent for the police, who would break
up any such masquerade, and with lighting a cigar, the red end of
which, in the gathering darkness, glowed with protest.

"Yes, I see pockets," the man in the trance was saying. "I see many
pockets, but they are all empty. No; I see one pocket that is not
empty."

There was a faint stir in the stillness, and the magician said, "Can
you see what is in the pocket?"

"Yes," answered the other; "there are two bright things. I think
they are two bits of steel. One of the pieces of steel is bent or
crooked."

"Have they been used in the removal of the relic from downstairs?"

"Yes."

There was another pause and the inquirer added, "Do you see anything
of the relic itself?"

"I see something shining on the floor, like the shadow or the ghost
of it. It is over there in the corner beyond the desk."

There was a movement of men turning and then a sudden stillness, as
of their stiffening, for over in the corner on the wooden floor
there was really a round spot of pale light. It was the only spot of
light in the room. The cigar had gone out.

"It points the way," came the voice of the oracle. "The spirits are
pointing the way to penitence, and urging the thief to restitution.
I can see nothing more." His voice trailed off into a silence that
lasted solidly for many minutes, like the long silence below when
the theft had been committed. Then it was broken by the ring of
metal on the floor, and the sound of something spinning and falling
like a tossed halfpenny.

"Light the lamp!" cried Fisher in a loud and even jovial voice,
leaping to his feet with far less languor than usual. "I must be
going now, but I should like to see it before I go. Why, I came on
purpose to see it."

The lamp was lit, and he did see it, for St. Paul's Penny was lying
on the floor at his feet.

"Oh, as for that," explained Fisher, when he was entertaining March
and Twyford at lunch about a month later, "I merely wanted to play
with the magician at his own game."

"I thought you meant to catch him in his own trap," said Twyford.
"I can't make head or tail of anything yet, but to my mind he was
always the suspect. I don't think he was necessarily a thief in the
vulgar sense. The police always seem to think that silver is stolen
for the sake of silver, but a thing like that might well be stolen
out of some religious mania. A runaway monk turned mystic might well
want it for some mystical purpose."

"No," replied Fisher, "the runaway monk is not a thief. At any rate
he is not the thief. And he's not altogether a liar, either. He said
one true thing at least that night."

"And what was that?" inquired March.

"He said it was all magnetism. As a matter of fact, it was done by
means of a magnet." Then, seeing they still looked puzzled, he
added, "It was that toy magnet belonging to your nephew, Mr.
Twyford."

"But I don't understand," objected March.  "If it was done with the
schoolboy's magnet, I suppose it was done by the schoolboy."

"Well," replied Fisher, reflectively, "it rather depends which
schoolboy."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"The soul of a schoolboy is a curious thing," Fisher continued, in a
meditative manner. "It can survive a great many things besides
climbing out of a chimney. A man can grow gray in great campaigns,
and still have the soul of a schoolboy. A man can return with a
great reputation from India and be put in charge of a great public
treasure, and still have the soul of a schoolboy, waiting to be
awakened by an accident. And it is ten times more so when to the
schoolboy you add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of stunted
schoolboy. You said just now that things might be done by religious
mania. Have you ever heard of irreligious mania? I assure you it
exists very violently, especially in men who like showing up
magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the temptation of
showing up a much more tremendous sham nearer home."

A light came into Harold March's eyes as he suddenly saw, as if afar
off, the wider implication of the suggestion. But Twyford was still
wrestling with one problem at a time.

"Do you really mean," he said, "that Colonel Morris took the relic?"

"He was the only person who could use the magnet," replied Fisher.
"In fact, your obliging nephew left him a number of things he could
use. He had a ball of string, and an instrument for making a hole in
the wooden floor--I made a little play with that hole in the floor
in my trance, by the way; with the lights left on below, it shone
like a new shilling." Twyford suddenly bounded on his chair. "But in
that case," he cried, in a new and altered voice, "why then of
course-- You said a piece of steel--?"

"I said there were two pieces of steel," said Fisher.  "The bent
piece of steel was the boy's magnet. The other was the relic in the
glass case."

"But that is silver," answered the archaeologist, in a voice now
almost unrecognizable.

"Oh," replied Fisher, soothingly, "I dare say it was painted with
silver a little."

There was a heavy silence, and at last Harold March said, "But where
is the real relic?"

"Where it has been for five years," replied Horne Fisher, "in the
possession of a mad millionaire named Vandam, in Nebraska. There was
a playful little photograph about him in a society paper the other
day, mentioning his delusion, and saying he was always being taken
in about relics."

Harold March frowned at the tablecloth; then, after an interval, he
said: "I think I understand your notion of how the thing was
actually done; according to that, Morris just made a hole and fished
it up with a magnet at the end of a string. Such a monkey trick
looks like mere madness, but I suppose he was mad, partly with the
boredom of watching over what he felt was a fraud, though he
couldn't prove it. Then came a chance to prove it, to himself at
least, and he had what he called 'fun' with it. Yes, I think I see a
lot of details now. But it's just the whole thing that knocks me.
How did it all come to be like that?"

Fisher was looking at him with level lids and an immovable manner.

"Every precaution was taken," he said.  "The Duke carried the relic
on his own person, and locked it up in the case with his own hands."

March was silent; but Twyford stammered.  "I don't understand you.
You give me the creeps. Why don't you speak plainer?"

"If I spoke plainer you would understand me less," said Horne
Fisher.

"All the same I should try," said March, still without lifting his
head.

"Oh, very well," replied Fisher, with a sigh; "the plain truth is,
of course, that it's a bad business. Everybody knows it's a bad
business who knows anything about it. But it's always happening, and
in one way one can hardly blame them. They get stuck on to a foreign
princess that's as stiff as a Dutch doll, and they have their fling.
In this case it was a pretty big fling."

The face of the Rev. Thomas Twyford certainly suggested that he was
a little out of his depth in the seas of truth, but as the other
went on speaking vaguely the old gentleman's features sharpened and
set.

"If it were some decent morganatic affair I wouldn't say; but he
must have been a fool to throw away thousands on a woman like that.
At the end it was sheer blackmail; but it's something that the old
ass didn't get it out of the taxpayers. He could only get it out of
the Yank, and there you are."

The Rev. Thomas Twyford had risen to his feet.

"Well, I'm glad my nephew had nothing to do with it," he said. "And
if that's what the world is like, I hope he will never have anything
to do with it."

"I hope not," answered Horne Fisher.  "No one knows so well as I do
that one can have far too much to do with it."

For Summers Minor had indeed nothing to do with it; and it is part
of his higher significance that he has really nothing to do with the
story, or with any such stories. The boy went like a bullet through
the tangle of this tale of crooked politics and crazy mockery and
came out on the other side, pursuing his own unspoiled purposes.
From the top of the chimney he climbed he had caught sight of a new
omnibus, whose color and name he had never known, as a naturalist
might see a new bird or a botanist a new flower. And he had been
sufficiently enraptured in rushing after it, and riding away upon
that fairy ship.



IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL

In an oasis, or green island, in the red and yellow seas of sand
that stretch beyond Europe toward the sunrise, there can be found a
rather fantastic contrast, which is none the less typical of such a
place, since international treaties have made it an outpost of the
British occupation. The site is famous among archaeologists for
something that is hardly a monument, but merely a hole in the
ground. But it is a round shaft, like that of a well, and probably a
part of some great irrigation works of remote and disputed date,
perhaps more ancient than anything in that ancient land. There is a
green fringe of palm and prickly pear round the black mouth of the
well; but nothing of the upper masonry remains except two bulky and
battered stones standing like the pillars of a gateway of nowhere,
in which some of the more transcendental archaeologists, in certain
moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the faint lines of
figures or features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while the
more rationalistic archaeologists, in the more rational hours of
daylight, see nothing but two shapeless rocks. It may have been
noticed, however, that all Englishmen are not archaeologists. Many
of those assembled in such a place for official and military
purposes have hobbies other than archaeology. And it is a solemn
fact that the English in this Eastern exile have contrived to make a
small golf links out of the green scrub and sand; with a comfortable
clubhouse at one end of it and this primeval monument at the other.
They did not actually use this archaic abyss as a bunker, because it
was by tradition unfathomable, and even for practical purposes
unfathomed. Any sporting projectile sent into it might be counted
most literally as a lost ball. But they often sauntered round it in
their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes, and one of them
had just come down from the clubhouse to find another gazing
somewhat moodily into the well.

Both the Englishmen wore light clothes and white pith helmets and
puggrees, but there, for the most part, their resemblance ended. And
they both almost simultaneously said the same word, but they said it
on two totally different notes of the voice.

"Have you heard the news?" asked the man from the club.  "Splendid."

"Splendid," replied the man by the well. But the first man
pronounced the word as a young man might say it about a woman, and
the second as an old man might say it about the weather, not without
sincerity, but certainly without fervor.

And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of
them. The first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and
boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native heat in his face that
did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather to the
ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was an older man and
certainly an older resident, a civilian official--Horne Fisher; and
his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the
paradox of the Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be
anything but cool.

Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was
splendid. That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about
something that everybody knew. The striking victory over a menacing
combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the
command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking victories,
was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone
to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.

"Now, no other nation in the world could have done a thing like
that," cried Captain Boyle, emphatically.

Horne Fisher was still looking silently into the well; a moment
later he answered: "We certainly have the art of unmaking mistakes.
That's where the poor old Prussians went wrong. They could only make
mistakes and stick to them. There is really a certain talent in
unmaking a mistake."

"What do you mean," asked Boyle, "what mistakes?"

"Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could
chew," replied Horne Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that
he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in
two million was ever allowed to hear of. "And it was certainly jolly
lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time. Odd how
often the right thing's been done for us by the second in command,
even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at
Waterloo."

"It ought to add a whole province to the Empire," observed the
other.

"Well, I suppose the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as
the canal," observed Fisher, thoughtfully, "though everybody knows
adding provinces doesn't always pay much nowadays."

Captain Boyle frowned in a slightly puzzled fashion. Being cloudily
conscious of never having heard of the Zimmernes in his life, he
could only remark, stolidly:

"Well, one can't be a Little Englander."

Horne Fisher smiled, and he had a pleasant smile.

"Every man out here is a Little Englander," he said. "He wishes he
were back in Little England."

"I don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid," said the
younger man, rather suspiciously. "One would think you didn't really
admire Hastings or--or--anything."

"I admire him no end," replied Fisher.  "He's by far the best man
for this post; he understands the Moslems and can do anything with
them. That's why I'm all against pushing Travers against him, merely
because of this last affair."

"I really don't understand what you're driving at," said the other,
frankly.

"Perhaps it isn't worth understanding," answered Fisher, lightly,
"and, anyhow, we needn't talk politics. Do you know the Arab legend
about that well?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about Arab legends," said Boyle,
rather stiffly.

"That's rather a mistake," replied Fisher, "especially from your
point of view. Lord Hastings himself is an Arab legend. That is
perhaps the very greatest thing he really is. If his reputation went
it would weaken us all over Asia and Africa. Well, the story about
that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows where, has
always fascinated me, rather. It's Mohammedan in form now, but I
shouldn't wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mohammed. It's
all about somebody they call the Sultan Aladdin, not our friend of
the lamp, of course, but rather like him in having to do with genii
or giants or something of that sort. They say he commanded the
giants to build him a sort of pagoda, rising higher and higher above
all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the people said when
they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower of
Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared
with old Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven--
a mere trifle. He wanted a tower that would pass heaven and rise
above it, and go on rising for ever and ever. And Allah cast him
down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank into the earth, boring
a hole deeper and deeper, till it made a well that was without a
bottom as the tower was to have been without a top. And down that
inverted tower of darkness the soul of the proud Sultan is falling
forever and ever."

"What a queer chap you are," said Boyle.  "You talk as if a fellow
could believe those fables."

"Perhaps I believe the moral and not the fable," answered Fisher.
"But here comes Lady Hastings. You know her, I think."

The clubhouse on the golf links was used, of course, for many other
purposes besides that of golf. It was the only social center of the
garrison beside the strictly military headquarters; it had a
billiard room and a bar, and even an excellent reference library for
those officers who were so perverse as to take their profession
seriously. Among these was the great general himself, whose head of
silver and face of bronze, like that of a brazen eagle, were often
to be found bent over the charts and folios of the library. The
great Lord Hastings believed in science and study, as in other
severe ideals of life, and had given much paternal advice on the
point to young Boyle, whose appearances in that place of research
were rather more intermittent. It was from one of these snatches of
study that the young man had just come out through the glass doors
of the library on to the golf links. But, above all, the club was so
appointed as to serve the social conveniences of ladies at least as
much as gentlemen, and Lady Hastings was able to play the queen in
such a society almost as much as in her own ballroom. She was
eminently calculated and, as some said, eminently inclined to play
such a part. She was much younger than her husband, an attractive
and sometimes dangerously attractive lady; and Mr. Horne Fisher
looked after her a little sardonically as she swept away with the
young soldier. Then his rather dreary eye strayed to the green and
prickly growths round the well, growths of that curious cactus
formation in which one thick leaf grows directly out of the other
without stalk or twig. It gave his fanciful mind a sinister feeling
of a blind growth without shape or purpose. A flower or shrub in the
West grows to the blossom which is its crown, and is content. But
this was as if hands could grow out of hands or legs grow out of
legs in a nightmare. "Always adding a province to the Empire," he
said, with a smile, and then added, more sadly, "but I doubt if I
was right, after all!"

A strong but genial voice broke in on his meditations and he looked
up and smiled, seeing the face of an old friend. The voice was,
indeed, rather more genial than the face, which was at the first
glance decidedly grim. It was a typically legal face, with angular
jaws and heavy, grizzled eyebrows; and it belonged to an eminently
legal character, though he was now attached in a semimilitary
capacity to the police of that wild district. Cuthbert Grayne was
perhaps more of a criminologist than either a lawyer or a policeman,
but in his more barbarous surroundings he had proved successful in
turning himself into a practical combination of all three. The
discovery of a whole series of strange Oriental crimes stood to his
credit. But as few people were acquainted with, or attracted to,
such a hobby or branch of knowledge, his intellectual life was
somewhat solitary. Among the few exceptions was Horne Fisher, who
had a curious capacity for talking to almost anybody about almost
anything.

"Studying botany, or is it archaeology?" inquired Grayne.  "I shall
never come to the end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that
what you don't know isn't worth knowing."

"You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness, and
even bitterness. "It's what I do know that isn't worth knowing. All
the seamy side of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives
and bribery and blackmail they call politics. I needn't be so proud
of having been down all these sewers that I should brag about it to
the little boys in the street."

"What do you mean?  What's the matter with you?" asked his friend.
"I never knew you taken like this before."

"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher.  "I've just been throwing
cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy."

"Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal
expert.

"Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course,"
continued Fisher, "but I ought to know that at that age illusions
can be ideals. And they're better than the reality, anyhow. But
there is one very ugly responsibility about jolting a young man out
of the rut of the most rotten ideal."

"And what may that be?" inquired his friend.

"It's very apt to set him off with the same energy in a much worse
direction," answered Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a
bottomless pit as deep as the bottomless well."

Fisher did not see his friend until a fortnight later, when he found
himself in the garden at the back of the clubhouse on the opposite
side from the links, a garden heavily colored and scented with sweet
semitropical plants in the glow of a desert sunset. Two other men
were with him, the third being the now celebrated second in command,
familiar to everybody as Tom Travers, a lean, dark man, who looked
older than his years, with a furrow in his brow and something morose
about the very shape of his black mustache. They had just been
served with black coffee by the Arab now officiating as the
temporary servant of the club, though he was a figure already
familiar, and even famous, as the old servant of the general. He
went by the name of Said, and was notable among other Semites for
that unnatural length of his yellow face and height of his narrow
forehead which is sometimes seen among them, and gave an irrational
impression of something sinister, in spite of his agreeable smile.

"I never feel as if I could quite trust that fellow," said Grayne,
when the man had gone away. "It's very unjust, I take it, for he was
certainly devoted to Hastings, and saved his life, they say. But
Arabs are often like that, loyal to one man. I can't help feeling he
might cut anybody else's throat, and even do it treacherously."

"Well," said Travers, with a rather sour smile, "so long as he
leaves Hastings alone the world won't mind much."

There was a rather embarrassing silence, full of memories of the
great battle, and then Horne Fisher said, quietly:

"The newspapers aren't the world, Tom. Don't you worry about them.
Everybody in your world knows the truth well enough."

"I think we'd better not talk about the general just now," remarked
Grayne, "for he's just coming out of the club."

"He's not coming here," said Fisher.  "He's only seeing his wife to
the car."

As he spoke, indeed, the lady came out on the steps of the club,
followed by her husband, who then went swiftly in front of her to
open the garden gate. As he did so she turned back and spoke for a
moment to a solitary man still sitting in a cane chair in the shadow
of the doorway, the only man left in the deserted club save for the
three that lingered in the garden. Fisher peered for a moment into
the shadow, and saw that it was Captain Boyle.

The next moment, rather to their surprise, the general reappeared
and, remounting the steps, spoke a word or two to Boyle in his turn.
Then he signaled to Said, who hurried up with two cups of coffee,
and the two men re-entered the club, each carrying his cup in his
hand. The next moment a gleam of white light in the growing darkness
showed that the electric lamps had been turned on in the library
beyond.

"Coffee and scientific researches," said Travers, grimly. "All the
luxuries of learning and theoretical research. Well, I must be
going, for I have my work to do as well." And he got up rather
stiffly, saluted his companions, and strode away into the dusk.

"I only hope Boyle is sticking to scientific researches," said Horne
Fisher. "I'm not very comfortable about him myself. But let's talk
about something else."

They talked about something else longer than they probably imagined,
until the tropical night had come and a splendid moon painted the
whole scene with silver; but before it was bright enough to see by
Fisher had already noted that the lights in the library had been
abruptly extinguished. He waited for the two men to come out by the
garden entrance, but nobody came.

"They must have gone for a stroll on the links," he said.

"Very possibly," replied Grayne.  "It's going to be a beautiful
night."

A moment or two after he had spoken they heard a voice hailing them
out of the shadow of the clubhouse, and were astonished to perceive
Travers hurrying toward them, calling out as he came:

"I shall want your help, you fellows," he cried. "There's something
pretty bad out on the links."

They found themselves plunging through the club smoking room and the
library beyond, in complete darkness, mental as well as material.
But Horne Fisher, in spite of his affectation of indifference, was a
person of a curious and almost transcendental sensibility to
atmospheres, and he already felt the presence of something more than
an accident. He collided with a piece of furniture in the library,
and almost shuddered with the shock, for the thing moved as he could
never have fancied a piece of furniture moving. It seemed to move
like a living thing, yielding and yet striking back. The next moment
Grayne had turned on the lights, and he saw he had only stumbled
against one of the revolving bookstands that had swung round and
struck him; but his involuntary recoil had revealed to him his own
subconscious sense of something mysterious and monstrous. There were
several of these revolving bookcases standing here and there about
the library; on one of them stood the two cups of coffee, and on
another a large open book. It was Budge's book on Egyptian
hieroglyphics, with colored plates of strange birds and gods, and
even as he rushed past, he was conscious of something odd about the
fact that this, and not any work of military science, should be open
in that place at that moment. He was even conscious of the gap in
the well-lined bookshelf from which it had been taken, and it seemed
almost to gape at him in an ugly fashion, like a gap in the teeth of
some sinister face.

A run brought them in a few minutes to the other side of the ground
in front of the bottomless well, and a few yards from it, in a
moonlight almost as broad as daylight, they saw what they had come
to see.

The great Lord Hastings lay prone on his face, in a posture in which
there was a touch of something strange and stiff, with one elbow
erect above his body, the arm being doubled, and his big, bony hand
clutching the rank and ragged grass. A few feet away was Boyle,
almost as motionless, but supported on his hands and knees, and
staring at the body. It might have been no more than shock and
accident; but there was something ungainly and unnatural about the
quadrupedal posture and the gaping face. It was as if his reason had
fled from him. Behind, there was nothing but the clear blue southern
sky, and the beginning of the desert, except for the two great
broken stones in front of the well. And it was in such a light and
atmosphere that men could fancy they traced in them enormous and
evil faces, looking down.

Horne Fisher stooped and touched the strong hand that was still
clutching the grass, and it was as cold as a stone. He knelt by the
body and was busy for a moment applying other tests; then he rose
again, and said, with a sort of confident despair:

"Lord Hastings is dead."

There was a stony silence, and then Travers remarked, gruffly: "This
is your department, Grayne; I will leave you to question Captain
Boyle. I can make no sense of what he says."

Boyle had pulled himself together and risen to his feet, but his
face still wore an awful expression, making it like a new mask or
the face of another man.

"I was looking at the well," he said, "and when I turned he had
fallen down."

Grayne's face was very dark.  "As you say, this is my affair," he
said. "I must first ask you to help me carry him to the library and
let me examine things thoroughly."

When they had deposited the body in the library, Grayne turned to
Fisher and said, in a voice that had recovered its fullness and
confidence, "I am going to lock myself in and make a thorough
examination first. I look to you to keep in touch with the others
and make a preliminary examination of Boyle. I will talk to him
later. And just telephone to headquarters for a policeman, and let
him come here at once and stand by till I want him."

Without more words the great criminal investigator went into the
lighted library, shutting the door behind him, and Fisher, without
replying, turned and began to talk quietly to Travers. "It is
curious," he said, "that the thing should happen just in front of
that place."

"It would certainly be very curious," replied Travers, "if the place
played any part in it."

"I think," replied Fisher, "that the part it didn't play is more
curious still."

And with these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken
Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the
moonlight, talking in low tones.

Dawn had begun to break abrupt and white when Cuthbert Grayne turned
out the lights in the library and came out on to the links. Fisher
was lounging about alone, in his listless fashion; but the police
messenger for whom he had sent was standing at attention in the
background.

"I sent Boyle off with Travers," observed Fisher, carelessly; "he'll
look after him, and he'd better have some sleep, anyhow."

"Did you get anything out of him?" asked Grayne.  "Did he tell you
what he and Hastings were doing?"

"Yes," answered Fisher, "he gave me a pretty clear account, after
all. He said that after Lady Hastings went off in the car the
general asked him to take coffee with him in the library and look up
a point about local antiquities. He himself was beginning to look
for Budge's book in one of the revolving bookstands when the general
found it in one of the bookshelves on the wall. After looking at
some of the plates they went out, it would seem, rather abruptly, on
to the links, and walked toward the old well; and while Boyle was
looking into it he heard a thud behind him, and turned round to find
the general lying as we found him. He himself dropped on his knees
to examine the body, and then was paralyzed with a sort of terror
and could not come nearer to it or touch it. But I think very little
of that; people caught in a real shock of surprise are sometimes
found in the queerest postures."

Grayne wore a grim smile of attention, and said, after a short
silence:

"Well, he hasn't told you many lies. It's really a creditably clear
and consistent account of what happened, with everything of
importance left out."

"Have you discovered anything in there?" asked Fisher.

"I have discovered everything," answered Grayne.

Fisher maintained a somewhat gloomy silence, as the other resumed
his explanation in quiet and assured tones.

"You were quite right, Fisher, when you said that young fellow was
in danger of going down dark ways toward the pit. Whether or no, as
you fancied, the jolt you gave to his view of the general had
anything to do with it, he has not been treating the general well
for some time. It's an unpleasant business, and I don't want to
dwell on it; but it's pretty plain that his wife was not treating
him well, either. I don't know how far it went, but it went as far
as concealment, anyhow; for when Lady Hastings spoke to Boyle it was
to tell him she had hidden a note in the Budge book in the library.
The general overheard, or came somehow to know, and he went straight
to the book and found it. He confronted Boyle with it, and they had
a scene, of course. And Boyle was confronted with something else; he
was confronted with an awful alternative, in which the life of one
old man meant ruin and his death meant triumph and even happiness."

"Well," observed Fisher, at last, "I don't blame him for not telling
you the woman's part of the story. But how do you know about the
letter?"

"I found it on the general's body," answered Grayne, "but I found
worse things than that. The body had stiffened in the way rather
peculiar to poisons of a certain Asiatic sort. Then I examined the
coffee cups, and I knew enough chemistry to find poison in the dregs
of one of them. Now, the General went straight to the bookcase,
leaving his cup of coffee on the bookstand in the middle of the
room. While his back was turned, and Boyle was pretending to examine
the bookstand, he was left alone with the coffee cup. The poison
takes about ten minutes to act, and ten minutes' walk would bring
them to the bottomless well."

"Yes," remarked Fisher, "and what about the bottomless well?"

"What has the bottomless well got to do with it?" asked his friend.

"It has nothing to do with it," replied Fisher.  "That is what I
find utterly confounding and incredible."

"And why should that particular hole in the ground have anything to
do with it?"

"It is a particular hole in your case," said Fisher.  "But I won't
insist on that just now. By the way, there is another thing I ought
to tell you. I said I sent Boyle away in charge of Travers. It would
be just as true to say I sent Travers in charge of Boyle."

"You don't mean to say you suspect Tom Travers?" cried the other.

"He was a deal bitterer against the general than Boyle ever was,"
observed Horne Fisher, with a curious indifference.

"Man, you're not saying what you mean," cried Grayne.  "I tell you I
found the poison in one of the coffee cups."

"There was always Said, of course," added Fisher, "either for hatred
or hire. We agreed he was capable of almost anything."

"And we agreed he was incapable of hurting his master," retorted
Grayne.

"Well, well," said Fisher, amiably, "I dare say you are right; but I
should just like to have a look at the library and the coffee cups."

He passed inside, while Grayne turned to the policeman in attendance
and handed him a scribbled note, to be telegraphed from
headquarters. The man saluted and hurried off; and Grayne, following
his friend into the library, found him beside the bookstand in the
middle of the room, on which were the empty cups.

"This is where Boyle looked for Budge, or pretended to look for him,
according to your account," he said.

As Fisher spoke he bent down in a half-crouching attitude, to look
at the volumes in the low, revolving shelf, for the whole bookstand
was not much higher than an ordinary table. The next moment he
sprang up as if he had been stung.

"Oh, my God!" he cried.

Very few people, if any, had ever seen Mr. Horne Fisher behave as he
behaved just then. He flashed a glance at the door, saw that the
open window was nearer, went out of it with a flying leap, as if
over a hurdle, and went racing across the turf, in the track of the
disappearing policeman. Grayne, who stood staring after him, soon
saw his tall, loose figure, returning, restored to all its normal
limpness and air of leisure. He was fanning himself slowly with a
piece of paper, the telegram he had so violently intercepted.

"Lucky I stopped that," he observed.  "We must keep this affair as
quiet as death. Hastings must die of apoplexy or heart disease."

"What on earth is the trouble?" demanded the other investigator.

"The trouble is," said Fisher, "that in a few days we should have
had a very agreeable alternative--of hanging an innocent man or
knocking the British Empire to hell."

"Do you mean to say," asked Grayne, "that this infernal crime is not
to be punished?"

Fisher looked at him steadily.

"It is already punished," he said.

After a moment's pause he went on.  "You reconstructed the crime
with admirable skill, old chap, and nearly all you said was true.
Two men with two coffee cups did go into the library and did put
their cups on the bookstand and did go together to the well, and one
of them was a murderer and had put poison in the other's cup. But it
was not done while Boyle was looking at the revolving bookcase. He
did look at it, though, searching for the Budge book with the note
in it, but I fancy that Hastings had already moved it to the shelves
on the wall. It was part of that grim game that he should find it
first.

"Now, how does a man search a revolving bookcase?  He does not
generally hop all round it in a squatting attitude, like a frog. He
simply gives it a touch and makes it revolve."

He was frowning at the floor as he spoke, and there was a light
under his heavy lids that was not often seen there. The mysticism
that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was
awake and moving in the depths. His voice took unexpected turns and
inflections, almost as if two men were speaking.

"That was what Boyle did; he barely touched the thing, and it went
round as easily as the world goes round. Yes, very much as the
world goes round, for the hand that turned it was not his. God, who
turns the wheel of all the stars, touched that wheel and brought it
full circle, that His dreadful justice might return."

"I am beginning," said Grayne, slowly, "to have some hazy and
horrible idea of what you mean."

"It is very simple," said Fisher, "when Boyle straightened himself
from his stooping posture, something had happened which he had not
noticed, which his enemy had not noticed, which nobody had noticed.
The two coffee cups had exactly changed places."

The rocky face of Grayne seemed to have sustained a shock in
silence; not a line of it altered, but his voice when it came was
unexpectedly weakened.

"I see what you mean," he said, "and, as you say, the less said
about it the better. It was not the lover who tried to get rid of
the husband, but--the other thing. And a tale like that about a man
like that would ruin us here. Had you any guess of this at the
start?"

"The bottomless well, as I told you," answered Fisher, quietly;
"that was what stumped me from the start. Not because it had
anything to do with it, because it had nothing to do with it."

He paused a moment, as if choosing an approach, and then went on:
"When a man knows his enemy will be dead in ten minutes, and takes
him to the edge of an unfathomable pit, he means to throw his body
into it. What else should he do? A born fool would have the sense to
do it, and Boyle is not a born fool. Well, why did not Boyle do it?
The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake
in the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to
throw him in, and yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly,
unformed idea of some substitution or reversal of parts; then I
stooped to turn the bookstand myself, by accident, and I instantly
knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve once more, like
moons in the sky."

After a pause, Cuthbert Grayne said, "And what are we to say to the
newspapers?"

"My friend, Harold March, is coming along from Cairo to-day," said
Fisher. "He is a very brilliant and successful journalist. But for
all that he's a thoroughly honorable man, so you must not tell him
the truth."

Half an hour later Fisher was again walking to and fro in front of
the clubhouse, with Captain Boyle, the latter by this time with a
very buffeted and bewildered air; perhaps a sadder and a wiser man.

"What about me, then?" he was saying.  "Am I cleared? Am I not going
to be cleared?"

"I believe and hope," answered Fisher, "that you are not going to be
suspected. But you are certainly not going to be cleared. There must
be no suspicion against him, and therefore no suspicion against you.
Any suspicion against him, let alone such a story against him, would
knock us endways from Malta to Mandalay. He was a hero as well as a
holy terror among the Moslems. Indeed, you might almost call him a
Moslem hero in the English service. Of course he got on with them
partly because of his own little dose of Eastern blood; he got it
from his mother, the dancer from Damascus; everybody knows that."

"Oh," repeated Boyle, mechanically, staring at him with round eyes,
"everybody knows that."

"I dare say there was a touch of it in his jealousy and ferocious
vengeance," went on Fisher. "But, for all that, the crime would ruin
us among the Arabs, all the more because it was something like a
crime against hospitality. It's been hateful for you and it's pretty
horrid for me. But there are some things that damned well can't be
done, and while I'm alive that's one of them."

"What do you mean?" asked Boyle, glancing at him curiously. "Why
should you, of all people, be so passionate about it?"

Horne Fisher looked at the young man with a baffling expression.

"I suppose," he said, "it's because I'm a Little Englander."

"I can never make out what you mean by that sort of thing," answered
Boyle, doubtfully.

"Do you think England is so little as all that?" said Fisher, with a
warmth in his cold voice, "that it can't hold a man across a few
thousand miles. You lectured me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my
young friend; but it's practical patriotism now for you and me, and
with no lies to help it. You talked as if everything always went
right with us all over the world, in a triumphant crescendo
culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with
us here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure
with, and that mustn't go as well, no, by God! It's bad enough that
a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no
earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against
us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet.
It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Bagdad should make us
fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off. Our
one score was Hastings and his victory, which was really somebody
else's victory. Tom Travers has to suffer, and so have you."

Then, after a moment's silence, he pointed toward the bottomless
well and said, in a quieter tone:

"I told you that I didn't believe in the philosophy of the Tower of
Aladdin. I don't believe in the Empire growing until it reaches the
sky; I don't believe in the Union Jack going up and up eternally
like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go
down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the
blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid
the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry--no I won't, and
that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty
millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister
married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had
shares in twenty swindling mines. If the thing is really tottering,
God help it, it mustn't be we who tip it over."

Boyle was regarding him with a bewilderment that was almost fear,
and had even a touch of distaste.

"Somehow," he said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about
the things you know."

"There is," replied Horne Fisher.  "I am not at all pleased with my
small stock of knowledge and reflection. But as it is partly
responsible for your not being hanged, I don't know that you need
complain of it."

And, as if a little ashamed of his first boast, he turned and
strolled away toward the bottomless well.



V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN

A thing can sometimes be too extraordinary to be remembered. If it
is clean out of the course of things, and has apparently no causes
and no consequences, subsequent events do not recall it, and it
remains only a subconscious thing, to be stirred by some accident
long after. It drifts apart like a forgotten dream; and it was in
the hour of many dreams, at daybreak and very soon after the end of
dark, that such a strange sight was given to a man sculling a boat
down a river in the West country. The man was awake; indeed, he
considered himself rather wide awake, being the political
journalist, Harold March, on his way to interview various political
celebrities in their country seats. But the thing he saw was so
inconsequent that it might have been imaginary. It simply slipped
past his mind and was lost in later and utterly different events;
nor did he even recover the memory till he had long afterward
discovered the meaning.

Pale mists of morning lay on the fields and the rushes along one
margin of the river; along the other side ran a wall of tawny brick
almost overhanging the water. He had shipped his oars and was
drifting for a moment with the stream, when he turned his head and
saw that the monotony of the long brick wall was broken by a bridge;
rather an elegant eighteenth-century sort of bridge with little
columns of white stone turning gray. There had been floods and the
river still stood very high, with dwarfish trees waist deep in it,
and rather a narrow arc of white dawn gleamed under the curve of the
bridge.

As his own boat went under the dark archway he saw another boat
coming toward him, rowed by a man as solitary as himself. His
posture prevented much being seen of him, but as he neared the
bridge he stood up in the boat and turned round. He was already so
close to the dark entry, however, that his whole figure was black
against the morning light, and March could see nothing of his face
except the end of two long whiskers or mustaches that gave something
sinister to the silhouette, like horns in the wrong place. Even
these details March would never have noticed but for what happened
in the same instant. As the man came under the low bridge he made a
leap at it and hung, with his legs dangling, letting the boat float
away from under him. March had a momentary vision of two black
kicking legs; then of one black kicking leg; and then of nothing
except the eddying stream and the long perspective of the wall. But
whenever he thought of it again, long afterward, when he understood
the story in which it figured, it was always fixed in that one
fantastic shape--as if those wild legs were a grotesque graven
ornament of the bridge itself, in the manner of a gargoyle. At the
moment he merely passed, staring, down the stream. He could see no
flying figure on the bridge, so it must have already fled; but he
was half conscious of some faint significance in the fact that among
the trees round the bridgehead opposite the wall he saw a lamp-post;
and, beside the lamp-post, the broad blue back of an unconscious
policeman.

Even before reaching the shrine of his political pilgrimage he had
many other things to think of besides the odd incident of the
bridge; for the management of a boat by a solitary man was not
always easy even on such a solitary stream. And indeed it was only
by an unforeseen accident that he was solitary. The boat had been
purchased and the whole expedition planned in conjunction with a
friend, who had at the last moment been forced to alter all his
arrangements. Harold March was to have traveled with his friend
Horne Fisher on that inland voyage to Willowood Place, where the
Prime Minister was a guest at the moment. More and more people were
hearing of Harold March, for his striking political articles were
opening to him the doors of larger and larger salons; but he had
never met the Prime Minister yet. Scarcely anybody among the general
public had ever heard of Horne Fisher; but he had known the Prime
Minister all his life. For these reasons, had the two taken the
projected journey together, March might have been slightly disposed
to hasten it and Fisher vaguely content to lengthen it out. For
Fisher was one of those people who are born knowing the Prime
Minister. The knowledge seemed to have no very exhilarant effect,
and in his case bore some resemblance to being born tired. But he
was distinctly annoyed to receive, just as he was doing a little
light packing of fishing tackle and cigars for the journey, a
telegram from Willowood asking him to come down at once by train, as
the Prime Minister had to leave that night. Fisher knew that his
friend the journalist could not possibly start till the next day,
and he liked his friend the journalist, and had looked forward to a
few days on the river. He did not particularly like or dislike the
Prime Minister, but he intensely disliked the alternative of a few
hours in the train. Nevertheless, he accepted Prime Ministers as he
accepted railway trains--as part of a system which he, at least, was
not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy. So he telephoned to
March, asking him, with many apologetic curses and faint damns, to
take the boat down the river as arranged, that they might meet at
Willowood by the time settled; then he went outside and hailed a
taxicab to take him to the railway station. There he paused at the
bookstall to add to his light luggage a number of cheap murder
stories, which he read with great pleasure, and without any
premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story in
real life.

A little before sunset he arrived, with his light suitcase in hand,
before the gate of the long riverside gardens of Willowood Place,
one of the smaller seats of Sir Isaac Hook, the master of much
shipping and many newspapers. He entered by the gate giving on the
road, at the opposite side to the river, but there was a mixed
quality in all that watery landscape which perpetually reminded a
traveler that the river was near. White gleams of water would shine
suddenly like swords or spears in the green thickets. And even in
the garden itself, divided into courts and curtained with hedges and
high garden trees, there hung everywhere in the air the music of
water. The first of the green courts which he entered appeared to be
a somewhat neglected croquet lawn, in which was a solitary young man
playing croquet against himself. Yet he was not an enthusiast for
the game, or even for the garden; and his sallow but well-featured
face looked rather sullen than otherwise. He was only one of those
young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they
are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are
limited to a game of some kind. He was dark and well dressed in a
light holiday fashion, and Fisher recognized him at once as a young
man named James Bullen, called, for some unknown reason, Bunker. He
was the nephew of Sir Isaac; but, what was much more important at
the moment, he was also the private secretary of the Prime Minister.

"Hullo, Bunker!" observed Horne Fisher.  "You're the sort of man I
wanted to see. Has your chief come down yet?"

"He's only staying for dinner," replied Bullen, with his eye on the
yellow ball. "He's got a great speech to-morrow at Birmingham and
he's going straight through to-night. He's motoring himself there;
driving the car, I mean. It's the one thing he's really proud of."

"You mean you're staying here with your uncle, like a good boy?"
replied Fisher. "But what will the Chief do at Birmingham without
the epigrams whispered to him by his brilliant secretary?"

"Don't you start ragging me," said the young man called Bunker.
"I'm only too glad not to go trailing after him. He doesn't know a
thing about maps or money or hotels or anything, and I have to dance
about like a courier. As for my uncle, as I'm supposed to come into
the estate, it's only decent to be here sometimes."

"Very proper," replied the other.  "Well, I shall see you later on,"
and, crossing the lawn, he passed out through a gap in the hedge.

He was walking across the lawn toward the landing stage on the
river, and still felt all around him, under the dome of golden
evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that riverhaunted
garden. The next square of turf which he crossed seemed at first
sight quite deserted, till he saw in the twilight of trees in one
corner of it a hammock and in the hammock a man, reading a newspaper
and swinging one leg over the edge of the net.

Him also he hailed by name, and the man slipped to the ground and
strolled forward. It seemed fated that he should feel something of
the past in the accidents of that place, for the figure might well
have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the
croquet hoops and mallets. It was the figure of an elderly man with
long whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful
cut of collar and cravat. Having been a fashionable dandy forty
years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring
the fashions. A white top-hat lay beside the Morning Post in the
hammock behind him. This was the Duke of Westmoreland, the relic of
a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not
heraldry but history. Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such
noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction. But whether the
duke owed the general respect he enjoyed to the genuineness of his
pedigree or to the fact that he owned a vast amount of very valuable
property was a point about which Mr. Fisher's opinion might have
been more interesting to discover.

"You were looking so comfortable," said Fisher, "that I thought you
must be one of the servants. I'm looking for somebody to take this
bag of mine; I haven't brought a man down, as I came away in a
hurry."

"Nor have I, for that matter," replied the duke, with some pride. "I
never do. If there's one animal alive I loathe it's a valet. I
learned to dress myself at an early age and was supposed to do it
decently. I may be in my second childhood, but I've not go so far as
being dressed like a child."

"The Prime Minister hasn't brought a valet; he's brought a secretary
instead," observed Fisher. "Devilish inferior job. Didn't I hear
that Harker was down here?"

"He's over there on the landing stage," replied the duke,
indifferently, and resumed the study of the Morning Post.

Fisher made his way beyond the last green wall of the garden on to a
sort of towing path looking on the river and a wooden island
opposite. There, indeed, he saw a lean, dark figure with a stoop
almost like that of a vulture, a posture well known in the law
courts as that of Sir John Harker, the Attorney-General. His face
was lined with headwork, for alone among the three idlers in the
garden he was a man who had made his own way; and round his bald
brow and hollow temples clung dull red hair, quite flat, like plates
of copper.

"I haven't seen my host yet," said Horne Fisher, in a slightly more
serious tone than he had used to the others, "but I suppose I shall
meet him at dinner."

"You can see him now; but you can't meet him," answered Harker.

He nodded his head toward one end of the island opposite, and,
looking steadily in the same direction, the other guest could see
the dome of a bald head and the top of a fishing rod, both equally
motionless, rising out of the tall undergrowth against the
background of the stream beyond. The fisherman seemed to be seated
against the stump of a tree and facing toward the other bank, so
that his face could not be seen, but the shape of his head was
unmistakable.

"He doesn't like to be disturbed when he's fishing," continued
Harker. "It's a sort of fad of his to eat nothing but fish, and he's
very proud of catching his own. Of course he's all for simplicity,
like so many of these millionaires. He likes to come in saying he's
worked for his daily bread like a laborer."

"Does he explain how he blows all the glass and stuffs all the
upholstery," asked Fisher, "and makes all the silver forks, and
grows all the grapes and peaches, and designs all the patterns on
the carpets? I've always heard he was a busy man."

"I don't think he mentioned it," answered the lawyer. "What is the
meaning of this social satire?"

"Well, I am a trifle tired," said Fisher, "of the Simple Life and
the Strenuous Life as lived by our little set. We're all really
dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being
independent in something. The Prime Minister prides himself on doing
without a chauffeur, but he can't do without a factotum and
Jack-of-all-trades; and poor old Bunker has to play the part of a
universal genius, which God knows he was never meant for. The duke
prides himself on doing without a valet, but, for all that, he must
give a lot of people an infernal lot of trouble to collect such
extraordinary old clothes as he wears. He must have them looked up
in the British Museum or excavated out of the tombs. That white hat
alone must require a sort of expedition fitted out to find it, like
the North Pole. And here we have old Hook pretending to produce his
own fish when he couldn't produce his own fish knives or fish forks
to eat it with. He may be simple about simple things like food, but
you bet he's luxurious about luxurious things, especially little
things. I don't include you; you've worked too hard to enjoy playing
at work."

"I sometimes think," said Harker, "that you conceal a horrid secret
of being useful sometimes. Haven't you come down here to see Number
One before he goes on to Birmingham?"

Horne Fisher answered, in a lower voice:  "Yes; and I hope to be
lucky enough to catch him before dinner. He's got to see Sir Isaac
about something just afterward."

"Hullo!" exclaimed Harker.  "Sir Isaac's finished his fishing. I
know he prides himself on getting up at sunrise and going in at
sunset."

The old man on the island had indeed risen to his feet, facing round
and showing a bush of gray beard with rather small, sunken features,
but fierce eyebrows and keen, choleric eyes. Carefully carrying his
fishing tackle, he was already making his way back to the mainland
across a bridge of flat stepping-stones a little way down the
shallow stream; then he veered round, coming toward his guests and
civilly saluting them. There were several fish in his basket and he
was in a good temper.

"Yes," he said, acknowledging Fisher's polite expression of
surprise, "I get up before anybody else in the house, I think. The
early bird catches the worm."

"Unfortunately," said Harker, "it is the early fish that catches the
worm."

"But the early man catches the fish," replied the old man, gruffly.

"But from what I hear, Sir Isaac, you are the late man, too,"
interposed Fisher. "You must do with very little sleep."

"I never had much time for sleeping," answered Hook, "and I shall
have to be the late man to-night, anyhow. The Prime Minister wants
to have a talk, he tells me, and, all things considered, I think
we'd better be dressing for dinner."

Dinner passed off that evening without a word of politics and little
enough but ceremonial trifles. The Prime Minister, Lord Merivale,
who was a long, slim man with curly gray hair, was gravely
complimentary to his host about his success as a fisherman and the
skill and patience he displayed; the conversation flowed like the
shallow stream through the stepping-stones.

"It wants patience to wait for them, no doubt," said Sir Isaac, "and
skill to play them, but I'm generally pretty lucky at it."

"Does a big fish ever break the line and get away?" inquired the
politician, with respectful interest.

"Not the sort of line I use," answered Hook, with satisfaction. "I
rather specialize in tackle, as a matter of fact. If he were strong
enough to do that, he'd be strong enough to pull me into the river."

"A great loss to the community," said the Prime Minister, bowing.

Fisher had listened to all these futilities with inward impatience,
waiting for his own opportunity, and when the host rose he sprang to
his feet with an alertness he rarely showed. He managed to catch
Lord Merivale before Sir Isaac bore him off for the final interview.
He had only a few words to say, but he wanted to get them said.

He said, in a low voice as he opened the door for the Premier, "I
have seen Montmirail; he says that unless we protest immediately on
behalf of Denmark, Sweden will certainly seize the ports."

Lord Merivale nodded.  "I'm just going to hear what Hook has to say
about it," he said.

"I imagine," said Fisher, with a faint smile, "that there is very
little doubt what he will say about it."

Merivale did not answer, but lounged gracefully toward the library,
whither his host had already preceded him. The rest drifted toward
the billiard room, Fisher merely remarking to the lawyer: "They
won't be long. We know they're practically in agreement."

"Hook entirely supports the Prime Minister," assented Harker.

"Or the Prime Minister entirely supports Hook," said Horne Fisher,
and began idly to knock the balls about on the billiard table.

Horne Fisher came down next morning in a late and leisurely fashion,
as was his reprehensible habit; he had evidently no appetite for
catching worms. But the other guests seemed to have felt a similar
indifference, and they helped themselves to breakfast from the
sideboard at intervals during the hours verging upon lunch. So that
it was not many hours later when the first sensation of that strange
day came upon them. It came in the form of a young man with light
hair and a candid expression, who came sculling down the river and
disembarked at the landing stage. It was, in fact, no other than Mr.
Harold March, whose journey had begun far away up the river in the
earliest hours of that day. He arrived late in the afternoon, having
stopped for tea in a large riverside town, and he had a pink evening
paper sticking out of his pocket. He fell on the riverside garden
like a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt
without knowing it.

The first exchange of salutations and introductions was commonplace
enough, and consisted, indeed, of the inevitable repetition of
excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host. He had gone fishing
again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the appointed hour,
though he sat within a stone's throw of where they stood.

"You see it's his only hobby," observed Harker, apologetically,
"and, after all, it's his own house; and he's very hospitable in
other ways."

"I'm rather afraid," said Fisher, in a lower voice, "that it's
becoming more of a mania than a hobby. I know how it is when a man
of that age begins to collect things, if it's only collecting those
rotten little river fish. You remember Talbot's uncle with his
toothpicks, and poor old Buzzy and the waste of cigar ashes. Hook
has done a lot of big things in his time--the great deal in the
Swedish timber trade and the Peace Conference at Chicago--but I
doubt whether he cares now for any of those big things as he cares
for those little fish."

"Oh, come, come," protested the Attorney-General. "You'll make Mr.
March think he has come to call on a lunatic. Believe me, Hook only
does it for fun, like any other sport, only he's of the kind that
takes his fun sadly. But I bet if there were big news about timber
or shipping, he would drop his fun and his fish all right."

"Well, I wonder," said Horne Fisher, looking sleepily at the island
in the river.

"By the way, is there any news of anything?" asked Harker of Harold
March. "I see you've got an evening paper; one of those enterprising
evening papers that come out in the morning."

"The beginning of Lord Merivale's Birmingham speech," replied March,
handing him the paper. "It's only a paragraph, but it seems to me
rather good."

Harker took the paper, flapped and refolded it, and looked at the
"Stop Press" news. It was, as March had said, only a paragraph. But
it was a paragraph that had a peculiar effect on Sir John Harker.
His lowering brows lifted with a flicker and his eyes blinked, and
for a moment his leathery jaw was loosened. He looked in some odd
fashion like a very old man. Then, hardening his voice and handing
the paper to Fisher without a tremor, he simply said:

"Well, here's a chance for the bet. You've got your big news to
disturb the old man's fishing."

Horne Fisher was looking at the paper, and over his more languid and
less expressive features a change also seemed to pass. Even that
little paragraph had two or three large headlines, and his eye
encountered, "Sensational Warning to Sweden," and, "We Shall
Protest."

"What the devil--" he said, and his words softened first to a
whisper and then a whistle.

"We must tell old Hook at once, or he'll never forgive us," said
Harker. "He'll probably want to see Number One instantly, though it
may be too late now. I'm going across to him at once. I bet I'll
make him forget his fish, anyhow." And, turning his back, he made
his way hurriedly along the riverside to the causeway of flat
stones.

March was staring at Fisher, in amazement at the effect his pink
paper had produced.

"What does it all mean?" he cried.  "I always supposed we should
protest in defense of the Danish ports, for their sakes and our own.
What is all this botheration about Sir Isaac and the rest of you? Do
you think it bad news?"

"Bad news!" repeated Fisher, with a sort of soft emphasis beyond
expression.

"Is it as bad as all that?" asked his friend, at last.

"As bad as all that?" repeated Fisher.  "Why of course it's as good
as it can be. It's great news. It's glorious news! That's where the
devil of it comes in, to knock us all silly. It's admirable. It's
inestimable. It is also quite incredible."

He gazed again at the gray and green colors of the island and the
river, and his rather dreary eye traveled slowly round to the hedges
and the lawns.

"I felt this garden was a sort of dream," he said, "and I suppose I
must be dreaming. But there is grass growing and water moving; and
something impossible has happened."

Even as he spoke the dark figure with a stoop like a vulture
appeared in the gap of the hedge just above him.

"You have won your bet," said Harker, in a harsh and almost croaking
voice. "The old fool cares for nothing but fishing. He cursed me and
told me he would talk no politics."

"I thought it might be so," said Fisher, modestly.  "What are you
going to do next?"

"I shall use the old idiot's telephone, anyhow," replied the lawyer.
"I must find out exactly what has happened. I've got to speak for
the Government myself to-morrow." And he hurried away toward the
house.

In the silence that followed, a very bewildering silence so far as
March was concerned, they saw the quaint figure of the Duke of
Westmoreland, with his white hat and whiskers, approaching them
across the garden. Fisher instantly stepped toward him with the pink
paper in his hand, and, with a few words, pointed out the
apocalyptic paragraph. The duke, who had been walking slowly, stood
quite still, and for some seconds he looked like a tailor's dummy
standing and staring outside some antiquated shop. Then March heard
his voice, and it was high and almost hysterical:

"But he must see it; he must be made to understand. It cannot have
been put to him properly." Then, with a certain recovery of fullness
and even pomposity in the voice, "I shall go and tell him myself."

Among the queer incidents of that afternoon, March always remembered
something almost comical about the clear picture of the old
gentleman in his wonderful white hat carefully stepping from stone
to stone across the river, like a figure crossing the traffic in
Piccadilly. Then he disappeared behind the trees of the island, and
March and Fisher turned to meet the Attorney-General, who was coming
out of the house with a visage of grim assurance.

"Everybody is saying," he said, "that the Prime Minister has made
the greatest speech of his life. Peroration and loud and prolonged
cheers. Corrupt financiers and heroic peasants. We will not desert
Denmark again."

Fisher nodded and turned away toward the towing path, where he saw
the duke returning with a rather dazed expression. In answer to
questions he said, in a husky and confidential voice:

"I really think our poor friend cannot be himself. He refused to
listen; he--ah--suggested that I might frighten the fish."

A keen ear might have detected a murmur from Mr. Fisher on the
subject of a white hat, but Sir John Harker struck it more
decisively:

"Fisher was quite right. I didn't believe it myself, but it's quite
clear that the old fellow is fixed on this fishing notion by now. If
the house caught fire behind him he would hardly move till sunset."

Fisher had continued his stroll toward the higher embanked ground of
the towing path, and he now swept a long and searching gaze, not
toward the island, but toward the distant wooded heights that were
the walls of the valley. An evening sky as clear as that of the
previous day was settling down all over the dim landscape, but
toward the west it was now red rather than gold; there was scarcely
any sound but the monotonous music of the river. Then came the sound
of a half-stifled exclamation from Horne Fisher, and Harold March
looked up at him in wonder.

"You spoke of bad news," said Fisher.  "Well, there is really bad
news now. I am afraid this is a bad business."

"What bad news do you mean?" asked his friend, conscious of
something strange and sinister in his voice.

"The sun has set," answered Fisher.

He went on with the air of one conscious of having said something
fatal. "We must get somebody to go across whom he will really listen
to. He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly
always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being
methodical. And he never goes on sitting there after sunset, with
the whole place getting dark. Where's his nephew? I believe he's
really fond of his nephew."

"Look!" cried March, abruptly.  "Why, he's been across already.
There he is coming back."

And, looking up the river once more, they saw, dark against the
sunset reflections, the figure of James Bullen stepping hastily and
rather clumsily from stone to stone. Once he slipped on a stone with
a slight splash. When he rejoined the group on the bank his olive
face was unnaturally pale.

The other four men had already gathered on the same spot and almost
simultaneously were calling out to him, "What does he say now?"

"Nothing. He says--nothing."

Fisher looked at the young man steadily for a moment; then he
started from his immobility and, making a motion to March to follow
him, himself strode down to the river crossing. In a few moments
they were on the little beaten track that ran round the wooded
island, to the other side of it where the fisherman sat. Then they
stood and looked at him, without a word.

Sir Isaac Hook was still sitting propped up against the stump of the
tree, and that for the best of reasons. A length of his own
infallible fishing line was twisted and tightened twice round his
throat and then twice round the wooden prop behind him. The leading
investigator ran forward and touched the fisherman's hand, and it
was as cold as a fish.

"The sun has set," said Horne Fisher, in the same terrible tones,
"and he will never see it rise again."

Ten minutes afterward the five men, shaken by such a shock, were
again together in the garden, looking at one another with white but
watchful faces. The lawyer seemed the most alert of the group; he
was articulate if somewhat abrupt.

"We must leave the body as it is and telephone for the police," he
said. "I think my own authority will stretch to examining the
servants and the poor fellow's papers, to see if there is anything
that concerns them. Of course, none of you gentlemen must leave this
place."

Perhaps there was something in his rapid and rigorous legality that
suggested the closing of a net or trap. Anyhow, young Bullen
suddenly broke down, or perhaps blew up, for his voice was like an
explosion in the silent garden.

"I never touched him," he cried.  "I swear I had nothing to do with
it!"

"Who said you had?" demanded Harker, with a hard eye. "Why do you
cry out before you're hurt?"

"Because you all look at me like that," cried the young man,
angrily. "Do you think I don't know you're always talking about my
damned debts and expectations?"

Rather to March's surprise, Fisher had drawn away from this first
collision, leading the duke with him to another part of the garden.
When he was out of earshot of the others he said, with a curious
simplicity of manner:

"Westmoreland, I am going straight to the point."

"Well?" said the other, staring at him stolidly.

"You have a motive for killing him," said Fisher.

The duke continued to stare, but he seemed unable to speak.

"I hope you had a motive for killing him," continued Fisher, mildly.
"You see, it's rather a curious situation. If you have a motive for
murdering, you probably didn't murder. But if you hadn't any motive,
why, then perhaps, you did."

"What on earth are you talking about?" demanded the duke, violently.

"It's quite simple," said Fisher.  "When you went across he was
either alive or dead. If he was alive, it might be you who killed
him, or why should you have held your tongue about his death? But if
he was dead, and you had a reason for killing him, you might have
held your tongue for fear of being accused." Then after a silence he
added, abstractedly: "Cyprus is a beautiful place, I believe.
Romantic scenery and romantic people. Very intoxicating for a young
man."

The duke suddenly clenched his hands and said, thickly, "Well, I had
a motive."

"Then you're all right," said Fisher, holding out his hand with an
air of huge relief. "I was pretty sure you wouldn't really do it;
you had a fright when you saw it done, as was only natural. Like a
bad dream come true, wasn't it?"

While this curious conversation was passing, Harker had gone into
the house, disregarding the demonstrations of the sulky nephew, and
came back presently with a new air of animation and a sheaf of
papers in his hand.

"I've telephoned for the police," he said, stopping to speak to
Fisher, "but I think I've done most of their work for them. I
believe I've found out the truth. There's a paper here--" He
stopped, for Fisher was looking at him with a singular expression;
and it was Fisher who spoke next:

"Are there any papers that are not there, I wonder? I mean that are
not there now?" After a pause he added: "Let us have the cards on
the table. When you went through his papers in such a hurry, Harker,
weren't you looking for something to--to make sure it shouldn't be
found?"

Harker did not turn a red hair on his hard head, but he looked at
the other out of the corners of his eyes.

"And I suppose," went on Fisher, smoothly, "that is why you, too,
told us lies about having found Hook alive. You knew there was
something to show that you might have killed him, and you didn't
dare tell us he was killed. But, believe me, it's much better to be
honest now."

Harker's haggard face suddenly lit up as if with infernal flames.

"Honest," he cried, "it's not so damned fine of you fellows to be
honest. You're all born with silver spoons in your mouths, and then
you swagger about with everlasting virtue because you haven't got
other people's spoons in your pockets. But I was born in a Pimlico
lodging house and I had to make my spoon, and there'd be plenty to
say I only spoiled a horn or an honest man. And if a struggling man
staggers a bit over the line in his youth, in the lower parts of the
law which are pretty dingy, anyhow, there's always some old vampire
to hang on to him all his life for it."

"Guatemalan Golcondas, wasn't it?" said Fisher, sympathetically.

Harker suddenly shuddered. Then he said, "I believe you must know
everything, like God Almighty."

"I know too much," said Horne Fisher, "and all the wrong things."

The other three men were drawing nearer to them, but before they
came too near, Harker said, in a voice that had recovered all its
firmness:

"Yes, I did destroy a paper, but I really did find a paper, too; and
I believe that it clears us all."

"Very well," said Fisher, in a louder and more cheerful tone; "let
us all have the benefit of it."

"On the very top of Sir Isaac's papers," explained Harker, "there
was a threatening letter from a man named Hugo. It threatens to kill
our unfortunate friend very much in the way that he was actually
killed. It is a wild letter, full of taunts; you can see it for
yourselves; but it makes a particular point of poor Hook's habit of
fishing from the island. Above all, the man professes to be writing
from a boat. And, since we alone went across to him," and he smiled
in a rather ugly fashion, "the crime must have been committed by a
man passing in a boat."

"Why, dear me!" cried the duke, with something almost amounting to
animation. "Why, I remember the man called Hugo quite well! He was a
sort of body servant and bodyguard of Sir Isaac. You see, Sir Isaac
was in some fear of assault. He was--he was not very popular with
several people. Hugo was discharged after some row or other; but I
remember him well. He was a great big Hungarian fellow with great
mustaches that stood out on each side of his face."

A door opened in the darkness of Harold March's memory, or, rather,
oblivion, and showed a shining landscape, like that of a lost dream.
It was rather a waterscape than a landscape, a thing of flooded
meadows and low trees and the dark archway of a bridge. And for one
instant he saw again the man with mustaches like dark horns leap up
on to the bridge and disappear.

"Good heavens!" he cried.  "Why, I met the murderer this morning!"

        *       *       *

Horne Fisher and Harold March had their day on the river, after all,
for the little group broke up when the police arrived. They declared
that the coincidence of March's evidence had cleared the whole
company, and clinched the case against the flying Hugo. Whether that
Hungarian fugitive would ever be caught appeared to Horne Fisher to
be highly doubtful; nor can it be pretended that he displayed any
very demoniac detective energy in the matter as he leaned back in
the boat cushions, smoking, and watching the swaying reeds slide
past.

"It was a very good notion to hop up on to the bridge," he said. "An
empty boat means very little; he hasn't been seen to land on either
bank, and he's walked off the bridge without walking on to it, so to
speak. He's got twenty-four hours' start; his mustaches will
disappear, and then he will disappear. I think there is every hope
of his escape."

"Hope?" repeated March, and stopped sculling for an instant.

"Yes, hope," repeated the other.  "To begin with, I'm not going to
be exactly consumed with Corsican revenge because somebody has
killed Hook. Perhaps you may guess by this time what Hook was. A
damned blood-sucking blackmailer was that simple, strenuous,
self-made captain of industry. He had secrets against nearly
everybody; one against poor old Westmoreland about an early marriage
in Cyprus that might have put the duchess in a queer position; and
one against Harker about some flutter with his client's money when
he was a young solicitor. That's why they went to pieces when they
found him murdered, of course. They felt as if they'd done it in a
dream. But I admit I have another reason for not wanting our
Hungarian friend actually hanged for the murder."

"And what is that?" asked his friend.

"Only that he didn't commit the murder," answered Fisher.

Harold March laid down the oars and let the boat drift for a moment.

"Do you know, I was half expecting something like that," he said.
"It was quite irrational, but it was hanging about in the
atmosphere, like thunder in the air."

"On the contrary, it's finding Hugo guilty that's irrational,"
replied Fisher. "Don't you see that they're condemning him for the
very reason for which they acquit everybody else? Harker and
Westmoreland were silent because they found him murdered, and knew
there were papers that made them look like the murderers. Well, so
did Hugo find him murdered, and so did Hugo know there was a paper
that would make him look like the murderer. He had written it
himself the day before."

"But in that case," said March, frowning, "at what sort of unearthly
hour in the morning was the murder really committed? It was barely
daylight when I met him at the bridge, and that's some way above the
island."

"The answer is very simple," replied Fisher.  "The crime was not
committed in the morning. The crime was not committed on the
island."

March stared at the shining water without replying, but Fisher
resumed like one who had been asked a question:

"Every intelligent murder involves taking advantage of some one
uncommon feature in a common situation. The feature here was the
fancy of old Hook for being the first man up every morning, his
fixed routine as an angler, and his annoyance at being disturbed.
The murderer strangled him in his own house after dinner on the
night before, carried his corpse, with all his fishing tackle,
across the stream in the dead of night, tied him to the tree, and
left him there under the stars. It was a dead man who sat fishing
there all day. Then the murderer went back to the house, or, rather,
to the garage, and went off in his motor car. The murderer drove his
own motor car."

Fisher glanced at his friend's face and went on.  "You look
horrified, and the thing is horrible. But other things are horrible,
too. If some obscure man had been hag-ridden by a blackmailer and
had his family life ruined, you wouldn't think the murder of his
persecutor the most inexcusable of murders. Is it any worse when a
whole great nation is set free as well as a family? By this warning
to Sweden we shall probably prevent war and not precipitate it, and
save many thousand lives rather more valuable than the life of that
viper. Oh, I'm not talking sophistry or seriously justifying the
thing, but the slavery that held him and his country was a thousand
times less justifiable. If I'd really been sharp I should have
guessed it from his smooth, deadly smiling at dinner that night. Do
you remember that silly talk about how old Isaac could always play
his fish? In a pretty hellish sense he was a fisher of men."

Harold March took the oars and began to row again.

"I remember," he said, "and about how a big fish might break the
line and get away."



VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL

Two men, the one an architect and the other an archaeologist, met on
the steps of the great house at Prior's Park; and their host, Lord
Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it natural to introduce them. It
must be confessed that he was hazy as well as breezy, and had no
very clear connection in his mind, beyond the sense that an
architect and an archaeologist begin with the same series of
letters. The world must remain in a reverent doubt as to whether he
would, on the same principles, have presented a diplomatist to a
dipsomaniac or a ratiocinator to a rat catcher. He was a big, fair,
bull-necked young man, abounding in outward gestures, unconsciously
flapping his gloves and flourishing his stick.

"You two ought to have something to talk about," he said,
cheerfully. "Old buildings and all that sort of thing; this is
rather an old building, by the way, though I say it who shouldn't. I
must ask you to excuse me a moment; I've got to go and see about the
cards for this Christmas romp my sister's arranging. We hope to see
you all there, of course. Juliet wants it to be a fancy-dress
affair--abbots and crusaders and all that. My ancestors, I suppose,
after all."

"I trust the abbot was not an ancestor," said the archaeological
gentleman, with a smile.

"Only a sort of great-uncle, I imagine," answered the other,
laughing; then his rather rambling eye rolled round the ordered
landscape in front of the house; an artificial sheet of water
ornamented with an antiquated nymph in the center and surrounded by
a park of tall trees now gray and black and frosty, for it was in
the depth of a severe winter.

"It's getting jolly cold," his lordship continued. "My sister hopes
we shall have some skating as well as dancing."

"If the crusaders come in full armor," said the other, "you must be
careful not to drown your ancestors."

"Oh, there's no fear of that," answered Bulmer; "this precious lake
of ours is not two feet deep anywhere." And with one of his
flourishing gestures he stuck his stick into the water to
demonstrate its shallowness. They could see the short end bent in
the water, so that he seemed for a moment to lean his large weight
on a breaking staff.

"The worst you can expect is to see an abbot sit down rather
suddenly," he added, turning away. "Well, au revoir; I'll let you
know about it later."

The archaeologist and the architect were left on the great stone
steps smiling at each other; but whatever their common interests,
they presented a considerable personal contrast, and the fanciful
might even have found some contradiction in each considered
individually. The former, a Mr. James Haddow, came from a drowsy den
in the Inns of Court, full of leather and parchment, for the law was
his profession and history only his hobby; he was indeed, among
other things, the solicitor and agent of the Prior's Park estate.
But he himself was far from drowsy and seemed remarkably wide awake,
with shrewd and prominent blue eyes, and red hair brushed as neatly
as his very neat costume. The latter, whose name was Leonard Crane,
came straight from a crude and almost cockney office of builders and
house agents in the neighboring suburb, sunning itself at the end of
a new row of jerry-built houses with plans in very bright colors and
notices in very large letters. But a serious observer, at a second
glance, might have seen in his eyes something of that shining sleep
that is called vision; and his yellow hair, while not affectedly
long, was unaffectedly untidy. It was a manifest if melancholy truth
that the architect was an artist. But the artistic temperament was
far from explaining him; there was something else about him that was
not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his
dreaminess, he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and
even sports apart from his ordinary life, like memories of some
previous existence. On this occasion, nevertheless, he hastened to
disclaim any authority on the other man's hobby.

"I mustn't appear on false pretences," he said, with a smile. "I
hardly even know what an archaeologist is, except that a rather
rusty remnant of Greek suggests that he is a man who studies old
things."

"Yes," replied Haddow, grimly.  "An archaeologist is a man who
studies old things and finds they are new."

Crane looked at him steadily for a moment and then smiled again.

"Dare one suggest," he said, "that some of the things we have been
talking about are among the old things that turn out not to be old?"

His companion also was silent for a moment, and the smile on his
rugged face was fainter as he replied, quietly:

"The wall round the park is really old. The one gate in it is
Gothic, and I cannot find any trace of destruction or restoration.
But the house and the estate generally--well the romantic ideas read
into these things are often rather recent romances, things almost
like fashionable novels. For instance, the very name of this place,
Prior's Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit mediaeval
abbey; I dare say the spiritualists by this time have discovered the
ghost of a monk there. But, according to the only authoritative
study of the matter I can find, the place was simply called Prior's
as any rural place is called Podger's. It was the house of a Mr.
Prior, a farmhouse, probably, that stood here at some time or other
and was a local landmark. Oh, there are a great many examples of the
same thing, here and everywhere else. This suburb of ours used to be
a village, and because some of the people slurred the name and
pronounced it Holliwell, many a minor poet indulged in fancies about
a Holy Well, with spells and fairies and all the rest of it, filling
the suburban drawing-rooms with the Celtic twilight. Whereas anyone
acquainted with the facts knows that 'Hollinwall' simply means 'the
hole in the wall,' and probably referred to some quite trivial
accident. That's what I mean when I say that we don't so much find
old things as we find new ones."

Crane seemed to have grown somewhat inattentive to the little
lecture on antiquities and novelties, and the cause of his
restlessness was soon apparent, and indeed approaching. Lord
Bulmer's sister, Juliet Bray, was coming slowly across the lawn,
accompanied by one gentleman and followed by two others. The young
architect was in the illogical condition of mind in which he
preferred three to one.

The man walking with the lady was no other than the eminent Prince
Borodino, who was at least as famous as a distinguished diplomatist
ought to be, in the interests of what is called secret diplomacy. He
had been paying a round of visits at various English country houses,
and exactly what he was doing for diplomacy at Prior's Park was as
much a secret as any diplomatist could desire. The obvious thing to
say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome
if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be
a rather bald way of putting it. Fantastic as it sounds, it would
fit the case better to say that people would have been surprised to
see hair growing on him; as surprised as if they had found hair
growing on the bust of a Roman emperor. His tall figure was buttoned
up in a tight-waisted fashion that rather accentuated his potential
bulk, and he wore a red flower in his buttonhole. Of the two men
walking behind one was also bald, but in a more partial and also a
more premature fashion, for his drooping mustache was still yellow,
and if his eyes were somewhat heavy it was with languor and not with
age. It was Horne Fisher, and he was talking as easily and idly
about everything as he always did. His companion was a more
striking, and even more sinister, figure, and he had the added
importance of being Lord Bulmer's oldest and most intimate friend. He
was generally known with a severe simplicity as Mr. Brain; but it was
understood that he had been a judge and police official in India, and
that he had enemies, who had represented his measures against crime as
themselves almost criminal. He was a brown skeleton of a man with dark,
deep, sunken eyes and a black mustache that hid the meaning of his
mouth. Though he had the look of one wasted by some tropical disease,
his movements were much more alert than those of his lounging companion.

"It's all settled," announced the lady, with great animation, when
they came within hailing distance. "You've all got to put on
masquerade things and very likely skates as well, though the prince
says they don't go with it; but we don't care about that. It's
freezing already, and we don't often get such a chance in England."

"Even in India we don't exactly skate all the year round," observed
Mr. Brain.

"And even Italy is not primarily associated with ice," said the
Italian.

"Italy is primarily associated with ices," remarked Mr. Horne
Fisher. "I mean with ice cream men. Most people in this country
imagine that Italy is entirely populated with ice cream men and
organ grinders. There certainly are a lot of them; perhaps they're
an invading army in disguise."

"How do you know they are not the secret emissaries of our
diplomacy?" asked the prince, with a slightly scornful smile. "An
army of organ grinders might pick up hints, and their monkeys might
pick up all sort of things."

"The organs are organized in fact," said the flippant Mr. Fisher.
"Well, I've known it pretty cold before now in Italy and even in
India, up on the Himalayan slopes. The ice on our own little round
pond will be quite cozy by comparison."

Juliet Bray was an attractive lady with dark hair and eyebrows and
dancing eyes, and there was a geniality and even generosity in her
rather imperious ways. In most matters she could command her
brother, though that nobleman, like many other men of vague ideas,
was not without a touch of the bully when he was at bay. She could
certainly command her guests, even to the extent of decking out the
most respectable and reluctant of them with her mediaeval
masquerade. And it really seemed as if she could command the
elements also, like a witch. For the weather steadily hardened and
sharpened; that night the ice of the lake, glimmering in the
moonlight, was like a marble floor, and they had begun to dance and
skate on it before it was dark.

Prior's Park, or, more properly, the surrounding district of
Holinwall, was a country seat that had become a suburb; having once
had only a dependent village at its doors, it now found outside all
its doors the signals of the expansion of London. Mr. Haddow, who
was engaged in historical researches both in the library and the
locality, could find little assistance in the latter. He had already
realized, from the documents, that Prior's Park had originally been
something like Prior's Farm, named after some local figure, but the
new social conditions were all against his tracing the story by its
traditions. Had any of the real rustics remained, he would probably
have found some lingering legend of Mr. Prior, however remote he
might be. But the new nomadic population of clerks and artisans,
constantly shifting their homes from one suburb to another, or their
children from one school to another, could have no corporate
continuity. They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes
everywhere with the extension of education.

Nevertheless, when he came out of the library next morning and saw
the wintry trees standing round the frozen pond like a black forest,
he felt he might well have been far in the depths of the country.
The old wall running round the park kept that inclosure itself still
entirely rural and romantic, and one could easily imagine that the
depths of that dark forest faded away indefinitely into distant
vales and hills. The gray and black and silver of the wintry wood
were all the more severe or somber as a contrast to the colored
carnival groups that already stood on and around the frozen pool.
For the house party had already flung themselves impatiently into
fancy dress, and the lawyer, with his neat black suit and red hair,
was the only modern figure among them.

"Aren't you going to dress up?" asked Juliet, indignantly shaking at
him a horned and towering blue headdress of the fourteenth century
which framed her face very becomingly, fantastic as it was.
"Everybody here has to be in the Middle Ages. Even Mr. Brain has put
on a sort of brown dressing gown and says he's a monk; and Mr.
Fisher got hold of some old potato sacks in the kitchen and sewed
them together; he's supposed to be a monk, too. As to the prince,
he's perfectly glorious, in great crimson robes as a cardinal. He
looks as if he could poison everybody. You simply must be
something."

"I will be something later in the day," he replied. "At present I am
nothing but an antiquary and an attorney. I have to see your brother
presently, about some legal business and also some local
investigations he asked me to make. I must look a little like a
steward when I give an account of my stewardship."

"Oh, but my brother has dressed up!" cried the girl.  "Very much so.
No end, if I may say so. Why he's bearing down on you now in all his
glory."

The noble lord was indeed marching toward them in a magnificent
sixteenth-century costume of purple and gold, with a gold-hilted
sword and a plumed cap, and manners to match. Indeed, there was
something more than his usual expansiveness of bodily action in his
appearance at that moment. It almost seemed, so to speak, that the
plumes on his hat had gone to his head. He flapped his great,
gold-lined cloak like the wings of a fairy king in a pantomime; he
even drew his sword with a flourish and waved it about as he did his
walking stick. In the light of after events there seemed to be
something monstrous and ominous about that exuberance, something of
the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few
people's minds that he might possibly be drunk.

As he strode toward his sister the first figure he passed was that
of Leonard Crane, clad in Lincoln green, with the horn and baldrick
and sword appropriate to Robin Hood; for he was standing nearest to
the lady, where, indeed, he might have been found during a
disproportionate part of the time. He had displayed one of his
buried talents in the matter of skating, and now that the skating
was over seemed disposed to prolong the partnership. The boisterous
Bulmer playfully made a pass at him with his drawn sword, going
forward with the lunge in the proper fencing fashion, and making a
somewhat too familiar Shakespearean quotation about a rodent and a
Venetian coin.

Probably in Crane also there was a subdued excitement just then;
anyhow, in one flash he had drawn his own sword and parried; and
then suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, Bulmer's weapon seemed
to spring out of his hand into the air and rolled away on the
ringing ice.

"Well, I never!" said the lady, as if with justifiable indignation.
"You never told me you could fence, too."

Bulmer put up his sword with an air rather bewildered than annoyed,
which increased the impression of something irresponsible in his
mood at the moment; then he turned rather abruptly to his lawyer,
saying:

"We can settle up about the estate after dinner; I've missed nearly
all the skating as it is, and I doubt if the ice will hold till
to-morrow night. I think I shall get up early and have a spin by
myself."

"You won't be disturbed with my company," said Horne Fisher, in his
weary fashion. "If I have to begin the day with ice, in the American
fashion, I prefer it in smaller quantities. But no early hours for
me in December. The early bird catches the cold."

"Oh, I shan't die of catching a cold," answered Bulmer, and
laughed.

        *       *       *

A considerable group of the skating party had consisted of the
guests staying at the house, and the rest had tailed off in twos and
threes some time before most of the guests began to retire for the
night. Neighbors, always invited to Prior's Park on such occasions,
went back to their own houses in motors or on foot; the legal and
archeological gentleman had returned to the Inns of Court by a late
train, to get a paper called for during his consultation with his
client; and most of the other guests were drifting and lingering at
various stages on their way up to bed. Horne Fisher, as if to
deprive himself of any excuse for his refusal of early rising, had
been the first to retire to his room; but, sleepy as he looked, he
could not sleep. He had picked up from a table the book of
antiquarian topography, in which Haddow had found his first hints
about the origin of the local name, and, being a man with a quiet
and quaint capacity for being interested in anything, he began to
read it steadily, making notes now and then of details on which his
previous reading left him with a certain doubt about his present
conclusions. His room was the one nearest to the lake in the center
of the woods, and was therefore the quietest, and none of the last
echoes of the evening's festivity could reach him. He had followed
carefully the argument which established the derivation from Mr.
Prior's farm and the hole in the wall, and disposed of any
fashionable fancy about monks and magic wells, when he began to be
conscious of a noise audible in the frozen silence of the night. It
was not a particularly loud noise, but it seemed to consist of a
series of thuds or heavy blows, such as might be struck on a wooden
door by a man seeking to enter. They were followed by something like
a faint creak or crack, as if the obstacle had either been opened or
had given way. He opened his own bedroom door and listened, but as
he heard talk and laughter all over the lower floors, he had no
reason to fear that a summons would be neglected or the house left
without protection. He went to his open window, looking out over the
frozen pond and the moonlit statue in the middle of their circle of
darkling woods, and listened again. But silence had returned to that
silent place, and, after straining his ears for a considerable time,
he could hear nothing but the solitary hoot of a distant departing
train. Then he reminded himself how many nameless noises can be
heard by the wakeful during the most ordinary night, and shrugging
his shoulders, went wearily to bed.

He awoke suddenly and sat up in bed with his ears filled, as with
thunder, with the throbbing echoes of a rending cry. He remained
rigid for a moment, and then sprang out of bed, throwing on the
loose gown of sacking he had worn all day. He went first to the
window, which was open, but covered with a thick curtain, so that
his room was still completely dark; but when he tossed the curtain
aside and put his head out, he saw that a gray and silver daybreak
had already appeared behind the black woods that surrounded the
little lake, and that was all that he did see. Though the sound had
certainly come in through the open window from this direction, the
whole scene was still and empty under the morning light as under the
moonlight. Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand he had laid on a
window sill gripped it tighter, as if to master a tremor, and his
peering blue eyes grew bleak with fear. It may seem that his emotion
was exaggerated and needless, considering the effort of common sense
by which he had conquered his nervousness about the noise on the
previous night. But that had been a very different sort of noise. It
might have been made by half a hundred things, from the chopping of
wood to the breaking of bottles. There was only one thing in nature
from which could come the sound that echoed through the dark house
at daybreak. It was the awful articulate voice of man; and it was
something worse, for he knew what man.

He knew also that it had been a shout for help. It seemed to him
that he had heard the very word; but the word, short as it was, had
been swallowed up, as if the man had been stifled or snatched away
even as he spoke. Only the mocking reverberations of it remained
even in his memory, but he had no doubt of the original voice. He
had no doubt that the great bull's voice of Francis Bray, Baron
Bulmer, had been heard for the last time between the darkness and
the lifting dawn.

How long he stood there he never knew, but he was startled into life
by the first living thing that he saw stirring in that half-frozen
landscape. Along the path beside the lake, and immediately under his
window, a figure was walking slowly and softly, but with great
composure--a stately figure in robes of a splendid scarlet; it was
the Italian prince, still in his cardinal's costume. Most of the
company had indeed lived in their costumes for the last day or two,
and Fisher himself had assumed his frock of sacking as a convenient
dressing gown; but there seemed, nevertheless, something unusually
finished and formal, in the way of an early bird, about this
magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early bird had been up
all night.

"What is the matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the window,
and the Italian turned up his great yellow face like a mask of
brass.

"We had better discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.

Fisher ran downstairs, and encountered the great, red-robed figure
entering the doorway and blocking the entrance with his bulk.

"Did you hear that cry?" demanded Fisher.

"I heard a noise and I came out," answered the diplomatist, and his
face was too dark in the shadow for its expression to be read.

"It was Bulmer's voice," insisted Fisher.  "I'll swear it was
Bulmer's voice."

"Did you know him well?" asked the other.

The question seemed irrelevant, though it was not illogical, and
Fisher could only answer in a random fashion that he knew Lord
Bulmer only slightly.

"Nobody seems to have known him well," continued the Italian, in
level tones. "Nobody except that man Brain. Brain is rather older
than Bulmer, but I fancy they shared a good many secrets."

Fisher moved abruptly, as if waking from a momentary trance, and
said, in a new and more vigorous voice, "But look here, hadn't we
better get outside and see if anything has happened."

"The ice seems to be thawing," said the other, almost with
indifference.

When they emerged from the house, dark stains and stars in the gray
field of ice did indeed indicate that the frost was breaking up, as
their host had prophesied the day before, and the very memory of
yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.

"He knew there would be a thaw," observed the prince. "He went out
skating quite early on purpose. Did he call out because he landed in
the water, do you think?"

Fisher looked puzzled.  "Bulmer was the last man to bellow like that
because he got his boots wet. And that's all he could do here; the
water would hardly come up to the calf of a man of his size. You can
see the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if it were through a
thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only broken the ice he
wouldn't have said much at the moment, though possibly a good deal
afterward. We should have found him stamping and damning up and down
this path, and calling for clean boots."

"Let us hope we shall find him as happily employed," remarked the
diplomatist. "In that case the voice must have come out of the
wood."

"I'll swear it didn't come out of the house," said Fisher; and the
two disappeared together into the twilight of wintry trees.

The plantation stood dark against the fiery colors of sunrise, a
black fringe having that feathery appearance which makes trees when
they are bare the very reverse of rugged. Hours and hours afterward,
when the same dense, but delicate, margin was dark against the
greenish colors opposite the sunset, the search thus begun at
sunrise had not come to an end. By successive stages, and to slowly
gathering groups of the company, it became apparent that the most
extraordinary of all gaps had appeared in the party; the guests
could find no trace of their host anywhere. The servants reported
that his bed had been slept in and his skates and his fancy costume
were gone, as if he had risen early for the purpose he had himself
avowed. But from the top of the house to the bottom, from the walls
round the park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of Lord
Bulmer, dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized that a chilling
premonition had already prevented him from expecting to find the man
alive. But his bald brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and
unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.

He considered the possibility of Bulmer having gone off of his own
accord, for some reason; but after fully weighing it he finally
dismissed it. It was inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard
at daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles. There was only
one gateway in the ancient and lofty wall round the small park; the
lodge keeper kept it locked till late in the morning, and the lodge
keeper had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had
before him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His instinct
had been from the first so attuned to the tragedy that it would have
been almost a relief to him to find the corpse. He would have been
grieved, but not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body dangling
from one of his own trees as from a gibbet, or floating in his own
pool like a pallid weed. What horrified him was to find nothing.

He soon become conscious that he was not alone even in his most
individual and isolated experiments. He often found a figure
following him like his shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings
in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old wall. The
dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were mobile,
darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain
of the Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after
a tiger. Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished
man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly
with him.

"This silence is rather a social strain," he said.  "May I break the
ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the way, has already
broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice might be a rather
melancholy metaphor in this case."

"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly.  "I don't fancy the ice
had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."

"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.

"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find
something out before they come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't
say I have much hope from police methods in this country. Too much
red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What we want is to
see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get to it would be to
collect the company and count them, so to speak. Nobody's left
lately, except that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."

"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the other. "Eight
hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train I
heard Bulmer's own voice as plain as I hear yours now."

"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the man from India.
After a pause he added: "There's somebody else I should like to
find, before we go after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.
What's become of that fellow in green--the architect dressed up as
a forester? I haven't seem him about."

Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all the distracted
company before the arrival of the police. But when he first began
to comment once more on the young architect's delay in putting in
an appearance, he found himself in the presence of a minor mystery,
and a psychological development of an entirely unexpected kind.

Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her brother's
disappearance with a somber stoicism in which there was, perhaps,
more paralysis than pain; but when the other question came to the
surface she was both agitated and angry.

"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about anybody," Brain was
saying in his staccato style. "But we should like to know a little
more about Mr. Crane. Nobody seems to know much about him, or where
he comes from. And it seems a sort of coincidence that yesterday he
actually crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and could have stuck him,
too, since he showed himself the better swordsman. Of course, that
may be an accident and couldn't possibly be called a case against
anybody; but then we haven't the means to make a real case against
anybody. Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur
sleuthhounds."

"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet.  "Because Mr.
Crane is a genius who's made his own way, you try to suggest he's a
murderer without daring to say so. Because he wore a toy sword and
happened to know how to use it, you want us to believe he used it
like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world. And because
he could have hit my brother and didn't, you deduce that he did.
That's the sort of way you argue. And as for his having disappeared,
you're wrong in that as you are in everything else, for here he
comes."

And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious Robin Hood slowly
detached itself from the gray background of the trees, and came
toward them as she spoke.

He approached the group slowly, but with composure; but he was
decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain and Fisher had already taken
in one detail of the green-clad figure more clearly than all the
rest. The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword was
gone.

Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did not follow up the
question thus suggested; but, while retaining an air of leading the
inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the subject.

"Now we're all assembled," he observed, quietly, "there is a
question I want to ask to begin with. Did anybody here actually see
Lord Bulmer this morning?"

Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the circle of faces till he
came to Juliet's; then he compressed his lips a little and said:

"Yes, I saw him."

"Was he alive and well?" asked Brain, quickly.  "How was he
dressed?"

"He appeared exceedingly well," replied Crane, with a curious
intonation. "He was dressed as he was yesterday, in that purple
costume copied from the portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth
century. He had his skates in his hand."

"And his sword at his side, I suppose," added the questioner. "Where
is your own sword, Mr. Crane?"

"I threw it away."

In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many
minds became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.

They had grown used to their fanciful garments looking more gay and
gorgeous against the dark gray and streaky silver of the forest, so
that the moving figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking.
The effect had been more fitting because so many of them had idly
parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the most arresting
attitude that remained in their memories had been anything but
merely monastic; that of the moment when the figure in bright green
and the other in vivid violet had for a moment made a silver cross
of their crossing swords. Even when it was a jest it had been
something of a drama; and it was a strange and sinister thought that
in the gray daybreak the same figures in the same posture might have
been repeated as a tragedy.

"Did you quarrel with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.

"Yes," replied the immovable man in green.  "Or he quarreled with
me."

"Why did he quarrel with you?" asked the investigator; and Leonard
Crane made no reply.

Horne Fisher, curiously enough, had only given half his attention to
this crucial cross-examination. His heavy-lidded eyes had languidly
followed the figure of Prince Borodino, who at this stage had
strolled away toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a pause, as
of meditation, had disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

He was recalled from his irrelevance by the voice of Juliet Bray,
which rang out with an altogether new note of decision:

"If that is the difficulty, it had best be cleared up. I am engaged
to Mr. Crane, and when we told my brother he did not approve of it;
that is all."

Neither Brain nor Fisher exhibited any surprise, but the former
added, quietly:

"Except, I suppose, that he and your brother went off into the wood
to discuss it, where Mr. Crane mislaid his sword, not to mention his
companion."

"And may I ask," inquired Crane, with a certain flicker of mockery
passing over his pallid features, "what I am supposed to have done
with either of them? Let us adopt the cheerful thesis that I am a
murderer; it has yet to be shown that I am a magician. If I ran your
unfortunate friend through the body, what did I do with the body?
Did I have it carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it merely
a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white hind?"

"It is no occasion for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge, with
abrupt authority. "It doesn't make it look better for you that you
can joke about the loss."

Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye was still on the edge of the
wood behind, and he became conscious of masses of dark red, like a
stormy sunset cloud, glowing through the gray network of the thin
trees, and the prince in his cardinal's robes reemerged on to the
pathway. Brain had had half a notion that the prince might have gone
to look for the lost rapier. But when he reappeared he was carrying
in his hand, not a sword, but an ax.

The incongruity between the masquerade and the mystery had created a
curious psychological atmosphere. At first they had all felt
horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a
festival, by an event that had only too much the character of a
funeral. Many of them would have already gone back and dressed in
clothes that were more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow
at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial
and frivolous than the first. And as they reconciled themselves to
their ridiculous trappings, a curious sensation had come over some
of them, notably over the more sensitive, like Crane and Fisher and
Juliet, but in some degree over everybody except the practical Mr.
Brain. It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own
ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake, and playing some
old part that they only half remembered. The movements of those
colored figures seemed to mean something that had been settled long
before, like a silent heraldry. Acts, attitudes, external objects,
were accepted as an allegory even without the key; and they knew
when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it was. And
somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new
and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the
gaunt trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering
face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could
not have named a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have
become toy swords and the whole tale of them broken and tossed away
like a toy. Borodino looked like the Old World headsman, clad in
terrible red, and carrying the ax for the execution of the criminal.
And the criminal was not Crane.

Mr. Brain of the Indian police was glaring at the new object, and it
was a moment or two before he spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.

"What are you doing with that?" he asked.  "Seems to be a woodman's
chopper."

"A natural association of ideas," observed Horne Fisher.  "If you
meet a cat in a wood you think it's a wildcat, though it may have
just strolled from the drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I
happen to know that is not the woodman's chopper. It's the kitchen
chopper, or meat ax, or something like that, that somebody has
thrown away in the wood. I saw it in the kitchen myself when I was
getting the potato sacks with which I reconstructed a mediaeval
hermit."

"All the same, it is not without interest," remarked the prince,
holding out the instrument to Fisher, who took it and examined it
carefully. "A butcher's cleaver that has done butcher's work."

"It was certainly the instrument of the crime," assented Fisher, in
a low voice.

Brain was staring at the dull blue gleam of the ax head with fierce
and fascinated eyes. "I don't understand you," he said. "There is
no--there are no marks on it."

"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it has
committed a crime. This is as near as the criminal came to the crime
when he committed it."

"What do you mean?"

"He was not there when he did it," explained Fisher.  "It's a poor
sort of murderer who can't murder people when he isn't there."

"You seem to be talking merely for the sake of mystification," said
Brain. "If you have any practical advice to give you might as well
make it intelligible."

"The only practical advice I can suggest," said Fisher,
thoughtfully, "is a little research into local topography and
nomenclature. They say there used to be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm
in this neighborhood. I think some details about the domestic life
of the late Mr. Prior would throw a light on this terrible
business."

"And you have nothing more immediate than your topography to offer,"
said Brain, with a sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"

"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole in
the Wall."

        *       *       *


That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and under a strong
west wind that followed the breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane was
wending his way in a wild rotatory walk round and round the high,
continuous wall that inclosed the little wood. He was driven by a
desperate idea of solving for himself the riddle that had clouded
his reputation and already even threatened his liberty. The police
authorities, now in charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but
he knew well enough that if he tried to move far afield he would be
instantly arrested. Horne Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had
refused to expand them as yet, had stirred the artistic temperament
of the architect to a sort of wild analysis, and he was resolved to
read the hieroglyph upside down and every way until it made sense.
If it was something connected with a hole in the wall he would find
the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to
find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge told
him that the masonry was all of one workmanship and one date, and,
except for the regular entrance, which threw no light on the
mystery, he found nothing suggesting any sort of hiding place or
means of escape. Walking a narrow path between the winding wall and
the wild eastward bend and sweep of the gray and feathery trees,
seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like
lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and
mingling with the first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened
moon behind him, he began to feel his head going round as his heels
were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier. He had
thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension
which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from
a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical
light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he
could see Bulmer's body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid
halo over the woods and the wall. He was haunted also with the hint,
which somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all had
something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed even to be something
creepy in the fact that he was always respectfully referred to as
Mr. Prior, and that it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer
that he had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful things.
As a matter of fact, he had found that no local inquiries had
revealed anything at all about the Prior family.

The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the wind had driven off
the clouds and itself died fitfully away, when he came round again
to the artificial lake in front of the house. For some reason it
looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a
classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of
the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very
pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to
his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue,
sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced
the wrinkled brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as
a hermit and apparently practicing something of the solitude of a
hermit. Nevertheless, he looked up at Leonard Crane and smiled,
almost as if he had expected him.

"Look here," said Crane, planting himself in front of him, "can you
tell me anything about this business?"

"I shall soon have to tell everybody everything about it," replied
Fisher, "but I've no objection to telling you something first. But,
to begin with, will you tell me something? What really happened when
you met Bulmer this morning? You did throw away your sword, but you
didn't kill him."

"I didn't kill him because I threw away my sword," said the other.
"I did it on purpose--or I'm not sure what might have happened."

After a pause he went on, quietly:  "The late Lord Bulmer was a very
breezy gentleman, extremely breezy. He was very genial with his
inferiors, and would have his lawyer and his architect staying in
his house for all sorts of holidays and amusements. But there was
another side to him, which they found out when they tried to be his
equals. When I told him that his sister and I were engaged,
something happened which I simply can't and won't describe. It
seemed to me like some monstrous upheaval of madness. But I suppose
the truth is painfully simple. There is such a thing as the
coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the most horrible thing in
humanity."

"I know," said Fisher.  "The Renaissance nobles of the Tudor time
were like that."

"It is odd that you should say that," Crane went on. "For while we
were talking there came on me a curious feeling that we were
repeating some scene of the past, and that I was really some outlaw,
found in the woods like Robin Hood, and that he had really stepped
in all his plumes and purple out of the picture frame of the
ancestral portrait. Anyhow, he was the man in possession, and he
neither feared God nor regarded man. I defied him, of course, and
walked away. I might really have killed him if I had not walked
away."

"Yes," said Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in possession and he
was in possession, and this is the end of the story. It all fits
in."

"Fits in with what?" cried his companion, with sudden impatience. "I
can't make head or tail of it. You tell me to look for the secret in
the hole in the wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall."

"There isn't any," said Fisher.  "That's the secret." After
reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you call it a hole in the
wall of the world. Look here; I'll tell you if you like, but I'm
afraid it involves an introduction. You've got to understand one of
the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey
without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn
with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about
telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and
the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry,
from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It
turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and
ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is
unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to
remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French
romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would
just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern
intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept
anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here.

"When some critic or other chose to say that Prior's Park was not a
priory, but was named after some quite modern man named Prior,
nobody really tested the theory at all. It never occurred to anybody
repeating the story to ask if there _was_ any Mr. Prior, if anybody
had ever seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact, it was a
priory, and shared the fate of most priories--that is, the Tudor
gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned
it into his own private house; he did worse things, as you shall
hear. But the point here is that this is how the trick works, and
the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale. The
name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best maps
produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a
smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most
ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor. But it is spelled wrong and
pronounced right."

"Do you mean to say," asked Crane, quickly, "that there really was a
well?"

"There is a well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at the bottom of
it."

As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet
of water in front of him.

"The well is under that water somewhere," he said, "and this is not
the first tragedy connected with it. The founder of this house did
something which his fellow ruffians very seldom did; something that
had to be hushed up even in the anarchy of the pillage of the
monasteries. The well was connected with the miracles of some saint,
and the last prior that guarded it was something like a saint
himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr. He defied
the new owner and dared him to pollute the place, till the noble, in
a fury, stabbed him and flung his body into the well, whither, after
four hundred years, it has been followed by an heir of the usurper,
clad in the same purple and walking the world with the same pride."

"But how did it happen," demanded Crane, "that for the first time
Bulmer fell in at that particular spot?"

"Because the ice was only loosened at that particular spot, by the
only man who knew it," answered Horne Fisher. "It was cracked
deliberately, with the kitchen chopper, at that special place; and I
myself heard the hammering and did not understand it. The place had
been covered with an artificial lake, if only because the whole
truth had to be covered with an artificial legend. But don't you see
that it is exactly what those pagan nobles would have done, to
desecrate it with a sort of heathen goddess, as the Roman Emperor
built a temple to Venus on the Holy Sepulchre. But the truth could
still be traced out, by any scholarly man determined to trace it.
And this man was determined to trace it."

"What man?" asked the other, with a shadow of the answer in his
mind.

"The only man who has an alibi," replied Fisher.  "James Haddow, the
antiquarian lawyer, left the night before the fatality, but he left
that black star of death on the ice. He left abruptly, having
previously proposed to stay; probably, I think, after an ugly scene
with Bulmer, at their legal interview. As you know yourself, Bulmer
could make a man feel pretty murderous, and I rather fancy the
lawyer had himself irregularities to confess, and was in danger of
exposure by his client. But it's my reading of human nature that a
man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby. Haddow may have
been a dishonest lawyer, but he couldn't help being an honest
antiquary. When he got on the track of the truth about the Holy Well
he had to follow it up; he was not to be bamboozled with newspaper
anecdotes about Mr. Prior and a hole in the wall; he found out
everything, even to the exact location of the well, and he was
rewarded, if being a successful assassin can be regarded as a
reward."

"And how did you get on the track of all this hidden history?" asked
the young architect.

A cloud came across the brow of Horne Fisher.  "I knew only too much
about it already," he said, "and, after all, it's shameful for me to
be speaking lightly of poor Bulmer, who has paid his penalty; but
the rest of us haven't. I dare say every cigar I smoke and every
liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the harrying of
the holy places and the persecution of the poor. After all, it needs
very little poking about in the past to find that hole in the wall,
that great breach in the defenses of English history. It lies just
under the surface of a thin sheet of sham information and
instruction, just as the black and blood-stained well lies just
under that floor of shallow water and flat weeds. Oh, the ice is
thin, but it bears; it is strong enough to support us when we dress
up as monks and dance on it, in mockery of the dear, quaint old
Middle Ages. They told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on
fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy. I put on the only
costume I think fit for a man who has inherited the position of a
gentleman, and yet has not entirely lost the feelings of one."

In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a sweeping and downward
gesture.

"Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they
would stay on my bald head."



VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE

Harold March and the few who cultivated the friendship of Horne
Fisher, especially if they saw something of him in his own social
setting, were conscious of a certain solitude in his very
sociability. They seemed to be always meeting his relations and
never meeting his family. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they
saw much of his family and nothing of his home. His cousins and
connections ramified like a labyrinth all over the governing class
of Great Britain, and he seemed to be on good, or at least on
good-humored, terms with most of them. For Horne Fisher was
remarkable for a curious impersonal information and interest
touching all sorts of topics, so that one could sometimes fancy that
his culture, like his colorless, fair mustache and pale, drooping
features, had the neutral nature of a chameleon. Anyhow, he could
always get on with viceroys and Cabinet Ministers and all the great
men responsible for great departments, and talk to each of them on
his own subject, on the branch of study with which he was most
seriously concerned. Thus he could converse with the Minister for
War about silkworms, with the Minister of Education about detective
stories, with the Minister of Labor about Limoges enamel, and with
the Minister of Missions and Moral Progress (if that be his correct
title) about the pantomime boys of the last four decades. And as the
first was his first cousin, the second his second cousin, the third
his brother-in-law, and the fourth his uncle by marriage, this
conversational versatility certainly served in one sense to create a
happy family. But March never seemed to get a glimpse of that
domestic interior to which men of the middle classes are accustomed
in their friendships, and which is indeed the foundation of
friendship and love and everything else in any sane and stable
society. He wondered whether Horne Fisher was both an orphan and an
only child.

It was, therefore, with something like a start that he found that
Fisher had a brother, much more prosperous and powerful than
himself, though hardly, March thought, so entertaining. Sir Henry
Harland Fisher, with half the alphabet after his name, was something
at the Foreign Office far more tremendous than the Foreign
Secretary. Apparently, it ran in the family, after all; for it
seemed there was another brother, Ashton Fisher, in India, rather
more tremendous than the Viceroy. Sir Henry Fisher was a heavier,
but handsomer edition of his brother, with a brow equally bald, but
much more smooth. He was very courteous, but a shade patronizing,
not only to March, but even, as March fancied, to Horne Fisher as
well. The latter gentleman, who had many intuitions about the
half-formed thoughts of others, glanced at the topic himself as they
came away from the great house in Berkeley Square.

"Why, don't you know," he observed quietly, "that I am the fool of
the family?"

"It must be a clever family," said Harold March, with a smile.

"Very gracefully expressed," replied Fisher; "that is the best of
having a literary training. Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration to
say I am the fool of the family. It's enough to say I am the failure
of the family."

"It seems queer to me that you should fail especially," remarked the
journalist. "As they say in the examinations, what did you fail in?"

"Politics," replied his friend.  "I stood for Parliament when I was
quite a young man and got in by an enormous majority, with loud
cheers and chairing round the town. Since then, of course, I've been
rather under a cloud."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand the 'of course,'" answered
March, laughing.

"That part of it isn't worth understanding," said Fisher.  "But as a
matter of fact, old chap, the other part of it was rather odd and
interesting. Quite a detective story in its way, as well as the
first lesson I had in what modern politics are made of. If you like,
I'll tell you all about it." And the following, recast in a less
allusive and conversational manner, is the story that he told.


Nobody privileged of late years to meet Sir Henry Harland Fisher
would believe that he had ever been called Harry. But, indeed, he
had been boyish enough when a boy, and that serenity which shone on
him through life, and which now took the form of gravity, had once
taken the form of gayety. His friends would have said that he was
all the more ripe in his maturity for having been young in his
youth. His enemies would have said that he was still light minded,
but no longer light hearted. But in any case, the whole of the story
Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of the accident which had made
young Harry Fisher private secretary to Lord Saltoun. Hence his
later connection with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed, come to
him as a sort of legacy from his lordship when that great man was
the power behind the throne. This is not the place to say much about
Saltoun, little as was known of him and much as there was worth
knowing. England has had at least three or four such secret
statesmen. An aristocratic polity produces every now and then an
aristocrat who is also an accident, a man of intellectual
independence and insight, a Napoleon born in the purple. His vast
work was mostly invisible, and very little could be got out of him
in private life except a crusty and rather cynical sense of humor.
But it was certainly the accident of his presence at a family dinner
of the Fishers, and the unexpected opinion he expressed, which
turned what might have been a dinner-table joke into a sort of small
sensational novel.

Save for Lord Saltoun, it was a family party of Fishers, for the
only other distinguished stranger had just departed after dinner,
leaving the rest to their coffee and cigars. This had been a figure
of some interest--a young Cambridge man named Eric Hughes who was
the rising hope of the party of Reform, to which the Fisher family,
along with their friend Saltoun, had long been at least formally
attached. The personality of Hughes was substantially summed up in
the fact that he talked eloquently and earnestly through the whole
dinner, but left immediately after to be in time for an appointment.
All his actions had something at once ambitious and conscientious;
he drank no wine, but was slightly intoxicated with words. And his
face and phrases were on the front page of all the newspapers just
then, because he was contesting the safe seat of Sir Francis Verner
in the great by-election in the west. Everybody was talking about
the powerful speech against squirarchy which he had just delivered;
even in the Fisher circle everybody talked about it except Horne
Fisher himself who sat in a corner, lowering over the fire.

"We jolly well have to thank him for putting some new life into the
old party," Ashton Fisher was saying. "This campaign against the old
squires just hits the degree of democracy there is in this county.
This act for extending county council control is practically his
bill; so you may say he's in the government even before he's in the
House."

"One's easier than the other," said Harry, carelessly.  "I bet the
squire's a bigger pot than the county council in that county. Verner
is pretty well rooted; all these rural places are what you call
reactionary. Damning aristocrats won't alter it."

"He damns them rather well," observed Ashton.  "We never had a
better meeting than the one in Barkington, which generally goes
Constitutional. And when he said, 'Sir Francis may boast of blue
blood; let us show we have red blood,' and went on to talk about
manhood and liberty, the room simply rose at him."

"Speaks very well," said Lord Saltoun, gruffly, making his only
contribution to the conversation so far.

Then the almost equally silent Horne Fisher suddenly spoke, without
taking his brooding eyes off the fire.

"What I can't understand," he said, "is why nobody is ever slanged
for the real reason."

"Hullo!" remarked Harry, humorously, "you beginning to take notice?"

"Well, take Verner," continued Horne Fisher.  "If we want to attack
Verner, why not attack him? Why compliment him on being a romantic
reactionary aristocrat? Who is Verner? Where does he come from? His
name sounds old, but I never heard of it before, as the man said of
the Crucifixion. Why talk about his blue blood? His blood may be
gamboge yellow with green spots, for all anybody knows. All we know
is that the old squire, Hawker, somehow ran through his money (and
his second wife's, I suppose, for she was rich enough), and sold the
estate to a man named Verner. What did he make his money in? Oil?
Army contracts?"

"I don't know," said Saltoun, looking at him thoughtfully.

"First thing I ever knew you didn't know," cried the exuberant
Harry.

"And there's more, besides," went on Horne Fisher, who seemed to
have suddenly found his tongue. "If we want country people to vote
for us, why don't we get somebody with some notion about the
country? We don't talk to people in Threadneedle Street about
nothing but turnips and pigsties. Why do we talk to people in
Somerset about nothing but slums and socialism? Why don't we give
the squire's land to the squire's tenants, instead of dragging in
the county council?"

"Three acres and a cow," cried Harry, emitting what the
Parliamentary reports call an ironical cheer.

"Yes," replied his brother, stubbornly.  "Don't you think
agricultural laborers would rather have three acres and a cow than
three acres of printed forms and a committee? Why doesn't somebody
start a yeoman party in politics, appealing to the old traditions of
the small landowner? And why don't they attack men like Verner for
what they are, which is something about as old and traditional as an
American oil trust?"

"You'd better lead the yeoman party yourself," laughed Harry.
"Don't you think it would be a joke, Lord Saltoun, to see my brother
and his merry men, with their bows and bills, marching down to
Somerset all in Lincoln green instead of Lincoln and Bennet hats?"

"No," answered Old Saltoun, "I don't think it would be a joke. I
think it would be an exceedingly serious and sensible idea."

"Well, I'm jiggered!" cried Harry Fisher, staring at him. "I said
just now it was the first fact you didn't know, and I should say
this is the first joke you didn't see."

"I've seen a good many things in my time," said the old man, in his
rather sour fashion. "I've told a good many lies in my time, too,
and perhaps I've got rather sick of them. But there are lies and
lies, for all that. Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie,
because they hung together and partly to help one another out. But
I'm damned if I can see why we should lie for these cosmopolitan
cads who only help themselves. They're not backing us up any more;
they're simply crowding us out. If a man like your brother likes to
go into Parliament as a yeoman or a gentleman or a Jacobite or an
Ancient Briton, I should say it would be a jolly good thing."

In the rather startled silence that followed Horne Fisher sprang to
his feet and all his dreary manner dropped off him.

"I'm ready to do it to-morrow," he cried.  "I suppose none of you
fellows would back me up."

Then Harry Fisher showed the finer side of his impetuosity. He made
a sudden movement as if to shake hands.

"You're a sport," he said, "and I'll back you up, if nobody else
will. But we can all back you up, can't we? I see what Lord Saltoun
means, and, of course, he's right. He's always right."

"So I will go down to Somerset," said Horne Fisher.

"Yes, it is on the way to Westminster," said Lord Saltoun, with a
smile.

And so it happened that Horne Fisher arrived some days later at the
little station of a rather remote market town in the west,
accompanied by a light suitcase and a lively brother. It must not be
supposed, however, that the brother's cheerful tone consisted
entirely of chaff. He supported the new candidate with hope as well
as hilarity; and at the back of his boisterous partnership there was
an increasing sympathy and encouragement. Harry Fisher had always
had an affection for his more quiet and eccentric brother, and was
now coming more and more to have a respect for him. As the campaign
proceeded the respect increased to ardent admiration. For Harry was
still young, and could feel the sort of enthusiasm for his captain
in electioneering that a schoolboy can feel for his captain in
cricket.

Nor was the admiration undeserved. As the new three-cornered
contest developed it became apparent to others besides his devoted
kinsman that there was more in Horne Fisher than had ever met the
eye. It was clear that his outbreak by the family fireside had been
but the culmination of a long course of brooding and studying on the
question. The talent he retained through life for studying his
subject, and even somebody else's subject, had long been
concentrated on this idea of championing a new peasantry against a
new plutocracy. He spoke to a crowd with eloquence and replied to an
individual with humor, two political arts that seemed to come to him
naturally. He certainly knew much more about rural problems than
either Hughes, the Reform candidate, or Verner, the Constitutional
candidate. And he probed those problems with a human curiosity, and
went below the surface in a way that neither of them dreamed of
doing. He soon became the voice of popular feelings that are never
found in the popular press. New angles of criticism, arguments that
had never before been uttered by an educated voice, tests and
comparisons that had been made only in dialect by men drinking in
the little local public houses, crafts half forgotten that had come
down by sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their fathers
were free--all this created a curious and double excitement. It
startled the well informed by being a new and fantastic idea they
had never encountered. It startled the ignorant by being an old and
familiar idea they never thought to have seen revived. Men saw
things in a new light, and knew not even whether it was the sunset
or the dawn.

Practical grievances were there to make the movement formidable. As
Fisher went to and fro among the cottages and country inns, it was
borne in on him without difficulty that Sir Francis Verner was a
very bad landlord. Nor was the story of his acquisition of the land
any more ancient and dignified than he had supposed; the story was
well known in the county and in most respects was obvious enough.
Hawker, the old squire, had been a loose, unsatisfactory sort of
person, had been on bad terms with his first wife (who died, as some
said, of neglect), and had then married a flashy South American
Jewess with a fortune. But he must have worked his way through this
fortune also with marvelous rapidity, for he had been compelled to
sell the estate to Verner and had gone to live in South America,
possibly on his wife's estates. But Fisher noticed that the laxity
of the old squire was far less hated than the efficiency of the new
squire. Verner's history seemed to be full of smart bargains and
financial flutters that left other people short of money and temper.
But though he heard a great deal about Verner, there was one thing
that continually eluded him; something that nobody knew, that even
Saltoun had not known. He could not find out how Verner had
originally made his money.

"He must have kept it specially dark," said Horne Fisher to himself.
"It must be something he's really ashamed of. Hang it all! what _is_
a man ashamed of nowadays?"

And as he pondered on the possibilities they grew darker and more
distorted in his mind; he thought vaguely of things remote and
repulsive, strange forms of slavery or sorcery, and then of ugly
things yet more unnatural but nearer home. The figure of Verner
seemed to be blackened and transfigured in his imagination, and to
stand against varied backgrounds and strange skies.

As he strode up a village street, brooding thus, his eyes
encountered a complete contrast in the face of his other rival, the
Reform candidate. Eric Hughes, with his blown blond hair and eager
undergraduate face, was just getting into his motor car and saying a
few final words to his agent, a sturdy, grizzled man named Gryce.
Eric Hughes waved his hand in a friendly fashion; but Gryce eyed him
with some hostility. Eric Hughes was a young man with genuine
political enthusiasms, but he knew that political opponents are
people with whom one may have to dine any day. But Mr. Gryce was a
grim little local Radical, a champion of the chapel, and one of
those happy people whose work is also their hobby. He turned his
back as the motor car drove away, and walked briskly up the sunlit
high street of the little town, whistling, with political papers
sticking out of his pocket.

Fisher looked pensively after the resolute figure for a moment, and
then, as if by an impulse, began to follow it. Through the busy
market place, amid the baskets and barrows of market day, under the
painted wooden sign of the Green Dragon, up a dark side entry, under
an arch, and through a tangle of crooked cobbled streets the two
threaded their way, the square, strutting figure in front and the
lean, lounging figure behind him, like his shadow in the sunshine.
At length they came to a brown brick house with a brass plate, on
which was Mr. Gryce's name, and that individual turned and beheld
his pursuer with a stare.

"Could I have a word with you, sir?" asked Horne Fisher, politely.
The agent stared still more, but assented civilly, and led the other
into an office littered with leaflets and hung all round with highly
colored posters which linked the name of Hughes with all the higher
interests of humanity.

"Mr. Horne Fisher, I believe," said Mr. Gryce.  "Much honored by the
call, of course. Can't pretend to congratulate you on entering the
contest, I'm afraid; you won't expect that. Here we've been keeping
the old flag flying for freedom and reform, and you come in and
break the battle line."

For Mr. Elijah Gryce abounded in military metaphors and in
denunciations of militarism. He was a square-jawed, blunt-featured
man with a pugnacious cock of the eyebrow. He had been pickled in
the politics of that countryside from boyhood, he knew everybody's
secrets, and electioneering was the romance of his life.

"I suppose you think I'm devoured with ambition," said Horne Fisher,
in his rather listless voice, "aiming at a dictatorship and all
that. Well, I think I can clear myself of the charge of mere selfish
ambition. I only want certain things done. I don't want to do them.
I very seldom want to do anything. And I've come here to say that
I'm quite willing to retire from the contest if you can convince me
that we really want to do the same thing."

The agent of the Reform party looked at him with an odd and slightly
puzzled expression, and before he could reply, Fisher went on in the
same level tones:

"You'd hardly believe it, but I keep a conscience concealed about
me; and I am in doubt about several things. For instance, we both
want to turn Verner out of Parliament, but what weapon are we to
use? I've heard a lot of gossip against him, but is it right to act
on mere gossip? Just as I want to be fair to you, so I want to be
fair to him. If some of the things I've heard are true he ought to
be turned out of Parliament and every other club in London. But I
don't want to turn him out of Parliament if they aren't true."

At this point the light of battle sprang into Mr. Gryce's eyes and
he became voluble, not to say violent. He, at any rate, had no doubt
that the stories were true; he could testify, to his own knowledge,
that they were true. Verner was not only a hard landlord, but a mean
landlord, a robber as well as a rackrenter; any gentleman would be
justified in hounding him out. He had cheated old Wilkins out of his
freehold by a trick fit for a pickpocket; he had driven old Mother
Biddle to the workhouse; he had stretched the law against Long Adam,
the poacher, till all the magistrates were ashamed of him.

"So if you'll serve under the old banner," concluded Mr. Gryce, more
genially, "and turn out a swindling tyrant like that, I'm sure
you'll never regret it."

"And if that is the truth," said Horne Fisher, "are you going to
tell it?"

"What do you mean?  Tell the truth?" demanded Gryce.

"I mean you are going to tell the truth as you have just told it,"
replied Fisher. "You are going to placard this town with the
wickedness done to old Wilkins. You are going to fill the newspapers
with the infamous story of Mrs. Biddle. You are going to denounce
Verner from a public platform, naming him for what he did and naming
the poacher he did it to. And you're going to find out by what trade
this man made the money with which he bought the estate; and when
you know the truth, as I said before, of course you are going to
tell it. Upon those terms I come under the old flag, as you call it,
and haul down my little pennon."

The agent was eying him with a curious expression, surly but not
entirely unsympathetic. "Well," he said, slowly, "you have to do
these things in a regular way, you know, or people don't understand.
I've had a lot of experience, and I'm afraid what you say wouldn't
do. People understand slanging squires in a general way, but those
personalities aren't considered fair play. Looks like hitting below
the belt."

"Old Wilkins hasn't got a belt, I suppose," replied Horne Fisher.
"Verner can hit him anyhow, and nobody must say a word. It's
evidently very important to have a belt. But apparently you have to
be rather high up in society to have one. Possibly," he added,
thoughtfully--"possibly the explanation of the phrase 'a belted
earl,' the meaning of which has always escaped me."

"I mean those personalities won't do," returned Gryce, frowning at
the table.

"And Mother Biddle and Long Adam, the poacher, are not
personalities," said Fisher, "and suppose we mustn't ask how Verner
made all the money that enabled him to become--a personality."

Gryce was still looking at him under lowering brows, but the
singular light in his eyes had brightened. At last he said, in
another and much quieter voice:

"Look here, sir. I like you, if you don't mind my saying so. I
think you are really on the side of the people and I'm sure you're a
brave man. A lot braver than you know, perhaps. We daren't touch
what you propose with a barge pole; and so far from wanting you in
the old party, we'd rather you ran your own risk by yourself. But
because I like you and respect your pluck, I'll do you a good turn
before we part. I don't want you to waste time barking up the wrong
tree. You talk about how the new squire got the money to buy, and
the ruin of the old squire, and all the rest of it. Well, I'll give
you a hint about that, a hint about something precious few people
know."

"I am very grateful," said Fisher, gravely.  "What is it?"

"It's in two words," said the other.  "The new squire was quite poor
when he bought. The old squire was quite rich when he sold."

Horne Fisher looked at him thoughtfully as he turned away abruptly
and busied himself with the papers on his desk. Then Fisher uttered
a short phrase of thanks and farewell, and went out into the street,
still very thoughtful.

His reflection seemed to end in resolution, and, falling into a more
rapid stride, he passed out of the little town along a road leading
toward the gate of the great park, the country seat of Sir Francis
Verner. A glitter of sunlight made the early winter more like a late
autumn, and the dark woods were touched here and there with red and
golden leaves, like the last rays of a lost sunset. From a higher
part of the road he had seen the long, classical facade of the great
house with its many windows, almost immediately beneath him, but
when the road ran down under the wall of the estate, topped with
towering trees behind, he realized that it was half a mile round to
the lodge gates. After walking for a few minutes along the lane,
however, he came to a place where the wall had cracked and was in
process of repair. As it was, there was a great gap in the gray
masonry that looked at first as black as a cavern and only showed at
a second glance the twilight of the twinkling trees. There was
something fascinating about that unexpected gate, like the opening
of a fairy tale.

Horne Fisher had in him something of the aristocrat, which is very
near to the anarchist. It was characteristic of him that he turned
into this dark and irregular entry as casually as into his own front
door, merely thinking that it would be a short cut to the house. He
made his way through the dim wood for some distance and with some
difficulty, until there began to shine through the trees a level
light, in lines of silver, which he did not at first understand. The
next moment he had come out into the daylight at the top of a steep
bank, at the bottom of which a path ran round the rim of a large
ornamental lake. The sheet of water which he had seen shimmering
through the trees was of considerable extent, but was walled in on
every side with woods which were not only dark, but decidedly
dismal. At one end of the path was a classical statue of some
nameless nymph, and at the other end it was flanked by two classical
urns; but the marble was weather-stained and streaked with green and
gray. A hundred other signs, smaller but more significant, told him
that he had come on some outlying corner of the grounds neglected
and seldom visited. In the middle of the lake was what appeared to
be an island, and on the island what appeared to be meant for a
classical temple, not open like a temple of the winds, but with a
blank wall between its Doric pillars. We may say it only seemed like
an island, because a second glance revealed a low causeway of flat
stones running up to it from the shore and turning it into a
peninsula. And certainly it only seemed like a temple, for nobody
knew better than Horne Fisher that no god had ever dwelt in that
shrine.

"That's what makes all this classical landscape gardening so
desolate," he said to himself. "More desolate than Stonehenge or the
Pyramids. We don't believe in Egyptian mythology, but the Egyptians
did; and I suppose even the Druids believed in Druidism. But the
eighteenth-century gentleman who built these temples didn't believe
in Venus or Mercury any more than we do; that's why the reflection
of those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow of a
shade. They were men of the age of Reason; they, who filled their
gardens with these stone nymphs, had less hope than any men in all
history of really meeting a nymph in the forest."

His monologue stopped abruptly with a sharp noise like a thundercrack
that rolled in dreary echoes round the dismal mere. He knew at once
what it was--somebody had fired off a gun. But as to the meaning of
it he was momentarily staggered, and strange thoughts thronged into
his mind. The next moment he laughed; for he saw lying a little way
along the path below him the dead bird that the shot had brought
down.

At the same moment, however, he saw something else, which interested
him more. A ring of dense trees ran round the back of the island
temple, framing the facade of it in dark foliage, and he could have
sworn he saw a stir as of something moving among the leaves. The
next moment his suspicion was confirmed, for a rather ragged figure
came from under the shadow of the temple and began to move along the
causeway that led to the bank. Even at that distance the figure was
conspicuous by its great height and Fisher could see that the man
carried a gun under his arm. There came back into his memory at once
the name Long Adam, the poacher.

With a rapid sense of strategy he sometimes showed, Fisher sprang
from the bank and raced round the lake to the head of the little
pier of stones. If once a man reached the mainland he could easily
vanish into the woods. But when Fisher began to advance along the
stones toward the island, the man was cornered in a blind alley and
could only back toward the temple. Putting his broad shoulders
against it, he stood as if at bay; he was a comparatively young man,
with fine lines in his lean face and figure and a mop of ragged red
hair. The look in his eyes might well have been disquieting to
anyone left alone with him on an island in the middle of a lake.

"Good morning," said Horne Fisher, pleasantly.  "I thought at first
you were a murderer. But it seems unlikely, somehow, that the
partridge rushed between us and died for love of me, like the
heroines in the romances; so I suppose you are a poacher."

"I suppose you would call me a poacher," answered the man; and his
voice was something of a surprise coming from such a scarecrow; it
had that hard fastidiousness to be found in those who have made a
fight for their own refinement among rough surroundings. "I consider
I have a perfect right to shoot game in this place. But I am well
aware that people of your sort take me for a thief, and I suppose
you will try to land me in jail."

"There are preliminary difficulties," replied Fisher.  "To begin
with, the mistake is flattering, but I am not a gamekeeper. Still
less am I three gamekeepers, who would be, I imagine, about your
fighting weight. But I confess I have another reason for not wanting
to jail you."

"And what is that?" asked the other.

"Only that I quite agree with you," answered Fisher.  "I don't
exactly say you have a right to poach, but I never could see that it
was as wrong as being a thief. It seems to me against the whole
normal notion of property that a man should own something because it
flies across his garden. He might as well own the wind, or think he
could write his name on a morning cloud. Besides, if we want poor
people to respect property we must give them some property to
respect. You ought to have land of your own; and I'm going to give
you some if I can."

"Going to give me some land!" repeated Long Adam.

"I apologize for addressing you as if you were a public meeting,"
said Fisher, "but I am an entirely new kind of public man who says
the same thing in public and in private. I've said this to a hundred
huge meetings throughout the country, and I say it to you on this
queer little island in this dismal pond. I would cut up a big estate
like this into small estates for everybody, even for poachers. I
would do in England as they did in Ireland--buy the big men out, if
possible; get them out, anyhow. A man like you ought to have a
little place of his own. I don't say you could keep pheasants, but
you might keep chickens."

The man stiffened suddenly and he seemed at once to blanch and flame
at the promise as if it were a threat.

"Chickens!" he repeated, with a passion of contempt.

"Why do you object?" asked the placid candidate. "Because keeping
hens is rather a mild amusement for a poacher? What about poaching
eggs?"

"Because I am not a poacher," cried Adam, in a rending voice that
rang round the hollow shrines and urns like the echoes of his gun.
"Because the partridge lying dead over there is my partridge.
Because the land you are standing on is my land. Because my own land
was only taken from me by a crime, and a worse crime than poaching.
This has been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of years,
and if you or any meddlesome mountebank comes here and talks of
cutting it up like a cake, if I ever hear a word more of you and
your leveling lies--"

"You seem to be a rather turbulent public," observed Horne Fisher,
"but do go on. What will happen if I try to divide this estate
decently among decent people?"

The poacher had recovered a grim composure as he replied. "There
will be no partridge to rush in between."

With that he turned his back, evidently resolved to say no more, and
walked past the temple to the extreme end of the islet, where he
stood staring into the water. Fisher followed him, but, when his
repeated questions evoked no answer, turned back toward the shore.
In doing so he took a second and closer look at the artificial
temple, and noted some curious things about it. Most of these
theatrical things were as thin as theatrical scenery, and he
expected the classic shrine to be a shallow thing, a mere shell or
mask. But there was some substantial bulk of it behind, buried in
the trees, which had a gray, labyrinthian look, like serpents of
stone, and lifted a load of leafy towers to the sky. But what
arrested Fisher's eye was that in this bulk of gray-white stone
behind there was a single door with great, rusty bolts outside; the
bolts, however, were not shot across so as to secure it. Then he
walked round the small building, and found no other opening except
one small grating like a ventilator, high up in the wall. He
retraced his steps thoughtfully along the causeway to the banks of
the lake, and sat down on the stone steps between the two sculptured
funeral urns. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked it in ruminant
manner; eventually he took out a notebook and wrote down various
phrases, numbering and renumbering them till they stood in the
following order: "(1) Squire Hawker disliked his first wife. (2) He
married his second wife for her money. (3) Long Adam says the estate
is really his. (4) Long Adam hangs round the island temple, which
looks like a prison. (5) Squire Hawker was not poor when he gave up
the estate. (6) Verner was poor when he got the estate."

He gazed at these notes with a gravity which gradually turned to a
hard smile, threw away his cigarette, and resumed his search for a
short cut to the great house. He soon picked up the path which,
winding among clipped hedges and flower beds, brought him in front
of its long Palladian facade. It had the usual appearance of being,
not a private house, but a sort of public building sent into exile
in the provinces.

He first found himself in the presence of the butler, who really
looked much older than the building, for the architecture was dated
as Georgian; but the man's face, under a highly unnatural brown wig,
was wrinkled with what might have been centuries. Only his prominent
eyes were alive and alert, as if with protest. Fisher glanced at
him, and then stopped and said:

"Excuse me. Weren't you with the late squire, Mr. Hawker?"

"Yes, sir," said the man, gravely.  "Usher is my name. What can I do
for you?"

"Only take me into Sir Francis Verner," replied the visitor.

Sir Francis Verner was sitting in an easy chair beside a small table
in a large room hung with tapestries. On the table were a small
flask and glass, with the green glimmer of a liqueur and a cup of
black coffee. He was clad in a quiet gray suit with a moderately
harmonious purple tie; but Fisher saw something about the turn of
his fair mustache and the lie of his flat hair--it suddenly revealed
that his name was Franz Werner.

"You are Mr. Horne Fisher," he said.  "Won't you sit down?"

"No, thank you," replied Fisher.  "I fear this is not a friendly
occasion, and I shall remain standing. Possibly you know that I am
already standing--standing for Parliament, in fact--"

"I am aware we are political opponents," replied Verner, raising his
eyebrows. "But I think it would be better if we fought in a sporting
spirit; in a spirit of English fair play."

"Much better," assented Fisher.  "It would be much better if you
were English and very much better if you had ever played fair. But
what I've come to say can be said very shortly. I don't quite know
how we stand with the law about that old Hawker story, but my chief
object is to prevent England being entirely ruled by people like
you. So whatever the law would say, I will say no more if you will
retire from the election at once."

"You are evidently a lunatic," said Verner.

"My psychology may be a little abnormal," replied Horne Fisher, in a
rather hazy manner. "I am subject to dreams, especially day-dreams.
Sometimes what is happening to me grows vivid in a curious double
way, as if it had happened before. Have you ever had that mystical
feeling that things have happened before?"

"I hope you are a harmless lunatic," said Verner.

But Fisher was still staring in an absent fashion at the golden
gigantic figures and traceries of brown and red in the tapestries on
the walls; then he looked again at Verner and resumed: "I have a
feeling that this interview has happened before, here in this
tapestried room, and we are two ghosts revisiting a haunted chamber.
But it was Squire Hawker who sat where you sit and it was you who
stood where I stand." He paused a moment and then added, with
simplicity, "I suppose I am a blackmailer, too."

"If you are," said Sir Francis, "I promise you you shall go to
jail." But his face had a shade on it that looked like the
reflection of the green wine gleaming on the table. Horne Fisher
regarded him steadily and answered, quietly enough:

"Blackmailers do not always go to jail. Sometimes they go to
Parliament. But, though Parliament is rotten enough already, you
shall not go there if I can help it. I am not so criminal as you
were in bargaining with crime. You made a squire give up his country
seat. I only ask you to give up your Parliamentary seat."

Sir Francis Verner sprang to his feet and looked about for one of
the bell ropes of the old-fashioned, curtained room.

"Where is Usher?" he cried, with a livid face.

"And who is Usher?" said Fisher, softly.  "I wonder how much Usher
knows of the truth."

Verner's hand fell from the bell rope and, after standing for a
moment with rolling eyes, he strode abruptly from the room. Fisher
went but by the other door, by which he had entered, and, seeing no
sign of Usher, let himself out and betook himself again toward the
town.

That night he put an electric torch in his pocket and set out alone
in the darkness to add the last links to his argument. There was
much that he did not know yet; but he thought he knew where he could
find the knowledge. The night closed dark and stormy and the black
gap in the wall looked blacker than ever; the wood seemed to have
grown thicker and darker in a day. If the deserted lake with its
black woods and gray urns and images looked desolate even by
daylight, under the night and the growing storm it seemed still more
like the pool of Acheron in the land of lost souls. As he stepped
carefully along the jetty stones he seemed to be traveling farther
and farther into the abyss of night, and to have left behind him the
last points from which it would be possible to signal to the land of
the living. The lake seemed to have grown larger than a sea, but a
sea of black and slimy waters that slept with abominable serenity,
as if they had washed out the world. There was so much of this
nightmare sense of extension and expansion that he was strangely
surprised to come to his desert island so soon. But he knew it for a
place of inhuman silence and solitude; and he felt as if he had been
walking for years.

Nerving himself to a more normal mood, he paused under one of the
dark dragon trees that branched out above him, and, taking out his
torch, turned in the direction of the door at the back of the
temple. It was unbolted as before, and the thought stirred faintly
in him that it was slightly open, though only by a crack. The more
he thought of it, however, the more certain he grew that this was
but one of the common illusions of light coming from a different
angle. He studied in a more scientific spirit the details of the
door, with its rusty bolts and hinges, when he became conscious of
something very near him--indeed, nearly above his head. Something
was dangling from the tree that was not a broken branch. For some
seconds he stood as still as a stone, and as cold. What he saw above
him were the legs of a man hanging, presumably a dead man hanged.
But the next moment he knew better. The man was literally alive and
kicking; and an instant after he had dropped to the ground and
turned on the intruder. Simultaneously three or four other trees
seemed to come to life in the same fashion. Five or six other
figures had fallen on their feet from these unnatural nests. It was
as if the place were an island of monkeys. But a moment after they
had made a stampede toward him, and when they laid their hands on
him he knew that they were men.

With the electric torch in his hand he struck the foremost of them
so furiously in the face that the man stumbled and rolled over on
the slimy grass; but the torch was broken and extinguished, leaving
everything in a denser obscurity. He flung another man flat against
the temple wall, so that he slid to the ground; but a third and
fourth carried Fisher off his feet and began to bear him,
struggling, toward the doorway. Even in the bewilderment of the
battle he was conscious that the door was standing open. Somebody
was summoning the roughs from inside.

The moment they were within they hurled him upon a sort of bench or
bed with violence, but no damage; for the settee, or whatever it
was, seemed to be comfortably cushioned for his reception. Their
violence had in it a great element of haste, and before he could
rise they had all rushed for the door to escape. Whatever bandits
they were that infested this desert island, they were obviously
uneasy about their job and very anxious to be quit of it. He had the
flying fancy that regular criminals would hardly be in such a panic.
The next moment the great door crashed to and he could hear the
bolts shriek as they shot into their place, and the feet of the
retreating men scampering and stumbling along the causeway. But
rapidly as it happened, it did not happen before Fisher had done
something that he wanted to do. Unable to rise from his sprawling
attitude in that flash of time, he had shot out one of his long legs
and hooked it round the ankle of the last man disappearing through
the door. The man swayed and toppled over inside the prison chamber,
and the door closed between him and his fleeing companions. Clearly
they were in too much haste to realize that they had left one of
their company behind.

The man sprang to his feet again and hammered and kicked furiously
at the door. Fisher's sense of humor began to recover from the
struggle and he sat up on his sofa with something of his native
nonchalance. But as he listened to the captive captor beating on the
door of the prison, a new and curious reflection came to him.

The natural course for a man thus wishing to attract his friends'
attention would be to call out, to shout as well as kick. This man
was making as much noise as he could with his feet and hands, but
not a sound came from his throat. Why couldn't he speak? At first he
thought the man might be gagged, which was manifestly absurd. Then
his fancy fell back on the ugly idea that the man was dumb. He
hardly knew why it was so ugly an idea, but it affected his
imagination in a dark and disproportionate fashion. There seemed to
be something creepy about the idea of being left in a dark room with
a deaf mute. It was almost as if such a defect were a deformity. It
was almost as if it went with other and worse deformities. It was as
if the shape he could not trace in the darkness were some shape that
should not see the sun.

Then he had a flash of sanity and also of insight. The explanation
was very simple, but rather interesting. Obviously the man did not
use his voice because he did not wish his voice to be recognized. He
hoped to escape from that dark place before Fisher found out who he
was. And who was he? One thing at least was clear. He was one or
other of the four or five men with whom Fisher had already talked in
these parts, and in the development of that strange story.

"Now I wonder who you are," he said, aloud, with all his old lazy
urbanity. "I suppose it's no use trying to throttle you in order to
find out; it would be displeasing to pass the night with a corpse.
Besides I might be the corpse. I've got no matches and I've smashed
my torch, so I can only speculate. Who could you be, now? Let us
think."

The man thus genially addressed had desisted from drumming on the
door and retreated sullenly into a corner as Fisher continued to
address him in a flowing monologue.

"Probably you are the poacher who says he isn't a poacher. He says
he's a landed proprietor; but he will permit me to inform him that,
whatever he is, he's a fool. What hope can there ever be of a free
peasantry in England if the peasants themselves are such snobs as to
want to be gentlemen? How can we make a democracy with no democrats?
As it is, you want to be a landlord and so you consent to be a
criminal. And in that, you know, you are rather like somebody else.
And, now I think of it, perhaps you are somebody else."

There was a silence broken by breathing from the corner and the
murmur of the rising storm, that came in through the small grating
above the man's head. Horne Fisher continued:

"Are you only a servant, perhaps, that rather sinister old servant
who was butler to Hawker and Verner? If so, you are certainly the
only link between the two periods. But if so, why do you degrade
yourself to serve this dirty foreigner, when you at least saw the
last of a genuine national gentry? People like you are generally at
least patriotic. Doesn't England mean anything to you, Mr. Usher?
All of which eloquence is possibly wasted, as perhaps you are not
Mr. Usher.

"More likely you are Verner himself; and it's no good wasting
eloquence to make you ashamed of yourself. Nor is it any good to
curse you for corrupting England; nor are you the right person to
curse. It is the English who deserve to be cursed, and are cursed,
because they allowed such vermin to crawl into the high places of
their heroes and their kings. I won't dwell on the idea that you're
Verner, or the throttling might begin, after all. Is there anyone
else you could be? Surely you're not some servant of the other rival
organization. I can't believe you're Gryce, the agent; and yet Gryce
had a spark of the fanatic in his eye, too; and men will do
extraordinary things in these paltry feuds of politics. Or if not
the servant, is it the . . . No, I can't believe it . . . not the
red blood of manhood and liberty . . . not the democratic ideal . . ."

He sprang up in excitement, and at the same moment a growl of
thunder came through the grating beyond. The storm had broken, and
with it a new light broke on his mind. There was something else that
might happen in a moment.

"Do you know what that means?" he cried.  "It means that God himself
may hold a candle to show me your infernal face."

Then next moment came a crash of thunder; but before the thunder a
white light had filled the whole room for a single split second.

Fisher had seen two things in front of him. One was the
black-and-white pattern of the iron grating against the sky; the
other was the face in the corner. It was the face of his brother.

Nothing came from Horne Fisher's lips except a Christian name, which
was followed by a silence more dreadful than the dark. At last the
other figure stirred and sprang up, and the voice of Harry Fisher
was heard for the first time in that horrible room.

"You've seen me, I suppose," he said, "and we may as well have a
light now. You could have turned it on at any time, if you'd found
the switch."

He pressed a button in the wall and all the details of that room
sprang into something stronger than daylight. Indeed, the details
were so unexpected that for a moment they turned the captive's
rocking mind from the last personal revelation. The room, so far
from being a dungeon cell, was more like a drawing-room, even a
lady's drawing-room, except for some boxes of cigars and bottles of
wine that were stacked with books and magazines on a side table. A
second glance showed him that the more masculine fittings were quite
recent, and that the more feminine background was quite old. His eye
caught a strip of faded tapestry, which startled him into speech, to
the momentary oblivion of bigger matters.

"This place was furnished from the great house," he said.

"Yes," replied the other, "and I think you know why."

"I think I do," said Horne Fisher, "and before I go on to more
extraordinary things I will, say what I think. Squire Hawker played
both the bigamist and the bandit. His first wife was not dead when
he married the Jewess; she was imprisoned on this island. She bore
him a child here, who now haunts his birthplace under the name of
Long Adam. A bankruptcy company promoter named Werner discovered the
secret and blackmailed the squire into surrendering the estate.
That's all quite clear and very easy. And now let me go on to
something more difficult. And that is for you to explain what the
devil you are doing kidnaping your born brother."

After a pause Henry Fisher answered:

"I suppose you didn't expect to see me," he said.  "But, after all,
what could you expect?"'

"I'm afraid I don't follow," said Horne Fisher.

"I mean what else could you expect, after making such a muck of it?"
said his brother, sulkily. "We all thought you were so clever. How
could we know you were going to be--well, really, such a rotten
failure?"

"This is rather curious," said the candidate, frowning.  "Without
vanity, I was not under the impression that my candidature was a
failure. All the big meetings were successful and crowds of people
have promised me votes."

"I should jolly well think they had," said Henry, grimly. "You've
made a landslide with your confounded acres and a cow, and Verner
can hardly get a vote anywhere. Oh, it's too rotten for anything!"

"What on earth do you mean?"

"Why, you lunatic," cried Henry, in tones of ringing sincerity, "you
don't suppose you were meant to _win_ the seat, did you? Oh, it's
too childish! I tell you Verner's got to get in. Of course he's got
to get in. He's to have the Exchequer next session, and there's the
Egyptian loan and Lord knows what else. We only wanted you to split
the Reform vote because accidents might happen after Hughes had made
a score at Barkington."

"I see," said Fisher, "and you, I think, are a pillar and ornament
of the Reform party. As you say, I am not clever."

The appeal to party loyalty fell on deaf ears; for the pillar of
Reform was brooding on other things. At last he said, in a more
troubled voice:

"I didn't want you to catch me; I knew it would be a shock. But I
tell you what, you never would have caught me if I hadn't come here
myself, to see they didn't ill treat you and to make sure everything
was as comfortable as it could be." There was even a sort of break
in his voice as he added, "I got those cigars because I knew you
liked them."

Emotions are queer things, and the idiocy of this concession
suddenly softened Horne Fisher like an unfathomable pathos.

"Never mind, old chap," he said; "we'll say no more about it. I'll
admit that you're really as kind-hearted and affectionate a
scoundrel and hypocrite as ever sold himself to ruin his country.
There, I can't say handsomer than that. Thank you for the cigars,
old man. I'll have one if you don't mind."

By the time that Horne Fisher had ended his telling of this story to
Harold March they had come out into one of the public parks and
taken a seat on a rise of ground overlooking wide green spaces under
a blue and empty sky; and there was something incongruous in the
words with which the narration ended.

"I have been in that room ever since," said Horne Fisher.  "I am in
it now. I won the election, but I never went to the House. My life
has been a life in that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of
books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and
information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world
outside. I shall probably die there." And he smiled as he looked
across the vast green park to the gray horizon.



VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE

It was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a
pattern of flower beds and a strip of blue sea, that Horne Fisher
and Harold March had their final explanation, which might be called
an explosion.

Harold March had come to the little table and sat down at it with a
subdued excitement smoldering in his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue
eyes. In the newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table
there was enough to explain some if not all of his emotion. Public
affairs in every department had reached a crisis. The government
which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used
to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused of blunders and
even of financial abuses. Some said that the experiment of
attempting to establish a peasantry in the west of England, on the
lines of an early fancy of Horne Fisher's, had resulted in nothing
but dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors. There had
been particular complaints of the ill treatment of harmless
foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new
scientific works constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power
which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful
allies, was inclined to take the matter up in the interests of its
exiled subjects; and there had been wild talk about ambassadors and
ultimatums. But something much more serious, in its personal
interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his
friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.

Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there was a certain unusual
liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary
image of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed
gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely
bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a
pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be
certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of
sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that
is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against
the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole,
and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with something
almost like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds gathering
over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried
his own sunshine.

"Look here," said Harold March, abruptly, "you've been no end of a
friend to me, and I never was so proud of a friendship before; but
there's something I must get off my chest. The more I found out, the
less I understood how you could stand it. And I tell you I'm going
to stand it no longer."

Horne Fisher gazed across at him gravely and attentively, but rather
as if he were a long way off.

"You know I always liked you," said Fisher, quietly, "but I also
respect you, which is not always the same thing. You may possibly
guess that I like a good many people I don't respect. Perhaps it is
my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault. But you are very different, and
I promise you this: that I will never try to keep you as somebody to
be liked, at the price of your not being respected."

"I know you are magnanimous," said March after a silence, "and yet
you tolerate and perpetuate everything that is mean." Then after
another silence he added: "Do you remember when we first met, when
you were fishing in that brook in the affair of the target? And do
you remember you said that, after all, it might do no harm if I
could blow the whole tangle of this society to hell with dynamite."

"Yes, and what of that?" asked Fisher.

"Only that I'm going to blow it to hell with dynamite," said Harold
March, "and I think it right to give you fair warning. For a long
time I didn't believe things were as bad as you said they were. But
I never felt as if I could have bottled up what you knew, supposing
you really knew it. Well, the long and the short of it is that I've
got a conscience; and now, at last, I've also got a chance. I've
been put in charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand, and
we're going to open a cannonade on corruption."

"That will be--Attwood, I suppose," said Fisher, reflectively.
"Timber merchant. Knows a lot about China."

"He knows a lot about England," said March, doggedly, "and now I
know it, too, we're not going to hush it up any longer. The people
of this country have a right to know how they're ruled--or, rather,
ruined. The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money lenders and has
to do as he is told; otherwise he's bankrupt, and a bad sort of
bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it. The
Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it,
too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs. When you
say that plainly about a man who may send thousands of Englishmen to
die for nothing, you're called personal. If a poor engine driver
gets drunk and sends thirty or forty people to death, nobody
complains of the exposure being personal. The engine driver is not a
person."

"I quite agree with you," said Fisher, calmly.  "You are perfectly
right."

"If you agree with us, why the devil don't you act with us?"
demanded his friend. "If you think it's right, why don't you do
what's right? It's awful to think of a man of your abilities simply
blocking the road to reform."

"We have often talked about that," replied Fisher, with the same
composure. "The Prime Minister is my father's friend. The Foreign
Minister married my sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my
first cousin. I mention the genealogy in some detail just now for a
particular reason. The truth is I have a curious kind of
cheerfulness at the moment. It isn't altogether the sun and the sea,
sir. I am enjoying an emotion that is entirely new to me; a happy
sensation I never remember having had before."

"What the devil do you mean?"

"I am feeling proud of my family," said Horne Fisher.

Harold March stared at him with round blue eyes, and seemed too much
mystified even to ask a question. Fisher leaned back in his chair in
his lazy fashion, and smiled as he continued.

"Look here, my dear fellow. Let me ask a question in turn. You
imply that I have always known these things about my unfortunate
kinsmen. So I have. Do you suppose that Attwood hasn't always known
them? Do you suppose he hasn't always known you as an honest man who
would say these things when he got a chance? Why does Attwood
unmuzzle you like a dog at this moment, after all these years? I
know why he does; I know a good many things, far too many things.
And therefore, as I have the honor to remark, I am proud of my
family at last."

"But why?" repeated March, rather feebly.

"I am proud of the Chancellor because he gambled and the Foreign
Minister because he drank and the Prime Minister because he took a
commission on a contract," said Fisher, firmly. "I am proud of them
because they did these things, and can be denounced for them, and
know they can be denounced for them, and are _standing firm for all
that_. I take off my hat to them because they are defying blackmail,
and refusing to smash their country to save themselves. I salute
them as if they were going to die on the battlefield."

After a pause he continued:  "And it will be a battlefield, too, and
not a metaphorical one. We have yielded to foreign financiers so
long that now it is war or ruin, Even the people, even the country
people, are beginning to suspect that they are being ruined. That is
the meaning of the regrettable incidents in the newspapers."

"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals?" asked March.

"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals," replied Fisher, "is that
the financiers have introduced Chinese labor into this country with
the deliberate intention of reducing workmen and peasants to
starvation. Our unhappy politicians have made concession after
concession; and now they are asking concessions which amount to our
ordering a massacre of our own poor. If we do not fight now we shall
never fight again. They will have put England in an economic
position of starving in a week. But we are going to fight now; I
shouldn't wonder if there were an ultimatum in a week and an
invasion in a fortnight. All the past corruption and cowardice is
hampering us, of course; the West country is pretty stormy and
doubtful even in a military sense; and the Irish regiments there,
that are supposed to support us by the new treaty, are pretty well
in mutiny; for, of course, this infernal coolie capitalism is being
pushed in Ireland, too. But it's to stop now; and if the government
message of reassurance gets through to them in time, they may turn
up after all by the time the enemy lands. For my poor old gang is
going to stand to its guns at last. Of course it's only natural that
when they have been whitewashed for half a century as paragons,
their sins should come back on them at the very moment when they are
behaving like men for the first time in their lives. Well, I tell
you, March, I know them inside out; and I know they are behaving
like heroes. Every man of them ought to have a statue, and on the
pedestal words like those of the noblest ruffian of the Revolution:
'Que mon nom soit fletri; que la France soit libre.'"

"Good God!" cried March, "shall we never get to the bottom of your
mines and countermines?"

After a silence Fisher answered in a lower voice, looking his friend
in the eyes.

"Did you think there was nothing but evil at the bottom of them?" he
asked, gently. "Did you think I had found nothing but filth in the
deep seas into which fate has thrown me? Believe me, you never know
the best about men till you know the worst about them. It does not
dispose of their strange human souls to know that they were
exhibited to the world as impossibly impeccable wax works, who never
looked after a woman or knew the meaning of a bribe. Even in a
palace, life can be lived well; and even in a Parliament, life can
be lived with occasional efforts to live it well. I tell you it is
as true of these rich fools and rascals as it is true of every poor
footpad and pickpocket; that only God knows how good they have tried
to be. God alone knows what the conscience can survive, or how a man
who has lost his honor will still try to save his soul."

There was another silence, and March sat staring at the table and
Fisher at the sea. Then Fisher suddenly sprang to his feet and
caught up his hat and stick with all his new alertness and even
pugnacity.

"Look here, old fellow," he cried, "let us make a bargain. Before
you open your campaign for Attwood come down and stay with us for
one week, to hear what we're really doing. I mean with the Faithful
Few, formerly known as the Old Gang, occasionally to be described as
the Low Lot. There are really only five of us that are quite fixed,
and organizing the national defense; and we're living like a
garrison in a sort of broken-down hotel in Kent. Come and see what
we're really doing and what there is to be done, and do us justice.
And after that, with unalterable love and affection for you, publish
and be damned."

Thus it came about that in the last week before war, when events
moved most rapidly, Harold March found himself one of a sort of
small house party of the people he was proposing to denounce. They
were living simply enough, for people with their tastes, in an old
brown-brick inn faced with ivy and surrounded by rather dismal
gardens. At the back of the building the garden ran up very steeply
to a road along the ridge above; and a zigzag path scaled the slope
in sharp angles, turning to and fro amid evergreens so somber that
they might rather be called everblack. Here and there up the slope
were statues having all the cold monstrosity of such minor ornaments
of the eighteenth century; and a whole row of them ran as on a
terrace along the last bank at the bottom, opposite the back door.
This detail fixed itself first in March's mind merely because it
figured in the first conversation he had with one of the cabinet
ministers.

The cabinet ministers were rather older than he had expected to find
them. The Prime Minister no longer looked like a boy, though he
still looked a little like a baby. But it was one of those old and
venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair. Everything about
him was soft, to his speech and his way of walking; but over and
above that his chief function seemed to be sleep. People left alone
with him got so used to his eyes being closed that they were almost
startled when they realized in the stillness that the eyes were wide
open, and even watching. One thing at least would always make the
old gentleman open his eyes. The one thing he really cared for in
this world was his hobby of armored weapons, especially Eastern
weapons, and he would talk for hours about Damascus blades and Arab
swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
was a short, dark, sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very
sullen manner, which contrasted with the gorgeous flower in his
buttonhole and his festive trick of being always slightly
overdressed. It was something of a euphemism to call him a
well-known man about town. There was perhaps more mystery in the
question of how a man who lived for pleasure seemed to get so little
pleasure out of it. Sir David Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the
only one of them who was a self-made man, and the only one of them
who looked like an aristocrat. He was tall and thin and very
handsome, with a grizzled beard; his gray hair was very curly, and
even rose in front in two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the
fanciful to tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to
stir sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows over his
rather haggard eyes. For the Foreign Secretary made no secret of his
somewhat nervous condition, whatever might be the cause of it.

"Do you know that mood when one could scream because a mat is
crooked?" he said to March, as they walked up and down in the back
garden below the line of dingy statues. "Women get into it when
they've worked too hard; and I've been working pretty hard lately,
of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat a little
crooked--habit of looking like a gay dog. Sometime I swear I'll
knock it off. That statue of Britannia over there isn't quite
straight; it sticks forward a bit as if the lady were going to
topple over. The damned thing is that it doesn't topple over and be
done with it. See, it's clamped with an iron prop. Don't be
surprised if I get up in the middle of the night to hike it down."

They paced the path for a few moments in silence and then he
continued. "It's odd those little things seem specially big when
there are bigger things to worry about. We'd better go in and do
some work."

Horne Fisher evidently allowed for all the neurotic possibilities of
Archer and the dissipated habits of Herries; and whatever his faith
in their present firmness, did not unduly tax their time and
attention, even in the case of the Prime Minister. He had got the
consent of the latter finally to the committing of the important
documents, with the orders to the Western armies, to the care of a
less conspicuous and more solid person--an uncle of his named Horne
Hewitt, a rather colorless country squire who had been a good
soldier, and was the military adviser of the committee. He was
charged with expediting the government pledge, along with the
concerted military plans, to the half-mutinous command in the west;
and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not fall into
the hands of the enemy, who might appear at any moment from the
east. Over and above this military official, the only other person
present was a police official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a
police surgeon and now a distinguished detective, sent to be a
bodyguard to the group. He was a square-faced man with big
spectacles and a grimace that expressed the intention of keeping his
mouth shut. Nobody else shared their captivity except the hotel
proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two
of his servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord
James Herries. He was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked
much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master, having
chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but fine
features. He was probably the one really efficient person in the
house.

After about four days of the informal council, March had come to
feel a sort of grotesque sublimity about these dubious figures,
defiant in the twilight of danger, as if they were hunchbacks and
cripples left alone to defend a town. All were working hard; and he
himself looked up from writing a page of memoranda in a private room
to see Horne Fisher standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for
travel. He fancied that Fisher looked a little pale; and after a
moment that gentleman shut the door behind him and said, quietly:

"Well, the worst has happened. Or nearly the worst."

"The enemy has landed," cried March, and sprang erect out of his
chair.

"Oh, I knew the enemy would land," said Fisher, with composure.
"Yes, he's landed; but that's not the worst that could happen. The
worst is that there's a leak of some sort, even from this fortress
of ours. It's been a bit of a shock to me, I can tell you; though I
suppose it's illogical. After all, I was full of admiration at
finding three honest men in politics. I ought not to be full of
astonishment if I find only two."

He ruminated a moment and then said, in such a fashion that March
could hardly tell if he were changing the subject or no:

"It's hard at first to believe that a fellow like Herries, who had
pickled himself in vice like vinegar, can have any scruple left. But
about that I've noticed a curious thing. Patriotism is not the first
virtue. Patriotism rots into Prussianism when you pretend it is the
first virtue. But patriotism is sometimes the last virtue. A man
will swindle or seduce who will not sell his country. But who
knows?"

"But what is to be done?" cried March, indignantly.

"My uncle has the papers safe enough," replied Fisher, "and is
sending them west to-night; but somebody is trying to get at them
from outside, I fear with the assistance of somebody inside. All
I can do at present is to try to head off the man outside; and I
must get away now and do it. I shall be back in about twenty-four
hours. While I'm away I want you to keep an eye on these people and
find out what you can. Au revoir." He vanished down the stairs; and
from the window March could see him mount a motor cycle and trail
away toward the neighboring town.

On the following morning, March was sitting in the window seat of
the old inn parlor, which was oak-paneled and ordinarily rather
dark; but on that occasion it was full of the white light of a
curiously clear morning--the moon had shone brilliantly for the
last two or three nights. He was himself somewhat in shadow in the
corner of the window seat; and Lord James Herries, coming in hastily
from the garden behind, did not see him. Lord James clutched the
back of a chair, as if to steady himself, and, sitting down abruptly
at the table, littered with the last meal, poured himself out a
tumbler of brandy and drank it. He sat with his back to March, but
his yellow face appeared in a round mirror beyond and the tinge of it
was like that of some horrible malady. As March moved he started
violently and faced round.

"My God!" he cried, "have you seen what's outside?"

"Outside?" repeated the other, glancing over his shoulder at the
garden.

"Oh, go and look for yourself," cried Herries in a sort of fury.
"Hewitt's murdered and his papers stolen, that's all."

He turned his back again and sat down with a thud; his square
shoulders were shaking. Harold March darted out of the doorway into
the back garden with its steep slope of statues.

The first thing he saw was Doctor Prince, the detective, peering
through his spectacles at something on the ground; the second was
the thing he was peering at. Even after the sensational news he had
heard inside, the sight was something of a sensation.

The monstrous stone image of Britannia was lying prone and face
downward on the garden path; and there stuck out at random from
underneath it, like the legs of a smashed fly, an arm clad in a
white shirt sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair of
the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne Fisher's
unfortunate uncle. There were pools of blood and the limbs were
quite stiff in death.

"Couldn't this have been an accident?" said March, finding words at
last.

"Look for yourself, I say," repeated the harsh voice of Herries, who
had followed him with restless movements out of the door. "The
papers are gone, I tell you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse
and cut the papers out of the inner pocket. There's the coat over
there on the bank, with the great slash in it."

"But wait a minute," said the detective, Prince, quietly. "In that
case there seems to be something of a mystery. A murderer might
somehow have managed to throw the statue down on him, as he seems to
have done. But I bet he couldn't easily have lifted it up again.
I've tried; and I'm sure it would want three men at least. Yet we
must suppose, on that theory, that the murderer first knocked him
down as he walked past, using the statue as a stone club, then
lifted it up again, took him out and deprived him of his coat, then
put him back again in the posture of death and neatly replaced the
statue. I tell you it's physically impossible. And how else could he
have unclothed a man covered with that stone monument? It's worse
than the conjurer's trick, when a man shuffles a coat off with his
wrists tied."

"Could he have thrown down the statue after he'd stripped the
corpse?" asked March.

"And why?" asked Prince, sharply.  "If he'd killed his man and got
his papers, he'd be away like the wind. He wouldn't potter about in
a garden excavating the pedestals of statues. Besides--Hullo, who's
that up there?"

High on the ridge above them, drawn in dark thin lines against the
sky, was a figure looking so long and lean as to be almost spidery.
The dark silhouette of the head showed two small tufts like horns;
and they could almost have sworn that the horns moved.

"Archer!" shouted Herries, with sudden passion, and called to him
with curses to come down. The figure drew back at the first cry,
with an agitated movement so abrupt as almost to be called an antic.
The next moment the man seemed to reconsider and collect himself,
and began to come down the zigzag garden path, but with obvious
reluctance, his feet falling in slower and slower rhythm. Through
March's mind were throbbing the phrases that this man himself had
used, about going mad in the middle of the night and wrecking the
stone figure. Just so, he could fancy, the maniac who had done such
a thing might climb the crest of the hill, in that feverish dancing
fashion, and look down on the wreck he had made. But the wreck he
had made here was not only a wreck of stone.

When the man emerged at last on to the garden path, with the full
light on his face and figure, he was walking slowly indeed, but
easily, and with no appearance of fear.

"This is a terrible thing," he said.  "I saw it from above; I was
taking a stroll along the ridge."

"Do you mean that you saw the murder?" demanded March, "or the
accident? I mean did you see the statue fall?"

"No," said Archer, "I mean I saw the statue fallen."

Prince seemed to be paying but little attention; his eye was riveted
on an object lying on the path a yard or two from the corpse. It
seemed to be a rusty iron bar bent crooked at one end.

"One thing I don't understand," he said, "is all this blood. The
poor fellow's skull isn't smashed; most likely his neck is broken;
but blood seems to have spouted as if all his arteries were severed.
I was wondering if some other instrument . . . that iron thing, for
instance; but I don't see that even that is sharp enough. I suppose
nobody knows what it is."

"I know what it is," said Archer in his deep but somewhat shaky
voice. "I've seen it in my nightmares. It was the iron clamp or prop
on the pedestal, stuck on to keep the wretched image upright when it
began to wobble, I suppose. Anyhow, it was always stuck in the
stonework there; and I suppose it came out when the thing
collapsed."

Doctor Prince nodded, but he continued to look down at the pools of
blood and the bar of iron.

"I'm certain there's something more underneath all this," he said at
last. "Perhaps something more underneath the statue. I have a huge
sort of hunch that there is. We are four men now and between us we
can lift that great tombstone there."

They all bent their strength to the business; there was a silence
save for heavy breathing; and then, after an instant of the
tottering and staggering of eight legs, the great carven column of
rock was rolled away, and the body lying in its shirt and trousers
was fully revealed. The spectacles of Doctor Prince seemed almost to
enlarge with a restrained radiance like great eyes; for other things
were revealed also. One was that the unfortunate Hewitt had a deep
gash across the jugular, which the triumphant doctor instantly
identified as having been made with a sharp steel edge like a razor.
The other was that immediately under the bank lay littered three
shining scraps of steel, each nearly a foot long, one pointed and
another fitted into a gorgeously jeweled hilt or handle. It was
evidently a sort of long Oriental knife, long enough to be called a
sword, but with a curious wavy edge; and there was a touch or two of
blood on the point.

"I should have expected more blood, hardly on the point," observed
Doctor Prince, thoughtfully, "but this is certainly the instrument.
The slash was certainly made with a weapon shaped like this, and
probably the slashing of the pocket as well. I suppose the brute
threw in the statue, by way of giving him a public funeral."

March did not answer; he was mesmerized by the strange stones that
glittered on the strange sword hilt; and their possible significance
was broadening upon him like a dreadful dawn. It was a curious
Asiatic weapon. He knew what name was connected in his memory with
curious Asiatic weapons. Lord James spoke his secret thought for
him, and yet it startled him like an irrelevance.

"Where is the Prime Minister?"  Herries had cried, suddenly, and
somehow like the bark of a dog at some discovery.

Doctor Prince turned on him his goggles and his grim face; and it
was grimmer than ever.

"I cannot find him anywhere," he said.  "I looked for him at once,
as soon as I found the papers were gone. That servant of yours,
Campbell, made a most efficient search, but there are no traces."

There was a long silence, at the end of which Herries uttered
another cry, but upon an entirely new note.

"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he said, "for here he
comes, along with your friend Fisher. They look as if they'd been
for a little walking tour."

The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of Fisher,
splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch like that of
a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and of the great and
gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and was interested in
Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond this bodily recognition,
March could make neither head nor tail of their presence or
demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch of nonsense to the
whole nightmare. The more closely he watched them, as they stood
listening to the revelations of the detective, the more puzzled he
was by their attitude--Fisher seemed grieved by the death of his
uncle, but hardly shocked at it; the older man seemed almost openly
thinking about something else, and neither had anything to suggest
about a further pursuit of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite
of the prodigious importance of the documents he had stolen. When
the detective had gone off to busy himself with that department of
the business, to telephone and write his report, when Herries had
gone back, probably to the brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had
blandly sauntered away toward a comfortable armchair in another part
of the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly to Harold March.

"My friend," he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there is
no one else I can trust so much as that. The journey will take us
most of the day, and the chief business cannot be done till
nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly on the way. But I
want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."

March and Fisher both had motor bicycles; and the first half of
their day's journey consisted in coasting eastward amid the
unconversational noise of those uncomfortable engines. But when they
came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern Kent, Fisher
stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy stream;
and they sat down to eat and to drink and to speak almost for the
first time. It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were singing in the
wood behind, and the sun shone full on their ale bench and table;
but the face of Fisher in the strong sunlight had a gravity never
seen on it before.

"Before we go any farther," he said, "there is something you ought
to know. You and I have seen some mysterious things and got to the
bottom of them before now; and it's only right that you should get
to the bottom of this one. But in dealing with the death of my uncle
I must begin at the other end from where our old detective yarns
began. I will give you the steps of deduction presently, if you want
to listen to them; but I did not reach the truth of this by steps of
deduction. I will first of all tell you the truth itself, because I
knew the truth from the first. The other cases I approached from the
outside, but in this case I was inside. I myself was the very core
and center of everything."

Something in the speaker's pendent eyelids and grave gray eyes
suddenly shook March to his foundations; and he cried, distractedly,
"I don't understand!" as men do when they fear that they do
understand. There was no sound for a space but the happy chatter of
the birds, and then Horne Fisher said, calmly:

"It was I who killed my uncle. If you particularly want more, it
was I who stole the state papers from him."

"Fisher!" cried his friend in a strangled voice.

"Let me tell you the whole thing before we part," continued the
other, "and let me put it, for the sake of clearness, as we used to
put our old problems. Now there are two things that are puzzling
people about that problem, aren't there? The first is how the
murderer managed to slip off the dead man's coat, when he was
already pinned to the ground with that stone incubus. The other,
which is much smaller and less puzzling, is the fact of the sword
that cut his throat being slightly stained at the point, instead of
a good deal more stained at the edge. Well, I can dispose of the
first question easily. Horne Hewitt took off his own coat before he
was killed. I might say he took off his coat to be killed."

"Do you call that an explanation?" exclaimed March.  "The words seem
more meaningless, than the facts."

"Well, let us go on to the other facts," continued Fisher, equably.
"The reason that particular sword is not stained at the edge with
Hewitt's blood is that it was not used to kill Hewitt."

"But the doctor," protested March, "declared distinctly that the
wound was made by that particular sword."

"I beg your pardon," replied Fisher.  "He did not declare that it
was made by that particular sword. He declared it was made by a
sword of that particular pattern."

"But it was quite a queer and exceptional pattern," argued March;
"surely it is far too fantastic a coincidence to imagine--"

"It was a fantastic coincidence," reflected Horne Fisher. "It's
extraordinary what coincidences do sometimes occur. By the oddest
chance in the world, by one chance in a million, it so happened that
another sword of exactly the same shape was in the same garden at
the same time. It may be partly explained, by the fact that I
brought them both into the garden myself . . . come, my dear fellow;
surely you can see now what it means. Put those two things together;
there were two duplicate swords and he took off his coat for
himself. It may assist your speculations to recall the fact that I
am not exactly an assassin."

"A duel!" exclaimed March, recovering himself.  "Of course I ought
to have thought of that. But who was the spy who stole the papers?"

"My uncle was the spy who stole the papers," replied Fisher, "or who
tried to steal the papers when I stopped him--in the only way I
could. The papers, that should have gone west to reassure our
friends and give them the plans for repelling the invasion, would in
a few hours have been in the hands of the invader. What could I do?
To have denounced one of our friends at this moment would have been
to play into the hands of your friend Attwood, and all the party of
panic and slavery. Besides, it may be that a man over forty has a
subconscious desire to die as he has lived, and that I wanted, in a
sense, to carry my secrets to the grave. Perhaps a hobby hardens
with age; and my hobby has been silence. Perhaps I feel that I have
killed my mother's brother, but I have saved my mother's name.
Anyhow, I chose a time when I knew you were all asleep, and he was
walking alone in the garden. I saw all the stone statues standing in
the moonlight; and I myself was like one of those stone statues
walking. In a voice that was not my own, I told him of his treason
and demanded the papers; and when he refused, I forced him to take
one of the two swords. The swords were among some specimens sent
down here for the Prime Minister's inspection; he is a collector,
you know; they were the only equal weapons I could find. To cut an
ugly tale short, we fought there on the path in front of the
Britannia statue; he was a man of great strength, but I had somewhat
the advantage in skill. His sword grazed my forehead almost at the
moment when mine sank into the joint in his neck. He fell against
the statue, like Caesar against Pompey's, hanging on to the iron
rail; his sword was already broken. When I saw the blood from that
deadly wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my sword and
ran as if to lift him up. As I bent toward him something happened
too quick for me to follow. I do not know whether the iron bar was
rotted with rust and came away in his hand, or whether he rent it
out of the rock with his apelike strength; but the thing was in his
hand, and with his dying energies he swung it over my head, as I
knelt there unarmed beside him. I looked up wildly to avoid the
blow, and saw above us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward
like the figurehead of a ship. The next instant I saw it was leaning
an inch or two more than usual, and all the skies with their
outstanding stars seemed to be leaning with it. For the third second
it was as if the skies fell; and in the fourth I was standing in the
quiet garden, looking down on that flat ruin of stone and bone at
which you were looking to-day. He had plucked out the last prop that
held up the British goddess, and she had fallen and crushed the
traitor in her fall. I turned and darted for the coat which I knew
to contain the package, ripped it up with my sword, and raced away
up the garden path to where my motor bike was waiting on the road
above. I had every reason for haste; but I fled without looking back
at the statue and the body; and I think the thing I fled from was
the sight of that appalling allegory.

"Then I did the rest of what I had to do. All through the night and
into the daybreak and the daylight I went humming through the
villages and markets of South England like a traveling bullet, till
I came to the headquarters in the West where the trouble was. I was
just in time. I was able to placard the place, so to speak, with the
news that the government had not betrayed them, and that they would
find supports if they would push eastward against the enemy. There's
no time to tell you all that happened; but I tell you it was the day
of my life. A triumph like a torchlight procession, with torchlights
that might have been firebrands. The mutinies simmered down; the men
of Somerset and the western counties came pouring into the market
places; the men who died with Arthur and stood firm with Alfred. The
Irish regiments rallied to them, after a scene like a riot, and
marched eastward out of the town singing Fenian songs. There was all
that is not understood, about the dark laughter of that people, in
the delight with which, even when marching with the English to the
defense of England, they shouted at the top of their voices, 'High
upon the gallows tree stood the noble-hearted three . . . With
England's cruel cord about them cast.' However, the chorus was 'God
save Ireland,' and we could all have sung that just then, in one
sense or another.

"But there was another side to my mission. I carried the plans of
the defense; and to a great extent, luckily, the plans of the
invasion also. I won't worry you with strategics; but we knew where
the enemy had pushed forward the great battery that covered all his
movements; and though our friends from the West could hardly arrive
in time to intercept the main movement, they might get within long
artillery range of the battery and shell it, if they only knew
exactly where it was. They could hardly tell that unless somebody
round about here sent up some sort of signal. But, somehow, I rather
fancy that somebody will."

With that he got up from the table, and they remounted their
machines and went eastward into the advancing twilight of evening.
The levels of the landscape were repeated in flat strips of floating
cloud and the last colors of day clung to the circle of the horizon.
Receding farther and farther behind them was the semicircle of the
last hills; and it was quite suddenly that they saw afar off the dim
line of the sea. It was not a strip of bright blue as they had seen
it from the sunny veranda, but of a sinister and smoky violet, a
tint that seemed ominous and dark. Here Horne Fisher dismounted once
more.

"We must walk the rest of the way," he said, "and the last bit of
all I must walk alone."

He bent down and began to unstrap something from his bicycle. It was
something that had puzzled his companion all the way in spite of
what held him to more interesting riddles; it appeared to be several
lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in paper. Fisher
took it under his arm and began to pick his way across the turf. The
ground was growing more tumbled and irregular and he was walking
toward a mass of thickets and small woods; night grew darker every
moment. "We must not talk any more," said Fisher. "I shall whisper
to you when you are to halt. Don't try to follow me then, for it
will only spoil the show; one man can barely crawl safely to the
spot, and two would certainly be caught."

"I would follow you anywhere," replied March, "but I would halt,
too, if that is better."

"I know you would," said his friend in a low voice. "Perhaps you're
the only man I ever quite trusted in this world."

A few paces farther on they came to the end of a great ridge or
mound looking monstrous against the dim sky; and Fisher stopped with
a gesture. He caught his companion's hand and wrung it with a
violent tenderness, and then darted forward into the darkness. March
could faintly see his figure crawling along under the shadow of the
ridge, then he lost sight of it, and then he saw it again standing
on another mound two hundred yards away. Beside him stood a singular
erection made apparently of two rods. He bent over it and there was
the flare of a light; all March's schoolboy memories woke in him,
and he knew what it was. It was the stand of a rocket. The confused,
incongruous memories still possessed him up to the very moment of a
fierce but familiar sound; and an instant after the rocket left its
perch and went up into endless space like a starry arrow aimed at
the stars. March thought suddenly of the signs of the last days and
knew he was looking at the apocalyptic meteor of something like a
Day of judgment.

Far up in the infinite heavens the rocket drooped and sprang into
scarlet stars. For a moment the whole landscape out to the sea and
back to the crescent of the wooded hills was like a lake of ruby
light, of a red strangely rich and glorious, as if the world were
steeped in wine rather than blood, or the earth were an earthly
paradise, over which paused forever the sanguine moment of morning.

"God save England!" cried Fisher, with a tongue like the peal of a
trumpet. "And now it is for God to save."

As darkness sank again over land and sea, there came another sound;
far away in the passes of the hills behind them the guns spoke like
the baying of great hounds. Something that was not a rocket, that
came not hissing but screaming, went over Harold March's head and
expanded beyond the mound into light and deafening din, staggering
the brain with unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and
then another, and the world was full of uproar and volcanic vapor
and chaotic light. The artillery of the West country and the Irish
had located the great enemy battery, and were pounding it to pieces.

In the mad excitement of that moment March peered through the storm,
looking again for the long lean figure that stood beside the stand
of the rocket. Then another flash lit up the whole ridge. The figure
was not there.

Before the fires of the rocket had faded from the sky, long before
the first gun had sounded from the distant hills, a splutter of
rifle fire had flashed and flickered all around from the hidden
trenches of the enemy. Something lay in the shadow at the foot of
the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man
who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.








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Project Gutenberg's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by Gilbert K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton

Illustrator: W. Graham Robertson

Release Date: December 8, 2006 [EBook #20058]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL ***




Produced by Jason Isbell, Diane Monico, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









[Illustration: IN THE DARK ENTRANCE THERE APPEARED A FLAMING
FIGURE.]




The Napoleon of
Notting Hill




THE NAPOLEON
_of_
NOTTING HILL

_By_
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

_With Seven Full-Page Illustrations by
W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON
and a Map of the Seat of War_

REV. WILLIAM J. GORMLEY, C. M.

JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCIV




_Copyright in
U.S.A., 1904_

William Clowes & Sons, Limited, London and Beccles.




_TO HILAIRE BELLOC_

     _For every tiny town or place
     God made the stars especially;
     Babies look up with owlish face
     And see them tangled in a tree:
     You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
     A Sussex moon, untravelled still,
     I saw a moon that was the town's,
     The largest lamp on Campden Hill._

     _Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home
     The big blue cap that always fits,
     And so it is (be calm; they come
     To goal at last, my wandering wits),
     So is it with the heroic thing;
     This shall not end for the world's end,
     And though the sullen engines swing,
     Be you not much afraid, my friend._

     _This did not end by Nelson's urn
     Where an immortal England sits--
     Nor where your tall young men in turn
     Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
     And when the pedants bade us mark
     What cold mechanic happenings
     Must come; our souls said in the dark,
     "Belike; but there are likelier things."_

     _Likelier across these flats afar
     These sulky levels smooth and free
     The drums shall crash a waltz of war
     And Death shall dance with Liberty;
     Likelier the barricades shall blare
     Slaughter below and smoke above,
     And death and hate and hell declare
     That men have found a thing to love._

     _Far from your sunny uplands set
     I saw the dream; the streets I trod
     The lit straight streets shot out and met
     The starry streets that point to God.
     This legend of an epic hour
     A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
     Under the great grey water-tower
     That strikes the stars on Campden Hill._

                             G. K. C.




_CONTENTS_

BOOK I


_Chapter_                                                   _Page_

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ART OF PROPHECY                13

II. THE MAN IN GREEN                                          21

III. THE HILL OF HUMOUR                                       49


BOOK II

I. THE CHARTER OF THE CITIES                                  65

II. THE COUNCIL OF THE PROVOSTS                               82

III. ENTER A LUNATIC                                         102


BOOK III

I. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF ADAM WAYNE                        125

II. THE REMARKABLE MR. TURNBULL                              147

III. THE EXPERIMENT OF MR. BUCK                              163


BOOK IV

I. THE BATTLE OF THE LAMPS                                   189

II. THE CORRESPONDENT OF THE "COURT JOURNAL"                 208

III. THE GREAT ARMY OF SOUTH KENSINGTON                      224


BOOK V

I. THE EMPIRE OF NOTTING HILL                                259

II. THE LAST BATTLE                                          279

III. TWO VOICES                                              291




_ILLUSTRATIONS_


IN THE DARK ENTRANCE THERE APPEARED A FLAMING FIGURE    _Frontispiece_

                                                        _To face page_

CITY MEN OUT ON ALL FOURS IN A FIELD COVERED WITH
VEAL CUTLETS                                                  16

"I'M THE KING OF THE CASTLE"                                  70

"I BRING HOMAGE TO MY KING"                                  104

MAP OF THE SEAT OF WAR                                       190

KING AUBERON DESCENDED FROM THE OMNIBUS WITH DIGNITY         220

"A FINE EVENING, SIR," SAID THE CHEMIST                      264

"WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE!"                                  296




BOOK I




_THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL_




CHAPTER I--_Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy_


The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do
it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep
to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in
Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen
very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say
about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait
until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go
and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes,
however, it is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the
childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world
done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the
false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets
with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a
more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But
humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men
are men, but Man is a woman.

But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the
Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The
reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies,
that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did
something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought
struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke
climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really
happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some
prophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see
the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was
quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in
crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high
post in the State. And all these clever men were at work giving
accounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all
quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it
seemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not
really be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and
sleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and
night on what their descendants would be likely to do.

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was
this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in
their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until
something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in
some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it
showed the signs of the times.

Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought
that science would take charge of the future; and just as the
motor-car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be
quicker than the motor-car; and so on for ever. And there arose from
their ashes Dr. Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on his
machine so fast round the world that he could keep up a long, chatty
conversation in some old-world village by saying a word of a sentence
each time he came round. And it was said that the experiment had been
tried on an apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fast
that there seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) a
continuous band round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion and
tweeds--a thing like the ring of Saturn.

Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter,
who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live
simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed
by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were
immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and
continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with
the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a
field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians
said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one
would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian,
but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called
it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted
that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then
came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the
pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

[Illustration: CITY MEN OUT ON ALL FOURS IN A FIELD COVERED WITH VEAL
CUTLETS.]

And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines of
kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes,
who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire,
and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire
and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong and the
Chinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar and
the Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the lower
animals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi ("the
Paul of Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yet further, and held that, as a
result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a
member of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who
should, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at the
idea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstood
his stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a
hard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment,
and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italian
organ-grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun,
Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, proving
that the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies,
but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that the
qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notion
that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing and
burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professor
could bear.

There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of our
race would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea was
developed more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage
which every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weeping
by the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over the
scene of the historic battle which was to take place some centuries
afterwards.

And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would in
the twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant,
Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russia
in the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.

There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a
continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people,
and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with
an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the
same number on both sides.

All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity
what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking
something they saw "going strong," as the saying is, and carrying it
as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was
the true and simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," said
Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage,--"just as when we see a pig in a
litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law
of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,--just
as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more
thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow
taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we
know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics
has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go
on until it reaches to the sky."

And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people
(engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite
unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without
fulfilling some of their prophecies.

But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets,
of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especially
women, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of
doubt. They could not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. They
still had something up their sleeve; they were still playing the game
of Cheat the Prophet.

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and
thither, crying, "What can it be? What can it be? What will London be
like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses
upside down--more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands--make feet
flexible, don't you know? Moon ... motor-cars ... no heads...." And so
they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal
the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the
twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty
years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is
now.




CHAPTER II--_The Man in Green_


Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years
hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into
a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it
was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely
lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal--such as the
French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to
common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and
compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something
positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all
belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said,
"All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we
must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's revolutions
are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction
in favour of tails."

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of
dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not
happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling
the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at
last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept
the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did
not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in
revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing.
England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one.
Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one
cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet.
That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as
they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had
become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man
doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

There was therefore no reason whatever why the three young men who had
always walked up to their Government office together should not walk
up to it together on this particular wintry and cloudy morning.
Everything in that age had become mechanical, and Government clerks
especially. All those clerks assembled regularly at their posts. Three
of those clerks always walked into town together. All the
neighbourhood knew them: two of them were tall and one short. And on
this particular morning the short clerk was only a few seconds late to
join the other two as they passed his gate: he could have overtaken
them in three strides; he could have called after them easily. But he
did not.

For some reason that will never be understood until all souls are
judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed
with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked
steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull,
everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street
after street, through district after district, looking at the backs of
the two men, who would have swung round at the sound of his voice.
Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and
it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times,
you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you
are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall
Government officials, and through street after street, and round
corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again
coat-tails--when, he did not in the least know why, something happened
to his eyes.

Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black
dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking
backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the
less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at
the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their
meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze.
The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever
the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It
was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in
his soul ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in
frock-coats except as dragons walking backwards. He explained
afterwards, quite tactfully and nicely, to his two official friends,
that (while feeling an inexpressible regard for each of them) he could
not seriously regard the face of either of them as anything but a
kind of tail. It was, he admitted, a handsome tail--a tail elevated in
the air. But if, he said, any true friend of theirs wished to see
their faces, to look into the eyes of their soul, that friend must be
allowed to walk reverently round behind them, so as to see them from
the rear. There he would see the two black dragons with the blind
eyes.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the
small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles--they changed
the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know--that
adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord
of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like
song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four
dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead
day.

The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that
shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper
twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come
from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the
shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of
waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the
floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy;
the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with
eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now
he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.

The two young men in front were like the small young man himself,
well-dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that
luxuriant severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a
favourite exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr.
Max Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of "certain
congruities of dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen."

They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the
longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.

They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that
a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled
past the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after
them and said--

"I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere
where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but
it keeps on growing again."

One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.

"Why, here is a little place," cried the small man, with a sort of
imbecile cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable
toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. "Do you know,
I often find hair-dressers when I walk about London. I'll lunch with
you at Cicconani's. You know, I'm awfully fond of hair-dressers'
shops. They're miles better than those nasty butchers'." And he
disappeared into the doorway.

The man called James continued to gaze after him, a monocle screwed
into his eye.

"What the devil do you make of that fellow?" he asked his companion, a
pale young man with a high nose.

The pale young man reflected conscientiously for some minutes, and
then said--

"Had a knock on his head when he was a kid, I should think."

"No, I don't think it's that," replied the Honourable James Barker.
"I've sometimes fancied he was a sort of artist, Lambert."

"Bosh!" cried Mr. Lambert, briefly.

"I admit I can't make him out," resumed Barker, abstractedly; "he
never opens his mouth without saying something so indescribably
half-witted that to call him a fool seems the very feeblest attempt at
characterisation. But there's another thing about him that's rather
funny. Do you know that he has the one collection of Japanese lacquer
in Europe? Have you ever seen his books? All Greek poets and mediæval
French and that sort of thing. Have you ever been in his rooms? It's
like being inside an amethyst. And he moves about in all that and
talks like--like a turnip."

"Well, damn all books. Your blue books as well," said the ingenuous
Mr. Lambert, with a friendly simplicity. "You ought to understand such
things. What do you make of him?"

"He's beyond me," returned Barker. "But if you asked me for my
opinion, I should say he was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they
call it--artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously
believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half
bewildered his own mind and doesn't know the difference between sanity
and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and
found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme
idiocy is as good as sense. But I can't explain these psychological
games."

"You can't explain them to me," replied Mr. Wilfrid Lambert, with
candour.

As they passed up the long streets towards their restaurant the copper
twilight cleared slowly to a pale yellow, and by the time they reached
it they stood discernible in a tolerable winter daylight. The
Honourable James Barker, one of the most powerful officials in the
English Government (by this time a rigidly official one), was a lean
and elegant young man, with a blank handsome face and bleak blue eyes.
He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind
which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with
honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a
single man. Wilfrid Lambert, the youth with the nose which appeared to
impoverish the rest of his face, had also contributed little to the
enlargement of the human spirit, but he had the honourable excuse of
being a fool.

Lambert would have been called a silly man; Barker, with all his
cleverness, might have been called a stupid man. But mere silliness
and stupidity sank into insignificance in the presence of the awful
and mysterious treasures of foolishness apparently stored up in the
small figure that stood waiting for them outside Cicconani's. The
little man, whose name was Auberon Quin, had an appearance compounded
of a baby and an owl. His round head, round eyes, seemed to have been
designed by nature playfully with a pair of compasses. His flat dark
hair and preposterously long frock-coat gave him something of the look
of a child's "Noah." When he entered a room of strangers, they mistook
him for a small boy, and wanted to take him on their knees, until he
spoke, when they perceived that a boy would have been more
intelligent.

"I have been waiting quite a long time," said Quin, mildly. "It's
awfully funny I should see you coming up the street at last."

"Why?" asked Lambert, staring. "You told us to come here yourself."

"My mother used to tell people to come to places," said the sage.

They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when
their eyes were caught by something in the street. The weather, though
cold and blank, was now quite clear, and across the dull brown of the
wood pavement and between the dull grey terraces was moving something
not to be seen for miles round--not to be seen perhaps at that time in
England--a man dressed in bright colours. A small crowd hung on the
man's heels.

He was a tall stately man, clad in a military uniform of brilliant
green, splashed with great silver facings. From the shoulder swung a
short green furred cloak, somewhat like that of a Hussar, the lining
of which gleamed every now and then with a kind of tawny crimson. His
breast glittered with medals; round his neck was the red ribbon and
star of some foreign order; and a long straight sword, with a blazing
hilt, trailed and clattered along the pavement. At this time the
pacific and utilitarian development of Europe had relegated all such
customs to the Museums. The only remaining force, the small but
well-organised police, were attired in a sombre and hygienic manner.
But even those who remembered the last Life Guards and Lancers who
disappeared in 1912 must have known at a glance that this was not, and
never had been, an English uniform; and this conviction would have
been heightened by the yellow aquiline face, like Dante carved in
bronze, which rose, crowned with white hair, out of the green military
collar, a keen and distinguished, but not an English face.

The magnificence with which the green-clad gentleman walked down the
centre of the road would be something difficult to express in human
language. For it was an ingrained simplicity and arrogance, something
in the mere carriage of the head and body, which made ordinary moderns
in the street stare after him; but it had comparatively little to do
with actual conscious gestures or expression. In the matter of these
merely temporary movements, the man appeared to be rather worried and
inquisitive, but he was inquisitive with the inquisitiveness of a
despot and worried as with the responsibilities of a god. The men who
lounged and wondered behind him followed partly with an astonishment
at his brilliant uniform, that is to say, partly because of that
instinct which makes us all follow one who looks like a madman, but
far more because of that instinct which makes all men follow (and
worship) any one who chooses to behave like a king. He had to so
sublime an extent that great quality of royalty--an almost imbecile
unconsciousness of everybody, that people went after him as they do
after kings--to see what would be the first thing or person he would
take notice of. And all the time, as we have said, in spite of his
quiet splendour, there was an air about him as if he were looking for
somebody; an expression of inquiry.

Suddenly that expression of inquiry vanished, none could tell why, and
was replaced by an expression of contentment. Amid the rapt attention
of the mob of idlers, the magnificent green gentleman deflected
himself from his direct course down the centre of the road and walked
to one side of it. He came to a halt opposite to a large poster of
Colman's Mustard erected on a wooden hoarding. His spectators almost
held their breath.

He took from a small pocket in his uniform a little penknife; with
this he made a slash at the stretched paper. Completing the rest of
the operation with his fingers, he tore off a strip or rag of paper,
yellow in colour and wholly irregular in outline. Then for the first
time the great being addressed his adoring onlookers--

"Can any one," he said, with a pleasing foreign accent, "lend me a
pin?"

Mr. Lambert, who happened to be nearest, and who carried innumerable
pins for the purpose of attaching innumerable buttonholes, lent him
one, which was received with extravagant but dignified bows, and
hyperboles of thanks.

The gentleman in green, then, with every appearance of being
gratified, and even puffed up, pinned the piece of yellow paper to
the green silk and silver-lace adornments of his breast. Then he
turned his eyes round again, searching and unsatisfied.

"Anything else I can do, sir?" asked Lambert, with the absurd
politeness of the Englishman when once embarrassed.

"Red," said the stranger, vaguely, "red."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I beg yours also, Señor," said the stranger, bowing. "I was wondering
whether any of you had any red about you."

"Any red about us?--well really--no, I don't think I have--I used to
carry a red bandanna once, but--"

"Barker," asked Auberon Quin, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo?
Where's your red cockatoo?"

"What do you mean?" asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've
never seen me with any cockatoo!"

"I know," said Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the
time?"

Barker swung round, not without resentment.

"I am sorry, sir," he said, shortly but civilly, "none of us seem to
have anything red to lend you. But why, if one may ask--"

"I thank you, Señor, it is nothing. I can, since there is nothing
else, fulfil my own requirements."

And standing for a second of thought with the penknife in his hand, he
stabbed his left palm. The blood fell with so full a stream that it
struck the stones without dripping. The foreigner pulled out his
handkerchief and tore a piece from it with his teeth. The rag was
immediately soaked in scarlet.

"Since you are so generous, Señor," he said, "another pin, perhaps."

Lambert held one out, with eyes protruding like a frog's.

The red linen was pinned beside the yellow paper, and the foreigner
took off his hat.

"I have to thank you all, gentlemen," he said; and wrapping the
remainder of the handkerchief round his bleeding hand, he resumed his
walk with an overwhelming stateliness.

While all the rest paused, in some disorder, little Mr. Auberon Quin
ran after the stranger and stopped him, with hat in hand. Considerably
to everybody's astonishment, he addressed him in the purest Spanish--

"Señor," he said in that language, "pardon a hospitality, perhaps
indiscreet, towards one who appears to be a distinguished, but a
solitary guest in London. Will you do me and my friends, with whom
you have held some conversation, the honour of lunching with us at the
adjoining restaurant?"

The man in the green uniform had turned a fiery colour of pleasure at
the mere sound of his own language, and he accepted the invitation
with that profusion of bows which so often shows, in the case of the
Southern races, the falsehood of the notion that ceremony has nothing
to do with feeling.

"Señor," he said, "your language is my own; but all my love for my
people shall not lead me to deny to yours the possession of so
chivalrous an entertainer. Let me say that the tongue is Spanish but
the heart English." And he passed with the rest into Cicconani's.

"Now, perhaps," said Barker, over the fish and sherry, intensely
polite, but burning with curiosity, "perhaps it would be rude of me to
ask why you did that?"

"Did what, Señor?" asked the guest, who spoke English quite well,
though in a manner indefinably American.

"Well," said the Englishman, in some confusion, "I mean tore a strip
off a hoarding and ... er ... cut yourself ... and...."

"To tell you that, Señor," answered the other, with a certain sad
pride, "involves merely telling you who I am. I am Juan del Fuego,
President of Nicaragua."

The manner with which the President of Nicaragua leant back and drank
his sherry showed that to him this explanation covered all the facts
observed and a great deal more. Barker's brow, however, was still a
little clouded.

"And the yellow paper," he began, with anxious friendliness, "and the
red rag...."

"The yellow paper and the red rag," said Fuego, with indescribable
grandeur, "are the colours of Nicaragua."

"But Nicaragua ..." began Barker, with great hesitation, "Nicaragua is
no longer a...."

"Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed
like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and
the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the
hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea."

Auberon Quin suggested timidly, "A brilliant idea."

"Yes," said the foreigner, snatching at the word. "You are right,
generous Englishman. An idea _brillant_, a burning thought. Señor,
you asked me why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I
snatched at paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient
sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of
what colours mean to us--think of the position of one like myself, who
can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the
yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in
a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and
the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a
field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua.
Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country.
Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart
beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be
yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than
white stars."

"And if," said Quin, with equal enthusiasm, "there should happen to be
yellow wine and red wine at the same lunch, you could not confine
yourself to sherry. Let me order some Burgundy, and complete, as it
were, a sort of Nicaraguan heraldry in your inside."

Barker was fiddling with his knife, and was evidently making up his
mind to say something, with the intense nervousness of the amiable
Englishman.

"I am to understand, then," he said at last, with a cough, "that you,
ahem, were the President of Nicaragua when it made its--er--one must,
of course, agree--its quite heroic resistance to--er--"

The ex-President of Nicaragua waved his hand.

"You need not hesitate in speaking to me," he said. "I'm quite fully
aware that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against
Nicaragua and against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of
your evident courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes
that have laid my republic in ruins."

Barker looked immeasurably relieved and gratified.

"You are most generous, President," he said, with some hesitation over
the title, "and I will take advantage of your generosity to express
the doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things
as--er--the Nicaraguan independence."

"So your sympathies are," said Del Fuego, quite calmly, "with the big
nation which--"

"Pardon me, pardon me, President," said Barker, warmly; "my sympathies
are with no nation. You misunderstand, I think, the modern intellect.
We do not disapprove of the fire and extravagance of such
commonwealths as yours only to become more extravagant on a larger
scale. We do not condemn Nicaragua because we think Britain ought to
be more Nicaraguan. We do not discourage small nationalities because
we wish large nationalities to have all their smallness, all their
uniformity of outlook, all their exaggeration of spirit. If I differ
with the greatest respect from your Nicaraguan enthusiasm, it is not
because a nation or ten nations were against you; it is because
civilisation was against you. We moderns believe in a great
cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of
all the absorbed peoples--"

"The Señor will forgive me," said the President. "May I ask the Señor
how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?"

"I never catch a wild horse," replied Barker, with dignity.

"Precisely," said the other; "and there ends your absorption of the
talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you
say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all
peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin
Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or
schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says,
'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a
Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all
talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when
the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have
learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua
we had a way of catching wild horses--by lassooing the fore
feet--which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are
going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to
say what I have always said, that something went from the world when
Nicaragua was civilised."

"Something, perhaps," replied Barker, "but that something a mere
barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as
a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives
which are better, and I trust to civilisation."

"You have good authority," answered the Nicaraguan. "Many clever men
like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many
clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me,
in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what
there is particularly immortal about yours?"

"I think you do not quite understand, President, what ours is,"
answered Barker. "You judge it rather as if England was still a poor
and pugnacious island; you have been long out of Europe. Many things
have happened."

"And what," asked the other, "would you call the summary of those
things?"

"The summary of those things," answered Barker, with great animation,
"is that we are rid of the superstitions, and in becoming so we have
not merely become rid of the superstitions which have been most
frequently and most enthusiastically so described. The superstition of
big nationalities is bad, but the superstition of small nationalities
is worse. The superstition of reverencing our own country is bad, but
the superstition of reverencing other people's countries is worse. It
is so everywhere, and in a hundred ways. The superstition of monarchy
is bad, and the superstition of aristocracy is bad, but the
superstition of democracy is the worst of all."

The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.

"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"

Barker laughed.

"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the
purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how
continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the
decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble
to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John
Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect
or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old
idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all
men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring
democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why
should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we
want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly
look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what
time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it
ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it
ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one
saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob
of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great
democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal
insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in
England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the
dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head
of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he
is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of
hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary
monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an
official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly
despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."

"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you
choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot--that
you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."

"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations
trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not
half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is
impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary
monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can
you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the
Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a
deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of
the A's, and the solid success of the B's."

"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or
a cynic or a criminal."

"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he
is a tyrant--he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a
cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a
criminal--by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check
on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a
total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."

The Nicaraguan old gentleman leaned over with a queer expression in
his eyes.

"My church, sir," he said, "has taught me to respect faith. I do not
wish to speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do
you really mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who
may happen to come next, as a good despot?"

"I do," said Barker, simply. "He may not be a good man. But he will be
a good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of
government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume
the same thing in a jury?"

The old President smiled.

"I don't know," he said, "that I have any particular objection in
detail to your excellent scheme of Government. My only objection is a
quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong
to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an
alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue
with the choice of the soul."

"Of the soul," said Barker, knitting his brows, "I cannot pretend to
say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public--"

Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "I will step out for a
moment into the air."

"I'm so sorry, Auberon," said Lambert, good-naturedly; "do you feel
bad?"

"Not bad exactly," said Auberon, with self-restraint; "rather good, if
anything. Strangely and richly good. The fact is, I want to reflect a
little on those beautiful words that have just been uttered.
'Speaking,' yes, that was the phrase, 'speaking in the interests of
the public.' One cannot get the honey from such things without being
alone for a little."

"Is he really off his chump, do you think?" asked Lambert.

The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.

"He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He
is a dangerous man."

Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some maccaroni to his mouth.

"Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!"

"Every man is dangerous," said the old man without moving, "who cares
only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself."

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing
profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and
sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in
lodgings in Soho.

       *       *       *       *       *

Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure
shaking and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror
or ague: but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter.
He was repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent--"But
speaking in the interests of the public...."




CHAPTER III--_The Hill of Humour_


"In a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea," said
Auberon Quin, "there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been
to Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange
look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they
heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing
patent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the
minister at all. But in the dead man's pocket there was a return
ticket to Maidstone."

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert
went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then
Auberon resumed.

"That story," he said reverently, "is the test of humour."

They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they
began to climb a slope.

"I perceive," continued Auberon, "that you have passed the test, and
consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing.
Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great
anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty
benedicted, didn't you, Barker?"

"I saw the point," said Barker, somewhat loftily.

"Do you know," said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, "I have lots of
stories as good as that. Listen to this one."

And he slightly cleared his throat.

"Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist.
'There,' people of wide experience would say, 'There goes the
sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.' Once this was said so that he
overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and
grey. Polycarp turned upon him. 'Sallow!' he cried fiercely, 'sallow!
_Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes._' It was said that no
actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again."

Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

"Here is another," continued the insatiable Quin. "In a hollow of the
grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose
uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green
hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn't know that there was a
Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard
of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I
know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple
trust. And by and by in God's good time, it was discovered that this
uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so.
She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own
reward.'"

Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said--

"It seems a bit mysterious."

"Mysterious!" cried the other. "The true humour is mysterious. Do you
not realise the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries?"

"And what's that?" asked Lambert, shortly.

"It is very simple," replied the other. "Hitherto it was the ruin of a
joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a
joke that people do not see it. Humour, my friends, is the one
sanctity remaining to mankind. It is the one thing you are thoroughly
afraid of. Look at that tree."

His interlocutors looked vaguely towards a beech that leant out
towards them from the ridge of the hill.

"If," said Mr. Quin, "I were to say that you did not see the great
truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man
of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would
merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about
vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree
the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a
Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were
to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at
that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of
God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no more about me.
But if"--and he lifted a pontifical hand--"if I say that you cannot
see the humour of that tree, and that I see the humour of it--my God!
you will roll about at my feet."

He paused a moment, and then resumed.

"Yes; a sense of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the
new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves
with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be
set in it. It will be asked, 'Can you see the humour of this iron
railing?' or 'Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you
see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?'
How often I have laughed myself to sleep over a violet sunset."

"Quite so," said Mr. Barker, with an intelligent embarrassment.

"Let me tell you another story. How often it happens that the M.P.'s
for Essex are less punctual than one would suppose. The least punctual
Essex M.P., perhaps, was James Wilson, who said, in the very act of
plucking a poppy--"

Lambert suddenly faced round and struck his stick into the ground in a
defiant attitude.

"Auberon," he said, "chuck it. I won't stand it. It's all bosh."

Both men stared at him, for there was something very explosive about
the words, as if they had been corked up painfully for a long time.

"You have," began Quin, "no--"

"I don't care a curse," said Lambert, violently, "whether I have 'a
delicate sense of humour' or not. I won't stand it. It's all a
confounded fraud. There's no joke in those infernal tales at all. You
know there isn't as well as I do."

"Well," replied Quin, slowly, "it is true that I, with my rather
gradual mental processes, did not see any joke in them. But the finer
sense of Barker perceived it."

Barker turned a fierce red, but continued to stare at the horizon.

"You ass," said Lambert; "why can't you be like other people? Why
can't you say something really funny, or hold your tongue? The man who
sits on his hat in a pantomime is a long sight funnier than you are."

Quin regarded him steadily. They had reached the top of the ridge and
the wind struck their faces.

"Lambert," said Auberon, "you are a great and good man, though I'm
hanged if you look it. You are more. You are a great revolutionist or
deliverer of the world, and I look forward to seeing you carved in
marble between Luther and Danton, if possible in your present
attitude, the hat slightly on one side. I said as I came up the hill
that the new humour was the last of the religions. You have made it
the last of the superstitions. But let me give you a very serious
warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything _outré_, to imitate
the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man
whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for
twopence I'd do it."

"Do it, then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would
be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."

Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards
the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.

"Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable
acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other
and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a
peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great
pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us.
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness
which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man."

"I don't know what you are talking about," said Lambert,
contemptuously. "I only know I'd rather you stood on your silly head,
than talked so much."

"Auberon! for goodness' sake ..." cried Barker, springing forward; but
he was too late. Faces from all the benches and avenues were turned in
their direction. Groups stopped and small crowds collected; and the
sharp sunlight picked out the whole scene in blue, green and black,
like a picture in a child's toy-book. And on the top of the small
hill Mr. Auberon Quin stood with considerable athletic neatness upon
his head, and waved his patent-leather boots in the air.

"For God's sake, Quin, get up, and don't be an idiot," cried Barker,
wringing his hands; "we shall have the whole town here."

"Yes, get up, get up, man," said Lambert, amused and annoyed. "I was
only fooling; get up."

Auberon did so with a bound, and flinging his hat higher than the
trees, proceeded to hop about on one leg with a serious expression.
Barker stamped wildly.

"Oh, let's get home, Barker, and leave him," said Lambert; "some of
your proper and correct police will look after him. Here they come!"

Two grave-looking men in quiet uniforms came up the hill towards them.
One held a paper in his hand.

"There he is, officer," said Lambert, cheerfully; "we ain't
responsible for him."

The officer looked at the capering Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.

"We have not come, gentlemen," he said, "about what I think you are
alluding to. We have come from head-quarters to announce the
selection of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, inherited from the
old _régime_, that the news should be brought to the new Sovereign
immediately, wherever he is; so we have followed you across Kensington
Gardens."

Barker's eyes were blazing in his pale face. He was consumed with
ambition throughout his life. With a certain dull magnanimity of the
intellect he had really believed in the chance method of selecting
despots. But this sudden suggestion, that the selection might have
fallen upon him, unnerved him with pleasure.

"Which of us," he began, and the respectful official interrupted him.

"Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be permitted to say so, we
know your services to the Government, and should be very thankful if
it were. The choice has fallen...."

"God bless my soul!" said Lambert, jumping back two paces. "Not me.
Don't say I'm autocrat of all the Russias."

"No, sir," said the officer, with a slight cough and a glance towards
Auberon, who was at that moment putting his head between his legs and
making a noise like a cow; "the gentleman whom we have to congratulate
seems at the moment--er--er--occupied."

"Not Quin!" shrieked Barker, rushing up to him; "it can't be. Auberon,
for God's sake pull yourself together. You've been made King!"

With his head still upside down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered
modestly--

"I am not worthy. I cannot reasonably claim to equal the great men who
have previously swayed the sceptre of Britain. Perhaps the only
peculiarity that I can claim is that I am probably the first monarch
that ever spoke out his soul to the people of England with his head
and body in this position. This may in some sense give me, to quote a
poem that I wrote in my youth--

A nobler office on the earth
Than valour, power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old.

The intellect clarified by this posture--"

Lambert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.

"Don't you understand?" cried Lambert. "It's not a joke. They've
really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste."

"The great Bishops of the Middle Ages," said Quin, kicking his legs in
the air, as he was dragged up more or less upside down, "were in the
habit of refusing the honour of election three times and then
accepting it. A mere matter of detail separates me from those great
men. I will accept the post three times and refuse it afterwards. Oh!
I will toil for you, my faithful people! You shall have a banquet of
humour."

By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were
still trying in vain to impress him with the gravity of the situation.

"Did you not tell me, Wilfrid Lambert," he said, "that I should be of
more public value if I adopted a more popular form of humour? And when
should a popular form of humour be more firmly riveted upon me than
now, when I have become the darling of a whole people? Officer," he
continued, addressing the startled messenger, "are there no ceremonies
to celebrate my entry into the city?"

"Ceremonies," began the official, with embarrassment, "have been more
or less neglected for some little time, and--"

Auberon Quin began gradually to take off his coat.

"All ceremony," he said, "consists in the reversal of the obvious.
Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women.
Kindly help me on with this coat." And he held it out.

"But, your Majesty," said the officer, after a moment's bewilderment
and manipulation, "you're putting it on with the tails in front."

"The reversal of the obvious," said the King, calmly, "is as near as
we can come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on."

The rest of that afternoon and evening was to Barker and Lambert a
nightmare, which they could not properly realise or recall. The King,
with his coat on the wrong way, went towards the streets that were
awaiting him, and the old Kensington Palace which was the Royal
residence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into
crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in welcoming an
autocrat. Barker walked behind, his brain reeling, and, as the crowds
grew thicker and thicker, the sounds became more and more unusual. And
when he had reached the great market-place opposite the church,
Barker knew that he had reached it, though he was roods behind,
because a cry went up such as had never before greeted any of the
kings of the earth.




BOOK II




CHAPTER I--_The Charter of the Cities_


Lambert was standing bewildered outside the door of the King's
apartments amid the scurry of astonishment and ridicule. He was just
passing out into the street, in a dazed manner, when James Barker
dashed by him.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To stop all this foolery, of course," replied Barker; and he
disappeared into the room.

He entered it headlong, slamming the door, and slapping his
incomparable silk hat on the table. His mouth opened, but before he
could speak, the King said--

"Your hat, if you please."

Fidgetting with his fingers, and scarcely knowing what he was doing,
the young politician held it out.

The King placed it on his own chair, and sat on it.

"A quaint old custom," he explained, smiling above the ruins. "When
the King receives the representatives of the House of Barker, the hat
of the latter is immediately destroyed in this manner. It represents
the absolute finality of the act of homage expressed in the removal
of it. It declares that never until that hat shall once more appear
upon your head (a contingency which I firmly believe to be remote)
shall the House of Barker rebel against the Crown of England."

Barker stood with clenched fist, and shaking lip.

"Your jokes," he began, "and my property--" and then exploded with an
oath, and stopped again.

"Continue, continue," said the King, waving his hands.

"What does it all mean?" cried the other, with a gesture of passionate
rationality. "Are you mad?"

"Not in the least," replied the King, pleasantly. "Madmen are always
serious; they go mad from lack of humour. You are looking serious
yourself, James."

"Why can't you keep it to your own private life?" expostulated the
other. "You've got plenty of money, and plenty of houses now to play
the fool in, but in the interests of the public--"

"Epigrammatic," said the King, shaking his finger sadly at him. "None
of your daring scintillations here. As to why I don't do it in
private, I rather fail to understand your question. The answer is of
comparative limpidity. I don't do it in private, because it is funnier
to do it in public. You appear to think that it would be amusing to be
dignified in the banquet hall and in the street, and at my own
fireside (I could procure a fireside) to keep the company in a roar.
But that is what every one does. Every one is grave in public, and
funny in private. My sense of humour suggests the reversal of this; it
suggests that one should be funny in public, and solemn in private. I
desire to make the State functions, parliaments, coronations, and so
on, one roaring old-fashioned pantomime. But, on the other hand, I
shut myself up alone in a small store-room for two hours a day, where
I am so dignified that I come out quite ill."

By this time Barker was walking up and down the room, his frock coat
flapping like the black wings of a bird.

"Well, you will ruin the country, that's all," he said shortly.

"It seems to me," said Auberon, "that the tradition of ten centuries
is being broken, and the House of Barker is rebelling against the
Crown of England. It would be with regret (for I admire your
appearance) that I should be obliged forcibly to decorate your head
with the remains of this hat, but--"

"What I can't understand," said Barker flinging up his fingers with a
feverish American movement, "is why you don't care about anything else
but your games."

The King stopped sharply in the act of lifting the silken remnants,
dropped them, and walked up to Barker, looking at him steadily.

"I made a kind of vow," he said, "that I would not talk seriously,
which always means answering silly questions. But the strong man will
always be gentle with politicians.

'The shape my scornful looks deride
Required a God to form;'

if I may so theologically express myself. And for some reason I cannot
in the least understand, I feel impelled to answer that question of
yours, and to answer it as if there were really such a thing in the
world as a serious subject. You ask me why I don't care for anything
else. Can you tell me, in the name of all the gods you don't believe
in, why I should care for anything else?"

"Don't you realise common public necessities?" cried Barker. "Is it
possible that a man of your intelligence does not know that it is
every one's interest--"

"Don't you believe in Zoroaster? Is it possible that you neglect
Mumbo-Jumbo?" returned the King, with startling animation. "Does a man
of your intelligence come to me with these damned early Victorian
ethics? If, on studying my features and manner, you detect any
particular resemblance to the Prince Consort, I assure you you are
mistaken. Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you--did he ever convince
anybody--did he ever for one mad moment convince himself--that it must
be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do you
believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any more
chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined, that an
angler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? Herbert
Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason that he refrained
from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman
with different tastes. I am an English gentleman with different
tastes. He liked philosophy. I like art. He liked writing ten books on
the nature of human society. I like to see the Lord Chamberlain
walking in front of me with a piece of paper pinned to his coat-tails.
It is my humour. Are you answered? At any rate, I have said my last
serious word to-day, and my last serious word I trust for the
remainder of my life in this Paradise of Fools. The remainder of my
conversation with you to-day, which I trust will be long and
stimulating, I propose to conduct in a new language of my own by means
of rapid and symbolic movements of the left leg." And he began to
pirouette slowly round the room with a preoccupied expression.

Barker ran round the room after him, bombarding him with demands and
entreaties. But he received no response except in the new language. He
came out banging the door again, and sick like a man coming on shore.
As he strode along the streets he found himself suddenly opposite
Cicconani's restaurant, and for some reason there rose up before him
the green fantastic figure of the Spanish General, standing, as he had
seen him last, at the door, with the words on his lips, "You cannot
argue with the choice of the soul."

The King came out from his dancing with the air of a man of business
legitimately tired. He put on an overcoat, lit a cigar, and went out
into the purple night.

[Illustration: "I'M KING OF THE CASTLE."]

"I will go," he said, "and mingle with the people."

He passed swiftly up a street in the neighbourhood of Notting Hill,
when suddenly he felt a hard object driven into his waistcoat. He
paused, put up his single eye-glass, and beheld a boy with a wooden
sword and a paper cocked hat, wearing that expression of awed
satisfaction with which a child contemplates his work when he has hit
some one very hard. The King gazed thoughtfully for some time at his
assailant, and slowly took a note-book from his breast-pocket.

"I have a few notes," he said, "for my dying speech;" and he turned
over the leaves. "Dying speech for political assassination; ditto, if
by former friend--h'm, h'm. Dying speech for death at hands of injured
husband (repentant). Dying speech for same (cynical). I am not quite
sure which meets the present...."

"I'm the King of the Castle," said the boy, truculently, and very
pleased with nothing in particular.

The King was a kind-hearted man, and very fond of children, like all
people who are fond of the ridiculous.

"Infant," he said, "I'm glad you are so stalwart a defender of your
old inviolate Notting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child,
where it lifts itself among the stars so ancient, so lonely, so
unutterably Notting. So long as you are ready to die for the sacred
mountain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswater--"

The King stopped suddenly, and his eyes shone.

"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps the noblest of all my conceptions. A
revival of the arrogance of the old mediæval cities applied to our
glorious suburbs. Clapham with a city guard. Wimbledon with a city
wall. Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens. West Hampstead
going into battle with its own banner. It shall be done. I, the King,
have said it." And, hastily presenting the boy with half a crown,
remarking, "For the war-chest of Notting Hill," he ran violently home
at such a rate of speed that crowds followed him for miles. On
reaching his study, he ordered a cup of coffee, and plunged into
profound meditation upon the project. At length he called his
favourite Equerry, Captain Bowler, for whom he had a deep affection,
founded principally upon the shape of his whiskers.

"Bowler," he said, "isn't there some society of historical research,
or something of which I am an honorary member?"

"Yes, sir," said Captain Bowler, rubbing his nose, "you are a member
of 'The Encouragers of Egyptian Renaissance,' and 'The Teutonic Tombs
Club,' and 'The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities,'
and--"

"That is admirable," said the King. "The London Antiquities does my
trick. Go to the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities and
speak to their secretary, and their sub-secretary, and their
president, and their vice-president, saying, 'The King of England is
proud, but the honorary member of the Society for the Recovery of
London Antiquities is prouder than kings. I should like to tell you of
certain discoveries I have made touching the neglected traditions of
the London boroughs. The revelations may cause some excitement,
stirring burning memories and touching old wounds in Shepherd's Bush
and Bayswater, in Pimlico and South Kensington. The King hesitates,
but the honorary member is firm. I approach you invoking the vows of
my initiation, the Sacred Seven Cats, the Poker of Perfection, and the
Ordeal of the Indescribable Instant (forgive me if I mix you up with
the Clan-na-Gael or some other club I belong to), and ask you to
permit me to read a paper at your next meeting on the "Wars of the
London Boroughs."' Say all this to the Society, Bowler. Remember it
very carefully, for it is most important, and I have forgotten it
altogether, and send me another cup of coffee and some of the cigars
that we keep for vulgar and successful people. I am going to write my
paper."

The Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities met a month after
in a corrugated iron hall on the outskirts of one of the southern
suburbs of London. A large number of people had collected there under
the coarse and flaring gas-jets when the King arrived, perspiring and
genial. On taking off his great-coat, he was perceived to be in
evening dress, wearing the Garter. His appearance at the small table,
adorned only with a glass of water, was received with respectful
cheering.

The chairman (Mr. Huggins) said that he was sure that they had all
been pleased to listen to such distinguished lecturers as they had
heard for some time past (hear, hear). Mr. Burton (hear, hear), Mr.
Cambridge, Professor King (loud and continued cheers), our old friend
Peter Jessop, Sir William White (loud laughter), and other eminent
men, had done honour to their little venture (cheers). But there were
other circumstances which lent a certain unique quality to the present
occasion (hear, hear). So far as his recollection went, and in
connection with the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities it
went very far (loud cheers), he did not remember that any of their
lecturers had borne the title of King. He would therefore call upon
King Auberon briefly to address the meeting.

The King began by saying that this speech might be regarded as the
first declaration of his new policy for the nation. "At this supreme
hour of my life I feel that to no one but the members of the Society
for the Recovery of London Antiquities can I open my heart (cheers).
If the world turns upon my policy, and the storms of popular hostility
begin to rise (no, no), I feel that it is here, with my brave
Recoverers around me, that I can best meet them, sword in hand" (loud
cheers).

His Majesty then went on to explain that, now old age was creeping
upon him, he proposed to devote his remaining strength to bringing
about a keener sense of local patriotism in the various municipalities
of London. How few of them knew the legends of their own boroughs!
How many there were who had never heard of the true origin of the Wink
of Wandsworth! What a large proportion of the younger generation in
Chelsea neglected to perform the old Chelsea Chuff! Pimlico no longer
pumped the Pimlies. Battersea had forgotten the name of Blick.

There was a short silence, and then a voice said "Shame!"

The King continued: "Being called, however unworthily, to this high
estate, I have resolved that, so far as possible, this neglect shall
cease. I desire no military glory. I lay claim to no constitutional
equality with Justinian or Alfred. If I can go down to history as the
man who saved from extinction a few old English customs, if our
descendants can say it was through this man, humble as he was, that
the Ten Turnips are still eaten in Fulham, and the Putney parish
councillor still shaves one half of his head, I shall look my great
fathers reverently but not fearfully in the face when I go down to the
last house of Kings."

The King paused, visibly affected, but collecting himself, resumed
once more.

"I trust that to very few of you, at least, I need dwell on the
sublime origins of these legends. The very names of your boroughs
bear witness to them. So long as Hammersmith is called Hammersmith,
its people will live in the shadow of that primal hero, the
Blacksmith, who led the democracy of the Broadway into battle till he
drove the chivalry of Kensington before him and overthrew them at that
place which in honour of the best blood of the defeated aristocracy is
still called Kensington Gore. Men of Hammersmith will not fail to
remember that the very name of Kensington originated from the lips of
their hero. For at the great banquet of reconciliation held after the
war, when the disdainful oligarchs declined to join in the songs of
the men of the Broadway (which are to this day of a rude and popular
character), the great Republican leader, with his rough humour, said
the words which are written in gold upon his monument, 'Little birds
that can sing and won't sing, must be made to sing.' So that the
Eastern Knights were called Cansings or Kensings ever afterwards. But
you also have great memories, O men of Kensington! You showed that you
could sing, and sing great war-songs. Even after the dark day of
Kensington Gore, history will not forget those three Knights who
guarded your disordered retreat from Hyde Park (so called from your
hiding there), those three Knights after whom Knightsbridge is named.
Nor will it forget the day of your re-emergence, purged in the fire of
calamity, cleansed of your oligarchic corruptions, when, sword in
hand, you drove the Empire of Hammersmith back mile by mile, swept it
past its own Broadway, and broke it at last in a battle so long and
bloody that the birds of prey have left their name upon it. Men have
called it, with austere irony, the Ravenscourt. I shall not, I trust,
wound the patriotism of Bayswater, or the lonelier pride of Brompton,
or that of any other historic township, by taking these two special
examples. I select them, not because they are more glorious than the
rest, but partly from personal association (I am myself descended from
one of the three heroes of Knightsbridge), and partly from the
consciousness that I am an amateur antiquarian, and cannot presume to
deal with times and places more remote and more mysterious. It is not
for me to settle the question between two such men as Professor Hugg
and Sir William Whisky as to whether Notting Hill means Nutting Hill
(in allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it), or whether
it is a corruption of Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among
the ancients as an Earthly Paradise. When a Podkins and a Jossy
confess themselves doubtful about the boundaries of West Kensington
(said to have been traced in the blood of Oxen), I need not be ashamed
to confess a similar doubt. I will ask you to excuse me from further
history, and to assist me with your encouragement in dealing with the
problem which faces us to-day. Is this ancient spirit of the London
townships to die out? Are our omnibus conductors and policemen to lose
altogether that light which we see so often in their eyes, the dreamy
light of

'Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago'

--to quote the words of a little-known poet who was a friend of my
youth? I have resolved, as I have said, so far as possible, to
preserve the eyes of policemen and omnibus conductors in their present
dreamy state. For what is a state without dreams? And the remedy I
propose is as follows:--

"To-morrow morning at twenty-five minutes past ten, if Heaven spares
my life, I purpose to issue a Proclamation. It has been the work of my
life, and is about half finished. With the assistance of a whisky and
soda, I shall conclude the other half to-night, and my people will
receive it to-morrow. All these boroughs where you were born, and hope
to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient
magnificence,--Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea,
Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a
city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city
guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms,
and, if convenient, a gathering cry. I will not enter into the details
now, my heart is too full. They will be found in the proclamation
itself. You will all, however, be subject to enrolment in the local
city guards, to be summoned together by a thing called the Tocsin, the
meaning of which I am studying in my researches into history.
Personally, I believe a tocsin to be some kind of highly paid
official. If, therefore, any of you happen to have such a thing as a
halberd in the house, I should advise you to practise with it in the
garden."

Here the King buried his face in his handkerchief and hurriedly left
the platform, overcome by emotions.

The members of the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities rose
in an indescribable state of vagueness. Some were purple with
indignation; an intellectual few were purple with laughter; the great
majority found their minds a blank. There remains a tradition that one
pale face with burning blue eyes remained fixed upon the lecturer, and
after the lecture a red-haired boy ran out of the room.




CHAPTER II--_The Council of the Provosts_


The King got up early next morning and came down three steps at a time
like a schoolboy. Having eaten his breakfast hurriedly, but with an
appetite, he summoned one of the highest officials of the Palace, and
presented him with a shilling. "Go and buy me," he said, "a shilling
paint-box, which you will get, unless the mists of time mislead me, in
a shop at the corner of the second and dirtier street that leads out
of Rochester Row. I have already requested the Master of the
Buckhounds to provide me with cardboard. It seemed to me (I know not
why) that it fell within his department."

The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his
paint-box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms
for the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no
inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility.

"I cannot think," he said, "why people should think the names of
places in the country more poetical than those in London. Shallow
romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called
Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they
could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name
of St. John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not.
I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to
come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the
Harrow train."

And he thoughtfully retouched his design for the head-dress of the
halberdier of St. John's Wood, a design in black and red, compounded
of a pine tree and the plumage of an eagle. Then he turned to another
card. "Let us think of milder matters," he said. "Lavender Hill! Could
any of your glebes and combes and all the rest of it produce so
fragrant an idea? Think of a mountain of lavender lifting itself in
purple poignancy into the silver skies and filling men's nostrils with
a new breath of life--a purple hill of incense. It is true that upon
my few excursions of discovery on a halfpenny tram I have failed to
hit the precise spot. But it must be there; some poet called it by
its name. There is at least warrant enough for the solemn purple
plumes (following the botanical formation of lavender) which I have
required people to wear in the neighbourhood of Clapham Junction. It
is so everywhere, after all. I have never been actually to
Southfields, but I suppose a scheme of lemons and olives represent
their austral instincts. I have never visited Parson's Green, or seen
either the Green or the Parson, but surely the pale-green shovel-hats
I have designed must be more or less in the spirit. I must work in the
dark and let my instincts guide me. The great love I bear to my people
will certainly save me from distressing their noble spirit or
violating their great traditions."

As he was reflecting in this vein, the door was flung open, and an
official announced Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert.

Mr. Barker and Mr. Lambert were not particularly surprised to find the
King sitting on the floor amid a litter of water-colour sketches. They
were not particularly surprised because the last time they had called
on him they had found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by a litter
of children's bricks, and the time before surrounded by a litter of
wholly unsuccessful attempts to make paper darts. But the trend of
the royal infant's remarks, uttered from amid this infantile chaos,
was not quite the same affair.

For some time they let him babble on, conscious that his remarks meant
nothing. And then a horrible thought began to steal over the mind of
James Barker. He began to think that the King's remarks did not mean
nothing.

"In God's name, Auberon," he suddenly volleyed out, startling the
quiet hall, "you don't mean that you are really going to have these
city guards and city walls and things?"

"I am, indeed," said the infant, in a quiet voice. "Why shouldn't I
have them? I have modelled them precisely on your political
principles. Do you know what I've done, Barker? I've behaved like a
true Barkerian. I've ... but perhaps it won't interest you, the
account of my Barkerian conduct."

"Oh, go on, go on," cried Barker.

"The account of my Barkerian conduct," said Auberon, calmly, "seems
not only to interest, but to alarm you. Yet it is very simple. It
merely consists in choosing all the provosts under any new scheme by
the same principle by which you have caused the central despot to be
appointed. Each provost, of each city, under my charter, is to be
appointed by rotation. Sleep, therefore, my Barker, a rosy sleep."

Barker's wild eyes flared.

"But, in God's name, don't you see, Quin, that the thing is quite
different? In the centre it doesn't matter so much, just because the
whole object of despotism is to get some sort of unity. But if any
damned parish can go to any damned man--"

"I see your difficulty," said King Auberon, calmly. "You feel that
your talents may be neglected. Listen!" And he rose with immense
magnificence. "I solemnly give to my liege subject, James Barker, my
special and splendid favour, the right to override the obvious text of
the Charter of the Cities, and to be, in his own right, Lord High
Provost of South Kensington. And now, my dear James, you are all
right. Good day."

"But--" began Barker.

"The audience is at an end, Provost," said the King, smiling.

How far his confidence was justified, it would require a somewhat
complicated description to explain. "The Great Proclamation of the
Charter of the Free Cities" appeared in due course that morning, and
was posted by bill-stickers all over the front of the Palace, the King
assisting them with animated directions, and standing in the middle of
the road, with his head on one side, contemplating the result. It was
also carried up and down the main thoroughfares by sandwichmen, and
the King was, with difficulty, restrained from going out in that
capacity himself, being, in fact, found by the Groom of the Stole and
Captain Bowler, struggling between two boards. His excitement had
positively to be quieted like that of a child.

The reception which the Charter of the Cities met at the hands of the
public may mildly be described as mixed. In one sense it was popular
enough. In many happy homes that remarkable legal document was read
aloud on winter evenings amid uproarious appreciation, when everything
had been learnt by heart from that quaint but immortal old classic,
Mr. W. W. Jacobs. But when it was discovered that the King had every
intention of seriously requiring the provisions to be carried out, of
insisting that the grotesque cities, with their tocsins and city
guards, should really come into existence, things were thrown into a
far angrier confusion. Londoners had no particular objection to the
King making a fool of himself, but they became indignant when it
became evident that he wished to make fools of them; and protests
began to come in.

The Lord High Provost of the Good and Valiant City of West Kensington
wrote a respectful letter to the King, explaining that upon State
occasions it would, of course, be his duty to observe what formalities
the King thought proper, but that it was really awkward for a decent
householder not to be allowed to go out and put a post-card in a
pillar-box without being escorted by five heralds, who announced, with
formal cries and blasts of a trumpet, that the Lord High Provost
desired to catch the post.

The Lord High Provost of North Kensington, who was a prosperous
draper, wrote a curt business note, like a man complaining of a
railway company, stating that definite inconvenience had been caused
him by the presence of the halberdiers, whom he had to take with him
everywhere. When attempting to catch an omnibus to the City, he had
found that while room could have been found for himself, the
halberdiers had a difficulty in getting in to the vehicle--believe
him, theirs faithfully.

The Lord High Provost of Shepherd's Bush said his wife did not like
men hanging round the kitchen.

The King was always delighted to listen to these grievances,
delivering lenient and kingly answers, but as he always insisted, as
the absolute _sine qua non_, that verbal complaints should be
presented to him with the fullest pomp of trumpets, plumes, and
halberds, only a few resolute spirits were prepared to run the
gauntlet of the little boys in the street.

Among these, however, was prominent the abrupt and business-like
gentleman who ruled North Kensington. And he had before long, occasion
to interview the King about a matter wider and even more urgent than
the problem of the halberdiers and the omnibus. This was the great
question which then and for long afterwards brought a stir to the
blood and a flush to the cheek of all the speculative builders and
house agents from Shepherd's Bush to the Marble Arch, and from
Westbourne Grove to High Street, Kensington. I refer to the great
affair of the improvements in Notting Hill. The scheme was conducted
chiefly by Mr. Buck, the abrupt North Kensington magnate, and by Mr.
Wilson, the Provost of Bayswater. A great thoroughfare was to be
driven through three boroughs, through West Kensington, North
Kensington and Notting Hill, opening at one end into Hammersmith
Broadway, and at the other into Westbourne Grove. The negotiations,
buyings, sellings, bullying and bribing took ten years, and by the end
of it Buck, who had conducted them almost single-handed, had proved
himself a man of the strongest type of material energy and material
diplomacy. And just as his splendid patience and more splendid
impatience had finally brought him victory, when workmen were already
demolishing houses and walls along the great line from Hammersmith, a
sudden obstacle appeared that had neither been reckoned with nor
dreamed of, a small and strange obstacle, which, like a speck of grit
in a great machine, jarred the whole vast scheme and brought it to a
stand-still, and Mr. Buck, the draper, getting with great impatience
into his robes of office and summoning with indescribable disgust his
halberdiers, hurried over to speak to the King.

Ten years had not tired the King of his joke. There were still new
faces to be seen looking out from the symbolic head-gears he had
designed, gazing at him from amid the pastoral ribbons of Shepherd's
Bush or from under the sombre hoods of the Blackfriars Road. And the
interview which was promised him with the Provost of North Kensington
he anticipated with a particular pleasure, for "he never really
enjoyed," he said, "the full richness of the mediæval garments unless
the people compelled to wear them were very angry and business-like."

Mr. Buck was both. At the King's command the door of the
audience-chamber was thrown open and a herald appeared in the purple
colours of Mr. Buck's commonwealth emblazoned with the Great Eagle
which the King had attributed to North Kensington, in vague
reminiscence of Russia, for he always insisted on regarding North
Kensington as some kind of semi-arctic neighbourhood. The herald
announced that the Provost of that city desired audience of the King.

"From North Kensington?" said the King, rising graciously. "What news
does he bring from that land of high hills and fair women? He is
welcome."

The herald advanced into the room, and was immediately followed by
twelve guards clad in purple, who were followed by an attendant
bearing the banner of the Eagle, who was followed by another attendant
bearing the keys of the city upon a cushion, who was followed by Mr.
Buck in a great hurry. When the King saw his strong animal face and
steady eyes, he knew that he was in the presence of a great man of
business, and consciously braced himself.

"Well, well," he said, cheerily coming down two or three steps from a
daïs, and striking his hands lightly together, "I am glad to see you.
Never mind, never mind. Ceremony is not everything."

"I don't understand your Majesty," said the Provost, stolidly.

"Never mind, never mind," said the King, gaily. "A knowledge of Courts
is by no means an unmixed merit; you will do it next time, no doubt."

The man of business looked at him sulkily from under his black brows
and said again without show of civility--

"I don't follow you."

"Well, well," replied the King, good-naturedly, "if you ask me I don't
mind telling you, not because I myself attach any importance to these
forms in comparison with the Honest Heart. But it is usual--it is
usual--that is all, for a man when entering the presence of Royalty to
lie down on his back on the floor and elevating his feet towards
heaven (as the source of Royal power) to say three times 'Monarchical
institutions improve the manners.' But there, there--such pomp is far
less truly dignified than your simple kindliness."

The Provost's face was red with anger, and he maintained silence.

"And now," said the King, lightly, and with the exasperating air of a
man softening a snub; "what delightful weather we are having! You must
find your official robes warm, my Lord. I designed them for your own
snow-bound land."

"They're as hot as hell," said Buck, briefly. "I came here on
business."

"Right," said the King, nodding a great number of times with quite
unmeaning solemnity; "right, right, right. Business, as the sad glad
old Persian said, is business. Be punctual. Rise early. Point the pen
to the shoulder. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know not
whence you come nor why. Point the pen to the shoulder, for you know
not when you go nor where."

The Provost pulled a number of papers from his pocket and savagely
flapped them open.

"Your Majesty may have heard," he began, sarcastically, "of
Hammersmith and a thing called a road. We have been at work ten years
buying property and getting compulsory powers and fixing compensation
and squaring vested interests, and now at the very end, the thing is
stopped by a fool. Old Prout, who was Provost of Notting Hill, was a
business man, and we dealt with him quite satisfactorily. But he's
dead, and the cursed lot has fallen on a young man named Wayne, who's
up to some game that's perfectly incomprehensible to me. We offer him
a better price than any one ever dreamt of, but he won't let the road
go through. And his Council seems to be backing him up. It's midsummer
madness."

The King, who was rather inattentively engaged in drawing the
Provost's nose with his finger on the window-pane, heard the last two
words.

"What a perfect phrase that is!" he said. "'Midsummer madness'!"

"The chief point is," continued Buck, doggedly, "that the only part
that is really in question is one dirty little street--Pump Street--a
street with nothing in it but a public-house and a penny toy-shop, and
that sort of thing. All the respectable people of Notting Hill have
accepted our compensation. But the ineffable Wayne sticks out over
Pump Street. Says he's Provost of Notting Hill. He's only Provost of
Pump Street."

"A good thought," replied Auberon. "I like the idea of a Provost of
Pump Street. Why not let him alone?"

"And drop the whole scheme!" cried out Buck, with a burst of brutal
spirit. "I'll be damned if we do. No. I'm for sending in workmen to
pull down without more ado."

"Strike for the purple Eagle!" cried the King, hot with historical
associations.

"I'll tell you what it is," said Buck, losing his temper altogether.
"If your Majesty would spend less time in insulting respectable people
with your silly coats-of-arms, and more time over the business of the
nation--"

The King's brow wrinkled thoughtfully.

"The situation is not bad," he said; "the haughty burgher defying the
King in his own Palace. The burgher's head should be thrown back and
the right arm extended; the left may be lifted towards Heaven, but
that I leave to your private religious sentiment. I have sunk back in
this chair, stricken with baffled fury. Now again, please."

Buck's mouth opened like a dog's, but before he could speak another
herald appeared at the door.

"The Lord High Provost of Bayswater," he said, "desires an audience."

"Admit him," said Auberon. "This _is_ a jolly day."

The halberdiers of Bayswater wore a prevailing uniform of green, and
the banner which was borne after them was emblazoned with a green
bay-wreath on a silver ground, which the King, in the course of his
researches into a bottle of champagne, had discovered to be the quaint
old punning cognisance of the city of Bayswater.

"It is a fit symbol," said the King, "your immortal bay-wreath. Fulham
may seek for wealth, and Kensington for art, but when did the men of
Bayswater care for anything but glory?"

Immediately behind the banner, and almost completely hidden by it,
came the Provost of the city, clad in splendid robes of green and
silver with white fur and crowned with bay. He was an anxious little
man with red whiskers, originally the owner of a small sweet-stuff
shop.

"Our cousin of Bayswater," said the King, with delight; "what can we
get for you?" The King was heard also distinctly to mutter, "Cold
beef, cold 'am, cold chicken," his voice dying into silence.

"I came to see your Majesty," said the Provost of Bayswater, whose
name was Wilson, "about that Pump Street affair."

"I have just been explaining the situation to his Majesty," said Buck,
curtly, but recovering his civility. "I am not sure, however, whether
his Majesty knows how much the matter affects you also."

"It affects both of us, yer see, yer Majesty, as this scheme was
started for the benefit of the 'ole neighbourhood. So Mr. Buck and me
we put our 'eads together--"

The King clasped his hands.

"Perfect!" he cried in ecstacy. "Your heads together! I can see it!
Can't you do it now? Oh, do do it now!"

A smothered sound of amusement appeared to come from the halberdiers,
but Mr. Wilson looked merely bewildered, and Mr. Buck merely
diabolical.

"I suppose," he began bitterly, but the King stopped him with a
gesture of listening.

"Hush," he said, "I think I hear some one else coming. I seem to hear
another herald, a herald whose boots creak."

As he spoke another voice cried from the doorway--

"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington desires an audience."

"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington!" cried the King. "Why,
that is my old friend James Barker! What does he want, I wonder? If
the tender memories of friendship have not grown misty, I fancy he
wants something for himself, probably money. How are you, James?"

Mr. James Barker, whose guard was attired in a splendid blue, and
whose blue banner bore three gold birds singing, rushed, in his blue
and gold robes, into the room. Despite the absurdity of all the
dresses, it was worth noticing that he carried his better than the
rest, though he loathed it as much as any of them. He was a gentleman,
and a very handsome man, and could not help unconsciously wearing even
his preposterous robe as it should be worn. He spoke quickly, but with
the slight initial hesitation he always showed in addressing the King,
due to suppressing an impulse to address his old acquaintance in the
old way.

"Your Majesty--pray forgive my intrusion. It is about this man in Pump
Street. I see you have Buck here, so you have probably heard what is
necessary. I--"

The King swept his eyes anxiously round the room, which now blazed
with the trappings of three cities.

"There is one thing necessary," he said.

"Yes, your Majesty," said Mr. Wilson of Bayswater, a little eagerly.
"What does yer Majesty think necessary?"

"A little yellow," said the King, firmly. "Send for the Provost of
West Kensington."

Amid some materialistic protests he was sent for, and arrived with his
yellow halberdiers in his saffron robes, wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief. After all, placed as he was, he had a good deal to say
on the matter.

"Welcome, West Kensington," said the King. "I have long wished to see
you touching that matter of the Hammersmith land to the south of the
Rowton House. Will you hold it feudally from the Provost of
Hammersmith? You have only to do him homage by putting his left arm
in his overcoat and then marching home in state."

"No, your Majesty; I'd rather not," said the Provost of West
Kensington, who was a pale young man with a fair moustache and
whiskers, who kept a successful dairy.

The King struck him heartily on the shoulder.

"The fierce old West Kensington blood," he said; "they are not wise
who ask it to do homage."

Then he glanced again round the room. It was full of a roaring sunset
of colour, and he enjoyed the sight, possible to so few artists--the
sight of his own dreams moving and blazing before him. In the
foreground the yellow of the West Kensington liveries outlined itself
against the dark blue draperies of South Kensington. The crests of
these again brightened suddenly into green as the almost woodland
colours of Bayswater rose behind them. And over and behind all, the
great purple plumes of North Kensington showed almost funereal and
black.

"There is something lacking," said the King--"something lacking. What
can--Ah, there it is! there it is!"

In the doorway had appeared a new figure, a herald in flaming red. He
cried in a loud but unemotional voice--

"The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill desires an audience."




CHAPTER III--_Enter a Lunatic_


The King of the Fairies, who was, it is to be presumed, the godfather
of King Auberon, must have been very favourable on this particular day
to his fantastic godchild, for with the entrance of the guard of the
Provost of Notting Hill there was a certain more or less inexplicable
addition to his delight. The wretched navvies and sandwich-men who
carried the colours of Bayswater or South Kensington, engaged merely
for the day to satisfy the Royal hobby, slouched into the room with a
comparatively hang-dog air, and a great part of the King's
intellectual pleasure consisted in the contrast between the arrogance
of their swords and feathers and the meek misery of their faces. But
these Notting Hill halberdiers in their red tunics belted with gold
had the air rather of an absurd gravity. They seemed, so to speak, to
be taking part in the joke. They marched and wheeled into position
with an almost startling dignity and discipline.

They carried a yellow banner with a great red lion, named by the King
as the Notting Hill emblem, after a small public-house in the
neighbourhood, which he once frequented.

Between the two lines of his followers there advanced towards the King
a tall, red-haired young man, with high features and bold blue eyes.
He would have been called handsome, but that a certain indefinable air
of his nose being too big for his face, and his feet for his legs,
gave him a look of awkwardness and extreme youth. His robes were red,
according to the King's heraldry, and, alone among the Provosts, he
was girt with a great sword. This was Adam Wayne, the intractable
Provost of Notting Hill.

The King flung himself back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.

"What a day, what a day!" he said to himself. "Now there'll be a row.
I'd no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Provosts are so very
indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look
in his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those
large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He'll
remonstrate with the others, and they'll remonstrate with him, and
they'll all make themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me."

"Welcome, my Lord," he said aloud. "What news from the Hill of a
Hundred Legends? What have you for the ear of your King? I know that
troubles have arisen between you and these others, our cousins, but
these troubles it shall be our pride to compose. And I doubt not, and
cannot doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less
ardent, than theirs."

Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker's nostrils curled;
Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the Provost of West Kensington
followed in a smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never
changed, and he called out in an odd, boyish voice down the hall--

"I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have--my
sword."

And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on
one knee behind it.

There was a dead silence.

"I beg your pardon," said the King, blankly.

"You speak well, sire," said Adam Wayne, "as you ever speak, when you
say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be
if it were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme--the child of
the great Charter. I stand here for the rights the Charter gave me,
and I swear, by your sacred crown, that where I stand, I stand fast."

[Illustration: "I BRING HOMAGE TO MY KING."]

The eyes of all five men stood out of their heads.

Then Buck said, in his jolly, jarring voice: "Is the whole world mad?"

The King sprang to his feet, and his eyes blazed.

"Yes," he cried, in a voice of exultation, "the whole world is mad,
but Adam Wayne and me. It is true as death what I told you long ago,
James Barker, seriousness sends men mad. You are mad, because you care
for politics, as mad as a man who collects tram tickets. Buck is mad,
because he cares for money, as mad as a man who lives on opium. Wilson
is mad, because he thinks himself right, as mad as a man who thinks
himself God Almighty. The Provost of West Kensington is mad, because
he thinks he is respectable, as mad as a man who thinks he is a
chicken. All men are mad but the humorist, who cares for nothing and
possesses everything. I thought that there was only one humorist in
England. Fools!--dolts!--open your cows' eyes; there are two! In
Notting Hill--in that unpromising elevation--there has been born an
artist! You thought to spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by
becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more
bustling and rational. Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by
becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more
ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has
answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has
lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable
pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?"

"About the city of Notting Hill," answered Wayne, proudly, "of which
Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part."

"Not a very large part," said Barker, contemptuously.

"That which is large enough for the rich to covet," said Wayne,
drawing up his head, "is large enough for the poor to defend."

The King slapped both his legs, and waved his feet for a second in the
air.

"Every respectable person in Notting Hill," cut in Buck, with his
cold, coarse voice, "is for us and against you. I have plenty of
friends in Notting Hill."

"Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men's
hearthstones, my Lord Buck," said Provost Wayne. "I can well believe
they are your friends."

"They've never sold dirty toys, anyhow," said Buck, laughing shortly.

"They've sold dirtier things," said Wayne, calmly: "they have sold
themselves."

"It's no good, my Buckling," said the King, rolling about on his
chair. "You can't cope with this chivalrous eloquence. You can't cope
with an artist. You can't cope with the humorist of Notting Hill. Oh,
_Nunc dimittis_--that I have lived to see this day! Provost Wayne, you
stand firm?"

"Let them wait and see," said Wayne. "If I stood firm before, do you
think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the King? For I
fight for something greater, if greater there can be, than the
hearthstones of my people and the Lordship of the Lion. I fight for
your royal vision, for the great dream you dreamt of the League of the
Free Cities. You have given me this liberty. If I had been a beggar
and you had flung me a coin, if I had been a peasant in a dance and
you had flung me a favour, do you think I would have let it be taken
by any ruffians on the road? This leadership and liberty of Notting
Hill is a gift from your Majesty, and if it is taken from me, by God!
it shall be taken in battle, and the noise of that battle shall be
heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the studios of St. John's Wood."

"It is too much--it is too much," said the King. "Nature is weak. I
must speak to you, brother artist, without further disguise. Let me
ask you a solemn question. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting
Hill, don't you think it splendid?"

"Splendid!" cried Adam Wayne. "It has the splendour of God."

"Bowled out again," said the King. "You will keep up the pose.
Funnily, of course, it is serious. But seriously, isn't it funny?"

"What?" asked Wayne, with the eyes of a baby.

"Hang it all, don't play any more. The whole business--the Charter of
the Cities. Isn't it immense?"

"Immense is no unworthy word for that glorious design."

"Oh, hang you! But, of course, I see. You want me to clear the room of
these reasonable sows. You want the two humorists alone together.
Leave us, gentlemen."

Buck threw a sour look at Barker, and at a sullen signal the whole
pageant of blue and green, of red, gold, and purple, rolled out of
the room, leaving only two in the great hall, the King sitting in his
seat on the daïs, and the red-clad figure still kneeling on the floor
before his fallen sword.

The King bounded down the steps and smacked Provost Wayne on the back.

"Before the stars were made," he cried, "we were made for each other.
It is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street.
That is the real thing. It is the deification of the ludicrous."

The kneeling figure sprang to his feet with a fierce stagger.

"Ludicrous!" he cried, with a fiery face.

"Oh, come, come," said the King, impatiently, "you needn't keep it up
with me. The augurs must wink sometimes from sheer fatigue of the
eyelids. Let us enjoy this for half an hour, not as actors, but as
dramatic critics. Isn't it a joke?"

Adam Wayne looked down like a boy, and answered in a constrained
voice--

"I do not understand your Majesty. I cannot believe that while I fight
for your royal charter your Majesty deserts me for these dogs of the
gold hunt."

"Oh, damn your--But what's this? What the devil's this?"

The King stared into the young Provost's face, and in the twilight of
the room began to see that his face was quite white and his lip
shaking.

"What in God's name is the matter?" cried Auberon, holding his wrist.

Wayne flung back his face, and the tears were shining on it.

"I am only a boy," he said, "but it's true. I would paint the Red Lion
on my shield if I had only my blood."

King Auberon dropped the hand and stood without stirring,
thunderstruck.

"My God in Heaven!" he said; "is it possible that there is within the
four seas of Britain a man who takes Notting Hill seriously?"

"And my God in Heaven!" said Wayne passionately; "is it possible that
there is within the four seas of Britain a man who does not take it
seriously?"

The King said nothing, but merely went back up the steps of the daïs,
like a man dazed. He fell back in his chair again and kicked his
heels.

"If this sort of thing is to go on," he said weakly, "I shall begin to
doubt the superiority of art to life. In Heaven's name, do not play
with me. Do you really mean that you are--God help me!--a Notting Hill
patriot; that you are--?"

Wayne made a violent gesture, and the King soothed him wildly.

"All right--all right--I see you are; but let me take it in. You do
really propose to fight these modern improvers with their boards and
inspectors and surveyors and all the rest of it?"

"Are they so terrible?" asked Wayne, scornfully.

The King continued to stare at him as if he were a human curiosity.

"And I suppose," he said, "that you think that the dentists and small
tradesmen and maiden ladies who inhabit Notting Hill, will rally with
war-hymns to your standard?"

"If they have blood they will," said the Provost.

"And I suppose," said the King, with his head back among the cushions,
"that it never crossed your mind that"--his voice seemed to lose
itself luxuriantly--"never crossed your mind that any one ever thought
that the idea of a Notting Hill idealism was--er--slightly--slightly
ridiculous?"

"Of course they think so," said Wayne.

"What was the meaning of mocking the prophets?"

"Where," asked the King, leaning forward--"where in Heaven's name did
you get this miraculously inane idea?"

"You have been my tutor, Sire," said the Provost, "in all that is high
and honourable."

"Eh?" said the King.

"It was your Majesty who first stirred my dim patriotism into flame.
Ten years ago, when I was a boy (I am only nineteen), I was playing on
the slope of Pump Street, with a wooden sword and a paper helmet,
dreaming of great wars. In an angry trance I struck out with my sword,
and stood petrified, for I saw that I had struck you, Sire, my King,
as you wandered in a noble secrecy, watching over your people's
welfare. But I need have had no fear. Then was I taught to understand
Kingliness. You neither shrank nor frowned. You summoned no guards.
You invoked no punishments. But in august and burning words, which are
written in my soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my
sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing
to the altar, you pointed to the hill of Notting. 'So long,' you said,
'as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were
ringed with all the armies of Bayswater.' I have not forgotten the
words, and I have reason now to remember them, for the hour is come
and the crown of your prophecy. The sacred hill is ringed with the
armies of Bayswater, and I am ready to die."

The King was lying back in his chair, a kind of wreck.

"Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord," he murmured, "what a life! what a life! All my
work! I seem to have done it all. So you're the red-haired boy that
hit me in the waistcoat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I
thought I would have a joke, and I have created a passion. I tried to
compose a burlesque, and it seems to be turning halfway through into
an epic. What is to be done with such a world? In the Lord's name,
wasn't the joke broad and bold enough? I abandoned my subtle humour to
amuse you, and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What's to be
done with people when you write a pantomime for them--call the
sausages classic festoons, and the policeman cut in two a tragedy of
public duty? But why am I talking? Why am I asking questions of a nice
young gentleman who is totally mad? What is the good of it? What is
the good of anything? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!"

Suddenly he pulled himself upright.

"Don't you really think the sacred Notting Hill at all absurd?"

"Absurd?" asked Wayne, blankly. "Why should I?"

The King stared back equally blankly.

"I beg your pardon," he said.

"Notting Hill," said the Provost, simply, "is a rise or high ground of
the common earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which
they are born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think
it absurd?"

The King smiled.

"Because, my Leonidas--" he began, then suddenly, he knew not how,
found his mind was a total blank. After all, why was it absurd? Why
was it absurd? He felt as if the floor of his mind had given way. He
felt as all men feel when their first principles are hit hard with a
question. Barker always felt so when the King said, "Why trouble about
politics?"

The King's thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not collect them.

"It is generally felt to be a little funny," he said vaguely.

"I suppose," said Adam, turning on him with a fierce suddenness--"I
suppose you fancy crucifixion was a serious affair?"

"Well, I--" began Auberon--"I admit I have generally thought it had
its graver side."

"Then you are wrong," said Wayne, with incredible violence.
"Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd
and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be
laughed at--for slaves and provincials, for dentists and small
tradesmen, as you would say. I have seen the grotesque gallows-shape,
which the little Roman gutter-boys scribbled on walls as a vulgar
joke, blazing on the pinnacles of the temples of the world. And shall
I turn back?"

The King made no answer.

Adam went on, his voice ringing in the roof.

"This laughter with which men tyrannise is not the great power you
think it. Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What
could be funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside
down? What could be more in the style of your modern humour? But what
was the good of it? Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to
mankind. Upside down he stills hangs over Europe, and millions move
and breathe only in the life of his Church."

King Auberon got up absently.

"There is something in what you say," he said. "You seem to have been
thinking, young man."

"Only feeling, sire," answered the Provost. "I was born, like other
men, in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys'
games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through
nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These
little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought
out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be
absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic
when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow
evening in a certain street without being wracked with something of
which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sorrow or joy?
Why should any one be able to raise a laugh by saying 'the Cause of
Notting Hill'?--Notting Hill where thousands of immortal spirits blaze
with alternate hope and fear."

Auberon was flicking dust off his sleeve with quite a new seriousness
on his face, distinct from the owlish solemnity which was the pose of
his humour.

"It is very difficult," he said at last. "It is a damned difficult
thing. I see what you mean; I agree with you even up to a point--or I
should like to agree with you, if I were young enough to be a prophet
and poet. I feel a truth in everything you say until you come to the
words 'Notting Hill.' And then I regret to say that the old Adam
awakes roaring with laughter and makes short work of the new Adam,
whose name is Wayne."

For the first time Provost Wayne was silent, and stood gazing dreamily
at the floor. Evening was closing in, and the room had grown darker.

"I know," he said, in a strange, almost sleepy voice, "there is truth
in what you say, too. It is hard not to laugh at the common names--I
only say we should not. I have thought of a remedy; but such thoughts
are rather terrible."

"What thoughts?" asked Auberon.

The Provost of Notting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of
trance; in his eyes was an elvish light.

"I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may
rightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear,
stronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use.
But whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever
is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch,
with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill, men
will love them, and be afraid of them for ever."

"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the King.

"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast
cathedrals," went on the madman. "Why should it not make lamp-posts
fairer than Greek lamps; and an omnibus-ride like a painted ship? The
touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection."

"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.

"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword
lay flat and shining.

"The sword!" cried the King; and sprang up straight on the daïs.

"Yes, yes," cried Wayne, hoarsely. "The things touched by that are
not vulgar; the things touched by that--"

King Auberon made a gesture of horror.

"You will shed blood for that!" he cried. "For a cursed point of
view--"

"Oh, you kings, you kings!" cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. "How
humane you are, how tender, how considerate! You will make war for a
frontier, or the imports of a foreign harbour; you will shed blood for
the precise duty on lace, or the salute to an admiral. But for the
things that make life itself worthy or miserable--how humane you are!
I say here, and I know well what I speak of, there were never any
necessary wars but the religious wars. There were never any just wars
but the religious wars. There were never any humane wars but the
religious wars. For these men were fighting for something that
claimed, at least, to be the happiness of a man, the virtue of a man.
A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man,
king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think Buck and Barker
and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of
the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really
capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, you
whose English Government has so often fought for tomfooleries? If, as
your rich friends say, there are no gods, and the skies are dark above
us, what should a man fight for, but the place where he had the Eden
of childhood and the short heaven of first love? If no temples and no
scriptures are sacred, what is sacred if a man's own youth is not
sacred?"

The King walked a little restlessly up and down the daïs.

"It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to assent to a view so
desperate--so responsible...."

As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through
the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal,
but well-bred voice of Barker.

"I said to him quite plainly--the public interests--"

Auberon turned on Wayne with violence.

"What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying?
Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give
me back my sense of humour. Give it me back--give it me back, I say!"

"I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if
feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it."

The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.

"I don't think you have," he cried.




BOOK III




CHAPTER I--_The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_


A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems
appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor
was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of
attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who
was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary
critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were
known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated
malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate
criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock:
half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were
important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,
but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a
book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar
favour.

The peculiarity of "Hymns on the Hill" was the celebration of the
poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This
sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth
century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes
artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there
is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,
since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one
of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is
really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A
street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of
the book called "Hymns on the Hill," there was another peculiarity,
which the King pointed out with great acumen in his review. He was
naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a
volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."

This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,
while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style
the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat
too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the
country--using nature, that is, as a background from which all
poetical images had to be drawn--the more robust author of "Hymns on
the Hill" praised the country, or nature, by comparing it to the town,
and used the town itself as a background. "Take," said the critic,
"the typically feminine lines, 'To the Inventor of The Hansom Cab'--

'Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
           Where twain may dwell.'"

"Surely," wrote the King, "no one but a woman could have written those
lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her art is only
beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab
by theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking
up shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed,
do we not speak (with sacred propriety) of 'a man about town'? Who
ever spoke of a woman about town? However much, physically, 'about
town' a woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to
carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry
beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she
models her hat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our
nobler civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of
civilisation. And rather than be without birds, she will commit
massacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to
sing on it."

This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic
remembered his subject, and returned to it.

"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
          Where twain may dwell."

"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued
"Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab
by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author
of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his
fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and
poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the
end--

'The wind round the old street corner
Swung sudden and quick as a cab.'

"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great
compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral
chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a
great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney
coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to
speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in
which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to
two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to
speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which
the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her
complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of
Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the
mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"

Here, somewhat abruptly, the review concluded, probably because the
King had to send off his copy at that moment, as he was in some want
of money. But the King was a very good critic, whatever he may have
been as King, and he had, to a considerable extent, hit the right nail
on the head. "Hymns on the Hill" was not at all like the poems
originally published in praise of the poetry of London. And the
reason was that it was really written by a man who had seen nothing
else but London, and who regarded it, therefore, as the universe. It
was written by a raw, red-headed lad of seventeen, named Adam Wayne,
who had been born in Notting Hill. An accident in his seventh year
prevented his being taken away to the seaside, and thus his whole life
had been passed in his own Pump Street, and in its neighbourhood. And
the consequence was, that he saw the street-lamps as things quite as
eternal as the stars; the two fires were mingled. He saw the houses as
things enduring, like the mountains, and so he wrote about them as one
would write about mountains. Nature puts on a disguise when she speaks
to every man; to this man she put on the disguise of Notting Hill.
Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cumberland hills, a stormy
sky-line and sudden rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the
Essex flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So
nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violet roofs and lemon lamps,
the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to
praise the shadows and colours of the town; he had seen no other
shadows or colours, and so he praised them--because they were shadows
and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice
a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is
nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.

Mr. Wayne's little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he
submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went
back to his work, which was that of a draper's assistant, and wrote no
more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill,
because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was
the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any
particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border
of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the
boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from
him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns
of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard
of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to
his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in
literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of
those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of
artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might
have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a
treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky
star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his
dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when
all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners
and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have
been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found
himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and
speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike
treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by
taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic
omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of
drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one
poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of
open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have
dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is only a cheap
substitute.

Upwards from his abstracted childhood, Adam Wayne had grown strongly
and silently in a certain quality or capacity which is in modern
cities almost entirely artificial, but which can be natural, and was
primarily almost brutally natural in him, the quality or capacity of
patriotism. It exists, like other virtues and vices, in a certain
undiluted reality. It is not confused with all kinds of other things.
A child speaking of his country or his village may make every mistake
in Mandeville or tell every lie in Munchausen, but in his statement
there will be no psychological lies any more than there can be in a
good song. Adam Wayne, as a boy, had for his dull streets in Notting
Hill the ultimate and ancient sentiment that went out to Athens or
Jerusalem. He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make
real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation. He knew
that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes
much more than about victory. He knew that in proper names themselves
is half the poetry of all national poems. Above all, he knew the
supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection
with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the
patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his
country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.

All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but
because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum like
Pump Street, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a
paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost
too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.

It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out
some strip of street or fortress of steps as the limit of his haughty
claim, that the King had met him, and, with a few words flung in
mockery, ratified for ever the strange boundaries of his soul.
Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defence of Notting Hill in war
became to him a thing as solid as eating or drinking or lighting a
pipe. He disposed his meals for it, altered his plans for it, lay
awake in the night and went over it again. Two or three shops were to
him an arsenal; an area was to him a moat; corners of balconies and
turns of stone steps were points for the location of a culverin or an
archer. It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination
the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to
a romantic gold. The process began almost in babyhood, and became
habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night,
when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like
the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has
the bold simplicity of blue hills. But for him the night revealed
instead of concealing, and he read all the blank hours of morning and
afternoon, by a contradictory phrase, in the light of that darkness.
To this man, at any rate, the inconceivable had happened. The
artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones
and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he
said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden,
"How those railings stir one's blood!"

His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them
painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled
about it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet
evenings and stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen
to his blood, but without success. At last he took refuge in asking
Wayne himself. He discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he
had never noticed about the railings even after his six visits--the
fact that they were, like the great majority of others--in London,
shaped at the top after the manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had
half unconsciously compared them with the spears in pictures of
Lancelot and St. George, and had grown up under the shadow of the
graphic association. Now, whenever he looked at them, they were simply
the serried weapons that made a hedge of steel round the sacred homes
of Notting Hill. He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning
even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like
it. It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings
reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the
familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.

A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was
pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the
upper end of the disputed street. They were a grocer's, a chemist's, a
barber's, an old curiosity shop and a toy-shop that sold also
newspapers. It was these five shops which his childish fastidiousness
had first selected as the essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the
citadel of the city. If Notting Hill was the heart of the universe,
and Pump Street was the heart of Notting Hill, this was the heart of
Pump Street. The fact that they were all small and side by side
realised that feeling for a formidable comfort and compactness which,
as we have said, was the heart of his patriotism, and of all
patriotism. The grocer (who had a wine and spirit licence) was
included because he could provision the garrison; the old curiosity
shop because it contained enough swords, pistols, partisans,
cross-bows, and blunderbusses to arm a whole irregular regiment; the
toy and paper shop because Wayne thought a free press an essential
centre for the soul of Pump Street; the chemist's to cope with
outbreaks of disease among the besieged; and the barber's because it
was in the middle of all the rest, and the barber's son was an
intimate friend and spiritual affinity.

It was a cloudless October evening settling down through purple into
pure silver around the roofs and chimneys of the steep little street,
which looked black and sharp and dramatic. In the deep shadows the
gas-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them,
darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces, passed
to and fro the tall bird-like figure and eagle nose of Adam Wayne.

He swung his stick restlessly, and seemed fitfully talking to himself.

"There are, after all, enigmas," he said "even to the man who has
faith. There are doubts that remain even after the true philosophy is
completed in every rung and rivet. And here is one of them. Is the
normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than
those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and
dangerous glory? those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which
are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come
first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the
half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man
great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should
come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the
chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift
chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In such
ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the
higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my
choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the
grocer."

"Good morning, sir," said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,
partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined
with all the cares of the small tradesman. "What can I do for you,
sir?"

Wayne removed his hat on entering the shop, with a ceremonious
gesture, which, slight as it was, made the tradesman eye him with the
beginnings of wonder.

"I come, sir," he said soberly, "to appeal to your patriotism."

"Why, sir," said the grocer, "that sounds like the times when I was a
boy and we used to have elections."

"You will have them again," said Wayne, firmly, "and far greater
things. Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to
a too cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit
all day as you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the
earth, from strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests
that we could not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such
argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and
Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at
your elbow," he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a
drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, "China is
before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at
this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in
your hands."

Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then
picked it up again vaguely.

Wayne went on with a heightened colour, but a lowered voice,

"I know, I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a
vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like
many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather
to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow
nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares
under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the
grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism which no
wanderings or enlightenments should ever wholly extinguish, and I ask
you to remember Notting Hill. For, after all, in this cosmopolitan
magnificence, she has played no small part. Your dates may come from
the tall palms of Barbary, your sugar from the strange islands of the
tropics, your tea from the secret villages of the Empire of the
Dragon. That this room might be furnished, forests may have been
spoiled under the Southern Cross, and leviathans speared under the
Polar Star. But you yourself--surely no inconsiderable treasure--you
yourself, the brain that wields these vast interests--you yourself, at
least, have grown to strength and wisdom between these grey houses and
under this rainy sky. This city which made you, and thus made your
fortunes, is threatened with war. Come forth and tell to the ends of
the earth this lesson. Oil is from the North and fruits from the
South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon; sheep are from New
Zealand and men from Notting Hill."

The grocer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth
open, looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his
head, and said nothing. Then he said--

"Anything out of the shop, sir?"

Wayne looked round in a dazed way. Seeing a pile of tins of pine-apple
chunks, he waved his stick generally towards them.

"Yes," he said; "I'll take those."

"All those, sir?" said the grocer, with greatly increased interest.

"Yes, yes; all those," replied Wayne, still a little bewildered, like
a man splashed with cold water.

"Very good, sir; thank you, sir," said the grocer with animation. "You
may count upon my patriotism, sir."

"I count upon it already," said Wayne, and passed out into the
gathering night.

The grocer put the box of dates back in its place.

"What a nice fellow he is!" he said. "It's odd how often they are
nice. Much nicer than those as are all right."

Meanwhile Adam Wayne stood outside the glowing chemist's shop,
unmistakably wavering.

"What a weakness it is!" he muttered. "I have never got rid of it from
childhood--the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is
romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not--no, he is
not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in
Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning
bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It
is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is
beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid. But I
must be a man and enter."

He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the
counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely
business-like smile.

"A fine evening, sir," he said.

"Fine indeed, strange Father," said Adam, stretching his hands
somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your
shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of
green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of
pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft."

"Can I get you anything?" asked the chemist.

"Let me see," said Wayne, in a friendly but vague manner. "Let me have
some sal volatile."

"Eightpence, tenpence, or one and sixpence a bottle?" said the young
man, genially.

"One and six--one and six," replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.
"I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question."

He paused and collected himself.

"It is necessary," he muttered--"it is necessary to be tactful, and to
suit the appeal to each profession in turn."

"I come," he resumed aloud, "to ask you a question which goes to the
roots of your miraculous toils. Mr. Bowles, shall all this witchery
cease?" And he waved his stick around the shop.

Meeting with no answer, he continued with animation--

"In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your
profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened."

"Anything more, sir?" asked the chemist.

"Oh," said Wayne, somewhat disturbed--"oh, what is it chemists sell?
Quinine, I think. Thank you. Shall it be destroyed? I have met these
men of Bayswater and North Kensington--Mr. Bowles, they are
materialists. They see no witchery in your work, even when it is
wrought within their own borders. They think the chemist is
commonplace. They think him human."

The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult,
and immediately said--

"And the next article, please?"

"Alum," said the Provost, wildly. "I resume. It is in this sacred
town alone that your priesthood is reverenced. Therefore, when you
fight for us you fight not only for yourself, but for everything you
typify. You fight not only for Notting Hill, but for Fairyland, for as
surely as Buck and Barker and such men hold sway, the sense of
Fairyland in some strange manner diminishes."

"Anything more, sir?" asked Mr. Bowles, with unbroken cheerfulness.

"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In
all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city
(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these
great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,
but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the
gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient
sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can
count upon you."

"Oh yes, sir," said the chemist, with great animation; "we are always
glad to oblige a good customer."

Adam Wayne went out of the shop with a deep sense of fulfilment of
soul.

"It is so fortunate," he said, "to have tact, to be able to play upon
the peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the
grocer and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be
without tact?"




CHAPTER II--_The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_


After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's
confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.
Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and
the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something
unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment
against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he
could not quite conjecture.

His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had
begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,
indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the
door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently
a gentleman who had come down in the world.

"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?"
said Wayne, affably.

"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice
of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the
world. "Things are terribly quiet."

Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.

"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human
history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,
as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other
people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.
I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about
inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and
nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake
screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a
thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap
with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _débris_ of the
great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that
war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle
lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude
Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland
battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly
quiet."

Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original
source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained
depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little
more worried.

"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of
modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.
What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means
practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about
unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is
illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is
talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we
must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.
Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy
egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must
break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but
guard relics?"

The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led
those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the
last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.

"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't
quite know what to be, either."

"Why not," said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his
delicate persuasion--"why not be a colonel?"

It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to
yield more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first
to regard the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere
of immediate and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the
inevitable war of independence, coupled with the purchase of a
doubtful sixteenth-century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to
resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, somewhat infected with
the melancholy of its owner.

That melancholy was completed at the barber's.

"Shaving, sir?" inquired that artist from inside his shop.

"War!" replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon," said the other, sharply.

"War!" said Wayne, warmly. "But not for anything inconsistent with the
beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War
for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander
which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes
poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives.
Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not--"

"Now, you get out," said the barber, irascibly. "We don't want any of
your sort here. You get out."

And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when
enraged.

Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.

"Notting Hill," he said, "will need her bolder sons;" and he turned
gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side
streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys
upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist
of almost everything else in the world--tobacco, exercise-books,
sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil
sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers,
and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on
with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise
to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each
of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered
as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short
stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

"Sir," said Wayne, "I am going from house to house in this street of
ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens
our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the
toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before
the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the
wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars,
and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it
thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril
in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me
hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of
that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained
the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of
its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless,
the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.
You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.
You keep Noah's Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of
all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only,
sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality
of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those
boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are
they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely
death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden?
Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull."

"I don't," said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great
emphasis.

"I am glad to hear it," replied Wayne. "I confess that I feared for my
military schemes the awful innocence of your profession. How, I
thought to myself, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that
give pleasure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at
least partly reassured. Your tone suggests to me that I have at least
the entry of a gate of your fairyland--the gate through which the
soldiers enter, for it cannot be denied--I ought, sir, no longer to
deny, that it is of soldiers that I come to speak. Let your gentle
employment make you merciful towards the troubles of the world. Let
your own silvery experience tone down our sanguine sorrows. For there
is war in Notting Hill."

The little toy-shop keeper sprang up suddenly, slapping his fat hands
like two fans on the counter.

"War?" he cried. "Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke! Oh,
what a sight for sore eyes!"

Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.

"I am delighted," he stammered. "I had no notion--"

He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turnbull, who took
a flying leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.

"You look here, sir," he said; "you just look here."

He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were
flapping outside his shop.

"Look at those, sir," he said, and flung them down on the counter.

Wayne bent over them, and read on one--

"LAST FIGHTING.
REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY.
REMARKABLE, ETC."

On the other he read--

"LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED.
NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A
MONTH'S FIGHTING.
GREAT SLAUGHTER."

Wayne bent over them again, evidently puzzled; then he looked at the
dates. They were both dated in August fifteen years before.

"Why do you keep these old things?" he said, startled entirely out of
his absurd tact of mysticism. "Why do you hang them outside your
shop?"

"Because," said the other, simply, "they are the records of the last
war. You mentioned war just now. It happens to be my hobby."

Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.

"Come with me," said Turnbull, shortly, and led him into a parlour at
the back of the shop.

In the centre of the parlour stood a large deal table. On it were set
rows and rows of the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the
shopkeeper's stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it
had not been for a certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem
either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard.

"You are acquainted, no doubt," said Turnbull, turning his big eyes
upon Wayne--"you are acquainted, no doubt, with the arrangement of the
American and Nicaraguan troops in the last battle;" and he waved his
hand towards the table.

"I am afraid not," said Wayne. "I--"

"Ah! you were at that time occupied too much, perhaps, with the
Dervish affair. You will find it in this corner." And he pointed to a
part of the floor where there was another arrangement of children's
soldiers grouped here and there.

"You seem," said Wayne, "to be interested in military matters."

"I am interested in nothing else," answered the toy-shop keeper,
simply.

Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.

"In that case," he said, "I may approach you with an unusual degree
of confidence. Touching the matter of the defence of Notting Hill,
I--"

"Defence of Notting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir," said Turnbull,
with great perturbation. "Just step into this side room;" and he led
Wayne into another apartment, in which the table was entirely covered
with an arrangement of children's bricks. A second glance at it told
Wayne that the bricks were arranged in the form of a precise and
perfect plan of Notting Hill. "Sir," said Turnbull, impressively, "you
have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As
a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was
taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir,
as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to
any one, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game. And
suddenly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, having
swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement,
and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do but to
do what I do now--to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers,
and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred
to me. I thought it an amusing fancy to make a plan of how this
district or ours ought to be defended if it were ever attacked. It
seems to interest you too."

"If it were ever attacked," repeated Wayne, awed into an almost
mechanical enunciation. "Mr. Turnbull, it is attacked. Thank Heaven, I
am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the
only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless.
Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on
your head, Turnbull, you shall have your youth. God has not destroyed,
He has only deferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall explain
to me this military map of Notting Hill. For you and I have to defend
Notting Hill together."

Mr. Turnbull looked at the other for a moment, then hesitated, and
then sat down beside the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise
again for seven hours, when the dawn broke.

       *       *       *       *       *

The headquarters of Provost Adam Wayne and his Commander-in-Chief
consisted of a small and somewhat unsuccessful milk-shop at the corner
of Pump Street. The blank white morning had only just begun to break
over the blank London buildings when Wayne and Turnbull were to be
found seated in the cheerless and unswept shop. Wayne had something
feminine in his character; he belonged to that class of persons who
forget their meals when anything interesting is in hand. He had had
nothing for sixteen hours but hurried glasses of milk, and, with a
glass standing empty beside him, he was writing and sketching and
dotting and crossing out with inconceivable rapidity with a pencil and
a piece of paper. Turnbull was of that more masculine type in which a
sense of responsibility increases the appetite, and with his
sketch-map beside him he was dealing strenuously with a pile of
sandwiches in a paper packet, and a tankard of ale from the tavern
opposite, whose shutters had just been taken down. Neither of them
spoke, and there was no sound in the living stillness except the
scratching of Wayne's pencil and the squealing of an aimless-looking
cat. At length Wayne broke the silence by saying--

"Seventeen pounds eight shillings and ninepence."

Turnbull nodded and put his head in the tankard.

"That," said Wayne, "is not counting the five pounds you took
yesterday. What did you do with it?"

"Ah, that is rather interesting!" replied Turnbull, with his mouth
full. "I used that five pounds in a kindly and philanthropic act."

Wayne was gazing with mystification in his queer and innocent eyes.

"I used that five pounds," continued the other, "in giving no less
than forty little London boys rides in hansom cabs."

"Are you insane?" asked the Provost.

"It is only my light touch," returned Turnbull. "These hansom-cab
rides will raise the tone--raise the tone, my dear fellow--of our
London youths, widen their horizon, brace their nervous system, make
them acquainted with the various public monuments of our great city.
Education, Wayne, education. How many excellent thinkers have pointed
out that political reform is useless until we produce a cultured
populace. So that twenty years hence, when these boys are grown up--"

"Mad!" said Wayne, laying down his pencil; "and five pounds gone!"

"You are in error," explained Turnbull. "You grave creatures can never
be brought to understand how much quicker work really goes with the
assistance of nonsense and good meals. Stripped of its decorative
beauties, my statement was strictly accurate. Last night I gave forty
half-crowns to forty little boys, and sent them all over London to
take hansom cabs. I told them in every case to tell the cabman to
bring them to this spot. In half an hour from now the declaration of
war will be posted up. At the same time the cabs will have begun to
come in, you will have ordered out the guard, the little boys will
drive up in state, we shall commandeer the horses for cavalry, use the
cabs for barricade, and give the men the choice between serving in our
ranks and detention in our basements and cellars. The little boys we
can use as scouts. The main thing is that we start the war with an
advantage unknown in all the other armies--horses. And now," he said,
finishing his beer, "I will go and drill the troops."

And he walked out of the milk-shop, leaving the Provost staring.

A minute or two afterwards, the Provost laughed. He only laughed once
or twice in his life, and then he did it in a queer way as if it were
an art he had not mastered. Even he saw something funny in the
preposterous coup of the half-crowns and the little boys. He did not
see the monstrous absurdity of the whole policy and the whole war. He
enjoyed it seriously as a crusade, that is, he enjoyed it far more
than any joke can be enjoyed. Turnbull enjoyed it partly as a joke,
even more perhaps as a reversion from the things he hated--modernity
and monotony and civilisation. To break up the vast machinery of
modern life and use the fragments as engines of war, to make the
barricade of omnibuses and points of vantage of chimney-pots, was to
him a game worth infinite risk and trouble. He had that rational and
deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace
of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life
and a merry one.




CHAPTER III--_The Experiment of Mr. Buck_


An earnest and eloquent petition was sent up to the King signed with
the names of Wilson, Barker, Buck, Swindon, and others. It urged that
at the forthcoming conference to be held in his Majesty's presence
touching the final disposition of the property in Pump Street, it
might be held not inconsistent with political decorum and with the
unutterable respect they entertained for his Majesty if they appeared
in ordinary morning dress, without the costume decreed for them as
Provosts. So it happened that the company appeared at that council in
frock-coats and that the King himself limited his love of ceremony to
appearing (after his not unusual manner), in evening dress with one
order--in this case not the Garter, but the button of the Club of Old
Clipper's Best Pals, a decoration obtained (with difficulty) from a
halfpenny boy's paper. Thus also it happened that the only spot of
colour in the room was Adam Wayne, who entered in great dignity with
the great red robes and the great sword.

"We have met," said Auberon, "to decide the most arduous of modern
problems. May we be successful." And he sat down gravely.

Buck turned his chair a little, and flung one leg over the other.

"Your Majesty," he said, quite good-humouredly, "there is only one
thing I can't understand, and that is why this affair is not settled
in five minutes. Here's a small property which is worth a thousand to
us and is not worth a hundred to any one else. We offer the thousand.
It's not business-like, I know, for we ought to get it for less, and
it's not reasonable and it's not fair on us, but I'm damned if I can
see why it's difficult."

"The difficulty may be very simply stated," said Wayne. "You may offer
a million and it will be very difficult for you to get Pump Street."

"But look here, Mr. Wayne," cried Barker, striking in with a kind of
cold excitement. "Just look here. You've no right to take up a
position like that. You've a right to stand out for a bigger price,
but you aren't doing that. You're refusing what you and every sane man
knows to be a splendid offer simply from malice or spite--it must be
malice or spite. And that kind of thing is really criminal; it's
against the public good. The King's Government would be justified in
forcing you."

With his lean fingers spread on the table, he stared anxiously at
Wayne's face, which did not move.

"In forcing you ... it would," he repeated.

"It shall," said Buck, shortly, turning to the table with a jerk. "We
have done our best to be decent."

Wayne lifted his large eyes slowly.

"Was it my Lord Buck," he inquired, "who said that the King of England
'shall' do something?"

Buck flushed and said testily--

"I mean it must--it ought to. As I say, we've done our best to be
generous; I defy any one to deny it. As it is, Mr. Wayne, I don't want
to say a word that's uncivil. I hope it's not uncivil to say that you
can be, and ought to be, in gaol. It is criminal to stop public works
for a whim. A man might as well burn ten thousand onions in his front
garden or bring up his children to run naked in the street, as do what
you say you have a right to do. People have been compelled to sell
before now. The King could compel you, and I hope he will."

"Until he does," said Wayne, calmly, "the power and government of
this great nation is on my side and not yours, and I defy you to defy
it."

"In what sense," cried Barker, with his feverish eyes and hands, "is
the Government on your side?"

With one ringing movement Wayne unrolled a great parchment on the
table. It was decorated down the sides with wild water-colour sketches
of vestrymen in crowns and wreaths.

"The Charter of the Cities," he began.

Buck exploded in a brutal oath and laughed.

"That tomfool's joke. Haven't we had enough--"

"And there you sit," cried Wayne, springing erect and with a voice
like a trumpet, "with no argument but to insult the King before his
face."

Buck rose also with blazing eyes.

"I am hard to bully," he began--and the slow tones of the King struck
in with incomparable gravity--

"My Lord Buck, I must ask you to remember that your King is present.
It is not often that he needs to protect himself among his subjects."

Barker turned to him with frantic gestures.

"For God's sake don't back up the madman now," he implored. "Have
your joke another time. Oh, for Heaven's sake--"

"My Lord Provost of South Kensington," said King Auberon, steadily, "I
do not follow your remarks, which are uttered with a rapidity unusual
at Court. Nor do your well-meant efforts to convey the rest with your
fingers materially assist me. I say that my Lord Provost of North
Kensington, to whom I spoke, ought not in the presence of his
Sovereign to speak disrespectfully of his Sovereign's ordinances. Do
you disagree?"

Barker turned restlessly in his chair, and Buck cursed without
speaking. The King went on in a comfortable voice--

"My Lord Provost of Notting Hill, proceed."

Wayne turned his blue eyes on the King, and to every one's surprise
there was a look in them not of triumph, but of a certain childish
distress.

"I am sorry, your Majesty," he said; "I fear I was more than equally
to blame with the Lord Provost of North Kensington. We were debating
somewhat eagerly, and we both rose to our feet. I did so first, I am
ashamed to say. The Provost of North Kensington is, therefore,
comparatively innocent. I beseech your Majesty to address your rebuke
chiefly, at least, to me. Mr. Buck is not innocent, for he did no
doubt, in the heat of the moment, speak disrespectfully. But the rest
of the discussion he seems to me to have conducted with great good
temper."

Buck looked genuinely pleased, for business men are all simple-minded,
and have therefore that degree of communion with fanatics. The King,
for some reason, looked, for the first time in his life, ashamed.

"This very kind speech of the Provost of Notting Hill," began Buck,
pleasantly, "seems to me to show that we have at least got on to a
friendly footing. Now come, Mr. Wayne. Five hundred pounds have been
offered to you for a property you admit not to be worth a hundred.
Well, I am a rich man and I won't be outdone in generosity. Let us say
fifteen hundred pounds, and have done with it. And let us shake
hands;" and he rose, glowing and laughing.

"Fifteen hundred pounds," whispered Mr. Wilson of Bayswater; "can we
do fifteen hundred pounds?"

"I'll stand the racket," said Buck, heartily. "Mr. Wayne is a
gentleman and has spoken up for me. So I suppose the negotiations are
at an end."

Wayne bowed.

"They are indeed at an end. I am sorry I cannot sell you the
property."

"What?" cried Mr. Barker, starting to his feet.

"Mr. Buck has spoken correctly," said the King.

"I have, I have," cried Buck, springing up also; "I said--"

"Mr. Buck has spoken correctly," said the King; "the negotiations are
at an end."

All the men at the table rose to their feet; Wayne alone rose without
excitement.

"Have I, then," he said, "your Majesty's permission to depart? I have
given my last answer."

"You have it," said Auberon, smiling, but not lifting his eyes from
the table. And amid a dead silence the Provost of Notting Hill passed
out of the room.

"Well?" said Wilson, turning round to Barker--"well?"

Barker shook his head desperately.

"The man ought to be in an asylum," he said. "But one thing is
clear--we need not bother further about him. The man can be treated as
mad."

"Of course," said Buck, turning to him with sombre decisiveness.
"You're perfectly right, Barker. He is a good enough fellow, but he
can be treated as mad. Let's put it in simple form. Go and tell any
twelve men in any town, go and tell any doctor in any town, that there
is a man offered fifteen hundred pounds for a thing he could sell
commonly for four hundred, and that when asked for a reason for not
accepting it he pleads the inviolate sanctity of Notting Hill and
calls it the Holy Mountain. What would they say? What more can we have
on our side than the common sense of everybody? On what else do all
laws rest? I'll tell you, Barker, what's better than any further
discussion. Let's send in workmen on the spot to pull down Pump
Street. And if old Wayne says a word, arrest him as a lunatic. That's
all."

Barker's eyes kindled.

"I always regarded you, Buck, if you don't mind my saying so, as a
very strong man. I'll follow you."

"So, of course, will I," said Wilson.

Buck rose again impulsively.

"Your Majesty," he said, glowing with popularity, "I beseech your
Majesty to consider favourably the proposal to which we have committed
ourselves. Your Majesty's leniency, our own offers, have fallen in
vain on that extraordinary man. He may be right. He may be God. He
may be the devil. But we think it, for practical purposes, more
probable that he is off his head. Unless that assumption were acted
on, all human affairs would go to pieces. We act on it, and we propose
to start operations in Notting Hill at once."

The King leaned back in his chair.

"The Charter of the Cities ...," he said with a rich intonation.

But Buck, being finally serious, was also cautious, and did not again
make the mistake of disrespect.

"Your Majesty," he said, bowing, "I am not here to say a word against
anything your Majesty has said or done. You are a far better educated
man than I, and no doubt there were reasons, upon intellectual
grounds, for those proceedings. But may I ask you and appeal to your
common good-nature for a sincere answer? When you drew up the Charter
of the Cities, did you contemplate the rise of a man like Adam Wayne?
Did you expect that the Charter--whether it was an experiment, or a
scheme of decoration, or a joke--could ever really come to this--to
stopping a vast scheme of ordinary business, to shutting up a road,
to spoiling the chances of cabs, omnibuses, railway stations, to
disorganising half a city, to risking a kind of civil war? Whatever
were your objects, were they that?"

Barker and Wilson looked at him admiringly; the King more admiringly
still.

"Provost Buck," said Auberon, "you speak in public uncommonly well. I
give you your point with the magnanimity of an artist. My scheme did
not include the appearance of Mr. Wayne. Alas! would that my poetic
power had been great enough."

"I thank your Majesty," said Buck, courteously, but quickly. "Your
Majesty's statements are always clear and studied; therefore I may
draw a deduction. As the scheme, whatever it was, on which you set
your heart did not include the appearance of Mr. Wayne, it will
survive his removal. Why not let us clear away this particular Pump
Street, which does interfere with our plans, and which does not, by
your Majesty's own statement, interfere with yours."

"Caught out!" said the King, enthusiastically and quite impersonally,
as if he were watching a cricket match.

"This man Wayne," continued Buck, "would be shut up by any doctors in
England. But we only ask to have it put before them. Meanwhile no
one's interests, not even in all probability his own, can be really
damaged by going on with the improvements in Notting Hill. Not our
interests, of course, for it has been the hard and quiet work of ten
years. Not the interests of Notting Hill, for nearly all its educated
inhabitants desire the change. Not the interests of your Majesty, for
you say, with characteristic sense, that you never contemplated the
rise of the lunatic at all. Not, as I say, his own interests, for the
man has a kind heart and many talents, and a couple of good doctors
would probably put him righter than all the free cities and sacred
mountains in creation. I therefore assume, if I may use so bold a
word, that your Majesty will not offer any obstacle to our proceeding
with the improvements."

And Mr. Buck sat down amid subdued but excited applause among the
allies.

"Mr. Buck," said the King, "I beg your pardon, for a number of
beautiful and sacred thoughts, in which you were generally classified
as a fool. But there is another thing to be considered. Suppose you
send in your workmen, and Mr. Wayne does a thing regrettable indeed,
but of which, I am sorry to say, I think him quite capable--knocks
their teeth out?"

"I have thought of that, your Majesty," said Mr. Buck, easily, "and I
think it can simply be guarded against. Let us send in a strong guard
of, say, a hundred men--a hundred of the North Kensington Halberdiers"
(he smiled grimly), "of whom your Majesty is so fond. Or say a hundred
and fifty. The whole population of Pump Street, I fancy, is only about
a hundred."

"Still they might stand together and lick you," said the King,
dubiously.

"Then say two hundred," said Buck, gaily.

"It might happen," said the King, restlessly, "that one Notting Hiller
fought better than two North Kensingtons."

"It might," said Buck, coolly; "then say two hundred and fifty."

The King bit his lip.

"And if they are beaten too?" he said viciously.

"Your Majesty," said Buck, and leaned back easily in his chair,
"suppose they are. If anything be clear, it is clear that all fighting
matters are mere matters of arithmetic. Here we have a hundred and
fifty, say, of Notting Hill soldiers. Or say two hundred. If one of
them can fight two of us--we can send in, not four hundred, but six
hundred, and smash him. That is all. It is out of all immediate
probability that one of them could fight four of us. So what I say is
this. Run no risks. Finish it at once. Send in eight hundred men and
smash him--smash him almost without seeing him. And go on with the
improvements."

And Mr. Buck pulled out a bandanna and blew his nose.

"Do you know, Mr. Buck," said the King, staring gloomily at the table,
"the admirable clearness of your reason produces in my mind a
sentiment which I trust I shall not offend you by describing as an
aspiration to punch your head. You irritate me sublimely. What can it
be in me? Is it the relic of a moral sense?"

"But your Majesty," said Barker, eagerly and suavely, "does not refuse
our proposals?"

"My dear Barker, your proposals are as damnable as your manners. I
want to have nothing to do with them. Suppose I stopped them
altogether. What would happen?"

Barker answered in a very low voice--

"Revolution."

The King glanced quickly at the men round the table. They were all
looking down silently: their brows were red.

He rose with a startling suddenness, and an unusual pallor.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you have overruled me. Therefore I can speak
plainly. I think Adam Wayne, who is as mad as a hatter, worth more
than a million of you. But you have the force, and, I admit, the
common sense, and he is lost. Take your eight hundred halberdiers and
smash him. It would be more sportsmanlike to take two hundred."

"More sportsmanlike," said Buck, grimly, "but a great deal less
humane. We are not artists, and streets purple with gore do not catch
our eye in the right way."

"It is pitiful," said Auberon. "With five or six times their number,
there will be no fight at all."

"I hope not," said Buck, rising and adjusting his gloves. "We desire
no fight, your Majesty. We are peaceable business men."

"Well," said the King, wearily, "the conference is at an end at last."

And he went out of the room before any one else could stir.

       *       *       *       *       *

Forty workmen, a hundred Bayswater Halberdiers, two hundred from
South, and three from North Kensington, assembled at the foot of
Holland Walk and marched up it, under the general direction of Barker,
who looked flushed and happy in full dress. At the end of the
procession a small and sulky figure lingered like an urchin. It was
the King.

"Barker," he said at length, appealingly, "you are an old friend of
mine--you understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you
let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne
business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter
to you--what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me
from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and
truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy
one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect
incidents--those rare, those precious things. Let me have one. Pay a
few pounds for it. Give these Notting Hillers a chance. Let them
alone."

"Auberon," said Barker, kindly, forgetting all royal titles in a rare
moment of sincerity, "I do feel what you mean. I have had moments when
these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised
with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily
believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne.
But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies.
It goes on great brutal wheels of facts--wheels on which you are the
butterfly; and Wayne is the fly on the wheel."

Auberon's eyes looked frankly at the other's.

"Thank you, James; what you say is true. It is only a parenthetical
consolation to me to compare the intelligence of flies somewhat
favourably with the intelligence of wheels. But it is the nature of
flies to die soon, and the nature of wheels to go on for ever. Go on
with the wheel. Good-bye, old man."

And James Barker went on, laughing, with a high colour, slapping his
bamboo on his leg.

The King watched the tail of the retreating regiment with a look of
genuine depression, which made him seem more like a baby than ever.
Then he swung round and struck his hands together.

"In a world without humour," he said, "the only thing to do is to eat.
And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified
attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total
ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is
supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is
earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a
hole in his head. I think Nature was indeed a little broad in her
humour in these matters. But we all fall back on the pantomime, as I
have in this municipal affair. Nature has her farces, like the act of
eating or the shape of the kangaroo, for the more brutal appetite. She
keeps her stars and mountains for those who can appreciate something
more subtly ridiculous." He turned to his equerry. "But, as I said
'eating,' let us have a picnic like two nice little children. Just run
and bring me a table and a dozen courses or so, and plenty of
champagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to
Nature."

It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple
repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but
still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of
a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened
feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he
and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of
dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.

"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this
Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of
things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to
pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke's good
enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all
that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a
miracle, Bowler?"

"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been
carefully brought up.

"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with
the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me
than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would
turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.
Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don't you believe people
when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in
miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were
wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their
boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the
origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean
absurdity. Take some more wine."

The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its
white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland
Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which
turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar
slowly, and went on--

"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining
miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see
that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to
his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of
Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite
delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a treaty, and
myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old
Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and
stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they
will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.
Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!
I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.
Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light
of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"

The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his
eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few
moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and
lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces
from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling
and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of
thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.
From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch
on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive
effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the
Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung
himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned
openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the
fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum,
and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken
nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five
feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table
was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the _débris_
was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring
past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his
famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence
swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and
cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery;
and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in
a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as
if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were
untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were
splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the
fantastic garb of the burlesque cities, some in the dullest modern
dress. The King stared at all of them, but none of them looked at the
King. Suddenly he stepped forward.

"Barker," he said, "what is all this?"

"Beaten," said the politician--"beaten all to hell!" And he plunged
past with nostrils shaking like a horse's, and more and more men
plunged after him.

Almost as he spoke, the last standing strip of fence bowed and
snapped, flinging, as from a catapult, a new figure upon the road. He
wore the flaming red of the halberdiers of Notting Hill, and on his
weapon there was blood, and in his face victory. In another moment
masses of red glowed through the gaps of the fence, and the pursuers,
with their halberds, came pouring down the lane. Pursued and pursuers
alike swept by the little figure with the owlish eyes, who had not
taken his hands out of his pockets.

The King had still little beyond the confused sense of a man caught in
a torrent--the feeling of men eddying by. Then something happened
which he was never able afterwards to describe, and which we cannot
describe for him. Suddenly in the dark entrance, between the broken
gates of a garden, there appeared framed a flaming figure.

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back, and his mane like
a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of
his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. And
the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The
great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind.
The sword seemed made for the sunlight. The preposterous masquerade,
born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This
was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature; and he himself,
with his rationality and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he
was the exception and the accident--a blot of black upon a world of
crimson and gold.




BOOK IV




CHAPTER I--_The Battle of the Lamps_


Mr. Buck, who, though retired, frequently went down to his big drapery
stores in Kensington High Street, was locking up those premises, being
the last to leave. It was a wonderful evening of green and gold, but
that did not trouble him very much. If you had pointed it out, he
would have agreed seriously, for the rich always desire to be
artistic.

He stepped out into the cool air, buttoning up his light yellow coat,
and blowing great clouds from his cigar, when a figure dashed up to
him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.

"Hullo, Barker!" said the draper. "Any of our summer articles? You're
too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy."

"Oh, don't chatter," cried Barker, stamping. "We've been beaten."

"Beaten--by what?" asked Buck, mystified.

"By Wayne."

Buck looked at Barker's fierce white face for the first time, as it
gleamed in the lamplight.

"Come and have a drink," he said.

They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established
himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.

"Have a smoke," he said.

Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment's
hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next
minute. They ordered drinks in silence.

"How did it happen?" asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.

"How the devil do I know?" cried Barker. "It happened like--like a
dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?"

"Well," said Buck, coolly, "how did they? You ought to know."

"I don't know; I can't describe," said the other, drumming on the
table. "It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with
those damned poleaxes of Auberon's--the only weapons we've got. We
marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings
which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was
near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it
was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already
crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the
network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself
came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern
side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were,
towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets
dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost
altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this
time we hadn't seen a soul."

[Illustration: Map of the SEAT of WAR.]

Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began
to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a
kind of map.

"But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle
on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to
happen that I couldn't understand. Sometimes a long way ahead--three
turns or corners ahead, as it were--there broke suddenly a sort of
noise, clattering, and confused cries, and then stopped. Then, when it
happened, something, I can't describe it--a kind of shake or stagger
went down the line, as if the line were a live thing, whose head had
been struck, or had been an electric cord. None of us knew why we were
moving, but we moved and jostled. Then we recovered, and went on
through the little dirty streets, round corners, and up twisted ways.
The little crooked streets began to give me a feeling I can't
explain--as if it were a dream. I felt as if things had lost their
reason, and we should never get out of the maze. Odd to hear me talk
like that, isn't it? The streets were quite well-known streets, all
down on the map. But the fact remains. I wasn't afraid of something
happening. I was afraid of nothing ever happening--nothing ever
happening for all God's eternity."

He drained his glass and called for more whisky. He drank it, and went
on.

"And then something did happen. Buck, it's the solemn truth, that
nothing has ever happened to you in your life. Nothing had ever
happened to me in my life."

"Nothing ever happened!" said Buck, staring. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing has ever happened," repeated Barker, with a morbid obstinacy.
"You don't know what a thing happening means? You sit in your office
expecting customers, and customers come; you walk in the street
expecting friends, and friends meet you; you want a drink, and get it;
you feel inclined for a bet, and make it. You expect either to win or
lose, and you do either one or the other. But things happening!" and
he shuddered ungovernably.

"Go on," said Buck, shortly. "Get on."

"As we walked wearily round the corners, something happened. When
something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It
happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a
dreadful thing--that there are other things besides one's self. I can
only put it in this way. We went round one turning, two turnings,
three turnings, four turnings, five. Then I lifted myself slowly up
from the gutter where I had been shot half senseless, and was beaten
down again by living men crashing on top of me, and the world was full
of roaring, and big men rolling about like nine-pins."

Buck looked at his map with knitted brows.

"Was that Portobello Road?" he asked.

"Yes," said Barker--"yes; Portobello Road. I saw it afterwards; but,
my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six
foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six
pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that
experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies and
religions.'"

"I have no doubt," said Buck. "If that was Portobello Road, don't you
see what happened?"

"I know what happened exceedingly well. I was knocked down four times;
an experience which, as I say, has an effect on the mental attitude.
And another thing happened, too. I knocked down two men. After the
fourth fall (there was not much bloodshed--more brutal rushing and
throwing--for nobody could use their weapons), after the fourth fall,
I say, I got up like a devil, and I tore a poleaxe out of a man's hand
and struck where I saw the scarlet of Wayne's fellows, struck again
and again. Two of them went over, bleeding on the stones, thank God;
and I laughed and found myself sprawling in the gutter again, and got
up again, and struck again, and broke my halberd to pieces. I hurt a
man's head, though."

Buck set down his glass with a bang, and spat out curses through his
thick moustache.

"What is the matter?" asked Barker, stopping, for the man had been
calm up to now, and now his agitation was far more violent than his
own.

"The matter?" said Buck, bitterly; "don't you see how these maniacs
have got us? Why should two idiots, one a clown and the other a
screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look
here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of
this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a
nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to
kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don't you see how
they've got us? Never mind how you felt--that is how you looked. The
King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. The
Provost of Notting Hill would put his cursed nose in the air and call
it heroic. But in Heaven's name what would you have called it--two
days before?"

Barker bit his lip.

"You haven't been through it, Buck," he said. "You don't understand
fighting--the atmosphere."

"I don't deny the atmosphere," said Buck, striking the table. "I only
say it's their atmosphere. It's Adam Wayne's atmosphere. It's the
atmosphere which you and I thought had vanished from an educated world
for ever."

"Well, it hasn't," said Barker; "and if you have any lingering doubts,
lend me a poleaxe, and I'll show you."

There was a long silence, and then Buck turned to his neighbour and
spoke in that good-tempered tone that comes of a power of looking
facts in the face--the tone in which he concluded great bargains.

"Barker," he said, "you are right. This old thing--this fighting, has
come back. It has come back suddenly and taken us by surprise. So it
is first blood to Adam Wayne. But, unless reason and arithmetic and
everything else have gone crazy, it must be next and last blood to us.
But when an issue has really arisen, there is only one thing to do--to
study that issue as such and win in it. Barker, since it is fighting,
we must understand fighting. I must understand fighting as coolly and
completely as I understand drapery; you must understand fighting as
coolly and completely as you understand politics. Now, look at the
facts. I stick without hesitation to my original formula. Fighting,
when we have the stronger force, is only a matter of arithmetic. It
must be. You asked me just now how two hundred men could defeat six
hundred. I can tell you. Two hundred men can defeat six hundred when
the six hundred behave like fools. When they forget the very
conditions they are fighting in; when they fight in a swamp as if it
were a mountain; when they fight in a forest as if it were a plain;
when they fight in streets without remembering the object of streets."

"What is the object of streets?" asked Barker.

"What is the object of supper?" cried Buck, furiously. "Isn't it
obvious? This military science is mere common sense. The object of a
street is to lead from one place to another; therefore all streets
join; therefore street fighting is quite a peculiar thing. You
advanced into that hive of streets as if you were advancing into an
open plain where you could see everything. Instead of that, you were
advancing into the bowels of a fortress, with streets pointing at you,
streets turning on you, streets jumping out at you, and all in the
hands of the enemy. Do you know what Portobello Road is? It is the
only point on your journey where two side streets run up opposite each
other. Wayne massed his men on the two sides, and when he had let
enough of your line go past, cut it in two like a worm. Don't you see
what would have saved you?"

Barker shook his head.

"Can't your 'atmosphere' help you?" asked Buck, bitterly. "Must I
attempt explanations in the romantic manner? Suppose that, as you were
fighting blindly with the red Notting Hillers who imprisoned you on
both sides, you had heard a shout from behind them. Suppose, oh,
romantic Barker! that behind the red tunics you had seen the blue and
gold of South Kensington taking them in the rear, surrounding them in
their turn and hurling them on to your halberds."

"If the thing had been possible," began Barker, cursing.

"The thing would have been as possible," said Buck, simply, "as simple
as arithmetic. There are a certain number of street entries that lead
to Pump Street. There are not nine hundred; there are not nine
million. They do not grow in the night. They do not increase like
mushrooms. It must be possible, with such an overwhelming force as we
have, to advance by all of them at once. In every one of the arteries,
or approaches, we can put almost as many men as Wayne can put into the
field altogether. Once do that, and we have him to demonstration. It
is like a proposition of Euclid."

"You think that is certain?" said Barker, anxious, but dominated
delightfully.

"I'll tell you what I think," said Buck, getting up jovially. "I
think Adam Wayne made an uncommonly spirited little fight; and I think
I am confoundedly sorry for him."

"Buck, you are a great man!" cried Barker, rising also. "You've
knocked me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting
romantic. Of course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being
physical, must be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither
mathematical nor physical nor anything else--because we deserved to be
beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him.
When shall we open the next campaign?"

"Now," said Buck, and walked out of the bar.

"Now!" cried Barker, following him eagerly. "Do you mean now? It is so
late."

Buck turned on him, stamping.

"Do you think fighting is under the Factory Acts?" he said; and he
called a cab. "Notting Hill Gate Station," he said; and the two drove
off.

       *       *       *       *       *

A genuine reputation can sometimes be made in an hour. Buck, in the
next sixty or eighty minutes, showed himself a really great man of
action. His cab carried him like a thunderbolt from the King to
Wilson, from Wilson to Swindon, from Swindon to Barker again; if his
course was jagged, it had the jaggedness of the lightning. Only two
things he carried with him--his inevitable cigar and the map of North
Kensington and Notting Hill. There were, as he again and again pointed
out, with every variety of persuasion and violence, only nine possible
ways of approaching Pump Street within a quarter of a mile round it;
three out of Westbourne Grove, two out of Ladbroke Grove, and four out
of Notting Hill High Street. And he had detachments of two hundred
each, stationed at every one of the entrances before the last green of
that strange sunset had sunk out of the black sky.

The sky was particularly black, and on this alone was one false
protest raised against the triumphant optimism of the Provost of North
Kensington. He overruled it with his infectious common sense.

"There is no such thing," he said, "as night in London. You have only
to follow the line of street lamps. Look, here is the map. Two hundred
purple North Kensington soldiers under myself march up Ossington
Street, two hundred more under Captain Bruce, of the North Kensington
Guard, up Clanricarde Gardens.[1] Two hundred yellow West Kensingtons
under Provost Swindon attack from Pembridge Road. Two hundred more of
my men from the eastern streets, leading away from Queen's Road. Two
detachments of yellows enter by two roads from Westbourne Grove.
Lastly, two hundred green Bayswaters come down from the North through
Chepstow Place, and two hundred more under Provost Wilson himself,
through the upper part of Pembridge Road. Gentlemen, it is mate in two
moves. The enemy must either mass in Pump Street and be cut to pieces;
or they must retreat past the Gaslight & Coke Co., and rush on my four
hundred; or they must retreat past St. Luke's Church, and rush on the
six hundred from the West. Unless we are all mad, it's plain. Come on.
To your quarters and await Captain Brace's signal to advance. Then you
have only to walk up a line of gas-lamps and smash this nonsense by
pure mathematics. To-morrow we shall all be civilians again."

[Footnote 1: Clanricarde Gardens at this time was no longer a
_cul-de-sac_, but was connected by Pump Street to Pembridge Square.
See map.]

His optimism glowed like a great fire in the night, and ran round the
terrible ring in which Wayne was now held helpless. The fight was
already over. One man's energy for one hour had saved the city from
war.

For the next ten minutes Buck walked up and down silently beside the
motionless clump of his two hundred. He had not changed his appearance
in any way, except to sling across his yellow overcoat a case with a
revolver in it. So that his light-clad modern figure showed up oddly
beside the pompous purple uniforms of his halberdiers, which darkly
but richly coloured the black night.

At length a shrill trumpet rang from some way up the street; it was
the signal of advance. Buck briefly gave the word, and the whole
purple line, with its dimly shining steel, moved up the side alley.
Before it was a slope of street, long, straight, and shining in the
dark. It was a sword pointed at Pump Street, the heart at which nine
other swords were pointed that night.

A quarter of an hour's silent marching brought them almost within
earshot of any tumult in the doomed citadel. But still there was no
sound and no sign of the enemy. This time, at any rate, they knew that
they were closing in on it mechanically, and they marched on under the
lamplight and the dark without any of that eerie sense of ignorance
which Barker had felt when entering the hostile country by one avenue
alone.

"Halt--point arms!" cried Buck, suddenly, and as he spoke there came a
clatter of feet tumbling along the stones. But the halberds were
levelled in vain. The figure that rushed up was a messenger from the
contingent of the North.

"Victory, Mr. Buck!" he cried, panting; "they are ousted. Provost
Wilson of Bayswater has taken Pump Street."

Buck ran forward in his excitement.

"Then, which way are they retreating? It must be either by St. Luke's
to meet Swindon, or by the Gas Company to meet us. Run like mad to
Swindon, and see that the yellows are holding the St. Luke's Road. We
will hold this, never fear. We have them in an iron trap. Run!"

As the messenger dashed away into the darkness, the great guard of
North Kensington swung on with the certainty of a machine. Yet
scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in
line gleaming in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard
on the stones, and again it proved to be only the messenger.

"Mr. Provost," he said, "the yellow West Kensingtons have been
holding the road by St. Luke's for twenty minutes since the capture of
Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be
retreating down that road."

"Then they are retreating down this," said Provost Buck, with a final
cheerfulness, "and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it
twists about. Forward!"

As they moved along the last three hundred yards of their journey,
Buck fell, for the first time in his life, perhaps, into a kind of
philosophical reverie, for men of his type are always made kindly, and
as it were melancholy, by success.

"I am sorry for poor old Wayne, I really am," he thought. "He spoke up
splendidly for me at that Council. And he blacked old Barker's eye
with considerable spirit. But I don't see what a man can expect when
he fights against arithmetic, to say nothing of civilisation. And what
a wonderful hoax all this military genius is! I suspect I've just
discovered what Cromwell discovered, that a sensible tradesman is the
best general, and that a man who can buy men and sell men can lead and
kill them. The thing's simply like adding up a column in a ledger. If
Wayne has two hundred men, he can't put two hundred men in nine
places at once. If they're ousted from Pump Street they're flying
somewhere. If they're not flying past the church they're flying past
the Works. And so we have them. We business men should have no chance
at all except that cleverer people than we get bees in their bonnets
that prevent them from reasoning properly--so we reason alone. And so
I, who am comparatively stupid, see things as God sees them, as a vast
machine. My God, what's this?" and he clapped his hands to his eyes
and staggered back.

Then through the darkness he cried in a dreadful voice--

"Did I blaspheme God? I am struck blind."

"What?" wailed another voice behind him, the voice of a certain
Wilfred Jarvis of North Kensington.

"Blind!" cried Buck; "blind!"

"I'm blind too!" cried Jarvis, in an agony.

"Fools, all of you," said a gross voice behind them; "we're all blind.
The lamps have gone out."

"The lamps! But why? where?" cried Buck, turning furiously in the
darkness. "How are we to get on? How are we to chase the enemy? Where
have they gone?"

"The enemy went--" said the rough voice behind, and then stopped
doubtfully.

"Where?" shouted Buck, stamping like a madman.

"They went," said the gruff voice, "past the Gas Works, and they've
used their chance."

"Great God!" thundered Buck, and snatched at his revolver; "do you
mean they've turned out--"

But almost before he had spoken the words, he was hurled like a stone
from catapult into the midst of his own men.

"Notting Hill! Notting Hill!" cried frightful voices out of the
darkness, and they seemed to come from all sides, for the men of North
Kensington, unacquainted with the road, had lost all their bearings in
the black world of blindness.

"Notting Hill! Notting Hill!" cried the invisible people, and the
invaders were hewn down horribly with black steel, with steel that
gave no glint against any light.

       *       *       *       *       *

Buck, though badly maimed with the blow of a halberd, kept an angry
but splendid sanity. He groped madly for the wall and found it.
Struggling with crawling fingers along it, he found a side opening and
retreated into it with the remnants of his men. Their adventures
during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not
know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not
knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it
was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing
had descended upon them which London does not know--darkness, which
was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if
they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those
frightful hours wore on, they buffeted in the darkness against living
men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury.
When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to
the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible
eyeless encounters, the North Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the
West Kensingtons had again and again met and butchered each other, and
they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street.




CHAPTER II--_The Correspondent of the Court Journal_


Journalism had become, like most other such things in England under
the cautious government and philosophy represented by James Barker,
somewhat sleepy and much diminished in importance. This was partly due
to the disappearance of party government and public speaking, partly
to the compromise or dead-lock which had made foreign wars impossible,
but mostly, of course, to the temper of the whole nation which was
that of a people in a kind of back-water. Perhaps the most well known
of the remaining newspapers was the _Court Journal_, which was
published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington
High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years
growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and
most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the
journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of
the twentieth century, the final victor was the _Court Journal_.

For some mysterious reason the King had a great affection for hanging
about in the _Court Journal_ office, smoking a morning cigarette and
looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of
lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work.
But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his
day, he might have found a more bustling centre.

On this particular morning, however, he came out of Kensington Palace
with a more alert step and a busier air than usual. He wore an
extravagantly long frock-coat, a pale-green waistcoat, a very full and
_dégagé_ black tie, and curious yellow gloves. This was his uniform as
Colonel of a regiment of his own creation, the 1st Decadents Green. It
was a beautiful sight to see him drilling them. He walked quickly
across the Park and the High Street, lighting his cigarette as he
went, and flung open the door of the _Court Journal_ office.

"You've heard the news, Pally--you've heard the news?" he said.

The Editor's name was Hoskins, but the King called him Pally, which
was an abbreviation of Paladium of our Liberties.

"Well, your Majesty," said Hoskins, slowly (he was a worried,
gentlemanly looking person, with a wandering brown beard)--"well,
your Majesty, I have heard rather curious things, but I--"

"You'll hear more of them," said the King, dancing a few steps of a
kind of negro shuffle. "You'll hear more of them, my blood-and-thunder
tribune. Do you know what I am going to do for you?"

"No, your Majesty," replied the Paladium, vaguely.

"I'm going to put your paper on strong, dashing, enterprising lines,"
said the King. "Now, where are your posters of last night's defeat?"

"I did not propose, your Majesty," said the Editor, "to have any
posters exactly--"

"Paper, paper!" cried the King, wildly; "bring me paper as big as a
house. I'll do you posters. Stop, I must take my coat off." He began
removing that garment with an air of set intensity, flung it playfully
at Mr. Hoskins' head, entirely enveloping him, and looked at himself
in the glass. "The coat off," he said, "and the hat on. That looks
like a sub-editor. It is indeed the very essence of sub-editing.
Well," he continued, turning round abruptly, "come along with that
paper."

The Paladium had only just extricated himself reverently from the
folds of the King's frock-coat, and said bewildered--

"I am afraid, your Majesty--"

"Oh, you've got no enterprise," said Auberon. "What's that roll in the
corner? Wall-paper? Decorations for your private residence? Art in the
home, Pally? Fling it over here, and I'll paint such posters on the
back of it that when you put it up in your drawing-room you'll paste
the original pattern against the wall." And the King unrolled the
wall-paper, spreading it over the whole floor. "Now give me the
scissors," he cried, and took them himself before the other could
stir.

He slit the paper into about five pieces, each nearly as big as a
door. Then he took a big blue pencil, and went down on his knees on
the dusty oil-cloth and began to write on them, in huge letters--

"FROM THE FRONT.
GENERAL BUCK DEFEATED.
DARKNESS, DANGER, AND DEATH.
WAYNE SAID TO BE IN PUMP STREET.
FEELING IN THE CITY."

He contemplated it for some time, with his head on one side, and got
up, with a sigh.

"Not quite intense enough," he said--"not alarming. I want the _Court
Journal_ to be feared as well as loved. Let's try something more
hard-hitting." And he went down on his knees again. After sucking the
blue pencil for some time, he began writing again busily. "How will
this do?" he said--

     "WAYNE'S WONDERFUL VICTORY."

"I suppose," he said, looking up appealingly, and sucking the
pencil--"I suppose we couldn't say 'wictory'--'Wayne's wonderful
wictory'? No, no. Refinement, Pally, refinement. I have it."

"WAYNE WINS.
ASTOUNDING FIGHT IN THE DARK.
_The gas-lamps in their courses fought against Buck._"

"(Nothing like our fine old English translation.) What else can we
say? Well, anything to annoy old Buck;" and he added, thoughtfully, in
smaller letters--

     "Rumoured Court-martial on General Buck."

"Those will do for the present," he said, and turned them both face
downwards. "Paste, please."

The Paladium, with an air of great terror, brought the paste out of an
inner room.

The King slabbed it on with the enjoyment of a child messing with
treacle. Then taking one of his huge compositions fluttering in each
hand, he ran outside, and began pasting them up in prominent positions
over the front of the office.

"And now," said Auberon, entering again with undiminished
vivacity--"now for the leading article."

He picked up another of the large strips of wall-paper, and, laying it
across a desk, pulled out a fountain-pen and began writing with
feverish intensity, reading clauses and fragments aloud to himself,
and rolling them on his tongue like wine, to see if they had the pure
journalistic flavour.

"The news of the disaster to our forces in Notting Hill, awful as it
is--awful as it is--(no, distressing as it is), may do some good if it
draws attention to the what's-his-name inefficiency (scandalous
inefficiency, of course) of the Government's preparations. In our
present state of information, it would be premature (what a jolly
word!)--it would be premature to cast any reflections upon the conduct
of General Buck, whose services upon so many stricken fields (ha,
ha!), and whose honourable scars and laurels, give him a right to have
judgment upon him at least suspended. But there is one matter on which
we must speak plainly. We have been silent on it too long, from
feelings, perhaps of mistaken caution, perhaps of mistaken loyalty.
This situation would never have arisen but for what we can only call
the indefensible conduct of the King. It pains us to say such things,
but, speaking as we do in the public interests (I plagiarise from
Barker's famous epigram), we shall not shrink because of the distress
we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial
moment of our country, the voice of the People demands with a single
tongue, 'Where is the King?' What is he doing while his subjects tear
each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his
amusements and his dissipations (of which we cannot pretend to be
ignorant) so engrossing that he can spare no thought for a perishing
nation? It is with a deep sense of our responsibility that we warn
that exalted person that neither his great position nor his
incomparable talents will save him in the hour of delirium from the
fate of all those who, in the madness of luxury or tyranny, have met
the English people in the rare day of its wrath."

"I am now," said the King, "going to write an account of the battle by
an eye-witness." And he picked up a fourth sheet of wall-paper. Almost
at the same moment Buck strode quickly into the office. He had a
bandage round his head.

"I was told," he said, with his usual gruff civility, "that your
Majesty was here."

"And of all things on earth," cried the King, with delight, "here is
an eye-witness! An eye-witness who, I regret to observe, has at
present only one eye to witness with. Can you write us the special
article, Buck? Have you a rich style?"

Buck, with a self-restraint which almost approached politeness, took
no notice whatever of the King's maddening geniality.

"I took the liberty, your Majesty," he said shortly, "of asking Mr.
Barker to come here also."

As he spoke, indeed, Barker came swinging into the office, with his
usual air of hurry.

"What is happening now?" asked Buck, turning to him with a kind of
relief.

"Fighting still going on," said Barker. "The four hundred from West
Kensington were hardly touched last night. They hardly got near the
place. Poor Wilson's Bayswater men got cut about, though. They fought
confoundedly well. They took Pump Street once. What mad things do
happen in the world. To think that of all of us it should be little
Wilson with the red whiskers who came out best."

The King made a note on his paper--

     "_Romantic Conduct of Mr. Wilson_."

"Yes," said Buck; "it makes one a bit less proud of one's _h's_."

The King suddenly folded or crumpled up the paper, and put it in his
pocket.

"I have an idea," he said. "I will be an eye-witness. I will write you
such letters from the Front as will be more gorgeous than the real
thing. Give me my coat, Paladium. I entered this room a mere King of
England. I leave it, Special War Correspondent of the _Court Journal_.
It is useless to stop me, Pally; it is vain to cling to my knees,
Buck; it is hopeless, Barker, to weep upon my neck. 'When duty
calls'--the remainder of the sentiment escapes me. You will receive my
first article this evening by the eight-o'clock post."

And, running out of the office, he jumped upon a blue Bayswater
omnibus that went swinging by.

"Well," said Barker, gloomily, "well."

"Barker," said Buck, "business may be lower than politics, but war is,
as I discovered last night, a long sight more like business. You
politicians are such ingrained demagogues that even when you have a
despotism you think of nothing but public opinion. So you learn to
tack and run, and are afraid of the first breeze. Now we stick to a
thing and get it. And our mistakes help us. Look here! at this moment
we've beaten Wayne."

"Beaten Wayne," repeated Barker.

"Why the dickens not?" cried the other, flinging out his hands. "Look
here. I said last night that we had them by holding the nine
entrances. Well, I was wrong. We should have had them but for a
singular event--the lamps went out. But for that it was certain. Has
it occurred to you, my brilliant Barker, that another singular event
has happened since that singular event of the lamps going out?"

"What event?" asked Barker.

"By an astounding coincidence, the sun has risen," cried out Buck,
with a savage air of patience. "Why the hell aren't we holding all
those approaches now, and passing in on them again? It should have
been done at sunrise. The confounded doctor wouldn't let me go out.
You were in command."

Barker smiled grimly.

"It is a gratification to me, my dear Buck, to be able to say that we
anticipated your suggestions precisely. We went as early as possible
to reconnoitre the nine entrances. Unfortunately, while we were
fighting each other in the dark, like a lot of drunken navvies, Mr.
Wayne's friends were working very hard indeed. Three hundred yards
from Pump Street, at every one of those entrances, there is a
barricade nearly as high as the houses. They were finishing the last,
in Pembridge Road, when we arrived. Our mistakes," he cried bitterly,
and flung his cigarette on the ground. "It is not we who learn from
them."

There was a silence for a few moments, and Barker lay back wearily in
a chair. The office clock ticked exactly in the stillness.

At length Barker said suddenly--

"Buck, does it ever cross your mind what this is all about? The
Hammersmith to Maida Vale thoroughfare was an uncommonly good
speculation. You and I hoped a great deal from it. But is it worth it?
It will cost us thousands to crush this ridiculous riot. Suppose we
let it alone?"

"And be thrashed in public by a red-haired madman whom any two doctors
would lock up?" cried out Buck, starting to his feet. "What do you
propose to do, Mr. Barker? To apologise to the admirable Mr. Wayne? To
kneel to the Charter of the Cities? To clasp to your bosom the flag of
the Red Lion? To kiss in succession every sacred lamp-post that saved
Notting Hill? No, by God! My men fought jolly well--they were beaten
by a trick. And they'll fight again."

"Buck," said Barker, "I always admired you. And you were quite right
in what you said the other day."

"In what?"

"In saying," said Barker, rising quietly, "that we had all got into
Adam Wayne's atmosphere and out of our own. My friend, the whole
territorial kingdom of Adam Wayne extends to about nine streets, with
barricades at the end of them. But the spiritual kingdom of Adam Wayne
extends, God knows where--it extends to this office, at any rate. The
red-haired madman whom any two doctors would lock up is filling this
room with his roaring, unreasonable soul. And it was the red-haired
madman who said the last word you spoke."

Buck walked to the window without replying. "You understand, of
course," he said at last, "I do not dream of giving in."

       *       *       *       *       *

The King, meanwhile, was rattling along on the top of his blue
omnibus. The traffic of London as a whole had not, of course, been
greatly disturbed by these events, for the affair was treated as a
Notting Hill riot, and that area was marked off as if it had been in
the hands of a gang of recognised rioters. The blue omnibuses simply
went round as they would have done if a road were being mended, and
the omnibus on which the correspondent of the _Court Journal_ was
sitting swept round the corner of Queen's Road, Bayswater.

The King was alone on the top of the vehicle, and was enjoying the
speed at which it was going.

"Forward, my beauty, my Arab," he said, patting the omnibus
encouragingly, "fleetest of all thy bounding tribe. Are thy relations
with thy driver, I wonder, those of the Bedouin and his steed? Does he
sleep side by side with thee--"

His meditations were broken by a sudden and jarring stoppage. Looking
over the edge, he saw that the heads of the horses were being held
by men in the uniform of Wayne's army, and heard the voice of an
officer calling out orders.

[Illustration: KING AUBERON DESCENDED FROM THE OMNIBUS WITH DIGNITY.]

King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity. The guard or
picket of red halberdiers who had stopped the vehicle did not number
more than twenty, and they were under the command of a short, dark,
clever-looking young man, conspicuous among the rest as being clad in
an ordinary frock-coat, but girt round the waist with a red sash and a
long seventeenth-century sword. A shiny silk hat and spectacles
completed the outfit in a pleasing manner.

"To whom have I the honour of speaking?" said the King, endeavouring
to look like Charles I., in spite of personal difficulties.

The dark man in spectacles lifted his hat with equal gravity.

"My name is Bowles," he said. "I am a chemist. I am also a captain of
O company of the army of Notting Hill. I am distressed at having to
incommode you by stopping the omnibus, but this area is covered by our
proclamation, and we intercept all traffic. May I ask to whom I have
the honour--Why, good gracious, I beg your Majesty's pardon. I am
quite overwhelmed at finding myself concerned with the King."

Auberon put up his hand with indescribable grandeur.

"Not with the King," he said; "with the special war correspondent of
the _Court Journal_."

"I beg your Majesty's pardon," began Mr. Bowles, doubtfully.

"Do you call me Majesty? I repeat," said Auberon, firmly, "I am a
representative of the press. I have chosen, with a deep sense of
responsibility, the name of Pinker. I should desire a veil to be drawn
over the past."

"Very well, sir," said Mr. Bowles, with an air of submission, "in our
eyes the sanctity of the press is at least as great as that of the
throne. We desire nothing better than that our wrongs and our glories
should be widely known. May I ask, Mr. Pinker, if you have any
objection to being presented to the Provost and to General Turnbull?"

"The Provost I have had the honour of meeting," said Auberon, easily.
"We old journalists, you know, meet everybody. I should be most
delighted to have the same honour again. General Turnbull, also, it
would be a gratification to know. The younger men are so interesting.
We of the old Fleet Street gang lose touch with them."

"Will you be so good as to step this way?" said the leader of O
company.

"I am always good," said Mr. Pinker. "Lead on."




CHAPTER III--_The Great Army of South Kensington_


The article from the special correspondent of the _Court Journal_
arrived in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King's
arabesque of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet
were illegible. Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at
first, as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer
appeared to have attempted the article once or twice in several
journalistic styles. At the side of one experiment was written, "Try
American style," and the fragment began--

"The King must go. We want gritty men. Flapdoodle is all very ...;"
and then broke off, followed by the note, "Good sound journalism
safer. Try it."

The experiment in good sound journalism appeared to begin--

"The greatest of English poets has said that a rose by any ..."

This also stopped abruptly. The next annotation at the side was almost
undecipherable, but seemed to be something like--

"How about old Steevens and the _mot juste_? E.g...."

"Morning winked a little wearily at me over the curt edge of Campden
Hill and its houses with their sharp shadows. Under the abrupt black
cardboard of the outline, it took some little time to detect colours;
but at length I saw a brownish yellow shifting in the obscurity, and I
knew that it was the guard of Swindon's West Kensington army. They are
being held as a reserve, and lining the whole ridge above the
Bayswater Road. Their camp and their main force is under the great
Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I forgot to say that the Waterworks
Tower looked swart.

"As I passed them and came over the curve of Silver Street, I saw the
blue cloudy masses of Barker's men blocking the entrance to the
high-road like a sapphire smoke (good). The disposition of the allied
troops, under the general management of Mr. Wilson, appears to be as
follows: The Yellow army (if I may so describe the West
Kensingtonians) lies, as I have said, in a strip along the ridge, its
furthest point westward being the west side of Campden Hill Road, its
furthest point eastward the beginning of Kensington Gardens. The Green
army of Wilson lines the Notting Hill High Road itself from Queen's
Road to the corner of Pembridge Road, curving round the latter, and
extending some three hundred yards up towards Westbourne Grove.
Westbourne Grove itself is occupied by Barker of South Kensington. The
fourth side of this rough square, the Queen's Road side, is held by
some of Buck's Purple warriors.

"The whole resembles some ancient and dainty Dutch flower-bed. Along
the crest of Campden Hill lie the golden crocuses of West Kensington.
They are, as it were, the first fiery fringe of the whole. Northward
lies our hyacinth Barker, with all his blue hyacinths. Round to the
south-west run the green rushes of Wilson of Bayswater, and a line of
violet irises (aptly symbolised by Mr. Buck) complete the whole. The
argent exterior ... (I am losing the style. I should have said
'Curving with a whisk' instead of merely 'Curving.' Also I should have
called the hyacinths 'sudden.' I cannot keep this up. War is too rapid
for this style of writing. Please ask office-boy to insert _mots
justes_.)

"The truth is that there is nothing to report. That commonplace
element which is always ready to devour all beautiful things (as the
Black Pig in the Irish Mythology will finally devour the stars and
gods); that commonplace element, as I say, has in its Black Piggish
way devoured finally the chances of any romance in this affair; that
which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets,
has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare--it
has degenerated into a siege. A siege may be defined as a peace plus
the inconvenience of war. Of course Wayne cannot hold out. There is no
more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon.
And if old Wayne had stocked his street with tinned meats till all his
garrison had to sit on them, he couldn't hold out for more than a
month or two. As a matter of melancholy fact, he has done something
rather like this. He has stocked his street with food until there must
be uncommonly little room to turn round. But what is the good? To hold
out for all that time and then to give in of necessity, what does it
mean? It means waiting until your victories are forgotten, and then
taking the trouble to be defeated. I cannot understand how Wayne can
be so inartistic.

"And how odd it is that one views a thing quite differently when one
knows it is defeated! I always thought Wayne was rather fine. But now,
when I know that he is done for, there seem to be nothing else but
Wayne. All the streets seem to point at him, all the chimneys seem to
lean towards him. I suppose it is a morbid feeling; but Pump Street
seems to be the only part of London that I feel physically. I suppose,
I say, that it is morbid. I suppose it is exactly how a man feels
about his heart when his heart is weak. 'Pump Street'--the heart is a
pump. And I am drivelling.

"Our finest leader at the front is, beyond all question, General
Wilson. He has adopted alone among the other Provosts the uniform of
his own halberdiers, although that fine old sixteenth-century garb was
not originally intended to go with red side-whiskers. It was he who,
against a most admirable and desperate defence, broke last night into
Pump Street and held it for at least half an hour. He was afterwards
expelled from it by General Turnbull, of Notting Hill, but only after
desperate fighting and the sudden descent of that terrible darkness
which proved so much more fatal to the forces of General Buck and
General Swindon.

"Provost Wayne himself, with whom I had, with great good fortune, a
most interesting interview, bore the most eloquent testimony to the
conduct of General Wilson and his men. His precise words are as
follows: 'I have bought sweets at his funny little shop when I was
four years old, and ever since. I never noticed anything, I am ashamed
to say, except that he talked through his nose, and didn't wash
himself particularly. And he came over our barricade like a devil from
hell.' I repeated this speech to General Wilson himself, with some
delicate improvements, and he seemed pleased with it. He does not,
however, seem pleased with anything so much just now as he is with the
wearing of a sword. I have it from the front on the best authority
that General Wilson was not completely shaved yesterday. It is
believed in military circles that he is growing a moustache....

"As I have said, there is nothing to report. I walk wearily to the
pillar-box at the corner of Pembridge Road to post my copy. Nothing
whatever has happened, except the preparations for a particularly long
and feeble siege, during which I trust I shall not be required to be
at the Front. As I glance up Pembridge Road in the growing dusk, the
aspect of that road reminds me that there is one note worth adding.
General Buck has suggested, with characteristic acumen, to General
Wilson that, in order to obviate the possibility of such a catastrophe
as overwhelmed the allied forces in the last advance on Notting Hill
(the catastrophe, I mean, of the extinguished lamps), each soldier
should have a lighted lantern round his neck. This is one of the
things which I really admire about General Buck. He possesses what
people used to mean by 'the humility of the man of science,' that is,
he learns steadily from his mistakes. Wayne may score off him in some
other way, but not in that way. The lanterns look like fairy lights as
they curve round the end of Pembridge Road.

       *       *       *       *       *

"_Later_.--I write with some difficulty, because the blood will run
down my face and make patterns on the paper. Blood is a very beautiful
thing; that is why it is concealed. If you ask why blood runs down my
face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me
what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a war-horse. If
you ask me how a war-horse came on the scene in our simple pedestrian
warfare, I am reduced to the necessity, so painful to a special
correspondent, of recounting my experiences.

"I was, as I have said, in the very act of posting my copy at the
pillar-box, and of glancing as I did so up the glittering curve of
Pembridge Road, studded with the lights of Wilson's men. I don't know
what made me pause to examine the matter, but I had a fancy that the
line of lights, where it melted into the indistinct brown twilight,
was more indistinct than usual. I was almost certain that in a certain
stretch of the road where there had been five lights there were now
only four. I strained my eyes; I counted them again, and there were
only three. A moment after there were only two; an instant after only
one; and an instant after that the lanterns near to me swung like
jangled bells, as if struck suddenly. They flared and fell; and for
the moment the fall of them was like the fall of the sun and stars out
of heaven. It left everything in a primal blindness. As a matter of
fact, the road was not yet legitimately dark. There were still red
rays of a sunset in the sky, and the brown gloaming was still warmed,
as it were, with a feeling as of firelight. But for three seconds
after the lanterns swung and sank, I saw in front of me a blackness
blocking the sky. And with the fourth second I knew that this
blackness which blocked the sky was a man on a great horse; and I was
trampled and tossed aside as a swirl of horsemen swept round the
corner. As they turned I saw that they were not black, but scarlet;
they were a sortie of the besieged, Wayne riding ahead.

"I lifted myself from the gutter, blinded with blood from a very
slight skin-wound, and, queerly enough, not caring either for the
blindness or for the slightness of the wound. For one mortal minute
after that amazing cavalcade had spun past, there was dead stillness
on the empty road. And then came Barker and all his halberdiers
running like devils in the track of them. It had been their business
to guard the gate by which the sortie had broken out; but they had not
reckoned, and small blame to them, on cavalry. As it was, Barker and
his men made a perfectly splendid run after them, almost catching
Wayne's horses by the tails.

"Nobody can understand the sortie. It consists only of a small number
of Wayne's garrison. Turnbull himself, with the vast mass of it, is
undoubtedly still barricaded in Pump Street. Sorties of this kind are
natural enough in the majority of historical sieges, such as the siege
of Paris in 1870, because in such cases the besieged are certain of
some support outside. But what can be the object of it in this case?
Wayne knows (or if he is too mad to know anything, at least Turnbull
knows) that there is not, and never has been, the smallest chance of
support for him outside; that the mass of the sane modern inhabitants
of London regard his farcical patriotism with as much contempt as they
do the original idiotcy that gave it birth--the folly of our miserable
King. What Wayne and his horsemen are doing nobody can even
conjecture. The general theory round here is that he is simply a
traitor, and has abandoned the besieged. But all such larger but yet
more soluble riddles are as nothing compared to the one small but
unanswerable riddle: Where did they get the horses?

       *       *       *       *       *

"_Later_.--I have heard a most extraordinary account of the origin of
the appearance of the horses. It appears that that amazing person,
General Turnbull, who is now ruling Pump Street in the absence of
Wayne, sent out, on the morning of the declaration of war, a vast
number of little boys (or cherubs of the gutter, as we pressmen say),
with half-crowns in their pockets, to take cabs all over London. No
less than a hundred and sixty cabs met at Pump Street; were
commandeered by the garrison. The men were set free, the cabs used to
make barricades, and the horses kept in Pump Street, where they were
fed and exercised for several days, until they were sufficiently
rapid and efficient to be used for this wild ride out of the town. If
this is so, and I have it on the best possible authority, the method
of the sortie is explained. But we have no explanation of its object.
Just as Barker's Blues were swinging round the corner after them, they
were stopped, but not by an enemy; only by the voice of one man, and
he a friend. Red Wilson of Bayswater ran alone along the main road
like a madman, waving them back with a halberd snatched from a
sentinel. He was in supreme command, and Barker stopped at the corner,
staring and bewildered. We could hear Wilson's voice loud and distinct
out of the dusk, so that it seemed strange that the great voice should
come out of the little body. 'Halt, South Kensington! Guard this
entry, and prevent them returning. I will pursue. Forward, the Green
Guards!'

"A wall of dark blue uniforms and a wood of pole-axes was between me
and Wilson, for Barker's men blocked the mouth of the road in two
rigid lines. But through them and through the dusk I could hear the
clear orders and the clank of arms, and see the green army of Wilson
marching by towards the west. They were our great fighting-men. Wilson
had filled them with his own fire; in a few days they had become
veterans. Each of them wore a silver medal of a pump, to boast that
they alone of all the allied armies had stood victorious in Pump
Street.

"I managed to slip past the detachment of Barker's Blues, who are
guarding the end of Pembridge Road, and a sharp spell of running
brought me to the tail of Wilson's green army as it swung down the
road in pursuit of the flying Wayne. The dusk had deepened into almost
total darkness; for some time I only heard the throb of the marching
pace. Then suddenly there was a cry, and the tall fighting men were
flung back on me, almost crushing me, and again the lanterns swung and
jingled, and the cold nozzles of great horses pushed into the press of
us. They had turned and charged us.

"'You fools!' came the voice of Wilson, cleaving our panic with a
splendid cold anger. 'Don't you see? the horses have no riders!'

"It was true. We were being plunged at by a stampede of horses with
empty saddles. What could it mean? Had Wayne met some of our men and
been defeated? Or had he flung these horses at us as some kind of ruse
or mad new mode of warfare, such as he seemed bent on inventing? Or
did he and his men want to get away in disguise? Or did they want to
hide in houses somewhere?

"Never did I admire any man's intellect (even my own) so much as I did
Wilson's at that moment. Without a word, he simply pointed the halberd
(which he still grasped) to the southern side of the road. As you
know, the streets running up to the ridge of Campden Hill from the
main road are peculiarly steep, they are more like sudden flights of
stairs. We were just opposite Aubrey Road, the steepest of all; up
that it would have been far more difficult to urge half-trained horses
than to run up on one's feet.

"'Left wheel!' hallooed Wilson. 'They have gone up here,' he added to
me, who happened to be at his elbow.

"'Why?' I ventured to ask.

"'Can't say for certain,' replied the Bayswater General. 'They've gone
up here in a great hurry, anyhow. They've simply turned their horses
loose, because they couldn't take them up. I fancy I know. I fancy
they're trying to get over the ridge to Kensingston or Hammersmith, or
somewhere, and are striking up here because it's just beyond the end
of our line. Damned fools, not to have gone further along the road,
though. They've only just shaved our last outpost. Lambert is hardly
four hundred yards from here. And I've sent him word.'

"'Lambert!' I said. 'Not young Wilfrid Lambert--my old friend.'

"'Wilfrid Lambert's his name,' said the General; 'used to be a "man
about town;" silly fellow with a big nose. That kind of man always
volunteers for some war or other; and what's funnier, he generally
isn't half bad at it. Lambert is distinctly good. The yellow West
Kensingtons I always reckoned the weakest part of the army; but he has
pulled them together uncommonly well, though he's subordinate to
Swindon, who's a donkey. In the attack from Pembridge Road the other
night he showed great pluck.'

"'He has shown greater pluck than that,' I said. 'He has criticised my
sense of humour. That was his first engagement.'

"This remark was, I am sorry to say, lost on the admirable commander
of the allied forces. We were in the act of climbing the last half of
Aubrey Road, which is so abrupt a slope that it looks like an
old-fashioned map leaning up against the wall. There are lines of
little trees, one above the other, as in the old-fashioned map.

"We reached the top of it, panting somewhat, and were just about to
turn the corner by a place called (in chivalrous anticipation of our
wars of sword and axe) Tower Creçy, when we were suddenly knocked in
the stomach (I can use no other term) by a horde of men hurled back
upon us. They wore the red uniform of Wayne; their halberds were
broken; their foreheads bleeding; but the mere impetus of their
retreat staggered us as we stood at the last ridge of the slope.

"'Good old Lambert!' yelled out suddenly the stolid Mr. Wilson of
Bayswater, in an uncontrollable excitement. 'Damned jolly old Lambert!
He's got there already! He's driving them back on us! Hurrah! hurrah!
Forward, the Green Guards!'

"We swung round the corner eastwards, Wilson running first,
brandishing the halberd--

"Will you pardon a little egotism? Every one likes a little egotism,
when it takes the form, as mine does in this case, of a disgraceful
confession. The thing is really a little interesting, because it shows
how the merely artistic habit has bitten into men like me. It was the
most intensely exciting occurrence that had ever come to me in my
life; and I was really intensely excited about it. And yet, as we
turned that corner, the first impression I had was of something that
had nothing to do with the fight at all. I was stricken from the sky
as by a thunderbolt, by the height of the Waterworks Tower on Campden
Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realise how high it
looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it.
For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war
was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with
some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that
shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on
something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the
dizziest height--the agony of man. And I knew that, compared to that,
this overwhelming tower was itself a triviality; it was a mere stalk
of stone which humanity could snap like a stick.

"I don't know why I have talked so much about this silly old
Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous
background. It was that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape,
against which our figures were relieved. But I think the real reason
was, that there was in my own mind so sharp a transition from the
tower of stone to the man of flesh. For what I saw first when I had
shaken off, as it were, the shadow of the tower, was a man, and a man
I knew.

"Lambert stood at the further corner of the street that curved round
the tower, his figure outlined in some degree by the beginning of
moonrise. He looked magnificent, a hero; but he looked something much
more interesting than that. He was, as it happened, in almost
precisely the same swaggering attitude in which he had stood nearly
fifteen years ago, when he swung his walking-stick and struck it into
the ground, and told me that all my subtlety was drivel. And, upon my
soul, I think he required more courage to say that than to fight as he
does now. For then he was fighting against something that was in the
ascendant, fashionable, and victorious. And now he is fighting (at the
risk of his life, no doubt) merely against something which is already
dead, which is impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more
impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into
contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the
psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was
attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is
attacking the interesting but totally extinguished Wayne.

"His name recalls me to the details of the scene. The facts were
these. A line of red halberdiers, headed by Wayne, were marching up
the street, close under the northern wall, which is, in fact, the
bottom of a sort of dyke or fortification of the Waterworks. Lambert
and his yellow West Kensingtons had that instant swept round the
corner and had shaken the Waynites heavily, hurling back a few of the
more timid, as I have just described, into our very arms. When our
force struck the tail of Wayne's, every one knew that all was up with
him. His favourite military barber was struck down. His grocer was
stunned. He himself was hurt in the thigh, and reeled back against the
wall. We had him in a trap with two jaws. 'Is that you?' shouted
Lambert, genially, to Wilson, across the hemmed-in host of Notting
Hill. 'That's about the ticket,' replied General Wilson; 'keep them
under the wall.'

"The men of Notting Hill were falling fast. Adam Wayne threw up his
long arms to the wall above him, and with a spring stood upon it; a
gigantic figure against the moon. He tore the banner out of the hands
of the standard-bearer below him, and shook it out suddenly above our
heads, so that it was like thunder in the heavens.

"'Round the Red Lion!' he cried. 'Swords round the Red Lion! Halberds
round the Red Lion! They are the thorns round rose.'

"His voice and the crack of the banner made a momentary rally, and
Lambert, whose idiotic face was almost beautiful with battle, felt it
as by an instinct, and cried--

"'Drop your public-house flag, you footler! Drop it!'

"'The banner of the Red Lion seldom stoops,' said Wayne, proudly,
letting it out luxuriantly on the night wind.

"The next moment I knew that poor Adam's sentimental theatricality had
cost him much. Lambert was on the wall at a bound, his sword in his
teeth, and had slashed at Wayne's head before he had time to draw his
sword, his hands being busy with the enormous flag. He stepped back
only just in time to avoid the first cut, and let the flag-staff fall,
so that the spear-blade at the end of it pointed to Lambert.

"'The banner stoops,' cried Wayne, in a voice that must have startled
streets. 'The banner of Notting Hill stoops to a hero.' And with the
words he drove the spear-point and half the flag-staff through
Lambert's body and dropped him dead upon the road below, a stone upon
the stones of the street.

"'Notting Hill! Notting Hill!' cried Wayne, in a sort of divine rage.
'Her banner is all the holier for the blood of a brave enemy! Up on
the wall, patriots! Up on the wall! Notting Hill!'

"With his long strong arm he actually dragged a man up on to the wall
to be silhouetted against the moon, and more and more men climbed up
there, pulled themselves and were pulled, till clusters and crowds of
the half-massacred men of Pump Street massed upon the wall above us.

"'Notting Hill! Notting Hill!' cried Wayne, unceasingly.

"'Well, what about Bayswater?' said a worthy working-man in Wilson's
army, irritably. 'Bayswater for ever!'

"'We have won!' cried Wayne, striking his flag-staff in the ground.
'Bayswater for ever! We have taught our enemies patriotism!'

"'Oh, cut these fellows up and have done with it!' cried one of
Lambert's lieutenants, who was reduced to something bordering on
madness by the responsibility of succeeding to the command.

"'Let us by all means try,' said Wilson, grimly; and the two armies
closed round the third.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I simply cannot describe what followed. I am sorry, but there is such
a thing as physical fatigue, as physical nausea, and, I may add, as
physical terror. Suffice it to say that the above paragraph was
written about 11 p.m., and that it is now about 2 a.m., and that the
battle is not finished, and is not likely to be. Suffice it further to
say that down the steep streets which lead from the Waterworks Tower
to the Notting Hill High Road, blood has been running, and is running,
in great red serpents, that curl out into the main thoroughfare and
shine in the moon.

       *       *       *       *       *

"_Later._--The final touch has been given to all this terrible
futility. Hours have passed; morning has broken; men are still swaying
and fighting at the foot of the tower and round the corner of Aubrey
Road; the fight has not finished. But I know it is a farce.

"News has just come to show that Wayne's amazing sortie, followed by
the amazing resistance through a whole night on the wall of the
Waterworks, is as if it had not been. What was the object of that
strange exodus we shall probably never know, for the simple reason
that every one who knew will probably be cut to pieces in the course
of the next two or three hours.

"I have heard, about three minutes ago, that Buck and Buck's methods
have won after all. He was perfectly right, of course, when one comes
to think of it, in holding that it was physically impossible for a
street to defeat a city. While we thought he was patrolling the
eastern gates with his Purple army; while we were rushing about the
streets and waving halberds and lanterns; while poor old Wilson was
scheming like Moltke and fighting like Achilles to entrap the wild
Provost of Notting Hill--Mr. Buck, retired draper, has simply driven
down in a hansom cab and done something about as plain as butter and
about as useful and nasty. He has gone down to South Kensington,
Brompton, and Fulham, and by spending about four thousand pounds of
his private means, has raised an army of nearly as many men; that is
to say, an army big enough to beat, not only Wayne, but Wayne and all
his present enemies put together. The army, I understand, is encamped
along High Street, Kensington, and fills it from the Church to Addison
Road Bridge. It is to advance by ten different roads uphill to the
north.

"I cannot endure to remain here. Everything makes it worse than it
need be. The dawn, for instance, has broken round Campden Hill;
splendid spaces of silver, edged with gold, are torn out of the sky.
Worse still, Wayne and his men feel the dawn; their faces, though
bloody and pale, are strangely hopeful ... insupportably pathetic.
Worst of all, for the moment they are winning. If it were not for Buck
and the new army they might just, and only just, win.

"I repeat, I cannot stand it. It is like watching that wonderful play
of old Maeterlinck's (you know my partiality for the healthy, jolly
old authors of the nineteenth century), in which one has to watch the
quiet conduct of people inside a parlour, while knowing that the very
men are outside the door whose word can blast it all with tragedy. And
this is worse, for the men are not talking, but writhing and bleeding
and dropping dead for a thing that is already settled--and settled
against them. The great grey masses of men still toil and tug and
sway hither and thither around the great grey tower; and the tower is
still motionless, as it will always be motionless. These men will be
crushed before the sun is set; and new men will arise and be crushed,
and new wrongs done, and tyranny will always rise again like the sun,
and injustice will always be as fresh as the flowers of spring. And
the stone tower will always look down on it. Matter, in its brutal
beauty, will always look down on those who are mad enough to consent
to die, and yet more mad, since they consent to live."

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus ended abruptly the first and last contribution of the Special
Correspondent of the _Court Journal_ to that valued periodical.

The Correspondent himself, as has been said, was simply sick and
gloomy at the last news of the triumph of Buck. He slouched sadly down
the steep Aubrey Road, up which he had the night before run in so
unusual an excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main
road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space
except a blue-and-gold glittering thing, running very fast, which
looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great
astonishment, to be Barker.

"Have you heard the good news?" asked that gentleman.

"Yes," said Quin, with a measured voice. "I have heard the glad
tidings of great joy. Shall we take a hansom down to Kensington? I see
one over there."

They took the cab, and were, in four minutes, fronting the ranks of
the multitudinous and invincible army. Quin had not spoken a word all
the way, and something about him had prevented the essentially
impressionable Barker from speaking either.

The great army, as it moved up Kensington High Street, calling many
heads to the numberless windows, for it was long indeed--longer than
the lives of most of the tolerably young--since such an army had been
seen in London. Compared with the vast organisation which was now
swallowing up the miles, with Buck at its head as leader, and the King
hanging at its tail as journalist, the whole story of our problem was
insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and
the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its
presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill
under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that
infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal
arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was
quite a fair matter for discussion. But it was a matter of history. At
the foot of Church Street, opposite Kensington Church, they paused in
their glowing good humour.

"Let us send some kind of messenger or herald up to them," said Buck,
turning to Barker and the King. "Let us send and ask them to cave in
without more muddle."

"What shall we say to them?" said Barker, doubtfully.

"The facts of the case are quite sufficient," rejoined Buck. "It is
the facts of the case that make an army surrender. Let us simply say
that our army that is fighting their army, and their army that is
fighting our army, amount altogether to about a thousand men. Say that
we have four thousand. It is very simple. Of the thousand fighting,
they have at the very most, three hundred, so that, with those three
hundred, they have now to fight four thousand seven hundred men. Let
them do it if it amuses them."

And the Provost of North Kensington laughed.

The herald who was despatched up Church Street in all the pomp of the
South Kensington blue and gold, with the Three Birds on his tabard,
was attended by two trumpeters.

"What will they do when they consent?" asked Barker, for the sake of
saying something in the sudden stillness of that immense army.

"I know my Wayne very well," said Buck, laughing. "When he submits he
will send a red herald flaming with the Lion of Notting Hill. Even
defeat will be delightful to him, since it is formal and romantic."

The King, who had strolled up to the head of the line, broke silence
for the first time.

"I shouldn't wonder," he said, "if he defied you, and didn't send the
herald after all. I don't think you do know your Wayne quite so well
as you think."

"All right, your Majesty," said Buck, easily; "if it isn't
disrespectful, I'll put my political calculations in a very simple
form. I'll lay you ten pounds to a shilling the herald comes with the
surrender."

"All right," said Auberon. "I may be wrong, but it's my notion of Adam
Wayne that he'll die in his city, and that, till he is dead, it will
not be a safe property."

"The bet's made, your Majesty," said Buck.

Another long silence ensued, in the course of which Barker alone, amid
the motionless army, strolled and stamped in his restless way.

Then Buck suddenly leant forward.

"It's taking your money, your Majesty," he said. "I knew it was. There
comes the herald from Adam Wayne."

"It's not," cried the King, peering forward also. "You brute, it's a
red omnibus."

"It's not," said Buck, calmly; and the King did not answer, for down
the centre of the spacious and silent Church Street was walking,
beyond question, the herald of the Red Lion, with two trumpeters.

Buck had something in him which taught him how to be magnanimous. In
his hour of success he felt magnanimous towards Wayne, whom he really
admired; magnanimous towards the King, off whom he had scored so
publicly; and, above all, magnanimous towards Barker, who was the
titular leader of this vast South Kensington army, which his own
talent had evoked.

"General Barker," he said, bowing, "do you propose now to receive the
message from the besieged?"

Barker bowed also, and advanced towards the herald.

"Has your master, Mr. Adam Wayne, received our request for surrender?"
he asked.

The herald conveyed a solemn and respectful affirmative.

Barker resumed, coughing slightly, but encouraged.

"What answer does your master send?"

The herald again inclined himself submissively, and answered in a kind
of monotone.

"My message is this. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting Hill,
under the charter of King Auberon and the laws of God and all mankind,
free and of a free city, greets James Barker, Lord High Provost of
South Kensington, by the same rights free and honourable, leader of
the army of the South. With all friendly reverence, and with all
constitutional consideration, he desires James Barker to lay down his
arms, and the whole army under his command to lay down their arms
also."

Before the words were ended the King had run forward into the open
space with shining eyes. The rest of the staff and the forefront of
the army were literally struck breathless. When they recovered they
began to laugh beyond restraint; the revulsion was too sudden.

"The Lord High Provost of Notting Hill," continued the herald, "does
not propose, in the event of your surrender, to use his victory for
any of those repressive purposes which others have entertained against
him. He will leave you your free laws and your free cities, your flags
and your governments. He will not destroy the religion of South
Kensington, or crush the old customs of Bayswater."

An irrepressible explosion of laughter went up from the forefront of
the great army.

"The King must have had something to do with this humour," said Buck,
slapping his thigh. "It's too deliciously insolent. Barker, have a
glass of wine."

And in his conviviality he actually sent a soldier across to the
restaurant opposite the church and brought out two glasses for a
toast.

When the laughter had died down, the herald continued quite
monotonously--

"In the event of your surrendering your arms and dispersing under the
superintendence of our forces, these local rights of yours shall be
carefully observed. In the event of your not doing so, the Lord High
Provost of Notting Hill desires to announce that he has just captured
the Waterworks Tower, just above you, on Campden Hill, and that within
ten minutes from now, that is, on the reception through me of your
refusal, he will open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley
where you stand in thirty feet of water. God save King Auberon!"

Buck had dropped his glass and sent a great splash of wine over the
road.

"But--but--" he said; and then by a last and splendid effort of his
great sanity, looked the facts in the face.

"We must surrender," he said. "You could do nothing against fifty
thousand tons of water coming down a steep hill, ten minutes hence. We
must surrender. Our four thousand men might as well be four. _Vicisti
Galilæe!_ Perkins, you may as well get me another glass of wine."

In this way the vast army of South Kensington surrendered and the
Empire of Notting Hill began. One further fact in this connection is
perhaps worth mentioning--the fact that, after his victory, Adam Wayne
caused the great tower on Campden Hill to be plated with gold and
inscribed with a great epitaph, saying that it was the monument of
Wilfrid Lambert, the heroic defender of the place, and surmounted with
a statue, in which his large nose was done something less than justice
to.




BOOK V




CHAPTER I--_The Empire of Notting Hill_


On the evening of the third of October, twenty years after the great
victory of Notting Hill, which gave it the dominion of London, King
Auberon came, as of old, out of Kensington Palace.

He had changed little, save for a streak or two of grey in his hair,
for his face had always been old, and his step slow, and, as it were,
decrepit.

If he looked old, it was not because of anything physical or mental.
It was because he still wore, with a quaint conservatism, the
frock-coat and high hat of the days before the great war. "I have
survived the Deluge," he said. "I am a pyramid, and must behave as
such."

As he passed up the street the Kensingtonians, in their picturesque
blue smocks, saluted him as a King, and then looked after him as a
curiosity. It seemed odd to them that men had once worn so elvish an
attire.

The King, cultivating the walk attributed to the oldest inhabitant
("Gaffer Auberon" his friends were now confidentially desired to call
him), went toddling northward. He paused, with reminiscence in his
eye, at the Southern Gate of Notting Hill, one of those nine great
gates of bronze and steel, wrought with reliefs of the old battles, by
the hand of Chiffy himself.

"Ah!" he said, shaking his head and assuming an unnecessary air of
age, and a provincialism of accent--"Ah! I mind when there warn't none
of this here."

He passed through the Ossington Gate, surmounted by a great lion,
wrought in red copper on yellow brass, with the motto, "Nothing Ill."
The guard in red and gold saluted him with his halberd.

It was about sunset, and the lamps were being lit. Auberon paused to
look at them, for they were Chiffy's finest work, and his artistic eye
never failed to feast on them. In memory of the Great Battle of the
Lamps, each great iron lamp was surmounted by a veiled figure, sword
in hand, holding over the flame an iron hood or extinguisher, as if
ready to let it fall if the armies of the South and West should again
show their flags in the city. Thus no child in Notting Hill could play
about the streets without the very lamp-posts reminding him of the
salvation of his country in the dreadful year.

"Old Wayne was right in a way," commented the King. "The sword does
make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now.
And to think people once thought me a buffoon for suggesting a
romantic Notting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the
expression)--it seems like a previous existence."

Turning a corner, he found himself in Pump Street, opposite the four
shops which Adam Wayne had studied twenty years before. He entered
idly the shop of Mr. Mead, the grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older,
like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with
a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured.
He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown,
and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and
covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares
passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck
was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as
Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and
sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently
as in the old days, but they were now blended and arranged with a
sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of
those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so
much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather as an
educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures. The tea was stored
in great blue and green vases, inscribed with the nine indispensable
sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and
purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored
symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery
metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but
rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate
what material had been canned in it.

"Your Majesty," said Mr. Mead, sweeping an Oriental reverence. "This
is an honour to me, but yet more an honour to the city."

Auberon took off his hat.

"Mr. Mead," he said, "Notting Hill, whether in giving or taking, can
deal in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell liquorice?"

"Liquorice, sire," said Mr. Mead, "is not the least important of our
benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia."

And going reverently towards a green and silver canister, made in the
form of an Arabian mosque, he proceeded to serve his customer.

"I was just thinking, Mr. Mead," said the King, reflectively, "I don't
know why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of
twenty years ago. Do you remember the times before the war?"

The grocer, having wrapped up the liquorice sticks in a piece of paper
(inscribed with some appropriate sentiment), lifted his large grey
eyes dreamily, and looked at the darkening sky outside.

"Oh yes, your Majesty," he said. "I remember these streets before the
Lord Provost began to rule us. I can't remember how we felt very well.
All the great songs and the fighting change one so; and I don't think
we can really estimate all we owe to the Provost; but I can remember
his coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember
the things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember,
I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it's the things
that I said, as far as I can recall them, that seem to me odd--as odd
as a madman's antics."

"Ah!" said the King; and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness.

"I thought nothing of being a grocer then," he said. "Isn't that odd
enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that
my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not
know that I was for all practical purposes a king with slaves spearing
fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under
the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a
hatter."

The King turned also, and stared out into the dark, where the great
lamps that commemorated the battle were already flaming.

"And is this the end of poor old Wayne?" he said, half to himself. "To
inflame every one so much that he is lost himself in the blaze. Is
this his victory that he, my incomparable Wayne, is now only one in a
world of Waynes? Has he conquered and become by conquest commonplace?
Must Mr. Mead, the grocer, talk as high as he? Lord! what a strange
world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble
to go mad!"

And he went dreamily out of the shop.

He paused outside the next one almost precisely as the Provost had
done two decades before.

[Illustration: "A FINE EVENING, SIR," SAID THE CHEMIST.]

"How uncommonly creepy this shop looks!" he said. "But yet somehow
encouragingly creepy, invitingly creepy. It looks like something in a
jolly old nursery story in which you are frightened out of your skin,
and yet know that things always end well. The way those low sharp
gables are carved like great black bat's wings folded down, and the
way those queer-coloured bowls underneath are made to shine like
giants eye-balls. It looks like a benevolent warlock's hut. It is
apparently a chemist's."

Almost as he spoke, Mr. Bowles, the chemist, came to his shop door in
a long black velvet gown and hood, monastic as it were, but yet with a
touch of the diabolic. His hair was still quite black, and his face
even paler than of old. The only spot of colour he carried was a red
star cut in some precious stone of strong tint, hung on his breast. He
belonged to the Society of the Red Star of Charity, founded on the
lamps displayed by doctors and chemists.

"A fine evening, sir," said the chemist. "Why, I can scarcely be
mistaken in supposing it to be your Majesty. Pray step inside and
share a bottle of sal-volatile, or anything that may take your fancy.
As it happens, there is an old acquaintance of your Majesty's in my
shop carousing (if I may be permitted the term) upon that beverage at
this moment."

The King entered the shop, which was an Aladdin's garden of shades and
hues, for as the chemist's scheme of colour was more brilliant than
the grocer's scheme, so it was arranged with even more delicacy and
fancy. Never, if the phrase may be employed, had such a nosegay of
medicines been presented to the artistic eye.

But even the solemn rainbow of that evening interior was rivalled or
even eclipsed by the figure standing in the centre of the shop. His
form, which was a large and stately one, was clad in a brilliant blue
velvet, cut in the richest Renaissance fashion, and slashed so as to
show gleams and gaps of a wonderful lemon or pale yellow. He had
several chains round his neck, and his plumes, which were of several
tints of bronze and gold, hung down to the great gold hilt of his long
sword. He was drinking a dose of sal-volatile, and admiring its opal
tint. The King advanced with a slight mystification towards the tall
figure, whose face was in shadow; then he said--

"By the Great Lord of Luck, Barker!"

The figure removed his plumed cap, showing the same dark head and
long, almost equine face which the King had so often seen rising out
of the high collar of Bond Street. Except for a grey patch on each
temple, it was totally unchanged.

"Your Majesty," said Barker, "this is a meeting nobly retrospective, a
meeting that has about it a certain October gold. I drink to old
days;" and he finished his sal-volatile with simple feeling.

"I am delighted to see you again, Barker," said the King. "It is
indeed long since we met. What with my travels in Asia Minor, and my
book having to be written (you have read my 'Life of Prince Albert for
Children,' of course?), we have scarcely met twice since the Great
War. That is twenty years ago."

"I wonder," said Barker, thoughtfully, "if I might speak freely to
your Majesty?"

"Well," said Auberon, "it's rather late in the day to start speaking
respectfully. Flap away, my bird of freedom."

"Well, your Majesty," replied Barker, lowering his voice, "I don't
think it will be so long to the next war."

"What do you mean?" asked Auberon.

"We will stand this insolence no longer," burst out Barker, fiercely.
"We are not slaves because Adam Wayne twenty years ago cheated us with
a water-pipe. Notting Hill is Notting Hill; it is not the world. We
in South Kensington, we also have memories--ay, and hopes. If they
fought for these trumpery shops and a few lamp-posts, shall we not
fight for the great High Street and the sacred Natural History
Museum?"

"Great Heavens!" said the astounded Auberon. "Will wonders never
cease? Have the two greatest marvels been achieved? Have you turned
altruistic, and has Wayne turned selfish? Are you the patriot, and he
the tyrant?"

"It is not from Wayne himself altogether that the evil comes,"
answered Barker. "He, indeed, is now mostly wrapped in dreams, and
sits with his old sword beside the fire. But Notting Hill is the
tyrant, your Majesty. Its Council and its crowds have been so
intoxicated by the spreading over the whole city of Wayne's old ways
and visions, that they try to meddle with every one, and rule every
one, and civilise every one, and tell every one what is good for him.
I do not deny the great impulse which his old war, wild as it seemed,
gave to the civic life of our time. It came when I was still a young
man, and I admit it enlarged my career. But we are not going to see
our own cities flouted and thwarted from day to day because of
something Wayne did for us all nearly a quarter of a century ago. I am
just waiting here for news upon this very matter. It is rumoured that
Notting Hill has vetoed the statue of General Wilson they are putting
up opposite Chepstow Place. If that is so, it is a black and white
shameless breach of the terms on which we surrendered to Turnbull
after the battle of the Tower. We were to keep our own customs and
self-government. If that is so--"

"It is so," said a deep voice; and both men turned round.

A burly figure in purple robes, with a silver eagle hung round his
neck and moustaches almost as florid as his plumes, stood in the
doorway.

"Yes," he said, acknowledging the King's start, "I am Provost Buck,
and the news is true. These men of the Hill have forgotten that we
fought round the Tower as well as they, and that it is sometimes
foolish, as well as base, to despise the conquered."

"Let us step outside," said Barker, with a grim composure.

Buck did so, and stood rolling his eyes up and down the lamp-lit
street.

"I would like to have a go at smashing all this," he muttered,
"though I am over sixty. I would like--"

His voice ended in a cry, and he reeled back a step, with his hands to
his eyes, as he had done in those streets twenty years before.

"Darkness!" he cried--"darkness again! What does it mean?"

For in truth every lamp in the street had gone out, so that they could
not see even each other's outline, except faintly. The voice of the
chemist came with startling cheerfulness out of the density.

"Oh, don't you know?" he said. "Did they never tell you this is the
Feast of the Lamps, the anniversary of the great battle that almost
lost and just saved Notting Hill? Don't you know, your Majesty, that
on this night twenty-one years ago we saw Wilson's green uniforms
charging down this street, and driving Wayne and Turnbull back upon
the gas-works, fighting with their handful like fiends from hell? And
that then, in that great hour, Wayne sprang through a window of the
gas-works, with one blow of his hand brought darkness on the whole
city, and then with a cry like a lion's, that was heard through four
streets, flew at Wilson's men, sword in hand, and swept them,
bewildered as they were, and ignorant of the map, clear out of the
sacred street again? And don't you know that upon that night every
year all lights are turned out for half an hour while we sing the
Notting Hill anthem in the darkness? Hark! there it begins."

Through the night came a crash of drums, and then a strong swell of
human voices--

"When the world was in the balance, there was night on Notting Hill,
(There was night on Notting Hill): it was nobler than the day;
On the cities where the lights are and the firesides glow,
From the seas and from the deserts came the thing we did not know,
Came the darkness, came the darkness, came the darkness on the foe,
      And the old guard of God turned to bay.
  For the old guard of God turns to bay, turns to bay,
  And the stars fall down before it ere its banners fall to-day:
  For when armies were around us as a howling and a horde,
  When falling was the citadel and broken was the sword,
  The darkness came upon them like the Dragon of the Lord,
      When the old guard of God turned to bay."

The voices were just uplifting themselves in a second verse when they
were stopped by a scurry and a yell. Barker had bounded into the
street with a cry of "South Kensington!" and a drawn dagger. In less
time than a man could blink, the whole packed street was full of
curses and struggling. Barker was flung back against the shop-front,
but used the second only to draw his sword as well as his dagger, and
calling out, "This is not the first time I've come through the thick
of you," flung himself again into the press. It was evident that he
had drawn blood at last, for a more violent outcry arose, and many
other knives and swords were discernible in the faint light. Barker,
after having wounded more than one man, seemed on the point of being
flung back again, when Buck suddenly stepped out into the street. He
had no weapon, for he affected rather the peaceful magnificence of the
great burgher, than the pugnacious dandyism which had replaced the old
sombre dandyism in Barker. But with a blow of his clenched fist he
broke the pane of the next shop, which was the old curiosity shop,
and, plunging in his hand, snatched a kind of Japanese scimitar, and
calling out, "Kensington! Kensington!" rushed to Barker's assistance.

Barker's sword was broken, but he was laying about him with his
dagger. Just as Buck ran up, a man of Notting Hill struck Barker down,
but Buck struck the man down on top of him, and Barker sprang up
again, the blood running down his face.

Suddenly all these cries were cloven by a great voice, that seemed to
fall out of heaven. It was terrible to Buck and Barker and the King,
from its seeming to come out the empty skies; but it was more terrible
because it was a familiar voice, and one which at the same time they
had not heard for so long.

"Turn up the lights," said the voice from above them, and for a moment
there was no reply, but only a tumult.

"In the name of Notting Hill and of the great Council of the City,
turn up the lights."

There was again a tumult and a vagueness for a moment, then the whole
street and every object in it sprang suddenly out of the darkness, as
every lamp sprang into life. And looking up they saw, standing upon a
balcony near the roof of one of the highest houses, the figure and the
face of Adam Wayne, his red hair blowing behind him, a little streaked
with grey.


"What is this, my people?" he said. "Is it altogether impossible to
make a thing good without it immediately insisting on being wicked?
The glory of Notting Hill in having achieved its independence, has
been enough for me to dream of for many years, as I sat beside the
fire. Is it really not enough for you, who have had so many other
affairs to excite and distract you? Notting Hill is a nation. Why
should it condescend to be a mere Empire? You wish to pull down the
statue of General Wilson, which the men of Bayswater have so rightly
erected in Westbourne Grove. Fools! Who erected that statue? Did
Bayswater erect it? No. Notting Hill erected it. Do you not see that
it is the glory of our achievement that we have infected the other
cities with the idealism of Notting Hill? It is we who have created
not only our own side, but both sides of this controversy. O too
humble fools, why should you wish to destroy your enemies? You have
done something more to them. You have created your enemies. You wish
to pull down that gigantic silver hammer, which stands, like an
obelisk, in the centre of the Broadway of Hammersmith. Fools! Before
Notting Hill arose, did any person passing through Hammersmith
Broadway expect to see there a gigantic silver hammer? You wish to
abolish the great bronze figure of a knight standing upon the
artificial bridge at Knightsbridge. Fools! Who would have thought of
it before Notting Hill arose? I have even heard, and with deep pain I
have heard it, that the evil eye of our imperial envy has been cast
towards the remote horizon of the west, and that we have objected to
the great black monument of a crowned raven, which commemorates the
skirmish of Ravenscourt Park. Who created all these things? Were they
there before we came? Cannot you be content with that destiny which
was enough for Athens, which was enough for Nazareth? the destiny, the
humble purpose, of creating a new world. Is Athens angry because
Romans and Florentines have adopted her phraseology for expressing
their own patriotism? Is Nazareth angry because as a little village it
has become the type of all little villages out of which, as the Snobs
say, no good can come? Has Athens asked every one to wear the chlamys?
Are all followers of the Nazarene compelled to wear turbans. No! but
the soul of Athens went forth and made men drink hemlock, and the soul
of Nazareth went forth and made men consent to be crucified. So has
the soul of Notting Hill gone forth and made men realise what it is to
live in a city. Just as we inaugurated our symbols and ceremonies, so
they have inaugurated theirs; and are you so mad as to contend against
them? Notting Hill is right; it has always been right. It has moulded
itself on its own necessities, its own _sine quâ non_; it has accepted
its own ultimatum. Because it is a nation it has created itself; and
because it is a nation it can destroy itself. Notting Hill shall
always be the judge. If it is your will because of this matter of
General Wilson's statue to make war upon Bayswater--"

A roar of cheers broke in upon his words, and further speech was
impossible. Pale to the lips, the great patriot tried again and again
to speak; but even his authority could not keep down the dark and
roaring masses in the street below him. He said something further, but
it was not audible. He descended at last sadly from the garret in
which he lived, and mingled with the crowd at the foot of the houses.
Finding General Turnbull, he put his hand on his shoulder with a queer
affection and gravity, and said--

"To-morrow, old man, we shall have a new experience, as fresh as the
flowers of spring. We shall be defeated. You and I have been through
three battles together, and have somehow or other missed this peculiar
delight. It is unfortunate that we shall not probably be able to
exchange our experiences, because, as it most annoyingly happens, we
shall probably both be dead."

Turnbull looked dimly surprised.

"I don't mind so much about being dead," he said, "but why should you
say that we shall be defeated?"

"The answer is very simple," replied Wayne, calmly. "It is because we
ought to be defeated. We have been in the most horrible holes before
now; but in all those I was perfectly certain that the stars were on
our side, and that we ought to get out. Now I know that we ought not
to get out; and that takes away from me everything with which I won."

As Wayne spoke he started a little, for both men became aware that a
third figure was listening to them--a small figure with wondering
eyes.

"Is it really true, my dear Wayne," said the King, interrupting, "that
you think you will be beaten to-morrow?"

"There can be no doubt about it whatever," replied Adam Wayne; "the
real reason is the one of which I have just spoken. But as a
concession to your materialism, I will add that they have an organised
army of a hundred allied cities against our one. That in itself,
however, would be unimportant."

Quin, with his round eyes, seemed strangely insistent.

"You are quite sure," he said, "that you must be beaten?"

"I am afraid," said Turnbull, gloomily, "that there can be no doubt
about it."

"Then," cried the King, flinging out his arms, "give me a halberd!
Give me a halberd, somebody! I desire all men to witness that I,
Auberon, King of England, do here and now abdicate, and implore the
Provost of Notting Hill to permit me to enlist in his army. Give me a
halberd!"

He seized one from some passing guard, and, shouldering it, stamped
solemnly after the shouting columns of halberdiers which were, by this
time, parading the streets. He had, however, nothing to do with the
wrecking of the statue of General Wilson, which took place before
morning.




CHAPTER II--_The Last Battle_


The day was cloudy when Wayne went down to die with all his army in
Kensington Gardens; it was cloudy again when that army had been
swallowed up by the vast armies of a new world. There had been an
almost uncanny interval of sunshine, in which the Provost of Notting
Hill, with all the placidity of an onlooker, had gazed across to the
hostile armies on the great spaces of verdure opposite; the long
strips of green and blue and gold lay across the park in squares and
oblongs like a proposition in Euclid wrought in a rich embroidery. But
the sunlight was a weak and, as it were, a wet sunlight, and was soon
swallowed up. Wayne spoke to the King, with a queer sort of coldness
and languor, as to the military operations. It was as he had said the
night before--that being deprived of his sense of an impracticable
rectitude, he was, in effect, being deprived of everything. He was out
of date, and at sea in a mere world of compromise and competition, of
Empire against Empire, of the tolerably right and the tolerably wrong.
When his eye fell on the King, however, who was marching very gravely
with a top hat and a halberd, it brightened slightly.

"Well, your Majesty," he said, "you at least ought to be proud to-day.
If your children are fighting each other, at least those who win are
your children. Other kings have distributed justice, you have
distributed life. Other kings have ruled a nation, you have created
nations. Others have made kingdoms, you have begotten them. Look at
your children, father!" and he stretched his hand out towards the
enemy.

Auberon did not raise his eyes.

"See how splendidly," cried Wayne, "the new cities come on--the new
cities from across the river. See where Battersea advances over
there--under the flag of the Lost Dog; and Putney--don't you see the
Man on the White Boar shining on their standard as the sun catches it?
It is the coming of a new age, your Majesty. Notting Hill is not a
common empire; it is a thing like Athens, the mother of a mode of
life, of a manner of living, which shall renew the youth of the
world--a thing like Nazareth. When I was young I remember, in the old
dreary days, wiseacres used to write books about how trains would get
faster, and all the world be one empire, and tram-cars go to the moon.
And even as a child I used to say to myself, 'Far more likely that we
shall go on the crusades again, or worship the gods of the city.' And
so it has been. And I am glad, though this is my last battle."

Even as he spoke there came a crash of steel from the left, and he
turned his head.

"Wilson!" he cried, with a kind of joy. "Red Wilson has charged our
left. No one can hold him in; he eats swords. He is as keen a soldier
as Turnbull, but less patient--less really great. Ha! and Barker is
moving. How Barker has improved; how handsome he looks! It is not all
having plumes; it is also having a soul in one's daily life. Ha!"

And another crash of steel on the right showed that Barker had closed
with Notting Hill on the other side.

"Turnbull is there!" cried Wayne. "See him hurl them back! Barker is
checked! Turnbull charges--wins! But our left is broken. Wilson has
smashed Bowles and Mead, and may turn our flank. Forward, the
Provost's Guard!"

And the whole centre moved forward, Wayne's face and hair and sword
flaming in the van.

The King ran suddenly forward.

The next instant a great jar that went through it told that it had met
the enemy. And right over against them through the wood of their own
weapons Auberon saw the Purple Eagle of Buck of North Kensington.

On the left Red Wilson was storming the broken ranks, his little green
figure conspicuous even in the tangle of men and weapons, with the
flaming red moustaches and the crown of laurel. Bowles slashed at his
head and tore away some of the wreath, leaving the rest bloody, and,
with a roar like a bull's, Wilson sprang at him, and, after a rattle
of fencing, plunged his point into the chemist, who fell, crying,
"Notting Hill!" Then the Notting Hillers wavered, and Bayswater swept
them back in confusion. Wilson had carried everything before him.

On the right, however, Turnbull had carried the Red Lion banner with a
rush against Barker's men, and the banner of the Golden Birds bore up
with difficulty against it. Barker's men fell fast. In the centre
Wayne and Buck were engaged, stubborn and confused. So far as the
fighting went, it was precisely equal. But the fighting was a farce.
For behind the three small armies with which Wayne's small army was
engaged lay the great sea of the allied armies, which looked on as yet
as scornful spectators, but could have broken all four armies by
moving a finger.

Suddenly they did move. Some of the front contingents, the pastoral
chiefs from Shepherd's Bush, with their spears and fleeces, were seen
advancing, and the rude clans from Paddington Green. They were
advancing for a very good reason. Buck, of North Kensington, was
signalling wildly; he was surrounded, and totally cut off. His
regiments were a struggling mass of people, islanded in a red sea of
Notting Hill.

The allies had been too careless and confident. They had allowed
Barker's force to be broken to pieces by Turnbull, and the moment that
was done, the astute old leader of Notting Hill swung his men round
and attacked Buck behind and on both sides. At the same moment Wayne
cried, "Charge!" and struck him in front like a thunderbolt.

Two-thirds of Buck's men were cut to pieces before their allies could
reach them. Then the sea of cities came on with their banners like
breakers, and swallowed Notting Hill for ever. The battle was not
over, for not one of Wayne's men would surrender, and it lasted till
sundown, and long after. But it was decided; the story of Notting Hill
was ended.

When Turnbull saw it, he ceased a moment from fighting, and looked
round him. The evening sunlight struck his face; it looked like a
child's.

"I have had my youth," he said. Then, snatching an axe from a man, he
dashed into the thick of the spears of Shepherd's Bush, and died
somewhere far in the depths of their reeling ranks. Then the battle
roared on; every man of Notting Hill was slain before night.

Wayne was standing by a tree alone after the battle. Several men
approached him with axes. One struck at him. His foot seemed partly to
slip; but he flung his hand out, and steadied himself against the
tree.

Barker sprang after him, sword in hand, and shaking with excitement.

"How large now, my lord," he cried, "is the Empire of Notting Hill?"

Wayne smiled in the gathering dark.

"Always as large as this," he said, and swept his sword round in a
semicircle of silver.

Barker dropped, wounded in the neck; and Wilson sprang over his body
like a tiger-cat, rushing at Wayne. At the same moment there came
behind the Lord of the Red Lion a cry and a flare of yellow, and a
mass of the West Kensington halberdiers ploughed up the slope,
knee-deep in grass, bearing the yellow banner of the city before them,
and shouting aloud.

At the same second Wilson went down under Wayne's sword, seemingly
smashed like a fly. The great sword rose again like a bird, but Wilson
seemed to rise with it, and, his sword being broken, sprang at Wayne's
throat like a dog. The foremost of the yellow halberdiers had reached
the tree and swung his axe above the struggling Wayne. With a curse
the King whirled up his own halberd, and dashed the blade in the man's
face. He reeled and rolled down the slope, just as the furious Wilson
was flung on his back again. And again he was on his feet, and again
at Wayne's throat. Then he was flung again, but this time laughing
triumphantly. Grasped in his hand was the red and yellow favour that
Wayne wore as Provost of Notting Hill. He had torn it from the place
where it had been carried for twenty-five years.

With a shout the West Kensington men closed round Wayne, the great
yellow banner flapping over his head.

"Where is your favour now, Provost?" cried the West Kensington leader.

And a laugh went up.

Adam struck at the standard-bearer and brought him reeling forward. As
the banner stooped, he grasped the yellow folds and tore off a shred.
A halberdier struck him on the shoulder, wounding bloodily.

"Here is one colour!" he cried, pushing the yellow into his belt; "and
here!" he cried, pointing to his own blood--"here is the other."

At the same instant the shock of a sudden and heavy halberd laid the
King stunned or dead. In the wild visions of vanishing consciousness,
he saw again something that belonged to an utterly forgotten time,
something that he had seen somewhere long ago in a restaurant. He saw,
with his swimming eyes, red and yellow, the colours of Nicaragua.

Quin did not see the end. Wilson, wild with joy, sprang again at Adam
Wayne, and the great sword of Notting Hill was whirled above once
more. Then men ducked instinctively at the rushing noise of the sword
coming down out of the sky, and Wilson of Bayswater was smashed and
wiped down upon the floor like a fly. Nothing was left of him but a
wreck; but the blade that had broken him was broken. In dying he had
snapped the great sword and the spell of it; the sword of Wayne was
broken at the hilt. One rush of the enemy carried Wayne by force
against the tree. They were too close to use halberd or even sword;
they were breast to breast, even nostrils to nostrils. But Buck got
his dagger free.

"Kill him!" he cried, in a strange stifled voice. "Kill him! Good or
bad, he is none of us! Do not be blinded by the face!... God! have we
not been blinded all along!" and he drew his arm back for a stab, and
seemed to close his eyes.

Wayne did not drop the hand that hung on to the tree-branch. But a
mighty heave went over his breast and his whole huge figure, like an
earthquake over great hills. And with that convulsion of effort he
rent the branch out of the tree, with tongues of torn wood; and,
swaying it once only, he let the splintered club fall on Buck,
breaking his neck. The planner of the Great Road fell face foremost
dead, with his dagger in a grip of steel.

"For you and me, and for all brave men, my brother," said Wayne, in
his strange chant, "there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of
the world."

The packed men made another lurch or heave towards him; it was almost
too dark to fight clearly. He caught hold of the oak again, this time
getting his hand into a wide crevice and grasping, as it were, the
bowels of the tree. The whole crowd, numbering some thirty men, made a
rush to tear him away from it; they hung on with all their weight and
numbers, and nothing stirred. A solitude could not have been stiller
than that group of straining men. Then there was a faint sound.

"His hand is slipping," cried two men in exultation.

"You don't know much of him," said another, grimly (a man of the old
war). "More likely his bone cracks."

"It is neither--by God, it is neither!" said one of the first two.

"What is it, then?" asked the second.

"The tree is falling," he replied.

"As the tree falleth, so shall it lie," said Wayne's voice out of the
darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had
had throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after
the event. Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a
madman, he spoke like a spectator. "As the tree falleth, so shall it
lie," he said. "Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence
of all exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what
is the only happiness, what is the only universality. I am clinging to
something. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and
see the kingdoms of the earth, and are liberal and wise and
cosmopolitan, which is all that the devil can give you--all that he
could offer to Christ, only to be spurned away. I am doing what the
truly wise do. When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of
a tree, saying, 'Let this tree be all I have,' that moment its roots
take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy I have is
what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a savage
knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill
is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall."

As he spoke, the turf lifted itself like a living thing, and out of it
rose slowly, like crested serpents, the roots of the oak. Then the
great head of the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones,
swept the sky suddenly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over
like a ship, smashing every one in its fall.




CHAPTER III--_Two Voices_


In a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was also
for hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no
one could have told from where, and said aloud--

"So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended
in blood, and all things are always the same."

And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it
had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.

"If all things are always the same, it is because they are always
heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are
always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is
given a little power--the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow
up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever
gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean--an
empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great--a
great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God
there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new
things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements and
change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the
old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that
many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not
feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of
change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the
weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by
nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any
one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that
there have been such things as children. No people that fight for
their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes,
O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always
unexpected."

A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voice
answered--

"But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whom
nothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances like
a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Notting
Hill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem,
Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. They
know that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearily
and respectably amused as they move upon it."

"They are philosophers or they are fools," said the other voice. "They
are not men. Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in
something fresher than progress--in the fact that with every baby a
new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single
man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of
so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under
the load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased God
so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other
souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the
youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And the
doom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real fact
affect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect a
children's game in a meadow. Notting Hill has fallen; Notting Hill has
died. But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived."

"But if," answered the other voice, "if what is achieved by all these
efforts be only the common contentment of humanity, why do men so
extravagantly toil and die in them? Has nothing been done by Notting
Hill than any chance clump of farmers or clan of savages would not
have done without it? What might have been done to Notting Hill if the
world had been different may be a deep question; but there is a
deeper. What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill had
never been?"

The other voice replied--

"The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry
systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something
would have been eternally lost. There has never been anything in the
world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite
like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God
loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and
unreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His
thunders, hated it, I loved it."

And with the voice a tall, strange figure lifted itself out of the
_débris_ in the half-darkness.

The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.

"But suppose the whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose that
whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real
meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all folly. Suppose--"

"I have been in it," answered the voice from the tall and strange
figure, "and I know it was not."

A smaller figure seemed half to rise in the dark.

"Suppose I am God," said the voice, "and suppose I made the world in
idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the
idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the
moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast
and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose
the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose
Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by
walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things,
laugh at them."

"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give
the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at
you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up
straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for
the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a
literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible
a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the
seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch
garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a
temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"

The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to
turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The
slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice
was more human.

"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and more
real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from
the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense
that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,
of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a
joke."

The tall figure answered--

"He could not know it. For it was not all a joke."

And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, and
showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other
voice came, having crept nearer still.

[Illustration: "WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE."]

"Adam Wayne," it said, "there are men who confess only in _articulo
mortis_; there are people who blame themselves only when they can no
longer help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the
bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never
understand before. Do you know who I am?"

"I know you, Auberon Quin," answered the tall figure, "and I shall be
glad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it."

"Adam Wayne," said the other voice, "of what I have to say you cannot
in common reason be glad to unburden me. Wayne, it was all a joke.
When I made these cities, I cared no more for them than I care for a
centaur, or a merman, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feathers, or
any other absurdity. When I spoke to you solemnly and encouragingly
about the flag of your freedom and the peace of your city, I was
playing a vulgar practical joke on an honest gentleman, a vulgar
practical joke that has lasted for twenty years. Though no one could
believe it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid
and tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or
the central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared to
break the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it
now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your
people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke."

There was silence, and the freshening breeze blew the sky clearer and
clearer, leaving great spaces of the white dawn.

At last Wayne said, very slowly--

"You did it all only as a joke?"

"Yes," said Quin, briefly.

"When you conceived the idea," went on Wayne, dreamily, "of an army
for Bayswater and a flag for Notting Hill, there was no gleam, no
suggestion in your mind that such things might be real and
passionate?"

"No," answered Auberon, turning his round white face to the morning
with a dull and splendid sincerity; "I had none at all."

Wayne sprang down from the height above him and held out his hand.

"I will not stop to thank you," he said, with a curious joy in his
voice, "for the great good for the world you have actually wrought.
All that I think of that I have said to you a moment ago, even when I
thought that your voice was the voice of a derisive omnipotence, its
laughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what is
immediate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us
throughout our lives been again and again called mad. And we are mad.
We are mad, because we are not two men, but one man. We are mad,
because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been
cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to
find. It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark
days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the
fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that, though we seem
to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and
woman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are
the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."

Quin looked down at the _débris_ of leaves and timber, the relics of
the battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, and
finally said--

"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism--the fact that I laughed at
these things and you adored them."

Wayne's wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it to
be struck by the sunrise.

"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that
is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps
taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will
alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism
between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom
mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark
and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the
pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have
lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows
mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But
in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes
of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The
cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous
grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover
laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend
at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us
go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our
wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is
already day."

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the
formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the
unknown world.


THE END




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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Miscellany of Men, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: A Miscellany of Men

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: November 5, 2008 [EBook #2015]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MISCELLANY OF MEN ***




Produced by Michael Pullen, Michael K. Johnson, and Joe Moretti







A MISCELLANY OF MEN

By G. K. Chesterton



Contents

     THE SUFFRAGIST

     THE POET AND THE CHEESE

     THE THING

     THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

     THE NAMELESS MAN

     THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

     THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

     THE MAD OFFICIAL

     THE ENCHANTED MAN

     THE SUN WORSHIPPER

     THE WRONG INCENDIARY

     THE FREE MAN

     THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

     THE PRIEST OF SPRING

     THE REAL JOURNALIST

     THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

     THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

     THE FOOL

     THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

     THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

     THE MYSTAGOGUE

     THE RED REACTIONARY

     THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

     THE MUMMER

     THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

     THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

     THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

     THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

     THE SULTAN

     THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

     THE MAN ON TOP

     THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

     THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

     THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

     THE ELF OF JAPAN

     THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

     THE CONTENTED MAN

     THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL




THE SUFFRAGIST

Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching
those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular
sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt.
One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up
her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which
he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more
of her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon
of which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite
accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the
simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest
when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose,
when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define
Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,
"Let them eat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor
made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that
vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the
poor, "But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be much
more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the
functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and
breathing are about the only two things that generally work best
when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same
sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also
polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest
of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or
woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different
from anything else in the world.

There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that
made them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone
axe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman
was ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that
might have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has
never been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like
the streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to
compare this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions.
Genuine royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish to
destroy kings. The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we
allow them any sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something
as base as a party system.

As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts,
you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere
collisions of separate institutions. You could compare it with the
emancipation of negroes from planters&mdash;if it were true that a white
man in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black
man. You could compare it with the revolt of tenants against a
landlord&mdash;if it were true that young landlords wrote sonnets to
invisible tenants. You could compare it to the fighting policy of the
Fenians&mdash;if it were true that every normal Irishman wanted an
Englishman to come and live with him. But as we know there are no
instincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not only
false but false on the cardinal fact. I do not speak of the comparative
comfort or merit of these different things: I say they are different. It
may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters: it
may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race
or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything
but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all
its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns.

But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express
or even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very
much concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more
vulgar people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned with how
a thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest
elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed
by stray examples or sudden images. When Danton was defending himself
before the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard
across the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of the
river. He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us would
think of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. None
of us would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even
less of a gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose we
heard that Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal,
had howled so that she could be heard in the Faubourg St.
Germain&mdash;well, I leave it to the instincts, if there are any left.
It is not wrong to howl. Neither is it right. It is simply a question
of the instant impression on the artistic and even animal parts of
humanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a gun.

Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found in
the gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator must
always be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the French
committee or the English House of Lords. And "demagogue," in the good
Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who
leads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive
gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long
sweep of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use
naturally and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture
of the drawing of a sword.

The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing
to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a
desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown
and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles
from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical
motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that
she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands;
leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth
open a little longer and wider than is dignified&mdash;well, I only
write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is
this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern
world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and
whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a
warning of nature.




THE POET AND THE CHEESE

There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the
white feather. There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than of
the bodily senses. Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, even
when they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movement
of music, to a crash or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us with
a shout like mountain brigands. Comfortable valleys accept us with open
arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the
great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even
when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.
One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something
unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went a
little farther and came to another place," comes back into the mind.

In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, and
found myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It was
one of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may
be, one afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grass
did not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious
impression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not literally
lonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression of
being so. The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had the
air of something hidden away and always overlooked. It seemed shy, like
a big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and
railings; and the chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in that
dead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea,
nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling
that I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in
the twenty-four.

I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almost
as private as a private house. Those who talk of "public-houses" as if
they were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased with
such a place. In the front window a stout old lady in black with an
elaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of
comfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was)
the original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat
a tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and
a pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework.
Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like
wood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not
touched, and probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there
was an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household
Words'.

I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had
met somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety;
and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at
once solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in
some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness
and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This was
curious; for Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not of
the fenlands or flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still water
and the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline
virtue. Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead
of a mountain poet. Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly the
whole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning.

After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of
rustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. The
old lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued
her needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at
her with a suddenly arrested concern. "I suppose," I said, "that it has
nothing to do with the cheese of that name." "Oh, yes," she answered,
with a staggering indifference, "they used to make it here."

I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. "But this
place is a Shrine!" I said. "Pilgrims should be pouring into it from
wherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be a
colossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stilton
cheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who
provided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let
into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
cheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if there
are any neighbouring hills) there should be a huge model of a Stilton
cheese, made of some rich green marble and engraven with some haughty
motto: I suggest something like 'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltonia
semper virescit.'" The old lady said, "Yes, sir," and continued her
domestic occupations.

After a strained and emotional silence, I said, "If I take a meal here
tonight can you give me any Stilton?"

"No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't got any Stilton," said the immovable
one, speaking as if it were something thousands of miles away.

"This is awful," I said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory of
England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and
forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it
yet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life,
the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that
will be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives.
Politely disengaging myself, I made my way as quickly as possible to
the nearest large, noisy, and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where I
sought out the nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant.

There (after trifling with beef, mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) I
got a Stilton cheese. I was so much moved by my memories that I wrote
a sonnet to the cheese. Some critical friends have hinted to me that my
sonnet is not strictly new; that it contains "echoes" (as they express
it) of some other poem that they have read somewhere. Here, at least,
are the lines I wrote:

           SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE

     Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
     And so thou art.  Nor losest grace thereby;
     England has need of thee, and so have I&mdash;
     She is a Fen.  Far as the eye can scour,
     League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
     To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
     Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
     Like a tall green volcano rose in power.

     Plain living and long drinking are no more,
     And pure religion reading 'Household Words',
     And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
     Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
     While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
     The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

I confess I feel myself as if some literary influence, something that
has haunted me, were present in this otherwise original poem; but it is
hopeless to disentangle it now.




THE THING

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like
the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken
free. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.

Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the
spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are
not knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to
find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to
be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the
sun and moon.

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes
of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked
a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows
are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives.
They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of
the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the
valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the
men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or
splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather
under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in
case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral
atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have
quite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the
men nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the
moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people
are utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic
processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.

Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place
which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for
good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever
it is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the
villas advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates
into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands
of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and
often actually foreigners.

Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was
really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate
whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a
gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps
they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that
the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof
over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say
in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange
trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over
and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa
is as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all
Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium
were flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a
moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a
thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.

Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes
round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It
is believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of
self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions
about everything except what he understands. The examination paper of
the Election generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Are
the green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your
opinion fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of the
President of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you
think that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy
and hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?
IV. Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III
reserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of
what America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst
thinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election."

Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that
the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions
like these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and
Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether
farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But
these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to
touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and
divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he
knows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere:
the Thing is throttled.

The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through;
in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances
of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of
Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone
forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning
only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would
have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.




THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed,
if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes
nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution
and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But
especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For
the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.

Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and,
perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as
possible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right
mode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which
is confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussions
about the relations of the sexes. Casting my eye round the room, I
notice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler of
these debates about the sexes: I mean a poker. I will take a poker and
think about it; first forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show
what I mean.

The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin
somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star
the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird,
comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only
naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his
shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He
might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone
bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat
upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth
for a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has
no heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must
look for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is
cast. This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one
creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a
spiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal
sense he has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external
need of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion,
so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red
flower called Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all material
things, is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime
externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that
is divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the world; seen
across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purple
and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and
rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its
presence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary
to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to
have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to
send an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of
a material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of
domesticity, hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, the
poker is strong enough to enter the burning fiery furnace, and, like
the holy children, not be consumed. In this heroic service it is often
battered and twisted, but is the more honourable for it, like any other
soldier who has been under fire.

Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical, but it is the right
view of pokers, and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong
view of pokers, such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's
children, or even (though that is more excusable) to make a policeman
jump, as the clown does in the pantomime. He who has thus gone back to
the beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see
things in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree of
purpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man
and the man for the glory of God.

This is thinking forwards. Now our modern discussions about everything,
Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes for Women, are all entangled in
an opposite train of thought, which runs as follows:&mdash;A modern
intellectual comes in and sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will not
begin with any dogmas about the nature of man, or any day-dreams about
the mystery of fire. He will begin with what he can see, the poker; and
the first thing he sees about the poker is that it is crooked. He says,
"Poor poker; it's crooked." Then he asks how it came to be crooked; and
is told that there is a thing in the world (with which his temperament
has hitherto left him unacquainted)&mdash;a thing called fire. He points
out, very kindly and clearly, how silly it is of people, if they want
a straight poker, to put it into a chemical combustion which will very
probably heat and warp it. "Let us abolish fire," he says, "and then
we shall have perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fire
at all?" They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire,
because he has no fur or feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers for
a few seconds, and then shakes his head. "I doubt if such an animal is
worth preserving," he says. "He must eventually go under in the cosmic
struggle when pitted against well-armoured and warmly protected species,
who have wings and trunks and spires and scales and horns and shaggy
hair. If Man cannot live without these luxuries, you had better abolish
Man." At this point, as a rule, the crowd is convinced; it heaves up all
its clubs and axes, and abolishes him. At least, one of him.

Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people's
welfare, let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a
straightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern
movements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right,
not because they are typical modern movements. Let us begin with the
actual woman or man in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the
finding of fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot
discussion&mdash;like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism may be
right. But if it is right, it is right because England has some divine
authority like Israel, or some human authority like Rome; not because we
have saddled ourselves with South Africa, and don't know how to get rid
of it. Socialism may be true. But if it is true, it is true because the
tribe or the city can really declare all land to be common land, not
because Harrod's Stores exist and the commonwealth must copy them.
Female suffrage may be just. But if it is just, it is just because women
are women, not because women are sweated workers and white slaves and
all sorts of things that they ought never to have been. Let not the
Imperialist accept a colony because it is there, nor the Suffragist
seize a vote because it is lying about, nor the Socialist buy up an
industry merely because it is for sale.

Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legal
decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies proved
that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall
some day want. If there must be a British Empire, let it be British, and
not, in mere panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be female
suffrage, let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse as
the male blackguard or as dull as the male clerk. If there is to be
Socialism, let it be social; that is, as different as possible from all
the big commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeyman
tailor does not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for more
cloth. The really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing
conditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some
deeply planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at
last into tiny twigs; and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is
trying to bend the tree by a twig: to alter England through a distant
colony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or to
destroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise
who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy
(in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things.




THE NAMELESS MAN

There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personal
government, and the republic or impersonal government. England is not a
government; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings.
But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the
method of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal
government politics are so much more personal. In France and America,
where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full
of human details&mdash;some might even say of inhuman details. But in
England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages
do not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, and
therefore names are suppressed. But in the republics, in France
especially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and his
own name at the end of it.

This is the essential condition of such candour. If we merely made our
anonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now. We
should only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I,
for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles,
and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows,
I had little reason to be vain of them. I have heard many arguments for
anonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity
is safe, which is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the fact
that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a
proof that you ought to publish it.

But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his name
to his writing. There is one answer, and there is only one answer, and
it is never given. It is that in the modern complexity very often a
man's name is almost as false as his pseudonym. The prominent person
today is eternally trying to lose a name, and to get a title. For
instance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the
'Daily Mail', and there are times when we feel moved to cry, "Bring to
us the man who thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capture
him, take great care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like some
precious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who
desires such things to be printed. Let us know his name; his social
and medical pedigree." But in the modern muddle (it might be said)
how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeed
subscribed by the man who had inspired them. Suppose that after every
article stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there were
printed the simple word "Northcliffe." What does that simple word
suggest to the simple soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise)
it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards
the Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the
fortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course, I
know that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Street
journalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he has
sought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time.

A title does not now even serve as a distinction: it does not
distinguish. A coronet is not merely an extinguisher: it is a
hiding-place.

But the really odd thing is this. This false quality in titles does not
merely apply to the new and vulgar titles, but to the old and historic
titles also. For hundreds of years titles in England have been
essentially unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct in
which titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there is
nothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk
means (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the
Leader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative government
or for it. All government is representative government until it begins
to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to
decay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant
as envoys of democracy; and most envoys of democracy lose no time in
becoming aristocrats. By the old essential human notion, the Duke of
Norfolk ought simply to be the first or most manifest of Norfolk men.

I see growing and filling out before me the image of an actual Duke of
Norfolk. For instance, Norfolk men all make their voices run up very
high at the end of a sentence. The Duke of Norfolk's voice, therefore,
ought to end in a perfect shriek. They often (I am told) end sentences
with the word "together"; entirely irrespective of its meaning. Thus
I shall expect the Duke of Norfolk to say: "I beg to second the motion
together"; or "This is a great constitutional question together." I
shall expect him to know much about the Broads and the sluggish rivers
above them; to know about the shooting of water-fowl, and not to
know too much about anything else. Of mountains he must be wildly and
ludicrously ignorant. He must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, even
the flatness of Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, the
great square church towers and the long level sunsets of East England.
If he does not do this, I decline to know him.

I need not multiply such cases; the principle applies everywhere. Thus I
lose all interest in the Duke of Devonshire unless he can assure me that
his soul is filled with that strange warm Puritanism, Puritanism shot
with romance, which colours the West Country. He must eat nothing but
clotted cream, drink nothing but cider, reading nothing but 'Lorna
Doone', and be unacquainted with any town larger than Plymouth, which he
must regard with some awe, as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, I
should expect the Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism and
dreamy ardour of the Celtic fringe.

Perhaps it may be thought that these demands are a little extreme; and
that our fancy is running away with us. Nevertheless, it is not my Duke
of Devonshire who is funny; but the real Duke of Devonshire. The point
is that the scheme of titles is a misfit throughout: hardly anywhere do
we find a modern man whose name and rank represent in any way his type,
his locality, or his mode of life. As a mere matter of social comedy,
the thing is worth noticing. You will meet a man whose name suggests a
gouty admiral, and you will find him exactly like a timid organist:
you will hear announced the name of a haughty and almost heathen grande
dame, and behold the entrance of a nice, smiling Christian cook. These
are light complications of the central fact of the falsification of all
names and ranks. Our peers are like a party of mediaeval knights who
should have exchanged shields, crests, and pennons. For the present rule
seems to be that the Duke of Sussex may lawfully own the whole of Essex;
and that the Marquis of Cornwall may own all the hills and valleys so
long as they are not Cornish.

The clue to all this tangle is as simple as it is terrible. If England
is an aristocracy, England is dying. If this system IS the country,
as some say, the country is stiffening into more than the pomp and
paralysis of China. It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that
it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon&mdash;and is very
particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and
to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease
called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean
coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is
the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem
straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kings
of finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it
should rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliament
does not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper
editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do
not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression "golden
silence." The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrase
for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless
nightmare, we must awake with a yell. The Revolution that releases
England from the fixed falsity of its present position will be not less
noisy than other revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal of
that rude accomplishment described among little boys as "calling names";
but that will not matter much so long as they are the right names.




THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an English Peasant.
Indeed, the type can only exist in community, so much does it depend on
cooperation and common laws. One must not think primarily of a French
Peasant; any more than of a German Measle. The plural of the word is its
proper form; you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. The
essence of the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all by
yourself.

Nevertheless, because human nature always craves and half creates
the things necessary to its happiness, there are approximations and
suggestions of the possibility of such a race even here. The nearest
approach I know to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of the
country gardener; not, of course, the great scientific gardener attached
to the great houses; he is a rich man's servant like any other. I mean
the small jobbing gardener who works for two or three moderate-sized
gardens; who works on his own; who sometimes even owns his house; and
who frequently owns his tools. This kind of man has really some of the
characteristics of the true Peasant&mdash;especially the characteristics
that people don't like. He has none of that irresponsible mirth which
is the consolation of most poor men in England. The gardener is even
disliked sometimes by the owners of the shrubs and flowers; because
(like Micaiah) he prophesies not good concerning them, but evil. The
English gardener is grim, critical, self-respecting; sometimes even
economical. Nor is this (as the reader's lightning wit will flash back
at me) merely because the English gardener is always a Scotch gardener.
The type does exist in pure South England blood and speech; I have
spoken to the type. I was speaking to the type only the other evening,
when a rather odd little incident occurred.

It was one of those wonderful evenings in which the sky was warm and
radiant while the earth was still comparatively cold and wet. But it
is of the essence of Spring to be unexpected; as in that heroic and
hackneyed line about coming "before the swallow dares." Spring never is
Spring unless it comes too soon. And on a day like that one might pray,
without any profanity, that Spring might come on earth as it was in
heaven. The gardener was gardening. I was not gardening. It is needless
to explain the causes of this difference; it would be to tell the
tremendous history of two souls. It is needless because there is a more
immediate explanation of the case: the gardener and I, if not equal in
agreement, were at least equal in difference. It is quite certain that
he would not have allowed me to touch the garden if I had gone down
on my knees to him. And it is by no means certain that I should have
consented to touch the garden if he had gone down on his knees to me.
His activity and my idleness, therefore, went on steadily side by side
through the long sunset hours.

And all the time I was thinking what a shame it was that he was not
sticking his spade into his own garden, instead of mine: he knew about
the earth and the underworld of seeds, the resurrection of Spring and
the flowers that appear in order like a procession marshalled by a
herald. He possessed the garden intellectually and spiritually, while
I only possessed it politically. I know more about flowers than
coal-owners know about coal; for at least I pay them honour when they
are brought above the surface of the earth. I know more about gardens
than railway shareholders seem to know about railways: for at least I
know that it needs a man to make a garden; a man whose name is Adam. But
as I walked on that grass my ignorance overwhelmed me&mdash;and yet that
phrase is false, because it suggests something like a storm from the sky
above. It is truer to say that my ignorance exploded underneath me, like
a mine dug long before; and indeed it was dug before the beginning of
the ages. Green bombs of bulbs and seeds were bursting underneath me
everywhere; and, so far as my knowledge went, they had been laid by
a conspirator. I trod quite uneasily on this uprush of the earth; the
Spring is always only a fruitful earthquake. With the land all alive
under me I began to wonder more and more why this man, who had made the
garden, did not own the garden. If I stuck a spade into the ground, I
should be astonished at what I found there...and just as I thought this
I saw that the gardener was astonished too.

Just as I was wondering why the man who used the spade did not profit by
the spade, he brought me something he had found actually in my soil. It
was a thin worn gold piece of the Georges, of the sort which are called,
I believe, Spade Guineas. Anyhow, a piece of gold.

If you do not see the parable as I saw it just then, I doubt if I can
explain it just now. He could make a hundred other round yellow fruits:
and this flat yellow one is the only sort that I can make. How it came
there I have not a notion&mdash;unless Edmund Burke dropped it in his
hurry to get back to Butler's Court. But there it was: this is a cold
recital of facts. There may be a whole pirate's treasure lying under
the earth there, for all I know or care; for there is no interest in a
treasure without a Treasure Island to sail to. If there is a treasure it
will never be found, for I am not interested in wealth beyond the dreams
of avarice since I know that avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia.
And, for the other party, my gardener would never consent to dig up the
garden.

Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed with intellectual emotions when I saw
that answer to my question; the question of why the garden did not
belong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply than
simply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only
underground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little more
of that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle while
he was active. I am not altogether idle myself; but the fact remains
that the power is in the thin slip of metal we call the Spade Guinea,
not in the strong square and curve of metal which we call the Spade.
And then I suddenly remembered that as I had found gold on my ground by
accident, so richer men in the north and west counties had found coal in
their ground, also by accident.

I told the gardener that as he had found the thing he ought to keep it,
but that if he cared to sell it to me it could be valued properly, and
then sold. He said at first, with characteristic independence, that he
would like to keep it. He said it would make a brooch for his wife. But
a little later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not
get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering
and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such
accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries?
Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and that
buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps
he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of the
coal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. Perhaps there is.




THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

The real evil of our Party System is commonly stated wrong. It was
stated wrong by Lord Rosebery, when he said that it prevented the best
men from devoting themselves to politics, and that it encouraged a
fanatical conflict. I doubt whether the best men ever would devote
themselves to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs and
babies and things like that. And as for the fanatical conflict in
party politics, I wish there was more of it. The real danger of the two
parties with their two policies is that they unduly limit the outlook of
the ordinary citizen. They make him barren instead of creative, because
he is never allowed to do anything except prefer one existing policy to
another. We have not got real Democracy when the decision depends upon
the people. We shall have real Democracy when the problem depends upon
the people. The ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but
what he is going to vote about.

It is this which involves some weakness in many current aspirations
towards the extension of the suffrage; I mean that, apart from all
questions of abstract justice, it is not the smallness or largeness of
the suffrage that is at present the difficulty of Democracy. It is not
the quantity of voters, but the quality of the thing they are voting
about. A certain alternative is put before them by the powerful houses
and the highest political class. Two roads are opened to them; but they
must go down one or the other. They cannot have what they choose, but
only which they choose. To follow the process in practice we may put it
thus. The Suffragettes&mdash;if one may judge by their frequent ringing
of his bell&mdash;want to do something to Mr. Asquith. I have no notion
what it is. Let us say (for the sake of argument) that they want to
paint him green. We will suppose that it is entirely for that simple
purpose that they are always seeking to have private interviews with
him; it seems as profitable as any other end that I can imagine to such
an interview. Now, it is possible that the Government of the day might
go in for a positive policy of painting Mr. Asquith green; might give
that reform a prominent place in their programme. Then the party in
opposition would adopt another policy, not a policy of leaving Mr.
Asquith alone (which would be considered dangerously revolutionary), but
some alternative course of action, as, for instance, painting him red.
Then both sides would fling themselves on the people, they would both
cry that the appeal was now to the Caesar of Democracy. A dark and
dramatic air of conflict and real crisis would arise on both sides;
arrows of satire would fly and swords of eloquence flame. The Greens
would say that Socialists and free lovers might well want to paint Mr.
Asquith red; they wanted to paint the whole town red. Socialists would
indignantly reply that Socialism was the reverse of disorder, and that
they only wanted to paint Mr. Asquith red so that he might resemble
the red pillar-boxes which typified State control. The Greens would
passionately deny the charge so often brought against them by the Reds;
they would deny that they wished Mr. Asquith green in order that he
might be invisible on the green benches of the Commons, as certain
terrified animals take the colour of their environment.

There would be fights in the street perhaps, and abundance of ribbons,
flags, and badges, of the two colours. One crowd would sing, "Keep the
Red Flag Flying," and the other, "The Wearing of the Green." But when
the last effort had been made and the last moment come, when two
crowds were waiting in the dark outside the public building to hear the
declaration of the poll, then both sides alike would say that it was now
for democracy to do exactly what it chose. England herself, lifting her
head in awful loneliness and liberty, must speak and pronounce judgment.
Yet this might not be exactly true. England herself, lifting her head in
awful loneliness and liberty, might really wish Mr. Asquith to be pale
blue. The democracy of England in the abstract, if it had been allowed
to make up a policy for itself, might have desired him to be black
with pink spots. It might even have liked him as he is now. But a huge
apparatus of wealth, power, and printed matter has made it practically
impossible for them to bring home these other proposals, even if they
would really prefer them. No candidates will stand in the spotted
interest; for candidates commonly have to produce money either from
their own pockets or the party's; and in such circles spots are not
worn. No man in the social position of a Cabinet Minister, perhaps,
will commit himself to the pale-blue theory of Mr. Asquith; therefore it
cannot be a Government measure, therefore it cannot pass.

Nearly all the great newspapers, both pompous and frivolous, will
declare dogmatically day after day, until every one half believes
it, that red and green are the only two colours in the paint-box. THE
OBSERVER will say: "No one who knows the solid framework of politics or
the emphatic first principles of an Imperial people can suppose for
a moment that there is any possible compromise to be made in such a
matter; we must either fulfil our manifest racial destiny and crown the
edifice of ages with the august figure of a Green Premier, or we must
abandon our heritage, break our promise to the Empire, fling ourselves
into final anarchy, and allow the flaming and demoniac image of a Red
Premier to hover over our dissolution and our doom." The DAILY MAIL
would say: "There is no halfway house in this matter; it must be green
or red. We wish to see every honest Englishman one colour or the other."
And then some funny man in the popular Press would star the sentence
with a pun, and say that the DAILY MAIL liked its readers to be green
and its paper to be read. But no one would even dare to whisper that
there is such a thing as yellow.

For the purposes of pure logic it is clearer to argue with silly
examples than with sensible ones: because silly examples are simple. But
I could give many grave and concrete cases of the kind of thing to which
I refer. In the later part of the Boer War both parties perpetually
insisted in every speech and pamphlet that annexation was inevitable and
that it was only a question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. It
was not inevitable in the least; it would have been perfectly easy to
make peace with the Boers as Christian nations commonly make peace with
their conquered enemies. Personally I think that it would have been
better for us in the most selfish sense, better for our pocket and
prestige, if we had never effected the annexation at all; but that is a
matter of opinion. What is plain is that it was not inevitable; it was
not, as was said, the only possible course; there were plenty of other
courses; there were plenty of other colours in the box. Again, in the
discussion about Socialism, it is repeatedly rubbed into the public mind
that we must choose between Socialism and some horrible thing that they
call Individualism. I don't know what it means, but it seems to mean
that anybody who happens to pull out a plum is to adopt the moral
philosophy of the young Horner&mdash;and say what a good boy he is for
helping himself.

It is calmly assumed that the only two possible types of society are a
Collectivist type of society and the present society that exists at this
moment and is rather like an animated muck-heap. It is quite unnecessary
to say that I should prefer Socialism to the present state of things. I
should prefer anarchism to the present state of things. But it is simply
not the fact that Collectivism is the only other scheme for a more equal
order. A Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only sound
scheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme. We might
have peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of Henry
George; we might have a number of tiny communes; we might have
co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred
things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot
imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social
madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that
it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the
civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of
these other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enough
to feel how much it has the world before it. There are at least ten
solutions of the Education question, and no one knows which Englishmen
really want. For Englishmen are only allowed to vote about the two
which are at that moment offered by the Premier and the Leader of the
Opposition. There are ten solutions of the drink question; and no one
knows which the democracy wants; for the democracy is only allowed to
fight about one Licensing Bill at a time.

So that the situation comes to this: The democracy has a right to answer
questions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still the political
aristocracy that asks the questions. And we shall not be unreasonably
cynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will always be
rather careful what questions it asks. And if the dangerous comfort and
self-flattery of modern England continues much longer there will be less
democratic value in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia of
slaves. For the powerful class will choose two courses of action, both
of them safe for itself, and then give the democracy the gratification
of taking one course or the other. The lord will take two things so much
alike that he would not mind choosing from them blindfold&mdash;and then
for a great jest he will allow the slaves to choose.




THE MAD OFFICIAL

Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very
nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all
my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of
moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of
thinking before he comes to the first chance of living.

But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that a man
does not know that it is going on. Routine and literalism and a
certain dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the very
atmosphere of morbidity. If once the man could become conscious of his
madness, he would cease to be man. He studies certain texts in Daniel
or cryptograms in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles,
which are on his nose night and day. If once he could take off the
spectacles he would smash them. He deduces all his fantasies about the
Sixth Seal or the Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisible
first principle. If he could once see the first principle, he would see
that it is not there.

This slow and awful self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur
not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard
to pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental
degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a
real test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things,
so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cutting
their beards till they found Jerusalem, Jacobins calling each other
Harmodius and Epaminondas when their names were Jacques and Jules, these
are wild things, but they were done in wild spirits at a wild moment.

But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State
is growing insane. For instance, I have a gun license. For all I know,
this would logically allow me to fire off fifty-nine enormous field-guns
day and night in my back garden. I should not be surprised at a man
doing it; for it would be great fun. But I should be surprised at the
neighbours putting up with it, and regarding it as an ordinary thing
merely because it might happen to fulfill the letter of my license.

Or, again, I have a dog license; and I may have the right (for all I
know) to turn ten thousand wild dogs loose in Buckinghamshire. I should
not be surprised if the law were like that; because in modern England
there is practically no law to be surprised at. I should not be
surprised even at the man who did it; for a certain kind of man, if he
lived long under the English landlord system, might do anything. But I
should be surprised at the people who consented to stand it. I should,
in other words, think the world a little mad if the incident, were
received in silence.

Now things every bit as wild as this are being received in silence every
day. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blows
fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is a
passive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of
the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural
stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here
and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from
glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in
silence, but with serenity. The face still smiles while the limbs,
literally and loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples
that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they
give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start
or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used
to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the
breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going
off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility,
with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted with
industrious lunatics. One of these countries is modern England.

Now here is an actual instance, a small case of how our social
conscience really works: tame in spirit, wild in result, blank in
realisation; a thing without the light of mind in it. I take this
paragraph from a daily paper:&mdash;"At Epping, yesterday, Thomas
Woolbourne, a Lambourne labourer, and his wife were summoned for
neglecting their five children. Dr. Alpin said he was invited by the
inspector of the N.S.P.C.C. to visit defendants' cottage. Both the
cottage and the children were dirty. The children looked exceedingly
well in health, but the conditions would be serious in case of illness.
Defendants were stated to be sober. The man was discharged. The woman,
who said she was hampered by the cottage having no water supply and
that she was ill, was sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment. The sentence
caused surprise, and the woman was removed crying, 'Lord save me!'"

I know no name for this but Chinese. It calls up the mental picture of
some archaic and changeless Eastern Court, in which men with dried faces
and stiff ceremonial costumes perform some atrocious cruelty to the
accompaniment of formal proverbs and sentences of which the very meaning
has been forgotten. In both cases the only thing in the whole farrago
that can be called real is the wrong. If we apply the lightest touch of
reason to the whole Epping prosecution it dissolves into nothing.

I here challenge any person in his five wits to tell me what that woman
was sent to prison for. Either it was for being poor, or it was for
being ill. Nobody could suggest, nobody will suggest, nobody, as a
matter of fact, did suggest, that she had committed any other crime.
The doctor was called in by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children. Was this woman guilty of cruelty to children? Not in the
least. Did the doctor say she was guilty of cruelty to children? Not in
the least. Was these any evidence even remotely bearing on the sin of
cruelty? Not a rap. The worse that the doctor could work himself up
to saying was that though the children were "exceedingly" well, the
conditions would be serious in case of illness. If the doctor will tell
me any conditions that would be comic in case of illness, I shall attach
more weight to his argument.

Now this is the worst effect of modern worry. The mad doctor has
gone mad. He is literally and practically mad; and still he is quite
literally and practically a doctor. The only question is the old one,
Quis docebit ipsum doctorem? Now cruelty to children is an utterly
unnatural thing; instinctively accursed of earth and heaven. But neglect
of children is a natural thing; like neglect of any other duty, it is
a mere difference of degree that divides extending arms and legs in
calisthenics and extending them on the rack. It is a mere difference of
degree that separates any operation from any torture. The thumb-screw
can easily be called Manicure. Being pulled about by wild horses can
easily be called Massage. The modern problem is not so much what people
will endure as what they will not endure. But I fear I interrupt.... The
boiling oil is boiling; and the Tenth Mandarin is already reciting the
"Seventeen Serious Principles and the Fifty-three Virtues of the Sacred
Emperor."




THE ENCHANTED MAN

When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players,
who acted Miss Gertrude Robins's POT LUCK at Naphill a short time ago,
it is the distressing, if scarcely surprising, truth that I entered very
late. This would have mattered little, I hope, to any one, but that late
comers had to be forced into front seats. For a real popular English
audience always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall; and
(as I have found in many an election) will endure the most unendurable
taunts rather than come forward. The English are a modest people; that
is why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to
be immodest. In theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable; and in
most playhouses we find the bored people in front and the eager people
behind.

As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a bored
person; but I may have been a boring person, especially as I was thus
required to sit in the seats of the scornful. It will be a happy day in
the dramatic world when all ladies have to take off their hats and all
critics have to take off their heads. The people behind will have a
chance then. And as it happens, in this case, I had not so much taken
off my head as lost it. I had lost it on the road; on that strange
journey that was the cause of my coming in late. I have a troubled
recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech;
I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people
afterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a man
talks when he has one eye on a clock.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock,
hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure
for such bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I
was moonstruck. A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had
inexplicably got in between me and all other scenes. If any one had
asked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothing
had occurred to me; except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge
of a hill. It was not an adventure; it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small
car that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But as
night blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way
increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.
Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a
yet steeper road like a ladder.

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower
of Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage,
and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car
and suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which
I am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his
great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts
of South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt."
The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch.
But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him
a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England.
Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for
it in England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable
veldts. I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many
different hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite
horizon, free and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little
more desolate than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as
that English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if
at a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an
abyss which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundless
only because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and cries
had been swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the
hills. I could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if
I hurled huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil had
bewitched the landscape: but that again does not express the best or
worst of it. All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so
inhuman that it has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay on
them; that is the nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were looking
at the back of the world; and the world did not know it. I had taken the
universe in the rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping upon
an unconscious creation.

I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that it
is a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen about
its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in
some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical
phrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place." Yet something was
present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.
Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place. It
had been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales about
princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in a
land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moon
looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the
one white eye of the world.

There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with a
point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There
were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: for
they were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration
which is the transition from life to art. But all the time I was
mesmerised by the moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted
things. The poacher shot pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the
wife hid pheasants; they were all (especially the policeman) as true
as death. But there was something more true to death than true to life
about it all: the figures were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or
fear or custom such as does not cramp the movements of the poor men of
other lands. I looked at the poacher and the policeman and the gun; then
at the gun and the policeman and the poacher; and I could find no name
for the fancy that haunted and escaped me. The poacher believed in the
Game Laws as much as the policeman. The poacher's wife not only believed
in the Game Laws, but protected them as well as him. She got a promise
from her husband that he would never shoot another pheasant. Whether he
kept it I doubt; I fancy he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that.
But I am sure he never shot a policeman. For we live in an enchanted
land.




THE SUN WORSHIPPER

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt.
And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in
that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the
warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as
fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that
argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and
the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory,
so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern
doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is
called the materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this:
that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic
motive. In short, history is a science; a science of the search for
food.

Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merely
untrue, but actually the reverse of the truth. It is putting it too
feebly to say that the history of man is not only economic. Man would
not have any history if he were only economic. The need for food is
certainly universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cows
have an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal
delicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grass
anywhere and never eats anything else. In short, the cow does fulfill
the materialist theory of history: that is why the cow has no history.
"A History of Cows" would be one of the simplest and briefest of
standard works. But if some cows thought it wicked to eat long grass
and persecuted all who did so; if the cow with the crumpled horn were
worshipped by some cows and gored to death by others; if cows began to
have obvious moral preferences over and above a desire for grass, then
cows would begin to have a history. They would also begin to have a
highly unpleasant time, which is perhaps the same thing.

The economic motive is not merely not inside all history; it is actually
outside all history. It belongs to Biology or the Science of Life; that
is, it concerns things like cows, that are not so very much alive. Men
are far too much alive to get into the science of anything; for them we
have made the art of history. To say that human actions have depended
on economic support is like saying that they have depended on having two
legs. It accounts for action, but not for such varied action; it is a
condition, but not a motive; it is too universal to be useful. Certainly
a soldier wins the Victoria Cross on two legs; he also runs away on two
legs. But if our object is to discover whether he will become a V.C. or
a coward the most careful inspection of his legs will yield us little or
no information. In the same way a man will want food if he is a dreamy
romantic tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweating
millionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supported
on legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished more
generously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a much
grander and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to the
hills and see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see the
horizon broken by crags of cake or happy hills of cheese.

So far the cow (who has no history) seems to have every other advantage.
But history&mdash;the whole point of history&mdash;precisely is that
some two legged soldiers ran away while others, of similar anatomical
structure, did not. The whole point of history precisely is: some people
(like poets and tramps) chance getting money by disregarding it, while
others (such as millionaires) will absolutely lose money for the fun
of bothering about it. There would be no history if there were only
economic history. All the historical events have been due to the
twists and turns given to the economic instinct by forces that were not
economic. For instance, this theory traces the French war of Edward
III to a quarrel about the French wines. Any one who has even smelt the
Middle Ages must feel fifty answers spring to his lips; but in this case
one will suffice. There would have been no such war, then, if we all
drank water like cows. But when one is a man one enters the world
of historic choice. The act of drinking wine is one that requires
explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.

But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.

When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago,
an ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said
that they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was
eagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do
not see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable
uprisings in history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is
generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on
the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from
captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula
(arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic
shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for
a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt
employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of
making bricks with nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic
intellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange and
unnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open, there
can be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather. Such a climate
notoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr.
Kipling describes. And it was while their brains were disordered by the
heat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation, that they
were led by a prophet, and, in short, that they were going to be of some
importance in the affairs of the world.

Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy was
pulled down in August; and that August is a month in summer.

In spite of all this, however, I have some little difficulty myself
in accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (at
these words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their heads three
times), and I rather think that exceptions might be found to the
principle. Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass my
belief in it.

No; my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence by
which the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines of
class and of economics. I cannot understand why all solicitors did not
leave off soliciting, all doctors leave off doctoring, all judges leave
off judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high
interest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to
what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years
ago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were striking
because they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy
confirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judges
and other persons who are particularly well paid showed no disposition
to strike. I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of my
own; and I continue to believe that the anger of the English poor (to
steal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne) came from something in man that
is other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun.

When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort, it is really
time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession
of what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn of
the mediaeval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thing
from a slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the land
rather than the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent could
not be raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if the
lord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but he
had the chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to the
means of production.

Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;
and something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There is
no doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but we
have destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as in
serfdom; nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The rich
man has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (in
the modern industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. They
can only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such
competitive and cruel terms as he chooses to impose.

Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, parts
inhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. That
retreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cut
off. Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows
or the Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no more
dreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe.
He owned all the birds that passed over his land: he might as well have
owned all the clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith's
land to Brown's land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog.
The logical answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown's
land ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous wasp
without a muzzle.

Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep
in the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off.
A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way
that a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or
on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense
of fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence.

The last possibility, of course, is that upon which all human beings
would fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spike
or deserted on an island. It is that of calling out for pity to the
passerby. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A
man in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help in
the name of God.

You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poor
to serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich. They have
still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:
that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the
working of that vast and slavish machine. And because they still had
this last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreat
was also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.
Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck at
your Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could. And you
opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, "It must be the sunshine."
You could only go on saying, "The sun, the sun." That was what the man
in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits.




THE WRONG INCENDIARY

I stood looking at the Coronation Procession&mdash;I mean the one
in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I
believe, had some success in London&mdash;and I was seriously impressed.
Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that
I was quite right. Never before have I realised how right I was in
maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism: the
smaller the field the taller the tower. There were things in our local
procession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occur
in the London procession. One of the most prominent citizens in our
procession (for instance) had his face blacked. Another rode on a pony
which wore pink and blue trousers. I was not present at the Metropolitan
affair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the
eyewitness may always offer to the absentee. But I believe with some
firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.

But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but of
something that occurred before it. In the field beyond the end of my
garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kind
of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, dead
trees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form,
reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on. All this refuse, material
and mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the
day when the King was crowned. The following is an account of the rather
strange thing that really happened. I do not know whether it was any
sort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell.

In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what I
supposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose
stones. Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting out
cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big
stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also
a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every
now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew
what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across
two meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt," I thought,
"they've mistaken the Coronation Day."

And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like
a bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too chaotic, and too close
to the houses of the town. All one side of a cottage was painted pink
with the giant brush of flame; the next side, by contrast, was painted
as black as tar. Along the front of this ran a blackening rim or rampart
edged with a restless red ribbon that danced and doubled and devoured
like a scarlet snake; and beyond it was nothing but a deathly fulness of
light.

I put on some clothes and went down the road; all the dull or startling
noises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked. The
heaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching, as if
some giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world. I
had not yet come within sight of the real heart and habitat of the fire;
but the strong red light, like an unnatural midnight sunset, powdered
the grayest grass with gold and flushed the few tall trees up to the
last fingers of their foliage. Behind them the night was black and
cavernous; and one could only trace faintly the ashen horizon beyond the
dark and magic Wilton Woods. As I went, a workman on a bicycle shot a
rood past me; then staggered from his machine and shouted to me to tell
him where the fire was. I answered that I was going to see, but thought
it was the cottages by the wood-yard. He said, "My God!" and vanished.

A little farther on I found grass and pavement soaking and flooded, and
the red and yellow flames repainted in pools and puddles. Beyond were
dim huddles of people and a small distant voice shouting out orders. The
fire-engines were at work. I went on among the red reflections, which
seemed like subterranean fires; I had a singular sensation of being in a
very important dream. Oddly enough, this was increased when I found that
most of my friends and neighbours were entangled in the crowd. Only in
dreams do we see familiar faces so vividly against a black background of
midnight. I was glad to find (for the workman cyclist's sake) that
the fire was not in the houses by the wood-yard, but in the wood-yard
itself. There was no fear for human life, and the thing was seemingly
accidental; though there were the usual ugly whispers about rivalry and
revenge. But for all that I could not shake off my dream-drugged soul a
swollen, tragic, portentous sort of sensation, that it all had something
to do with the crowning of the English King, and the glory or the end
of England. It was not till I saw the puddles and the ashes in broad
daylight next morning that I was fundamentally certain that my midnight
adventure had not happened outside this world.

But I was more arrogant than the ancient Emperors Pharaoh or
Nebuchadnezzar; for I attempted to interpret my own dream. The fire was
feeding upon solid stacks of unused beech or pine, gray and white piles
of virgin wood. It was an orgy of mere waste; thousands of good
things were being killed before they had ever existed. Doors, tables,
walking-sticks, wheelbarrows, wooden swords for boys, Dutch dolls for
girls I could hear the cry of each uncreated thing as it expired in the
flames. And then I thought of that other noble tower of needless things
that stood in the field beyond my garden; the bonfire, the mountain of
vanities, that is meant for burning; and how it stood dark and lonely in
the meadow, and the birds hopped on its corners and the dew touched and
spangled its twigs. And I remembered that there are two kinds of fires,
the Bad Fire and the Good Fire the last must surely be the meaning of
Bonfire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of
things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things,
of things that we do want; like all that wealth of wood that might have
made dolls and chairs and tables, but was only making a hueless ash.

And then I saw, in my vision, that just as there are two fires, so there
are two revolutions. And I saw that the whole mad modern world is a race
between them. Which will happen first&mdash;the revolution in which
bad things shall perish, or that other revolution, in which good things
shall perish also? One is the riot that all good men, even the most
conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the
face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the
throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is
possible, take tyranny and usury and public treason and bind them into
bundles and burn them. And the other is the disruption that may come
prematurely, negatively, and suddenly in the night; like the fire in my
little town.

It may come because the mere strain of modern life is unbearable; and in
it even the things that men do desire may break down; marriage and
fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man. The two
revolutions, white and black, are racing each other like two railway
trains; I cannot guess the issue...but even as I thought of it, the
tallest turret of the timber stooped and faltered and came down in a
cataract of noises. And the fire, finding passage, went up with a spout
like a fountain. It stood far up among the stars for an instant, a
blazing pillar of brass fit for a pagan conqueror, so high that one
could fancy it visible away among the goblin trees of Burnham or along
the terraces of the Chiltern Hills.




THE FREE MAN

The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men
find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally
to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save
their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked
Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun
to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the
sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of
Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting
his daily round in imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical,
and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary. For all
revolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, the
emergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words of
Sir Thomas Browne, "owes no homage unto the sun."

Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant
merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a
tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in
selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning
of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real
idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the
word "make" about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as
a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes his
way" through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the
Romans. When a man "makes a friend," he makes a man. And in the third
case we talk of a man "making love," as if he were (as, indeed, he is)
creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form
of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in
man, or, if you like the word, the artist.

In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the
citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Men
are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, the
eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants,
bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing
the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the
State. You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may
call the bees a despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant who
attempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a
career as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm
alone. The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious
character; but it is not even in humanity by any means equally
distributed. The idea that the State should not only be supported by
its children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticised and
reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any
other part of the planet; stronger in Western than Eastern Europe. And
touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act
within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been
the peculiar honour of our own country. For my part I greatly prefer the
Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I have
no objection to Britannia ruling the waves. I draw the line when
she begins to rule the dry land&mdash;and such damnably dry land
too&mdash;as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity
in the vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves." We had no
equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of.
And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old
optimistic prophecy that "Britons never shall be slaves."

The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than
it has been for the last twenty years. Never before has it been so easy
to slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people
up. Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protect
high-placed officials. Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts
rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolished
the Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passed
a law (which is now in force) that an Englishman's punishment shall not
depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have
got hold of him. But this is not the only case. The scorn of liberty
is in the air. A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Square
without a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary says
that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end
of the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage.
The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter
drops.

Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of
criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require
reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words,
it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but
discontented citizen wants to say. He does not want to spit on the
Bible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page in
Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Therefore the forbidding of these
things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special
sense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normal
man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against
unfair law courts. He does want to expose brutalities of the police.
He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer. He
does want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists and
suspicious finance. If he is run in for doing this (as he will be)
he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the
magistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he
does want to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he
will come out. And these are literally and exactly the things that
he now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the present
situation. I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the
normal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemn
quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can
write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I
should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational
criticism of the men and institutions of my country.

The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman can
say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private. One cannot
say, for instance, that&mdash;But I am afraid I must leave out
that instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove my
case&mdash;because it is so true.




THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded
that he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is
extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels.
But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards at
least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught
my eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quite
constantly walked into another man's house, thinking it was my own
house; my visits became almost monotonous. But walking into my own house
and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment
still beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded
man must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensations
they were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter
and the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nice
wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.

Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the
same kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin
and unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I was
treading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty
years old.

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost
unnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were
once great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers,
as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there is
something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that
were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in
the thicket. One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with the
dog evolved into a wolf.

This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned
out for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite
threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years
ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone
no farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked
building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or
coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick
of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a
blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust;
and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white
which always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of
some blind giant.

I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I had
not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought
much of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youth
walking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged
person, coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther off
than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatal
picture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I
stood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas.
They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained,
as if they had stood for centuries.

I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had half
slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked
off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but
were still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks
off the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then I
had recited most of Macaulay's VIRGINIA to myself, for I was young. And
then I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened with
the sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or three
green stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blinding
road.

I remembered how I had walked up this new one-sided street all those
years ago; and I remembered what I had thought. I thought that this
red and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and more
lonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight. The churchyard could
only be full of the ghosts of the dead; but these houses were full of
the ghosts of the unborn. And a man can never find a home in the future
as he can find it in the past. I was always fascinated by that mediaeval
notion of erecting a rudely carpentered stage in the street, and acting
on it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment. And I
thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built
boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real
miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that
human death that is near to the last judgment.

For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect row
especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes.
Something in the shape of this brick-and-mortar skeleton was attractive;
and there being no workmen about, I strolled into it for curiosity and
solitude. I gave, with all the sky-deep gravity of youth, a benediction
upon the man who was going to live there. I even remember that for the
convenience of meditation I called him James Harrogate.

As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played
the fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in
my pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls;
things addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I had
written up in what I supposed to be the dining-room:

     James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
     Then eat and eat and eat and eat,

or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric
was scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something
beginning:

     When laying what you call your head,
     O Harrogate, upon your bed,

and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing,
and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in
memory; for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century
the house was very different.

I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low
square windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream
of lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least,
was standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express
if I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red
chalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to
withdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct
accents to a very smart suburban maid, "Does Mr. James Harrogate live
here?"

She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was looking
for him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. I
had one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and then
decided not to look for him at all.




THE PRIEST OF SPRING

The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty
but of revolution, There are two great armies of the human intellect
who will fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is to
be congratulated on fitting in with the Spring&mdash;or the Spring on
fitting in with Easter.

The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a
story; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed
very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like
mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind
are like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures,
though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a mere increase
of themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged may
enjoy his breakfast; especially if it be his favourite breakfast; and
in the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy,
especially if it is his favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoy
either of them does not depend on either of them; it depends upon his
spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event. And that event is really
interesting to the soul; because it is the end of a story and (as some
hold) the end of a person.

Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for
our scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about
true religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of
mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself
to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)
that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis
or Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation,
they have got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody, to begin with, is
sufficiently interested in decaying vegetables, as such, to make any
particular mystery or disguise about them; and certainly not enough to
disguise them under the image of a very handsome young man, which is a
vastly more interesting thing. If Adonis was connected with the fall
of leaves in autumn and the return of flowers in spring, the process of
thought was quite different. It is a process of thought which springs
up spontaneously in all children and young artists; it springs up
spontaneously in all healthy societies. It is very difficult to explain
in a diseased society.

The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. A
cloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination; a
dream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a
daydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a
start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, save
in the mad tongues of the midnight; so the human mind starts from its
trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips; a complete
phrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dream
sentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting
in of breakfast. This senseless aphorism, invented when man's mind was
asleep, still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to
rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by
certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were
always unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always
intrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of "the
survival of the fittest," meaning only the survival of the survivors; or
wherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country," as
if the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; or
where a man talks about "going on towards Progress," which only means
going on towards going on; or when a man talks about "government by the
wise few," as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. "The wise
few" must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very
foolish who think themselves wise.

There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves
saying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I am
particularly irritated. It arose in the popularised science of the
nineteenth century, especially in connection with the study of myths and
religions. The fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes
the form of saying "This god or hero really represents the sun." Or
"Apollo killing the Python MEANS that the summer drives out the winter."
Or "The King dying in a western battle is a SYMBOL of the sun setting
in the west." Now I should really have thought that even the skeptical
professors, whose skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might have
reflected that human beings never think or feel like this. Consider what
is involved in this supposition. It presumes that primitive man went out
for a walk and saw with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. He
then said to primitive woman, "My dear, we had better keep this quiet.
We mustn't let it get about. The children and the slaves are so very
sharp. They might discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful.
So we won't call it 'the sun,' but I will draw a picture of a man
killing a snake; and whenever I do that you will know what I mean.
The sun doesn't look at all like a man killing a snake; so nobody can
possibly know. It will be a little secret between us; and while the
slaves and the children fancy I am quite excited with a grand tale of
a writhing dragon and a wrestling demigod, I shall really MEAN this
delicious little discovery, that there is a round yellow disc up in the
air." One does not need to know much mythology to know that this is a
myth. It is commonly called the Solar Myth.

Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way. The god
was never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a
hieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man (with whom my friend
Dombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of gods
and heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he saw
the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress
of nightfall, and he said, "That is how the face of the god would shine
when he had slain the dragon," or "That is how the whole world would
bleed to westward, if the god were slain at last."

No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship Nature. No
man, however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a man
as round as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, however
attracted to an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that the
Dryad was as lean and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never
worshipped Nature; and indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that all
human beings are superhuman beings. We have printed our own image upon
Nature, as God has printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous
sun to stand still; we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more
for a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we
could not for the time control, we have conceived great beings in human
shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the
march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is
his, and he made it. In other words, what the savage really said about
the sea was, "Only my fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out of
mere water." What the savage really said about the sun was, "Only my
great great-grandfather Jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown."

About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple.
I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that
one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are
no real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real
bank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to
those of us that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted,
even a false god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the
second place. When once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before
Him, offering flowers in spring as flames in winter. "My love is like a
red, red rose" does not mean that the poet is praising roses under the
allegory of a young lady. "My love is an arbutus" does not mean that the
author was a botanist so pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he
said he loved it. "Who art the moon and regent of my sky" does not mean
that Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon.
"Christ is the Sun of Easter" does not mean that the worshipper is
praising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothe
themselves with the spring or summer; but the body is more than raiment.
Religion takes almost disdainfully the dress of Nature; and indeed
Christianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with the
snow-drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields, I
know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring, for
spring alone, being always returning, would be always sad. There is
somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with flowers: and my
pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of the
dead.




THE REAL JOURNALIST

Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of
reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce
between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is
done. I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.
Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallel
columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its
responsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matter
of fact, goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more
hairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random
compromises, or barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, it
seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the
dawn. Seen from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief
every morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come out
without the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on
discovering the North Pole.

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality)
from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little
episode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and
instructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There
are really two stories: the story as seen from the outside, by a
man reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by the
journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand
through the night.

This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The
notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy
pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics,
long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant
leader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his
fanatic soul. In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not
having the fear of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote
the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said
because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because
he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and
forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that
orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five
letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the
mistake.

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it
was a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams,
and cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, for
all I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare and
failed to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress,
asking, as in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a
noble collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and
exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from
the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same
culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to
Shakespeare, but to a poet whom he called Grey. Which was another
cropper&mdash;or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak was
printed by the editor with the justly scornful title, "Mr. Chesterton
'Explains'?" Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the
meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks. They meant, of course, "Here
is a man who doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare; he tries to patch it up
and he can't even spell Gray. And that is what he calls an Explanation."
That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter,
the mistake, and the headline&mdash;as seen from the outside. The
falsehood was serious; the editorial rebuke was serious. The stern
editor and the sombre, baffled contributor confront each other as the
curtain falls.

And now I will tell you exactly what really happened. It is honestly
rather amusing; it is a story of what journals and journalists really
are. A monstrously lazy man lives in South Bucks partly by writing a
column in the Saturday Daily News. At the time he usually writes it
(which is always at the last moment) his house is unexpectedly invaded
by infants of all shapes and sizes. His Secretary is called away; and
he has to cope with the invading pigmies. Playing with children is a
glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood
why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not
of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with
gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous
complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful
eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's
bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his
turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on
the sister's picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the
sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match.

Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest
morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday
article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildly
calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for
a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair,
wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists on
the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his
thoughts; and he is able to observe some newspapers and circulars in
wrappers lying on the table. One is a dingy book catalogue; the second
is a shiny pamphlet about petrol; the third is a paper called The
Christian Commonwealth. He opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of a
page a sentence with which he honestly disagrees. It says that the sense
of beauty in Nature is a new thing, hardly felt before Wordsworth. A
stream of images and pictures pour through his head, like skies chasing
each other or forests running by. "Not felt before Wordsworth!" he
thinks. "Oh, but this won't do... bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang... night's candles are burnt out... glowed with living
sapphires... leaving their moon-loved maze... antique roots fantastic...
antique roots wreathed high... what is it in As You Like It?"

He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children
drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the
messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making
the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making
Shakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's Elegy; putting "fantastic
roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out." Then the
journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma
of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the
sister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is the first scene; that is
how an article is really written.

The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the article
has discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day:
but the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up the
paper and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to his
friends at the other end; he knows that they can spell "Gray," as no
doubt they can: but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in a
pencil scribble and the vowel may well be doubtful. The friend writes
at the top of the letter "'G. K. C.' Explains," putting the initials in
quotation marks. The next man passing it for press is bored with these
initials (I am with him there) and crosses them out, substituting with
austere civility, "Mr. Chesterton Explains." But and now he hears
the iron laughter of the Fates, for the blind bolt is about to
fall&mdash;but he neglects to cross out the second "quote" (as we call
it) and it goes up to press with a "quote" between the last words.
Another quotation mark at the end of "explains" was the work of one
merry moment for the printers upstairs. So the inverted commas were
lifted entirely off one word on to the other and a totally innocent
title suddenly turned into a blasting sneer. But that would have
mattered nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In the same
dark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so devoted
to this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward Grey.
He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was complete:
first blunder, second blunder, and final condemnation.

That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotistic
and ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You might
remember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged
by the neck on circumstantial evidence.




THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most
romantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch
blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known;
that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know it
is always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; that
they have an eye to business. I like that phrase "an eye" to business.

Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his
forehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which are
demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties
of counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out
he was done for. But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though
their best friends must admit that they are occasionally business-like.
They are, quite fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and this
is proved by the very economic argument that is used to prove their
harshness and hunger for the material. The mass of Scots have accepted
the industrial civilisation, with its factory chimneys and its famine
prices, with its steam and smoke and steel&mdash;and strikes. The mass
of the Irish have not accepted it. The mass of the Irish have clung to
agriculture with claws of iron; and have succeeded in keeping it. That
is because the Irish, though far inferior to the Scotch in art and
literature, are hugely superior to them in practical politics. You do
need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilisation. It does
really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think that Glasgow
is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved; and while I was in
Glasgow I shared the illusion. I have never had the faintest illusion
about Leeds or Birmingham. The industrial dream suited the Scots. Here
was a really romantic vista, suited to a romantic people; a vision of
higher and higher chimneys taking hold upon the heavens, of fiercer
and fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate like dew. Here were
taller and taller engines that began already to shriek and gesticulate
like giants. Here were thunderbolts of communication which already
flashed to and fro like thoughts. It was unreasonable to expect the
rapt, dreamy, romantic Scot to stand still in such a whirl of wizardry
to ask whether he, the ordinary Scot, would be any the richer.

He, the ordinary Scot, is very much the poorer. Glasgow is not a rich
city. It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly rich
men. It is not, perhaps, quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London,
Manchester, Birmingham, or Bolton. It is vastly poorer than Rome, Rouen,
Munich, or Cologne. A certain civic vitality notable in Glasgow may,
perhaps, be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scots
has there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independence
of the Irish. In any case, I think there can be no doubt of the main
historical fact. The Scotch were tempted by the enormous but unequal
opportunities of industrialism, because the Scotch are romantic. The
Irish refused those enormous and unequal opportunities, because the
Irish are clear-sighted. They would not need very clear sight by this
time to see that in England and Scotland the temptation has been a
betrayal. The industrial system has failed.

I was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out of
the westland counties about Glasgow, more or less towards the east and
the widening of the Forth. It may, for all I know (I amused myself with
the fancy), be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army,
when he gave battle before Stirling Brig; and, in the midst of mediaeval
diplomacies, made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality of
Scotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in
the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying
to be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full
(as its history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. The
wageslavery we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which
the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect,
than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of
Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what
makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains.
It is poetry. It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or
(what is worse) magic. Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something
of this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and
serfdoms; the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then,
in Scotland, the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean
the self-made man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as
well as to others. It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is
quite mad, and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of
kleptomaniac; but though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does
exist; I have met quite two of him. Him alone among modern merchants
we do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit. Something of the
irresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him. Our
scientific civilisation is not a civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance.
Like smoke it is choking us; like smoke it will pass away. Only of one
or two Scotsmen, in my experience, was it true that where there is smoke
there is fire.

But there are other kinds of fire; and better. The one great advantage
of this strange national temper is that, from the beginning of all
chronicles, it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotland
nearly everything has always been in revolt&mdash;especially loyalty.
If these people are capable of making Glasgow, they are also capable of
wrecking it; and the thought of my many good friends in that city makes
me really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as the
more huge calamity of the two. In Scotland there are many rich men so
weak as to call themselves strong. But there are not so many poor men
weak enough to believe them.

As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road. They had
little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps, like the fairies
who used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes. They were not, however,
strictly speaking, fairies. They might have been called gnomes, since
they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills. They worked
in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires. Just at the moment
when I saw them, moreover, they were not dancing; nor were they working.
They were doing nothing. Which, in my opinion (and I trust yours), was
the finest thing they could do.




THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are
and should be various, there must be some communication between them if
they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual
formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not
depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start
with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our
different visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees
the sun as a perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is
an impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The
colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to
live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that
there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle
(like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is
shut up in the cell of a separate universe.

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from
the denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the
individual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world
like a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed.
For what happens is this: that all the shortsighted people come together
and build a city called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for
granted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted
policies. Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together on
Salisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who
see a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon, not
once in a blue moon, but incessantly. So that instead of a small and
varied group, you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the
liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste.

Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one;
perhaps the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownership
by the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to
production. If a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can be
any kind of man he likes in any other sense&mdash;a bookie, a Mahatma,
a man about town, an archbishop, a Margate nigger. Without recalling
at the moment clear-headed Socialists in all of these capacities, it
is obvious that a clear-headed Socialist (that is, a Socialist with a
creed) can be a soldier, like Mr. Blatchford, or a Don, like Mr. Ball,
or a Bathchairman like Mr. Meeke, or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel,
or an artistic tradesman like the late Mr. William Morris.

But some people call themselves Socialists, and will not be bound by
what they call a narrow dogma; they say that Socialism means far, far
more than this; all that is high, all that is free, all that is, etc.,
etc. Now mark their dreadful fate; for they become totally unfit to be
tradesmen, or soldiers, or clergymen, or any other stricken human thing,
but become a particular sort of person who is always the same. When once
it has been discovered that Socialism does not mean a narrow economic
formula, it is also discovered that Socialism does mean wearing one
particular kind of clothes, reading one particular kind of books,
hanging up one particular kind of pictures, and in the majority of cases
even eating one particular kind of food. For men must recognise each
other somehow. These men will not know each other by a principle, like
fellow citizens. They cannot know each other by a smell, like dogs. So
they have to fall back on general colouring; on the fact that a man of
their sort will have a wife in pale green and Walter Crane's "Triumph of
Labour" hanging in the hall.

There are, of course, many other instances; for modern society is almost
made up of these large monochrome patches. Thus I, for one, regret
the supersession of the old Puritan unity, founded on theology, but
embracing all types from Milton to the grocer, by that newer Puritan
unity which is founded rather on certain social habits, certain common
notions, both permissive and prohibitive, in connection with Particular
social pleasures.

Thus I, for one, regret that (if you are going to have an aristocracy)
it did not remain a logical one founded on the science of heraldry; a
thing asserting and defending the quite defensible theory that physical
genealogy is the test; instead of being, as it is now, a mere machine of
Eton and Oxford for varnishing anybody rich enough with one monotonous
varnish.

And it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have a
creed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed to
believe, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of
religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it;
the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These people
do each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good,
with heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine which
alone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own
kind outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together and
call each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call
themselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker
in a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off
looking for somebody else with whom to brawl.

This has very largely happened to modern English religion; I have been
in many churches, chapels, and halls where a confident pride in having
got beyond creeds was coupled with quite a paralysed incapacity to
get beyond catchwords. But wherever the falsity appears it comes from
neglect of the same truth: that men should agree on a principle, that
they may differ on everything else; that God gave men a law that they
might turn it into liberties.

There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife
and husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all the
contemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of
identical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violent
contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more
incompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife's soul
cannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a first
cousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament;
they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to
think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to
think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at
it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing
disgrace&mdash;this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage;
and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by
affinities and auras. And what applies to the family applies to the
nation. A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with no
religion will be bigoted. Lastly, the worst effect of all is this:
that when men come together to profess a creed, they come courageously,
though it is to hide in catacombs and caves. But when they come together
in a clique they come sneakishly, eschewing all change or disagreement,
though it is to dine to a brass band in a big London hotel. For birds of
a feather flock together, but birds of the white feather most of all.




THE FOOL

For many years I had sought him, and at last I found him in a club. I
had been told that he was everywhere; but I had almost begun to think
that he was nowhere. I had been assured that there were millions of him;
but before my late discovery I inclined to think that there were none of
him. After my late discovery I am sure that there is one; and I incline
to think that there are several, say, a few hundreds; but unfortunately
most of them occupying important positions. When I say "him," I mean the
entire idiot.

I have never been able to discover that "stupid public" of which so many
literary men complain. The people one actually meets in trains or at tea
parties seem to me quite bright and interesting; certainly quite enough
so to call for the full exertion of one's own wits. And even when I have
heard brilliant "conversationalists" conversing with other people, the
conversation had much more equality and give and take than this age of
intellectual snobs will admit. I have sometimes felt tired, like other
people; but rather tired with men's talk and variety than with their
stolidity or sameness; therefore it was that I sometimes longed to find
the refreshment of a single fool.

But it was denied me. Turn where I would I found this monotonous
brilliancy of the general intelligence, this ruthless, ceaseless sparkle
of humour and good sense. The "mostly fools" theory has been used in an
anti-democratic sense; but when I found at last my priceless ass, I
did not find him in what is commonly called the democracy; nor in the
aristocracy either. The man of the democracy generally talks quite
rationally, sometimes on the anti-democratic side, but always with an
idea of giving reasons for what he says and referring to the realities
of his experience. Nor is it the aristocracy that is stupid; at least,
not that section of the aristocracy which represents it in politics.
They are often cynical, especially about money, but even their
boredom tends to make them a little eager for any real information or
originality. If a man like Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr. Wyndham made up
his mind for any reason to attack Syndicalism he would find out what it
was first. Not so the man I found in the club.

He was very well dressed; he had a heavy but handsome face; his black
clothes suggested the City and his gray moustaches the Army; but the
whole suggested that he did not really belong to either, but was one
of those who dabble in shares and who play at soldiers. There was some
third element about him that was neither mercantile nor military. His
manners were a shade too gentlemanly to be quite those of a gentleman.
They involved an unction and over-emphasis of the club-man: then I
suddenly remembered feeling the same thing in some old actors or old
playgoers who had modelled themselves on actors. As I came in he said,
"If I was the Government," and then put a cigar in his mouth which he
lit carefully with long intakes of breath. Then he took the cigar out
of his mouth again and said, "I'd give it 'em," as if it were quite a
separate sentence. But even while his mouth was stopped with the cigar
his companion or interlocutor leaped to his feet and said with great
heartiness, snatching up a hat, "Well, I must be off. Tuesday!". I
dislike these dark suspicions, but I certainly fancied I recognised the
sudden geniality with which one takes leave of a bore.

When, therefore, he removed the narcotic stopper from his mouth it was
to me that he addressed the belated epigram. "I'd give it 'em."

"What would you give them," I asked, "the minimum wage?"

"I'd give them beans," he said. "I'd shoot 'em down shoot 'em down,
every man Jack of them. I lost my best train yesterday, and here's
the whole country paralysed, and here's a handful of obstinate fellows
standing between the country and coal. I'd shoot 'em down!"

"That would surely be a little harsh," I pleaded. "After all, they
are not under martial law, though I suppose two or three of them have
commissions in the Yeomanry."

"Commissions in the Yeomanry!" he repeated, and his eyes and face, which
became startling and separate, like those of a boiled lobster, made me
feel sure that he had something of the kind himself.

"Besides," I continued, "wouldn't it be quite enough to confiscate their
money?"

"Well, I'd send them all to penal servitude, anyhow," he said, "and I'd
confiscate their funds as well."

"The policy is daring and full of difficulty," I replied, "but I do not
say that it is wholly outside the extreme rights of the republic. But
you must remember that though the facts of property have become
quite fantastic, yet the sentiment of property still exists. These
coal-owners, though they have not earned the mines, though they could
not work the mines, do quite honestly feel that they own the mines.
Hence your suggestion of shooting them down, or even of confiscating
their property, raises very&mdash;"

"What do you mean?" asked the man with the cigar, with a bullying eye.
"Who yer talking about?"

"I'm talking about what you were talking about," I replied; "as you put
it so perfectly, about the handful of obstinate fellows who are standing
between the country and the coal. I mean the men who are selling their
own coal for fancy prices, and who, as long as they can get those
prices, care as little for national starvation as most merchant princes
and pirates have cared for the provinces that were wasted or the peoples
that were enslaved just before their ships came home. But though I am a
bit of a revolutionist myself, I cannot quite go with you in the extreme
violence you suggest. You say&mdash;"

"I say," he cried, bursting through my speech with a really splendid
energy like that of some noble beast, "I say I'd take all these blasted
miners and&mdash;"

I had risen slowly to my feet, for I was profoundly moved; and I stood
staring at that mental monster.

"Oh," I said, "so it is the miners who are all to be sent to penal
servitude, so that we may get more coal. It is the miners who are to be
shot dead, every man Jack of them; for if once they are all shot dead
they will start mining again...You must forgive me, sir; I know I seem
somewhat moved. The fact is, I have just found something. Something I
have been looking for for years."

"Well," he asked, with no unfriendly stare, "and what have you found?"

"No," I answered, shaking my head sadly, "I do not think it would be
quite kind to tell you what I have found."

He had a hundred virtues, including the capital virtue of good humour,
and we had no difficulty in changing the subject and forgetting the
disagreement. He talked about society, his town friends and his country
sports, and I discovered in the course of it that he was a county
magistrate, a Member of Parliament, and a director of several important
companies. He was also that other thing, which I did not tell him.

The moral is that a certain sort of person does exist, to whose glory
this article is dedicated. He is not the ordinary man. He is not the
miner, who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence. He
is not the mine-owner, who is sharp enough to get a great deal more, by
selling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocratic
politician, who has a cynical but a fair sympathy with both economic
opportunities. But he is the man who appears in scores of public places
open to the upper middle class or (that less known but more powerful
section) the lower upper class. Men like this all over the country are
really saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities of
justice of the peace, candidate for Parliament, Colonel of the Yeomanry,
old family doctor, Poor Law guardian, coroner, or above all, arbiter in
trade disputes. He suffers, in the literal sense, from softening of the
brain; he has softened it by always taking the view of everything most
comfortable for his country, his class, and his private personality.
He is a deadly public danger. But as I have given him his name at the
beginning of this article there is no need for me to repeat it at the
end.




THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. And
I think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to
record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on
his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of
any modern problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strike
was a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was becalmed for an hour or
two, he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing this
which he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and
the bloody leaders of the mob whom he has never seen&mdash;nor any one
else either. If he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (as
happened to a friend of my grandfather) he should still remember that a
true account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to
have. Though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was being
murdered, we should still like to have the wrong side described in
the right way. Upon this principle I, who know nothing of diplomacy or
military arrangements, and have only held my breath like the rest of
the world while France and Germany were bargaining, will tell quite
truthfully of a small scene I saw, one of the thousand scenes that were,
so to speak, the anterooms of that inmost chamber of debate.

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares
of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those gray
and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden,
like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;
the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping
with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were
scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with
many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.
I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the
announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there
would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft
of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town
and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful
moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.
There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of
all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing
about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a
Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or
likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the
time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it
were a sort of mystical inn.

Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men,
when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front.
They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the French
conscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like young
criminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were so
obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to
them like hell; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in so
decent a place. But it was not so much the mere class variety that most
sharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just those
one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any
other way.

There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of
hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it
may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.
But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never
tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red
hair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed across
the church that he had always taken care of his health, not even from
thinking about it, but simply because he was told, and that he was one
of those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a
man. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little
Jew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of those
accidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the one
of the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff or
sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, with
knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters.

The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, and
gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying
their own prayers, and here and there crying. The gray clouds of
rain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep church
continuously darkened. The lads in front began to sing a military hymn
in odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, but
only one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like

     Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie,
     Valdarkararump pour la patrie.

Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growing
gloomier and gloomier with the clouds. In the dead stillness a child
started crying suddenly and incoherently. In a city far to the north a
French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.

I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline
of its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else to
talk about "clericalism" and "militarism." Those who talk like that are
made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate
"Socialism." The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God
and the Mother of God were not "clericalists"; or, if they were,
they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not
"militarists"&mdash;quite the other way just then. The priest made a
short speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are),
he uttered platitudes. In such circumstances platitudes are the only
possible things to say; because they are true. He began by saying that
he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.
They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with even
more than their alleged superstitious credulity. He said that war was
hateful, and that we all hated it; but that "in all things reasonable"
the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God. He spoke about
Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier
while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he
gave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a brief
interval for reflection):

     Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,
     Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.

which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.

While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded
about my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkening
church. They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I
cannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image. It seemed to me
that we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what was
happening outside the church. The monstrous and terrible jewels of the
windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but the
nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and
hardly dared to guess. The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy that
enemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors were
groaning under their hammers. Then I seemed to suppose that the town
itself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands
of years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on a
wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind the
veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed to
see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up an
infernal dawn. Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of
the abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds. And when the
darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of
St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church
and looking in at each window in turn.

Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a
ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. Sometimes
I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron
chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the
wings of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the young
men inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things
outside but as something barbaric and enormous.

I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of
limitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic
tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and
his mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the
passes of the Vosges. But on this subject I have heard many philosophies
and thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to is
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alter
it now.

But when I came out of the church there were none of these things,
but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the posters
announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.




THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by
some special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep a
man sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the State
may remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked;
when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.

The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been
gibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not
merely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an
aesthete&mdash;that is, an erotomaniac. He not only tortured other
people's bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting
shapes. Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was
followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman
Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The
populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when
they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of
the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw
a statue without a head.

It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, from
which, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XI
was a very patient and practical man of the world; but (like many
good business men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and the
torturer clung about everything he did, even when it was right. And just
as the great Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, so
even the silver splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul,
has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis
XI. Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible
savour that humanity finds still in its nostrils. Now in our time the
unhealthy man is on top; but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; or
mad on statecraft, like Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Our
tyrant is not the satyr or the torturer; but the miser.

The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote;
but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser had
some touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collected
gold&mdash;a substance that can really be admired for itself, like ivory
or old oak. An old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of the
simple ardour, something of the mystical materialism, of a child who
picks out yellow flowers. Gold is but one kind of coloured clay, but
coloured clay can be very beautiful. The modern idolater of riches is
content with far less genuine things. The glitter of guineas is like
the glitter of buttercups, the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells,
compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make the
hobby of the modern miser.

The modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin. He is content
sometimes with the dead crackle of notes; but far more often with the
mere repetition of noughts in a ledger, all as like each other as eggs
to eggs. And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as many
tramps and savages are, when he was once used to being unclean. A man
could find some comfort in an unswept attic or an unwashed shirt. But
the Yankee millionaire can find no comfort with five telephones at his
bed-head and ten minutes for his lunch. The round coins in the miser's
stocking were safe in some sense. The round noughts in the millionaire's
ledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him with
their increase depresses him with their diminution. The miser at least
collects coins; his hobby is numismatics. The man who collects noughts
collects nothings.

It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot;
but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The
answer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigma
for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is
important; because this special problem is separate from the old general
quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong
books, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powers
and privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are out
of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately
poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few
millionaires&mdash;that is, misers. In the old normal friction of normal
wealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side. I think that a
Berkshire squire has too much power over his tenants; that a Brompton
builder has too much power over his workmen; that a West London doctor
has too much power over the poor patients in the West London Hospital.

But a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance, for
instance. A Brompton builder has not money enough to run a Newspaper
Trust. A West End doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freeze
everybody out. The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern
market. The things that change modern history, the big national and
international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations,
the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages,
the big expenses often incurred in elections&mdash;these are getting too
big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly
fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.

There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about
them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the
chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser
aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even
good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are
sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their
patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to
sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous
man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will
never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old
bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough
to want it.

Lastly, the most serious point about them is this: that the new miser
is flattered for his meanness and the old one never was. It was never
called self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones. It is called
self-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans. A man like
Dancer was never praised as a Christian saint for going in rags. A
man like Rockefeller is praised as a sort of pagan stoic for his
early rising or his unassuming dress. His "simple" meals, his "simple"
clothes, his "simple" funeral, are all extolled as if they were
creditable to him. They are disgraceful to him: exactly as disgraceful
as the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him. To
be in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint; to be in rags
for money was that of a filthy old fool. Precisely in the same way,
to be "simple" for charity is the state of a saint; to be "simple" for
money is that of a filthy old fool. Of the two I have more respect for
the old miser, gnawing bones in an attic: if he was not nearer to God,
he was at least a little nearer to men. His simple life was a little
more like the life of the real poor.




THE MYSTAGOGUE

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and
impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your
aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is
perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond
all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all
good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment;
and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is
always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are
that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically
that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint
Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather
quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the
elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him
in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy
pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more
blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good
is always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined
thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the
salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness,
the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him "horror
of emptiness," as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; they
worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. They
think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on
the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless
corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil a
grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It
was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists
never drew him at all.

And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt
from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he
has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has
no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too
subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or
specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary
people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable
that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is
always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;
but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to
come out of it.

Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the
thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that
an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy
cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that
a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait
painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much.
And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the
pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important
half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that
connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The
"Mona Lisa" was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her
to be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And
Walter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture.
Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the
last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.

Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely
inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being
speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in
Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically
the critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms of
painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be
inadequate&mdash;but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the
first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can
at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent
cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the
Sea." Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying
forests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far too
fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense
of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.
Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt.
They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find
the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been
clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M.
Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had
something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the
pictures, but they said it.

Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post
Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They
are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt
to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is
untranslatable&mdash;that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable,
impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their
banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper
on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried
to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good
old anti-democratic muddlements: that "the public" does not understand
these things; that "the likes of us" cannot dare to question the dark
decisions of our lords.

I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple
test mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art,
something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Man
is made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandt
is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go
back and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art,
it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic
literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to
it. If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in their
eulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy&mdash;then they are quacks
or the high-priests of the unutterable. If the art critics can say
nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because
the artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have found
nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be
found.




THE RED REACTIONARY

The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and
complete road to anything&mdash;even to restoration. Revolution alone
can be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of the
dead.

A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper)
was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situated
in that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that great
creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its
own, and made a revolution against a revolution. As my friend went down
this street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr.
Gandish, "in his researches into 'istry," and which had somehow taken
his fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into
battle. I think the words ran:

          Monsieur de Charette.
          Dit au gens d'ici.
          Le roi va remettre.
          Le fleur de lys.

My friend was (and is) a Radical, but he was (and is) an Englishman, and
it never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaic
lyrics out of remote centuries; that one had to be a Catholic to enjoy
the "Dies Irae," or a Protestant to remember "Lillibullero." Yet he was
stopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative might
get him at least into temporary trouble.

A little time after I was helping King George V to get crowned, by
walking round a local bonfire and listening to a local band. Just as a
bonfire cannot be too big, so (by my theory of music) a band cannot
be too loud, and this band was so loud, emphatic, and obvious, that I
actually recognised one or two of the tunes. And I noticed that quite a
formidable proportion of them were Jacobite tunes; that is, tunes that
had been primarily meant to keep George V out of his throne for ever.
Some of the real airs of the old Scottish rebellion were played, such
as "Charlie is My Darling," or "What's a' the steer, kimmer?" songs that
men had sung while marching to destroy and drive out the monarchy under
which we live. They were songs in which the very kinsmen of the present
King were swept aside as usurpers. They were songs in which the actual
words "King George" occurred as a curse and a derision. Yet they
were played to celebrate his very Coronation; played as promptly and
innocently as if they had been "Grandfather's Clock" or "Rule Britannia"
or "The Honeysuckle and the Bee."

That contrast is the measure, not only between two nations, but between
two modes of historical construction and development. For there is not
really very much difference, as European history goes, in the time that
has elapsed between us and the Jacobite and between us and the Jacobin.
When George III was crowned the gauntlet of the King's Champion was
picked up by a partisan of the Stuarts. When George III was still on the
throne the Bourbons were driven out of France as the Stuarts had been
driven out of England. Yet the French are just sufficiently aware that
the Bourbons might possibly return that they will take a little trouble
to discourage it; whereas we are so certain that the Stuarts will never
return that we actually play their most passionate tunes as a compliment
to their rivals. And we do not even do it tauntingly. I examined the
faces of all the bandsmen; and I am sure they were devoid of irony:
indeed, it is difficult to blow a wind instrument ironically. We do it
quite unconsciously; because we have a huge fundamental dogma, which the
French have not. We really believe that the past is past. It is a very
doubtful point.

Now the great gift of a revolution (as in France) is that it makes men
free in the past as well as free in the future. Those who have cleared
away everything could, if they liked, put back everything. But we who
have preserved everything&mdash;we cannot restore anything. Take,
for the sake of argument, the complex and many coloured ritual of the
Coronation recently completed. That rite is stratified with the separate
centuries; from the first rude need of discipline to the last fine shade
of culture or corruption, there is nothing that cannot be detected or
even dated. The fierce and childish vow of the lords to serve their lord
"against all manner of folk" obviously comes from the real Dark Ages;
no longer confused, even by the ignorant, with the Middle Ages. It comes
from some chaos of Europe, when there was one old Roman road across four
of our counties; and when hostile "folk" might live in the next village.
The sacramental separation of one man to be the friend of the fatherless
and the nameless belongs to the true Middle Ages; with their great
attempt to make a moral and invisible Roman Empire; or (as the
Coronation Service says) to set the cross for ever above the ball.
Elaborate local tomfooleries, such as that by which the Lord of the
Manor of Work-sop is alone allowed to do something or other, these
probably belong to the decay of the Middle Ages, when that great
civilisation died out in grotesque literalism and entangled heraldry.
Things like the presentation of the Bible bear witness to the
intellectual outburst at the Reformation; things like the Declaration
against the Mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans; and
things like the allegiance of the Bishops bear witness to the wordy and
parenthetical political compromises which (to my deep regret) ended the
wars of religion.

But my purpose here is only to point out one particular thing. In all
that long list of variations there must be, and there are, things
which energetic modern minds would really wish, with the reasonable
modification, to restore. Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to see
again the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antique
and almost frozen formality. Dr. Horton probably really regrets the
old passion that excommunicated Rome. In the same way Mr. Belloc
would really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would prefer
the Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. The Dark Ages would
probably be disputed (from widely different motives) by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham would
win.

But the black case against Conservative (or Evolutionary) politics is
that none of these sincere men can win. Dr. Clifford cannot get back
to the Puritans; Mr. Belloc cannot get back to the mediaevals; because
(alas) there has been no Revolution to leave them a clear space for
building or rebuilding. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and can
wander back and pick and choose. But Englishmen have all the ages on top
of them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, without
being able to take so much as a brick out of it. If the French decide
that their Republic is bad they can get rid of it; but if we decide that
a Republic was good, we should have much more difficulty. If the French
democracy actually desired every detail of the mediaeval monarchy, they
could have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. If
another Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc
actually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shook
and blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every
tapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and the
purpose of Providence&mdash;such a scene would still be the lasting and
final justification of the French Revolution.

For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI.




THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

In the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest in
Asiatic arts or faiths, there are two incidental injustices which we
tend nowadays to do to our own records and our own religion. The first
is a tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in the
higher Orientals, but were peculiar to them. Thus our magazines will
fall into a habit of wondering praise of Bushido, the Japanese chivalry,
as if no Western knights had ever vowed noble vows, or as if no Eastern
knights had ever broken them. Or again, our drawing-rooms will be full
of the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness, as if no
Christians had been saints, or as if all Buddhists had been. But if the
first injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly Eastern, the
other injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarly
Eastern. It is too much taken for granted that the Eastern sort of
idealism is certainly superior and convincing; whereas in truth it is
only separate and peculiar. All that is richest, deepest, and subtlest
in the East is rooted in Pantheism; but all that is richest, deepest,
and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that Pantheism
is either the highest or the purest religion.

Thus, in turning over some excellent books recently written on the
spirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration, I found it quietly and
curiously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows with
the full stream of Nature; and identifies himself with all things; so
that the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forests his far-flung
arms. Now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found.
In so far as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in all
things, the Eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they have
of hunger and thirst.

I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the Far East do exhibit
this; but I rebel at being asked to admit that we must go to the Far
East to find it. Traces of such sentiments can be found, I fancy, even
in other painters and poets. I do not question that the poet Wo Wo (that
ornament of the eighth dynasty) may have written the words: "Even the
most undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producing
meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping." But, I do not
therefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who made
a somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mere
Occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not deny
that Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem
entitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall." But I do
not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the
cranny was not original and even sincere.

It is recorded (for all I know) of the philanthropic Emperor Bo, that
when engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabaster
and chrysoberyl, he chanced to cut down a small flower; whereupon, being
much affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon
tablets of ivory the lines beginning: "Small and unobtrusive blossom
with ruby extremities." But this incident, touching as it is, does not
shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I am
left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere
in their poetry&mdash;and in their prose.

I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art and
its admirers, and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and go
on to more general considerations. I therefore proceed to say&mdash;with
the utmost respect, that it is Cheek, a rarefied and etherealised form
of Cheek, for this school to speak in this way about the mother that
bore them, the great civilisation of the West. The West also has its
magic landscapes, only through our incurable materialism they look
like landscapes as well as like magic. The West also has its symbolic
figures, only they look like men as well as symbols. It will be answered
(and most justly) that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its own
instinct and tradition; that its artists are concerned to suggest one
thing and our artists another; that both should be admired in their
difference. Profoundly true; but what is the difference? It is certainly
not as the Orientalisers assert, that we must go to the Far East for a
sympathetic and transcendental interpretation of Nature. We have paid
a long enough toll of mystics and even of madmen to be quit of that
disability.

Yet there is a difference, and it is just what I suggested. The Eastern
mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy
of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says,
like St. Francis, "My brother fire and my sister water"; the former
says, "Myself fire and myself water." Whether you call the Eastern
attitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction of
oneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition. The
effect is the same, an effect which lives and throbs throughout all the
exquisite arts of the East. This effect is the Sing called rhythm, a
pulsation of pattern, or of ritual, or of colours, or of cosmic theory,
but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world.
But there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with a
thing because it is different. No one will say that Rembrandt did not
sympathise with an old woman; but no one will say that Rembrandt painted
like an old woman. No one will say that Reynolds did not appreciate
children; but no one will say he did it childishly. The supreme instance
of this divine division is sex, and that explains (what I could never
understand in my youth) why Christendom called the soul the bride of
God. For real love is an intense realisation of the "separateness" of
all our souls. The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world is
never mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a melting
back into Nature, a meeting of the waters. And water is plunging
and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill. The high and human
love-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the great
love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the same
instant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger.

For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and if
we grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realised
in what we differ. That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and
the Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and the
East. There were many other differences, calculated to arrest even
the superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon. But the essential
difference was simply this: that the Dragon did want to eat St. George;
whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the
Dragon. In most of the stories he killed the Dragon. In many of the
stories he not only spared, but baptised it. But in neither case did the
Christian have any appetite for cold dragon. The Dragon, however,
really has an appetite for cold Christian&mdash;and especially for cold
Christianity. This blind intention to absorb, to change the shape of
everything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon's stomach; this is
what is really meant by the Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East. The
Cosmos as such is cannibal; as old Time ate his children. The Eastern
saints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up. The Western
saint, like St. George, was sainted by the Western Church precisely
because he refused to be swallowed. The same process of thought that has
prevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented the
complete appearance of Pantheism. All Christian men instinctively resist
the idea of being absorbed into an Empire; an Austrian, a Spanish, a
British, or a Turkish Empire. But there is one empire, much larger and
much more tyrannical, which free men will resist with even stronger
passion. The free man violently resists being absorbed into the empire
which is called the Universe. He demands Home Rule for his nationality,
but still more Home Rule for his home. Most of all he demands Home
Rule for himself. He claims the right to be saved, in spite of Moslem
fatalism. He claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophical
optimism. He refuses to be the Cosmos; because he refuses to forget it.




THE MUMMER

The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so
close that they might as well have been inside the house instead of
just outside; so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seem
farther away. Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, who
come every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of
the old Christmas play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the Very
Venal Doctor. I will not describe it; it is indescribable; but I will
describe my parallel sentiments as it passed.

One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artistic
revivals of mediaeval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There are
elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple
society of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they are
mediaevalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. The
first is the primary idea of Mummery itself. If you will observe a child
just able to walk, you will see that his first idea is not to dress up
as anybody&mdash;but to dress up. Afterwards, of course, the idea
of being the King or Uncle William will leap to his lips. But it is
generally suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose,
from far deeper motives. Tommy does not assume the hat primarily because
it is Uncle William's hat, but because it is not Tommy's hat. It is a
ritual investiture; and is akin to those Gorgon masks that stiffened the
dances of Greece or those towering mitres that came from the mysteries
of Persia. For the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox: the
concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the
person. The man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and
conspicuous. It is part of that divine madness which all other creatures
wonder at in Man, that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and
anonymity. Man is not, perhaps, the only creature who dresses himself,
but he is the only creature who disguises himself. Beasts and birds do
indeed take the colours of their environment; but that is not in order
to be watched, but in order not to be watched; it is not the formalism
of rejoicing, but the formlessness of fear. It is not so with men, whose
nature is the unnatural. Ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue
because they lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and belles
powder their hair to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were not
dressing up as kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears.
Nay, even when modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve, it is
doubted by some naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escaping
notice. So merry-makers (or Mummers) adopt their costume to heighten
and exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it,
primarily speaking, in another identity. It is not Acting&mdash;that
comparatively low profession-comparatively I mean. It is Mummery;
and, as Mr. Kensit would truly say, all elaborate religious ritual is
Mummery. That is, it is the noble conception of making Man something
other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things.
It is only careful faddists and feeble German philosophers who want to
wear no clothes; and be "natural" in their Dionysian revels. Natural
men, really vigorous and exultant men, want to wear more and more
clothes when they are revelling. They want worlds of waistcoats and
forests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats toppling up to the stars.

Thus it is with the lingering Mummers at Christmas in the country. If
our more refined revivers of Miracle Plays or Morrice Dances tried to
reconstruct the old Mummers' Play of St. George and the Turkish Knight
(I do not know why they do not) they would think at once of picturesque
and appropriate dresses. St. George's panoply would be pictured from
the best books of armour and blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms and
ornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When my
garden door opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered,
the appearance of that champion was slightly different. His face was
energetically blacked all over with soot, above which he wore an
aged and very tall top hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like a
surplice, and he flourished a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you,
talk about "ignorance"; or suppose that the Mummer in question (he is a
very pleasant Ratcatcher, with a tenor voice) did this because he knew
no better. Try to realise that even a Ratcatcher knows St. George of
England was not black, and did not kill the Dragon with an umbrella.
The Rat-catcher is not under this delusion; any more than Paul Veronese
thought that very good men have luminous rings round their heads; any
more than the Pope thinks that Christ washed the feet of the twelve in
a Cathedral; any more than the Duke of Norfolk thinks the lions on a
tabard are like the lions at the Zoo. These things are denaturalised
because they are symbols; because the extraordinary occasion must hide
or even disfigure the ordinary people. Black faces were to mediaeval
mummeries what carved masks were to Greek plays: it was called being
"vizarded." My Rat-catcher is not sufficiently arrogant to suppose for
a moment that he looks like St. George. But he is sufficiently humble to
be convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can, he will
be on the right road.

This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men in
disguise. There are, of course, other mediaeval elements in it which
are also difficult to explain to the fastidious mediaevalists of to-day.
There is, for instance, a certain output of violence into the void. It
can best be defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without the
faintest desire to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have the
trick of turning on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerely
believed, merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam in startling
yet careless phrases. When Tennyson says that King Arthur "drew all the
petty princedoms under him," and "made a realm and ruled," his grave
Royalism is quite modern. Many mediaevals, outside the mediaeval
republics, believed in monarchy as solemnly as Tennyson. But that older
verse

     When good King Arthur ruled this land
     He was a goodly King&mdash;
     He stole three pecks of barley-meal
     To make a bag-pudding.

is far more Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There are
other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called
Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merely
Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still,
I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in
healthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking.
If you cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest, at least you can
carry the forest with you, like a Jack-in-the-Green. It is well to walk
under universal ensigns; and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whom
a walking forest was the witness of doom. That, indeed, is the very
intensity of the notion: a masked man is ominous; but who shall face a
mob of masks?




THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the
antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost
unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs
of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does
not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere
unlettered simplicity of mind.

But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our
decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its
best; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many
of the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a God
fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys and
concertinas, crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, are
not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements
of the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than
they are at a political "At Home," or even an artistic soiree; and if
the female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressed
and underdressed at the same time. It is better to ride a donkey than to
be a donkey. It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asks
men and women to change hats, rather than with the modern Utopia that
wants them to change heads.

But the truth is that such small, but real, element of vulgarity as
there is indeed in the tripper, is part of a certain folly and falsity
which is characteristic of much modernity, and especially of the very
people who persecute the poor tripper most. There is something in the
whole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that does
things in a clumsy and unbeautiful way.

A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge, which I happened to
visit yesterday. Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of
Stonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge
at all. The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the gray
tablelands like primeval altars, the trailing rain-clouds, the vapour
of primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient and
very lonely Britain. It would not spoil his Druidic mood if he
missed Stonehenge. But it does spoil his mood to find
Stonehenge&mdash;surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire, with a
policeman and a little shop selling picture post-cards.

Now if you protest against this, educated people will instantly answer
you, "Oh, it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones and
carve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge." It does not seem to
occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of
Stonehenge. The scratching of a name, particularly when performed
with blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Board
education, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from
the grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old. But nobody could
get a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid. This really
vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated;
it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted
to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge. It seems to me curious to
preserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over;
or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it
green.

And if you ask, "But what else could any one have done, what could the
most artistic age have done to save the monument?" I reply, "There are
hundreds of things that Greeks or Mediaevals might have done; and I have
no notion what they would have chosen; but I say that by an instinct in
their whole society they would have done something that was decent and
serious and suitable to the place. Perhaps some family of knights or
warriors would have the hereditary duty of guarding such a place. If so
their armour would be appropriate; their tents would be appropriate;
not deliberately&mdash;they would grow like that. Perhaps some religious
order such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving of
guard would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by all
sorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to you
mere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me one
twentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, as
calmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful."

The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is to
live in a good place Without living by its life. Any one who settles
down in a place without becoming part of it is (barring peculiar
personal cases, of course) a tripper or wandering cad. For instance,
the Jew is a genuine peculiar case. The Wandering Jew is not a wandering
cad. He is a highly civilised man in a highly difficult position; the
world being divided, and his own nation being divided, about whether he
can do anything else except wander.

The best example of the cultured, but common, tripper is the educated
Englishman on the Continent. We can no longer explain the quarrel by
calling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite. Hundreds of Englishmen
are extremely polite, and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude.
The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rude
Englishman. What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, is
the polite Englishman. He visits Italy for Botticellis or Flanders
for Rembrandts, and he treats the great nations that made these things
courteously&mdash;as he would treat the custodians of any museum. It
does not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of the
pictures, but the creator of them. He can afford to look down on such
nations&mdash;when he can paint such pictures.

That is, in matters of art and travel, the psychology of the cad.
If, living in Italy, you admire Italian art while distrusting Italian
character, you are a tourist, or cad. If, living in Italy, you admire
Italian art while despising Italian religion, you are a tourist, or cad.
It does not matter how many years you have lived there. Tourists will
often live a long time in hotels without discovering the nationality
of the waiters. Englishmen will often live a long time in Italy without
discovering the nationality of the Italians. But the test is simple. If
you admire what Italians did without admiring Italians&mdash;you are a
cheap tripper.

The same, of course, applies much nearer home. I have remarked elsewhere
that country shopkeepers are justly offended by London people, who,
coming among them, continue to order all their goods from London. It is
caddish to wink and squint at the colour of a man's wine, like a wine
taster; and then refuse to drink it. It is equally caddish to wink and
squint at the colour of a man's orchard, like a landscape painter; and
then refuse to buy the apples. It is always an insult to admire a thing
and not use it. But the main point is that one has no right to see
Stonehenge without Salisbury Plain and Salisbury: One has no right to
respect the dead Italians without respecting the live ones. One has no
right to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-sea
fishes&mdash;fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeing
the sights without breathing the air. It is very real bad manners.




THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

It is an old story that names do not fit things; it is an old story
that the oldest forest is called the New Forest, and that Irish stew is
almost peculiar to England. But these are traditional titles that tend,
of their nature, to stiffen; it is the tragedy of to-day that even
phrases invented for to-day do not fit it. The forest has remained new
while it is nearly a thousand years old; but our fashions have grown old
while they were still new.

The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked,
they are almost always attacked wrongly. People seem to have a positive
inspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to an
offender; they are always accusing a man of theft when he has been
convicted of murder. They must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageous
rebellion, when his offence has really been a sleek submission to
the powers that be. They must describe Mr. Lloyd George as using his
eloquence to rouse the mob, whereas he has really shown considerable
cleverness in damping it down. It was probably under the same impulse
towards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr. Inge as
"the Gloomy Dean."

Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean; nor is there
anything wrong about being gloomy. The only question is what dark but
sincere motives have made you gloomy. What dark but sincere motives
have made you a Dean. Now the address of Dr. Inge which gained him
this erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the modern
capitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appeared
to anticipate appalling results. Now if we look at the facts about that
gentleman's depression and also about his Deanery, we shall find a very
curious state of things.

When Dr. Inge was called "the Gloomy Dean" a great injustice was done
him. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against
the forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimism
rather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers have
suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong&mdash;such a man
is not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean. A
man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with
a mysterious fountain of high spirits. And the actual occasion is not
less curious; because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloom
reposes on his having said that our worker's demand high wages, while
the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less.

This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be much
difficulty about the matter. Men of the Far East will submit to very low
wages for the same reason that they will submit to "the punishment known
as Li, or Slicing"; for the same reason that they will praise polygamy
and suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to
the husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve their
temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they
sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual
perversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with
traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the
gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in
hundreds of other ways; and I can quite understand a man (though
hardly a Dean) really preferring their historic virtues to those of
Christendom. A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic
coolies than among his European comrades: and as we are to allow the
Broadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy
as anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless
Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; and
it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and
prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as
possible for it.

But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and
traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which
he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of
years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge
admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced
the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious
deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen
Chinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he
ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the
English to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties
of paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve;
his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all
sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the
most Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.

In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism
and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a
certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;
nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the
special defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that
all men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the
formula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there
were but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest
of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to
God night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly
works with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly
personal immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even
happy merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a
man. A man's meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there must
always be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to
the sacrament. A man's bed may be hard, but it must not be abject or
unclean: there must always be about the bed something of the decency of
the death-bed.

This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible
murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil
that threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot
encourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out.
Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being
Christian: it is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He had
absent-mindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. I
advise him to chuck it.

But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confucian
temples or traditions may have appeared fantastic; but it is not. Dr.
Inge is not a stupid old Tory Rector, strict both on Church and State.
Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian Socialists being
"court chaplains of King Demos" or about his own superb valour in
defying the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches.
We should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know that
Demos has never been king in England and precious seldom anywhere else;
we should not expect him to realise that if King Demos had any chaplains
they would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned;
he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a New
Theologian; that is, he is liberal in theology&mdash;and nothing else.
He is apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy
with those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging
the rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues of
Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament of
Religions where all believers respect each other's unbelief.

Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. When
next you hear the "liberal" Christian say that we should take what is
best in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that people
like Dr. Inge call best; what are the things that people like Dr. Inge
propose to take. You will not find them imitating the military valour of
the Moslem. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy of
the Hindoo. The more you study the "broad" movement of today, the more
you will find that these people want something much less like Chinese
metaphysics, and something much more like Chinese Labour. You will find
the levelling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering of
wages. Dr. Inge is the typical latitudinarian of to-day; and was never
more so than when he appeared not as the apostle of the blacks, but as
the apostle of the blacklegs. Preached, as it is, almost entirely
among the prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism or
Mohammedanism practically means this&mdash;that the poor must be as meek
as Buddhists, while the rich may be as ruthless as Mohammedans. That is
what they call the reunion of all religions.




THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of
washing; and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore
comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain.
Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities
of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists
are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public
bath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons
coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished
or dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when
coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an
enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:
it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry
rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring
cleaning.

If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble
at the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are
constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and
join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social
machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. It
disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman
to take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, because
it is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls
the string.

As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and
debauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative
intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret
or the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such
scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne
falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with
the terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as
he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven,
and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who
ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are
drinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the
trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs
as revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of
the world.

All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes
a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count
it Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine&mdash;especially for water.

There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel
a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he
puts on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying all
umbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of
despots in the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable
walking stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no
taste for pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my
hat, and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against
wet, it must be by some closer and more careless protection, something
that I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be
that yet more Highland thing, a mackintosh.

And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military
qualities of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue and
white sheen as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to think
of it as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty
raids. I like to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes,
descending on some doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofs
flashing in the sun or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beauties
of rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct light
is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is
unquestionably increased. There is less sunshine; but there are more
shiny things; such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles and
mackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors.

And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual
works of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet it
doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the
roads (to the sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice.
Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we
dwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous
pavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all
that golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow
sky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle,
the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet,
dazzling confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, will
appeal strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about this
dreamy and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strange
sense of looking down at the skies.




THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)
to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is
amusing to ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, ours
especially, when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of
one weakness this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures.

This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it cares
more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its "methods"
more than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, good
communications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there are
precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean
a hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
"scientific age," which wants to know whether the train is in the
timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one
instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the
case of photography.

Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared,
and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so
that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted
or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders,
a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I
should have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man,
with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.

Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,
if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and
dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic
or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked
like some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of
coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately
under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have
been painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one
under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches
of Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which
Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes
distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of
them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could
have picked him out in any crowd&mdash;so long as you had not seen his
photograph.

But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental and
conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits
of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring
of cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the
darkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. The
framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;
and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write
poetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as people
do when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never
held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated
his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished
by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature
has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could
have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest
water-colours, on the smoothest ivory.

I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one of
which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents
an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate
language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it
strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They
would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate
Max's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to
find the man.

This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific
civilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man
that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations,
seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever
since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had
shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time
afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was
quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black
men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But
it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so
startling an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of a
photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were
told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,
which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admitted
that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been
a Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black
is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to
moral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts before
it? Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celtic
wrath, always left out in such official communications, as they were
left out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as an
African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisation
drop all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arresting
thing&mdash;which might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first the
chilling note of science, demanding a man "above the middle height, chin
shaven, with gray moustache," etc., which might mean Mr. Balfour or Sir
Redvers Buller. It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that
a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a
nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.
These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.
They are almost always left out of the inquiry.




THE SULTAN

There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial
cultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butter
far you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted in
something dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when you
find your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when you
find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread
them among your fellow-creatures. It is a paradox; but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history; but I think the strongest case is
this. That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we
have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.

I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise
out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius, it was a fad,
and like most fads an imitation. For what was wrong with Rhodes was not
that, like Cromwell or Hildebrand, he made huge mistakes, nor even that
he committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes and
errors in order to spread certain ideas. And when one asked for the
ideas they could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrand
for Catholicism: but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the
world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the
principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs
of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous.
That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be the
fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could
not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which
he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old
bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently
quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his
time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill
somewhere in South Africa "his church." It was not his fault, I mean,
that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at
all. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he "figured out
that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible."
Many evolutionists much wiser had "figured out" things even more
babyish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular
science of his time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in
Streatham could not have spread for him. But it was exactly because he
had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and
ruined republics to spread them.

But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism not
only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are
actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to
extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented
as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our
Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the
East. For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism
has been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.

The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view of
politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first
to steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperial
cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself
submitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotism
and destiny.

There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of
Rhodes. The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact that
Africa is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in
the South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks,
Arabs, and Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes:
"It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I should
like to be the agent of fate." That was Cecil Rhodes's one small genuine
idea; and it is an Oriental idea.

Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperial
position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins and
barbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate.
We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to
teach a Turk to say "Kismet"; which he has said since his cradle. We
are to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all in
order to teach an Arab to believe he is "an agent of fate," when he has
never believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes's vision could come true
(which fortunately is increasingly improbable), such countries as Persia
or Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists in
billycocks, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbans.
The best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger, of a
doubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen&mdash;this
essential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because (as he
says himself) he did not believe in it.

It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empress
in addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title of
King is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meant
to be vast and wild; to be extravagant poems: the Brother of the Sun and
Moon, the Caliph who lives for ever. But a King of England (at least in
the days of real kings) did not bear a merely poetical title; but rather
a religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him.
He was not merely a conqueror, but a father&mdash;yes, even when he was
a bad father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with local
affections and limits: and the Cecil Rhodes Imperialism set up not the
King, but the Sultan; with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magic
of money, of luxury without uproar; of prostrate provinces and a chosen
race. Indeed Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential to
the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of woman.




THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained
in most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No
man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a
cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India
there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something
tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers
and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of
their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the
vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern.
Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens
to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the
Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the
Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this;
indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals
would have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable
grandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety
that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a
chorister suddenly began singing "Bill Bailey" in church. Yet that would
be only doing in music what the mediaevals did in sculpture. They put
into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall
song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the
hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of
its features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We see
a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightful
as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling,
infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite
different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been
so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval
building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough,
shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the
same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles,
are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all the
same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almost
equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediaevalism;
and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, as
of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again, the uniqueness
is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silvery
drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such as the
Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of these
explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about
Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of
furniture-vans.

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the
smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall
cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the
yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across
that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the
more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it
like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this
ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly
coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond
that the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,
straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as
the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;
what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not
variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,
but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man
of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or
an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had
mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this
gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving
towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across
the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with
the clouds. Then I saw what it was.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that
it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting
architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear
the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty
and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of
imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners
going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noises
of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up
its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from
all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in
the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his
wings of brass.

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in
the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight;
the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of
spears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church;
and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in
either hand the trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had
marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of
the desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been
woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the
tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every
snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner
of the architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally
in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like
torches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of
music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln
hill. So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of
the Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw
only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English
birds were floating.




THE MAN ON TOP

There is a fact at the root of all realities to-day which cannot be
stated too simply. It is that the powers of this world are now not
trusted simply because they are not trustworthy. This can be quite
clearly seen and said without any reference to our several passions or
partisanships. It does not follow that we think such a distrust a wise
sentiment to express; it does not even follow that we think it a good
sentiment to entertain. But such is the sentiment, simply because such
is the fact. The distinction can be quite easily defined in an example.
I do not think that private workers owe an indefinite loyalty to their
employer. But I do think that patriotic soldiers owe a more or less
indefinite loyalty to their leader in battle. But even if they ought to
trust their captain, the fact remains that they often do not trust him;
and the fact remains that he often is not fit to be trusted.

Most of the employers and many of the Socialists seem to have got a very
muddled ethic about the basis of such loyalty; and perpetually try to
put employers and officers upon the same disciplinary plane. I should
have thought myself that the difference was alphabetical enough. It has
nothing to do with the idealising of war or the materialising of trade;
it is a distinction in the primary purpose. There might be much more
elegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regiment
under Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or the
atmosphere, but in the aim. The British Army does not exist in order
to pay Lord Kitchener. William Morris's shop, however artistic and
philanthropic, did exist to pay William Morris. If it did not pay the
shopkeeper it failed as a shop; but Lord Kitchener does not fail if he
is underpaid, but only if he is defeated. The object of the Army is the
safety of the nation from one particular class of perils; therefore,
since all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who are
soldiers owe loyalty to the Army. But nobody has any obligation to make
some particular rich man richer. A man is bound, of course, to consider
the indirect results of his action in a strike; but he is bound to
consider that in a swing, or a giddy-go-round, or a smoking concert;
in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation. But direct
responsibility like that of a soldier he has none. He need not aim
solely and directly at the good of the shop; for the simple reason that
the shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation.
The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get what
he can out of the nation; the shop assistant may, under the same decent
restraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper. All this distinction
is very obvious. At least I should have thought so.

But the primary point which I mean is this. That even if we do take the
military view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebellious
shop assistant "disloyal"&mdash;that leaves exactly where it was the
question of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop.
Granted that all Mr. Poole's employees are bound to follow for ever the
cloven pennon of the Perfect Pair of Trousers, it is all the more true
that the pennon may, in point of fact, become imperfect. Granted that
all Barney Barnato's workers ought to have followed him to death or
glory, it is still a Perfectly legitimate question to ask which he was
likely to lead them to. Granted that Dr. Sawyer's boy ought to die for
his master's medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if he
died of them. While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we may
still wish the general were shot.

The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man.
Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners are
worthless for other purposes; they can secure nothing except the prize.
The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men; they are
accidents&mdash;or rather calamities. All revolutionary language is
a generation behind the times in talking of their futility. A
revolutionist would say (with perfect truth) that coal-owners know next
to nothing about coal-mining. But we are past that point. Coal-owners
know next to nothing about coal-owning. They do not develop and defend
the nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageous
policy, however wicked, as did the old aristocrats with the monopoly of
land. They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants; they have
only their powers. It is the same with all the powerful of to-day; it is
the same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official. Not
only is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary.
The arbiter decides, not by some gust of justice or injustice in his
soul like the old despot dooming men under a tree, but by the permanent
climate of the class to which he happens to belong. The ancient wig of
the judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunkey.

To judge about success or failure one must see things very simply; one
must see them in masses, as the artist, half closing his eyes against
details, sees light and shade. That is the only way in which a just
judgment can be formed as to whether any departure or development, such
as Islam or the American Republic, has been a benefit upon the whole.
Seen close, such great erections always abound in ingenious detail and
impressive solidity; it is only by seeing them afar off that one can
tell if the Tower leans.

Now if we thus take in the whole tilt or posture of our modern state,
we shall simply see this fact: that those classes who have on the whole
governed, have on the whole failed. If you go to a factory you will
see some very wonderful wheels going round; you will be told that the
employer often comes there early in the morning; that he has great
organising power; that if he works over the colossal accumulation of
wealth he also works over its wise distribution. All this may be true of
many employers, and it is practically said of all.

But if we shade our eyes from all this dazzle of detail; if we simply
ask what has been the main feature, the upshot, the final fruit of the
capitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special and
solid result of the reign of the employers has been&mdash;unemployment.
Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivot
upon which the whole process turns.

Or, again, if you visit the villages that depend on one of the great
squires, you will hear praises, often just, of the landlord's good sense
or good nature; you will hear of whole systems of pensions or of care
for the sick, like those of a small and separate nation; you will see
much cleanliness, order, and business habits in the offices and accounts
of the estate. But if you ask again what has been the upshot, what has
been the actual result of the reign of landlords, again the answer is
plain. At the end of the reign of landlords men will not live on the
land. The practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants.
The practical effect of having employers is that men are not employed.
The unrest of the populace is therefore more than a murmur against
tyranny; it is against a sort of treason. It is the suspicion that
even at the top of the tree, even in the seats of the mighty, our very
success is unsuccessful.




THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

There are some who are conciliated by Conciliation Boards. There are
some who, when they hear of Royal Commissions, breathe again&mdash;or
snore again. There are those who look forward to Compulsory Arbitration
Courts as to the islands of the blest. These men do not understand the
day that they look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen.

The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may
incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great things
for justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as when
the States General met to renew France's youth like the eagle's; or
when all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of
Washington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. The
real democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the
representative process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no good
giving those now in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory
regulations. It is against these very things that they are revolting.
Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against their
representatives or, as they would say, their misrepresentatives.
The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not in
applause, but in anger, as a god who should come out of his tabernacle
to rebuke and confound his priests.

There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom
we do not, in general, bother very much about. He is the kind of man of
whom his wife says that a better husband when he's sober you couldn't
have. She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in anger
and exaggeration. Really he drinks much less and works much more than
the modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not the
horror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies;
and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort
of industry natural to the classes from which men can climb into great
wealth. He has grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper,
accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and without
discomfort. He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and special
costume; to be put on for great festivals. He has several really curious
characteristics, which would attract the eyes of sociologists, if they
had any eyes. For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in
marked contrast to his actual spirit, which is generally patient and
civil. He has an odd way of using certain words of really horrible
meaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distant
taint of the evils to which they allude. He is rather sentimental; and,
like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness. At the
same time, he believes the ordinary manly commonplaces of freedom and
fraternity as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christian
men: he finds it very difficult to act according to them, but this
difficulty is not confined to him. He has a strong and individual sense
of humour, and not much power of corporate or militant action. He is not
a Socialist. Finally, he bears no more resemblance to a Labour Member
than he does to a City Alderman or a Die-Hard Duke. This is the Common
Labourer of England; and it is he who is on the march at last.

See this man in your mind as you see him in the street, realise that it
is his open mind we wish to influence or his empty stomach we wish to
cure, and then consider seriously (if you can) the five men, including
two of his own alleged oppressors, who were summoned as a Royal
Commission to consider his claims when he or his sort went out on strike
upon the railways. I knew nothing against, indeed I knew nothing about,
any of the gentlemen then summoned, beyond a bare introduction to
Mr. Henderson, whom I liked, but whose identity I was in no danger of
confusing with that of a railway-porter. I do not think that any old
gentleman, however absent-minded, would be likely on arriving at Euston,
let us say, to hand his Gladstone-bag to Mr. Henderson or to attempt to
reward that politician with twopence. Of the others I can only judge
by the facts about their status as set forth in the public Press. The
Chairman, Sir David Harrell, appeared to be an ex-official distinguished
in (of all things in the world) the Irish Constabulary. I have no
earthly reason to doubt that the Chairman meant to be fair; but I am not
talking about what men mean to be, but about what they are. The police
in Ireland are practically an army of occupation; a man serving in them
or directing them is practically a soldier; and, of course, he must
do his duty as such. But it seems truly extraordinary to select as one
likely to sympathise with the democracy of England a man whose whole
business in life it has been to govern against its will the democracy
of Ireland. What should we say if Russian strikers were offered the
sympathetic arbitration of the head of the Russian Police in Finland
or Poland? And if we do not know that the whole civilised world sees
Ireland with Poland as a typical oppressed nation, it is time we did.
The Chairman, whatever his personal virtues, must be by instinct
and habit akin to the capitalists in the dispute. Two more of the
Commissioners actually were the capitalists in the dispute. Then
came Mr. Henderson (pushing his trolley and cheerily crying, "By your
leave."), and then another less known gentleman who had "corresponded"
with the Board of Trade, and had thus gained some strange claim to
represent the very poor.

Now people like this might quite possibly produce a rational enough
report, and in this or that respect even improve things. Men of
that kind are tolerably kind, tolerably patriotic, and tolerably
business-like. But if any one supposes that men of that kind can
conceivably quiet any real 'quarrel with the Man of the Other Kind, the
man whom I first described, it is frantic. The common worker is angry
exactly because he has found out that all these boards consist of the
same well-dressed Kind of Man, whether they are called Governmental or
Capitalist. If any one hopes that he will reconcile the poor, I say, as
I said at the beginning, that such a one has not looked on the light of
day or dwelt in the land of the living.

But I do not criticise such a Commission except for one most practical
and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Man
of whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern
England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, would
be offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost
incomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. This
Kind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot be
represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the other Kind
of Man, fairly prosperous, fairly plausible, at home at least with the
middle class, capable at least of reaching and touching the upper class,
he must remain the only Kind of Man for such councils.

Very well. If then, you give at any future time any kind of compulsory
powers to such councils to prevent strikes, you will be driving the
first Kind of Man to work for a particular master as much as if you
drove him with a whip.




THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

I see that there have been more attempts at the whitewashing of King
John.

But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter; for he
believes that King John was innocent, not only on this point, but as a
whole. He thinks King John has been very badly treated; though I am not
sure whether he would attribute to that Plantagenet a saintly merit or
merely a humdrum respectability.

I sympathise with the whitewashing of King John, merely because it is
a protest against our waxwork style of history. Everybody is in a
particular attitude, with particular moral attributes; Rufus is always
hunting and Coeur-de-Lion always crusading; Henry VIII always marrying,
and Charles I always having his head cut off; Alfred rapidly and in
rotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes; and
King John pulling out Jews' teeth with the celerity and industry of
an American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiff
simplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive;
that is, mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the mind
a healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits, that Charles I prevented
enclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, that Henry
VIII was really interested in theology.

And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid
imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are
on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a
Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they
were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think
that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of
him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he had
what commonly makes them possible, dare-devil courage, for instance, and
hotheaded decision. But, above all, he had a morality which he broke,
but which we misunderstand.

The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will. In
their social system the mediaevals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE, as
their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings
of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of
man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. While
they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly
and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have
of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an
eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern
as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.

For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute
description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused
the apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have been
in an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might have
decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of
another world, a world that now can never be.

This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way
can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and
ballad. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy
intellectual forces. The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the
physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have
taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of
bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of
people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. It
brought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern version
of King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that
about him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him to
be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil
passions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken of
him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they would
have not talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads of
Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the
scene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But we
do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is
a definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant." Nor do we behold a deus ex
machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the
ballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass from
a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;
sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by
a jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moral
freedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being
the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and
sometimes well. In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for he
is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. In
that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived
in a world where every one was piebald.

King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind
of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's
backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capable
of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable
of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori
case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil.
Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman
actually in answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions are
simply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth. Yet though he
can be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of the
story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is the
paradox of mediaeval morals: as it must appear to the moderns. We must
try to conceive a race of men who hated John, and sought his blood, and
believed every abomination about him, who would have been quite capable
of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger. And
yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally
surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goods
to the poor, embraced the lepers in a lazar-house, and been canonised
as a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Will
should turn freely, which now is rusted, and sticks.

For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of our
public men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is a
noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admit
that he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with the
powerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and
rabid Socialist, maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expect
him to go on maddening them&mdash;and us. We do not expect him, let
us say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea of
repentance; especially in public things; that is why we cannot
really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and
aristocratic avarice. Progress in the modern sense is a very dismal
drudge; and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move on
because we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets,
the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings,
they did not confine themselves to saying, "Onward, Christian soldiers,"
still less, "Onward, Futurist soldiers"; what they said to high emperors
and to whole empires was, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?"




THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there
are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to
most modern books. A detective story generally describes six living
men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story
generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be
alive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted
one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged.
"That," says Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a private
detective"; after he has caught he can set free. The Christian Church
can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting
that official detective&mdash;the State. This, indeed, is one of the
injustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise from
looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. We
are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews,
and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they
used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them.
Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did the
Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the
Chinese.

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and
employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture,
if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real
difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The
State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment,
more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal
everywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to
create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever
attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to
avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the
weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the
world. Its speciality&mdash;or, if you like, its oddity&mdash;was this
merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not
slay.

I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays
on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in
America. The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent
experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure
as he passes through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire to
make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people;
that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions
have been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tell
them how good they are already; and in the case of suicidal outcasts,
whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincere
self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way.
I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament,
because they would so heartily agree with it.

Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr.
Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not a
detective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea of
tearing their evil out of men; it lacks the realism of the saints.
Redemption should bring truth as well as peace; and truth is a fine
thing, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must be
faced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to "letting
sleeping dogs lie" is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr.
Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divine
detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is a
sort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does not
see anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, "Tout
comprendre est tout pardonner." But it is much more evidently true to
say, "Rien comprendre est rien Pardonner," and the "Third Floor Back"
does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quite
selfish sentimentalist, who found it comforting to think well of his
neighbours. There is nothing very heroic in loving after you have been
deceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived.

When I saw this play it was natural to compare it with another play
which I had not seen, but which I have read in its printed version.
I mean Mr. Rann Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of which
sprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concerned
with a dim, yet evidently divine, figure changing the destinies of a
whole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other;
in fact, it is a very fine play indeed; but there is nothing
aesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the other
sensational, democratic, and (I use the word in a sound and good sense)
Salvationist.

But the difference lies precisely in this&mdash;that the Christ of Mr.
Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves;
he declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardons
evil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian, and
not a Christian Scientist. The distinction doubtless is partly explained
by the problems severally selected. Mr. Jerome practically supposes
Christ to be trying to save disreputable people; and that, of course,
is naturally a simple business. Mr. Kennedy supposes Him to be trying
to save the reputable people, which is a much larger affair. The chief
characters in The Servant in the House are a popular and strenuous
vicar, universally respected, and his fashionable and forcible wife.
It would have been no good to tell these people they had some good in
them&mdash;for that was what they were telling themselves all day long.
They had to be reminded that they had some bad in them&mdash;instinctive
idolatries and silent treasons which they always tried to forget. It is
in connection with these crimes of wealth and culture that we face the
real problem of positive evil. The whole of Mr. Blatchford's controversy
about sin was vitiated throughout by one's consciousness that whenever
he wrote the word "sinner" he thought of a man in rags. But here, again,
we can find truth merely by referring to vulgar literature&mdash;its
unfailing fountain. Whoever read a detective story about poor people?
The poor have crimes; but the poor have no secrets. And it is because
the proud have secrets that they need to be detected before they are
forgiven.




THE ELF OF JAPAN

There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that I
love them but I do not like them. The point is not merely verbal, but
psychologically quite valid. Cats are the first things that occur to me
as examples of the principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature from
another star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that he
might kill them. Some of my friends take quite a high moral line about
cats. Some, like Mr. Titterton, I think, admire a cat for its moral
independence and readiness to scratch anybody "if he does not behave
himself." Others, like Mr. Belloe, regard the cat as cruel and secret, a
fit friend for witches; one who will devour everything, except, indeed,
poisoned food, "so utterly lacking is it in Christian simplicity and
humility." For my part, I have neither of these feelings. I admire cats
as I admire catkins; those little fluffy things that hang on trees. They
are both pretty and both furry, and both declare the glory of God. And
this abstract exultation in all living things is truly to be called
Love; for it is a higher feeling than mere affectional convenience; it
is a vision. It is heroic, and even saintly, in this: that it asks for
nothing in return. I love all the eats in the street as St. Francis of
Assisi loved all the birds in the wood or all the fishes in the sea; not
so much, of course, but then I am not a saint. But he did not wish to
bridle a bird and ride on its back, as one bridles and rides on a horse.
He did not wish to put a collar round a fish's neck, marked with the
name "Francis," and the address "Assisi"&mdash;as one does with a dog.
He did not wish them to belong to him or himself to belong to them;
in fact, it would be a very awkward experience to belong to a lot of
fishes. But a man does belong to his dog, in another but an equally
real sense with that in which the dog belongs to him. The two bonds of
obedience and responsibility vary very much with the dogs and the men;
but they are both bonds. In other words, a man does not merely love a
dog; as he might (in a mystical moment) love any sparrow that perched
on his windowsill or any rabbit that ran across his path. A man likes a
dog; and that is a serious matter.

To me, unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of individual taste), a
cat is a wild animal. A cat is Nature personified. Like Nature, it is
so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty. But like
Nature again, it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it is
really cruel. Perhaps it isn't; and there again it is like Nature. Men
of old time worshipped cats as they worshipped crocodiles; and those
magnificent old mystics knew what they were about. The moment in which
one really loves cats is the same as that in which one (moderately and
within reason) loves crocodiles. It is that divine instant when a man
feels himself&mdash;no, not absorbed into the unity of all things (a
loathsome fancy)&mdash;but delighting in the difference of all things.
At the moment when a man really knows he is a man he will feel, however
faintly, a kind of fairy-tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile is
a crocodile. All the more will he exult in the things that are more
evidently beautiful than crocodiles, such as flowers and birds and
eats&mdash;which are more beautiful than either. But it does not follow
that he will wish to pick all the flowers or to cage all the birds or to
own all the cats.

No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admit
that any division between men and men can be anything but a fanciful
analogy to the division between men and animals. But in the sphere of
such fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be like
eats in this respect: that I can love them without liking them. I
feel it about certain quaint and alien societies, especially about the
Japanese. The exquisite old Japanese draughtsmanship (of which we shall
see no more, now Japan has gone in for Progress and Imperialism) had a
quality that was infinitely attractive and intangible. Japanese pictures
were really rather like pictures made by cats. They were full of
feathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches. If any one will
wander in some gallery fortunate enough to have a fine collection of
those slight water-colour sketches on rice paper which come from the
remote East, he will observe many elements in them which a fanciful
person might consider feline. There is, for instance, that odd enjoyment
of the tops of trees; those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, up
to which certainly no artist, but only a cat could climb. There is that
elvish love of the full moon, as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern,
hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminous
that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is the
exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish; subjects in which
cats are said to be interested. Then there is the slanting cat-like eye
of all these Eastern gods and men&mdash;but this is getting altogether
too coincident. We shall have another racial theory in no time
(beginning "Are the Japs Cats?"), and though I shall not believe in
my theory, somebody else might. There are people among my esteemed
correspondents who might believe anything. It is enough for me to say
here that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats. I mean that I
love them. I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easy
civilisation, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bear
to the bustling, irrepressible activities of nature and man. If I were
a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure I
should love them more even than the strong winged and unwearied birds
or the fruitful, ever multiplying fish. But, as for liking them, as one
likes a dog&mdash;that is quite another matter. That would mean trusting
them.

In the old English and Scotch ballads the fairies are regarded very much
in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats. They are not
specially spoken of as evil; they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful;
but they are not trusted as good. You do not say the wrong words or give
the wrong gifts to them; and there is a curious silence about what would
happen to you if you did. Now to me, Japan, the Japan of Art, was always
a fairyland. What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as
wedding cakes; what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as
lanterns!&hellip; but... but... the missionary explained (I read in the
paper) that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture
was a mere matter of verbal translation. "The Japanese would not call
twisting the thumbs back 'torture.'"




THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remark
in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming
a peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheist
asceticism to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both an
atheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominious
to see one's country thus losing her special point of honour about
asylum and liberty. It will be quite a new departure if we begin to
protect and whitewash foreign policemen. I always understood it was
only English policemen who were absolutely spotless. A good many of us,
however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authorities
and officials are being questioned. But there is one most graphic and
extraordinary fact, which it did not lie in Mr. Lynd's way to touch
upon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasise. It is
this: that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt these
authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious
powers. All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papers
are asking whether these authorities can give an account of their
stewardship. And at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that they
shall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yet
more irresponsible stewards. Bills like the Feeble-Minded Bill and
the Inebriate Bill (very appropriate names for them) actually arm with
scorpions the hand that has chastised the Malatestas and Maleckas with
whips. The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid
person who writes certificates and "passes" this, that, or the other;
this sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparently
because he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we are asking
why the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail a
ship. In another room we are deciding that the Government and experts
shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one's body,
damn any one's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity
of a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he is
still in the dock.

The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; as
when people talk of an author's "message," without thinking whom it
is from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of
another word. It is the excellent mediaeval word "charter." I remember
the Act that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called
"The Children's Charter." Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up as
lunatics people who are not lunatics was actually called a "charter" of
the feeble-minded. Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the
Bills are right. Even were they right in theory they would be applied
only to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty.
A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were not
washed when it was proved that she had no water. From that it will be an
easy step in Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when
it is proved that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down the
ages. And when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kind
person for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for
feeblemindedness.

But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use
the word "charter." A charter does not mean a thing that does good to
people. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties.
It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of their
cigarettes: it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of
their cigars. But I think the Goldsmiths' Company would be very much
surprised if the King granted them a new charter (in place of their
mediaeval charter), and it only meant that policemen might pull the
cigars out of their mouths. It may be a good thing that all drunkards
should be locked up: and many acute statesmen (King John, for instance)
would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats could
be locked up. But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have
granted to the barons a thing called "the Great Charter" and then locked
them all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of the
word "charter" would have struck the barons with considerable surprise.
I doubt if their narrow mediaeval minds could have taken it in.

The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no
Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own
conscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand them
till he understands this word "charter." I will attempt in a moment
to state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern,
practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter
was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last
Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is called
in the current jargon "recognition"; the acknowledgment in so many words
by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If
there had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have
been a railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from the
King, defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea
still true and then almost universal: that authority is necessary
for nothing so much as for the granting of liberties. Like everything
mediaeval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort of
small copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, not
because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free.
By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were
free. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:
the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and
determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave
man a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, which
included the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with the
fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored,
however dimly, in the whole system. There was a great deal of gross
inequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was taken
for granted. But the point is that equality and inequality were
ranks&mdash;or rights. There were not only things one was forbidden
to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not only
definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays of
his soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers alive
in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a "chartered" libertine.

Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every
man's door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes
liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel
that the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker.
But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held that
the wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it had
a father.




THE CONTENTED MAN

The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritating
because it is dull. It prepares the mind for a little sermon in the
style of the Vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfied
with our countrified innocence and our simple village sports. The word,
however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected; the "sweet
content" of the poet and the "cubic content" of the mathematician. Some
distinguish these by stressing the different syllables. Thus, it might
happen to any of us, at some social juncture, to remark gaily, "Of the
content of the King of the Cannibal Islands' Stewpot I am content to be
ignorant"; or "Not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe,
you are stealing the spoons." And there really is an analogy between the
mathematical and the moral use of the term, for lack of the observation
of which the latter has been much weakened and misused.

The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved in so far
that the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insane
peril of our tall and toppling cities. Content suggests some kind of
security; and it is not strange that our workers should often think
about rising above their position, since they have so continually to
think about sinking below it. The philanthropist who urges the poor to
saving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets. To
advise people to be content with what they have got may or may not be
sound moral philosophy.

But to urge people to be content with what they haven't got is a piece
of impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon. But though the
creed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs,
it remains true for the normal of mortal life. We speak of divine
discontent; discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content must
always be the human thing. It may be true that a particular man, in his
relation to his master or his neighbour, to his country or his enemies,
will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angry
justice. But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that man
as a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posture
towards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will be
wise to cultivate dissatisfaction. In a broad estimate of our earthly
experience, the great truism on the tablet remains: he must not covet
his neighbour's ox nor his ass nor anything that is his. In highly
complex and scientific civilisations he may sometimes find himself
forced into an exceptional vigilance. But, then, in highly complex and
scientific civilisations, nine times out of ten, he only wants his own
ass back.

But I wish to urge the case for cubic content; in which (even more than
in moral content) I take a personal interest. Now, moral content has
been undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the other
meaning. It has become a negative rather than a positive thing. In some
accounts of contentment it seems to be little more than a meek despair.

But this is not the true meaning of the term; it should stand for the
idea of a positive and thorough appreciation of the content of anything;
for feeling the substance and not merely the surface of experience.
"Content" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased;
placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented with
bread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It ought
to mean caring for bread and cheese; handling and enjoying the cubic
content of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Being
content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and
resigned to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there is
to appreciate in such a position; such as the quaint and elvish slope of
the ceiling or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney-pots. And
in this sense contentment is a real and even an active virtue; it is not
only affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forget
the attic in poetic musings; he remembers whatever the attic has of
poetry; he realises how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned and
simple&mdash;in short, how Attic is the attic.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of
getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and
it is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes so
cold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been
"through" things; when it is evident that they have come out on the
other side quite unchanged. A man might have gone "through" a plum
pudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding; it depends on the
size of the pudding&mdash;and the man. But the awful and sacred question
is "Has the pudding been through him?" Has he tasted, appreciated, and
absorbed the solid pudding, with its three dimensions and its three
thousand tastes and smells? Can he offer himself to the eyes of men as
one who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding?

In the same way we may ask of those who profess to have passed through
trivial or tragic experiences whether they have absorbed the content
of them; whether they licked up such living water as there was. It is a
pertinent question in connection with many modern problems.

Thus the young genius says, "I have lived in my dreary and squalid
village before I found success in Paris or Vienna." The sound
philosopher will answer, "You have never lived in your village, or you
would not call it dreary and squalid."

Thus the Imperialist, the Colonial idealist (who commonly speaks and
always thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, "I've been right away from
these little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies." The
sound philosopher will reply, "You have never been in these islands; you
have never seen the weald of Sussex or the plain of Salisbury; otherwise
you could never have called them either muddy or little."

Thus the Suffragette will say, "I have passed through the paltry duties
of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have come
out to intellectual liberty." The sound philosopher will answer, "You
have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it
vulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetry
in pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them." It is
right for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna;
it is right for the stray Englishman to climb across the high shoulder
of the world; it is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedrae
or high places she can allow to her sexual dignity. But it is wrong that
any of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed.
But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences really
record their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has not
succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is the
clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarian
principles) to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally a
woman angry about the past she never had.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and
love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really
been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them
back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because
we have drunk them dry.




THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL

I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover
a very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all the
controversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gather
up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things;
and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace&mdash;or in
other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-needed
work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for
the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last
roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly
irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like
the Ten Commandments. I would call it "Don'ts for Dogmatists; or Things
I am Tired Of."

This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would
begin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailing
imprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it might
begin thus:&mdash;

(1) Don't use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun.
An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict. Don't say, "Give me a
patriotism that is free from all boundaries." It is like saying, "Give
me a pork pie with no pork in it." Don't say, "I look forward to that
larger religion that shall have no special dogmas." It is like saying,
"I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet." A
quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something
that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't let
the meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberant
adjective.

(2) Don't say you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. This
practice is very flourishing and successful with public speakers. The
trick consists of first repudiating a certain view in unfavourable
terms, and then repeating the same view in favourable terms. Perhaps the
simplest form of it may be found in a landlord of my neighbourhood, who
said to his tenants in an election speech, "Of course I'm not going to
threaten you, but if this Budget passes the rents will go up." The thing
can be done in many forms besides this. "I am the last man to
mention party politics; but when I see the Empire rent in pieces by
irresponsible Radicals," etc. "In this hall we welcome all creeds. We
have no hostility against any honest belief; but only against that black
priestcraft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as," etc.
"I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany.
But this I will say; that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulous
armament," etc. Please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not to
make a remark. But don't fancy that you have somehow softened the saying
of a thing by having just promised not to say it.

(3) Don't use secondary words as primary words. "Happiness" (let us say)
is a primary word. You know when you have the thing, and you jolly well
know when you haven't. "Progress" is a secondary word; it means the
degree of one's approach to happiness, or to some such solid ideal. But
modern controversies constantly turn on asking, "Does Happiness help
Progress?" Thus, I see in the New Age this week a letter from Mr.
Egerton Swann, in which he warns the world against me and my friend Mr.
Belloc, on the ground that our democracy is "spasmodic" (whatever that
means); while our "reactionism is settled and permanent." It never
strikes Mr. Swann that democracy means something in itself; while
"reactionism" means nothing&mdash;except in connection with democracy.
You cannot react except from something. If Mr. Swann thinks I have ever
reacted from the doctrine that the people should rule, I wish he would
give me the reference.

(4) Don't say, "There is no true creed; for each creed believes itself
right and the others wrong." Probably one of the creeds is right and
the others are wrong. Diversity does show that most of the views must
be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they all must be
wrong. I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with more
desperate sincerity than about which horse will win the Derby. These are
certainly solemn convictions; men risk ruin for them. The man who puts
his shirt on Potosi must believe in that animal, and each of the other
men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in
them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are
wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of
the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand
for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy.
Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been
known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in
first. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that there
was one well-founded belief. I believe (merely upon authority) that the
world is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangular
or oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape, and
therefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat, with the wail of
imprecation, don't say that the variety of creeds prevents you from
accepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark.

(5) Don't (if any one calls your doctrine mad, which is likely enough),
don't answer that madmen are only the minority and the sane only the
majority. The sane are sane because they are the corporate substance of
mankind; the insane are not a minority because they are not a mob. The
man who thinks himself a man thinks the next man a man; he reckons his
neighbour as himself. But the man who thinks he is a chicken does not
try to look through the man who thinks he is glass. The man who thinks
himself Jesus Christ does not quarrel with the man who thinks himself
Rockefeller; as would certainly happen if the two had ever met. But
madmen never meet. It is the only thing they cannot do. They can talk,
they can inspire, they can fight, they can found religions; but they
cannot meet. Maniacs can never be the majority; for the simple reason
that they can never be even a minority. If two madmen had ever agreed
they might have conquered the world.

(6) Don't say that the idea of human equality is absurd, because some
men are tall and some short, some clever and some stupid. At the height
of the French Revolution it was noticed that Danton was tall and Murat
short. In the wildest popular excitement of America it is known that
Rockefeller is stupid and that Bryan is clever. The doctrine of human
equality reposes upon this: That there is no man really clever who has
not found that he is stupid. That there is no big man who has not felt
small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.

(7) Don't say (O don't say) that Primitive Man knocked down a woman
with a club and carried her away. Why on earth should he? Does the male
sparrow knock down the female sparrow with a twig? Does the male giraffe
knock down the female giraffe with a palm tree? Why should the male
have had to use any violence at any time in order to make the female a
female? Why should the woman roll herself in the mire lower than the
sow or the she-bear; and profess to have been a slave where all these
creatures were creators; where all these beasts were gods? Do not
talk such bosh. I implore you, I supplicate you not to talk such bosh.
Utterly and absolutely abolish all such bosh&mdash;and we may yet
begin to discuss these public questions properly. But I fear my list of
protests grows too long; and I know it could grow longer for ever. The
reader must forgive my elongations and elaborations. I fancied for the
moment that I was writing a book.









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Project Gutenberg's The Innocence of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Innocence of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: July 6, 2008 [EBook #204]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN ***




Produced by Judith Boss





THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

By G. K. Chesterton

                  Contents


                  The Blue Cross
                  The Secret Garden
                  The Queer Feet
                  The Flying Stars
                  The Invisible Man
                  The Honour of Israel Gow
                  The Wrong Shape
                  The Sins of Prince Saradine
                  The Hammer of God
                  The Eye of Apollo
                  The Sign of the Broken Sword
                  The Three Tools of Death





The Blue Cross

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of
sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies,
among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous--nor
wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight
contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official
gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket,
a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His
lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that
looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a
cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him
to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver,
that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat
covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was
Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous
investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to
make the greatest arrest of the century.

Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the
great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook
of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of
the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then
taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk
or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be
certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased
keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after
the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in
his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as
statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the
daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one
extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic
stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his
outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d'instruction
upside down and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran
down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him
to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in
such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly
those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was
almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran
the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no
carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by
the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people's
doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an
unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole
letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing
his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A
sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said
that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night
merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that
he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet
suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it.
Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure,
he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a
monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was
perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's ideas were
still in process of settlement.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise,
could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin's quick
eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably
tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot. But all along his
train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than
a cat could be a disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had
already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or on
the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There was a short
railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short
market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow
lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic
priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last
case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so
much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull
as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had
several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting.
The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local
stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles
disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France, and
could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and
this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby
umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know
which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a
moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be
careful, because he had something made of real silver "with blue stones"
in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness
with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the
priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came
back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good
nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by telling everybody
about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for
someone else; he looked out steadily for anyone, rich or poor, male or
female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above
it.

He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously secure
that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland
Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in case of need; he
then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of
London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he
paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical
of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round
looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in
the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four
sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this
side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents--a restaurant
that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably
attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of
lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in
the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street
ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up to
a first-floor window. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the
yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few
clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human
eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the
exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both
these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the
instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally
murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people
reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well
expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French intelligence
is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a thinking machine";
for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A
machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking
man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that
looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear
and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by
starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They
carry a truism so far--as in the French Revolution. But exactly because
Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a
man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only
a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong,
undisputed first principles. Here he had no strong first principles.
Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all,
he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall
toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a naked state of nescience,
Valentin had a view and a method of his own.

In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when he
could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully
followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of going to the right
places--banks, police stations, rendezvous--he systematically went to
the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down every cul de
sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish, went round every crescent
that led him uselessly out of the way. He defended this crazy course
quite logically. He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way;
but if one had no clue at all it was the best, because there was just
the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be
the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must
begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something
about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietude
and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the detective's rare
romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the
steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of
black coffee.

It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted; the
slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on the table to remind
him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to his order, he proceeded
musingly to shake some white sugar into his coffee, thinking all the
time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once by a
pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire; once by having to
pay for an unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through
a telescope at a comet that might destroy the world. He thought his
detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully
realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the
detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his
coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put
salt in it.

He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come; it
was certainly a sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for sugar as a
champagne-bottle for champagne. He wondered why they should keep salt in
it. He looked to see if there were any more orthodox vessels. Yes; there
were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there was some speciality in
the condiment in the salt-cellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he
looked round at the restaurant with a refreshed air of interest, to see
if there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which
puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin.
Except for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered
walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the
bell for the waiter.

When that official hurried up, fuzzy-haired and somewhat blear-eyed at
that early hour, the detective (who was not without an appreciation of
the simpler forms of humour) asked him to taste the sugar and see if
it was up to the high reputation of the hotel. The result was that the
waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.

"Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every morning?"
inquired Valentin. "Does changing the salt and sugar never pall on you
as a jest?"

The waiter, when this irony grew clearer, stammeringly assured him that
the establishment had certainly no such intention; it must be a most
curious mistake. He picked up the sugar-basin and looked at it; he
picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that, his face growing more and
more bewildered. At last he abruptly excused himself, and hurrying
away, returned in a few seconds with the proprietor. The proprietor also
examined the sugar-basin and then the salt-cellar; the proprietor also
looked bewildered.

Suddenly the waiter seemed to grow inarticulate with a rush of words.

"I zink," he stuttered eagerly, "I zink it is those two clergy-men."

"What two clergymen?"

"The two clergymen," said the waiter, "that threw soup at the wall."

"Threw soup at the wall?" repeated Valentin, feeling sure this must be
some singular Italian metaphor.

"Yes, yes," said the attendant excitedly, and pointed at the dark splash
on the white paper; "threw it over there on the wall."

Valentin looked his query at the proprietor, who came to his rescue with
fuller reports.

"Yes, sir," he said, "it's quite true, though I don't suppose it has
anything to do with the sugar and salt. Two clergymen came in and drank
soup here very early, as soon as the shutters were taken down. They were
both very quiet, respectable people; one of them paid the bill and went
out; the other, who seemed a slower coach altogether, was some minutes
longer getting his things together. But he went at last. Only, the
instant before he stepped into the street he deliberately picked up
his cup, which he had only half emptied, and threw the soup slap on the
wall. I was in the back room myself, and so was the waiter; so I could
only rush out in time to find the wall splashed and the shop empty. It
don't do any particular damage, but it was confounded cheek; and I tried
to catch the men in the street. They were too far off though; I only
noticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street."

The detective was on his feet, hat settled and stick in hand. He had
already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind he could
only follow the first odd finger that pointed; and this finger was odd
enough. Paying his bill and clashing the glass doors behind him, he was
soon swinging round into the other street.

It was fortunate that even in such fevered moments his eye was cool and
quick. Something in a shop-front went by him like a mere flash; yet
he went back to look at it. The shop was a popular greengrocer and
fruiterer's, an array of goods set out in the open air and plainly
ticketed with their names and prices. In the two most prominent
compartments were two heaps, of oranges and of nuts respectively. On
the heap of nuts lay a scrap of cardboard, on which was written in bold,
blue chalk, "Best tangerine oranges, two a penny." On the oranges was
the equally clear and exact description, "Finest Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb."
M. Valentin looked at these two placards and fancied he had met this
highly subtle form of humour before, and that somewhat recently. He
drew the attention of the red-faced fruiterer, who was looking
rather sullenly up and down the street, to this inaccuracy in his
advertisements. The fruiterer said nothing, but sharply put each
card into its proper place. The detective, leaning elegantly on his
walking-cane, continued to scrutinise the shop. At last he said, "Pray
excuse my apparent irrelevance, my good sir, but I should like to ask
you a question in experimental psychology and the association of ideas."

The red-faced shopman regarded him with an eye of menace; but he
continued gaily, swinging his cane, "Why," he pursued, "why are two
tickets wrongly placed in a greengrocer's shop like a shovel hat that
has come to London for a holiday? Or, in case I do not make myself
clear, what is the mystical association which connects the idea of nuts
marked as oranges with the idea of two clergymen, one tall and the other
short?"

The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's; he
really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself upon the stranger.
At last he stammered angrily: "I don't know what you 'ave to do with it,
but if you're one of their friends, you can tell 'em from me that I'll
knock their silly 'eads off, parsons or no parsons, if they upset my
apples again."

"Indeed?" asked the detective, with great sympathy. "Did they upset your
apples?"

"One of 'em did," said the heated shopman; "rolled 'em all over the
street. I'd 'ave caught the fool but for havin' to pick 'em up."

"Which way did these parsons go?" asked Valentin.

"Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the square,"
said the other promptly.

"Thanks," replied Valentin, and vanished like a fairy. On the other side
of the second square he found a policeman, and said: "This is urgent,
constable; have you seen two clergymen in shovel hats?"

The policeman began to chuckle heavily. "I 'ave, sir; and if you arst
me, one of 'em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the road that
bewildered that--"

"Which way did they go?" snapped Valentin.

"They took one of them yellow buses over there," answered the man; "them
that go to Hampstead."

Valentin produced his official card and said very rapidly: "Call up two
of your men to come with me in pursuit," and crossed the road with such
contagious energy that the ponderous policeman was moved to almost agile
obedience. In a minute and a half the French detective was joined on the
opposite pavement by an inspector and a man in plain clothes.

"Well, sir," began the former, with smiling importance, "and what
may--?"

Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. "I'll tell you on the top of
that omnibus," he said, and was darting and dodging across the tangle of
the traffic. When all three sank panting on the top seats of the yellow
vehicle, the inspector said: "We could go four times as quick in a
taxi."

"Quite true," replied their leader placidly, "if we only had an idea of
where we were going."

"Well, where are you going?" asked the other, staring.

Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing his
cigarette, he said: "If you know what a man's doing, get in front of
him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him. Stray
when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may
see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do is to keep our
eyes skinned for a queer thing."

"What sort of queer thing do you mean?" asked the inspector.

"Any sort of queer thing," answered Valentin, and relapsed into
obstinate silence.

The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed like
hours on end; the great detective would not explain further, and perhaps
his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his errand. Perhaps,
also, they felt a silent and growing desire for lunch, for the hours
crept long past the normal luncheon hour, and the long roads of the
North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like
an infernal telescope. It was one of those journeys on which a man
perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the
universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell
Park. London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then
was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels.
It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar cities all
just touching each other. But though the winter twilight was already
threatening the road ahead of them, the Parisian detective still sat
silent and watchful, eyeing the frontage of the streets that slid by on
either side. By the time they had left Camden Town behind, the policemen
were nearly asleep; at least, they gave something like a jump as
Valentin leapt erect, struck a hand on each man's shoulder, and shouted
to the driver to stop.

They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising why they
had been dislodged; when they looked round for enlightenment they found
Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left
side of the road. It was a large window, forming part of the long
facade of a gilt and palatial public-house; it was the part reserved for
respectable dining, and labelled "Restaurant." This window, like all the
rest along the frontage of the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass;
but in the middle of it was a big, black smash, like a star in the ice.

"Our cue at last," cried Valentin, waving his stick; "the place with the
broken window."

"What window? What cue?" asked his principal assistant. "Why, what proof
is there that this has anything to do with them?"

Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage.

"Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why, of
course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do with
them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must either follow one
wild possibility or else go home to bed?" He banged his way into the
restaurant, followed by his companions, and they were soon seated at a
late luncheon at a little table, and looked at the star of smashed glass
from the inside. Not that it was very informative to them even then.

"Got your window broken, I see," said Valentin to the waiter as he paid
the bill.

"Yes, sir," answered the attendant, bending busily over the change, to
which Valentin silently added an enormous tip. The waiter straightened
himself with mild but unmistakable animation.

"Ah, yes, sir," he said. "Very odd thing, that, sir."

"Indeed?" Tell us about it," said the detective with careless curiosity.

"Well, two gents in black came in," said the waiter; "two of those
foreign parsons that are running about. They had a cheap and quiet
little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out. The other was
just going out to join him when I looked at my change again and found
he'd paid me more than three times too much. 'Here,' I says to the chap
who was nearly out of the door, 'you've paid too much.' 'Oh,' he says,
very cool, 'have we?' 'Yes,' I says, and picks up the bill to show him.
Well, that was a knock-out."

"What do you mean?" asked his interlocutor.

"Well, I'd have sworn on seven Bibles that I'd put 4s. on that bill. But
now I saw I'd put 14s., as plain as paint."

"Well?" cried Valentin, moving slowly, but with burning eyes, "and
then?"

"The parson at the door he says all serene, 'Sorry to confuse your
accounts, but it'll pay for the window.' 'What window?' I says. 'The
one I'm going to break,' he says, and smashed that blessed pane with his
umbrella."

All three inquirers made an exclamation; and the inspector said under
his breath, "Are we after escaped lunatics?" The waiter went on with
some relish for the ridiculous story:

"I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn't do anything. The man
marched out of the place and joined his friend just round the corner.
Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I couldn't catch them,
though I ran round the bars to do it."

"Bullock Street," said the detective, and shot up that thoroughfare as
quickly as the strange couple he pursued.

Their journey now took them through bare brick ways like tunnels;
streets with few lights and even with few windows; streets that seemed
built out of the blank backs of everything and everywhere. Dusk was
deepening, and it was not easy even for the London policemen to guess
in what exact direction they were treading. The inspector, however, was
pretty certain that they would eventually strike some part of Hampstead
Heath. Abruptly one bulging gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like
a bull's-eye lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little
garish sweetstuff shop. After an instant's hesitation he went in; he
stood amid the gaudy colours of the confectionery with entire gravity
and bought thirteen chocolate cigars with a certain care. He was clearly
preparing an opening; but he did not need one.

An angular, elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his elegant
appearance with a merely automatic inquiry; but when she saw the door
behind him blocked with the blue uniform of the inspector, her eyes
seemed to wake up.

"Oh," she said, "if you've come about that parcel, I've sent it off
already."

"Parcel?" repeated Valentin; and it was his turn to look inquiring.

"I mean the parcel the gentleman left--the clergyman gentleman."

"For goodness' sake," said Valentin, leaning forward with his first
real confession of eagerness, "for Heaven's sake tell us what happened
exactly."

"Well," said the woman a little doubtfully, "the clergymen came in about
half an hour ago and bought some peppermints and talked a bit, and then
went off towards the Heath. But a second after, one of them runs
back into the shop and says, 'Have I left a parcel!' Well, I looked
everywhere and couldn't see one; so he says, 'Never mind; but if it
should turn up, please post it to this address,' and he left me the
address and a shilling for my trouble. And sure enough, though I thought
I'd looked everywhere, I found he'd left a brown paper parcel, so I
posted it to the place he said. I can't remember the address now; it
was somewhere in Westminster. But as the thing seemed so important, I
thought perhaps the police had come about it."

"So they have," said Valentin shortly. "Is Hampstead Heath near here?"

"Straight on for fifteen minutes," said the woman, "and you'll come
right out on the open." Valentin sprang out of the shop and began to
run. The other detectives followed him at a reluctant trot.

The street they threaded was so narrow and shut in by shadows that when
they came out unexpectedly into the void common and vast sky they were
startled to find the evening still so light and clear. A perfect dome
of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark
violet distances. The glowing green tint was just deep enough to pick
out in points of crystal one or two stars. All that was left of the
daylight lay in a golden glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that
popular hollow which is called the Vale of Health. The holiday makers
who roam this region had not wholly dispersed; a few couples sat
shapelessly on benches; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked
in one of the swings. The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around
the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking
across the valley, Valentin beheld the thing which he sought.

Among the black and breaking groups in that distance was one especially
black which did not break--a group of two figures clerically clad.
Though they seemed as small as insects, Valentin could see that one of
them was much smaller than the other. Though the other had a student's
stoop and an inconspicuous manner, he could see that the man was well
over six feet high. He shut his teeth and went forward, whirling his
stick impatiently. By the time he had substantially diminished the
distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope,
he had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet
which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could
be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of
the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned
about his brown paper parcels.

Now, so far as this went, everything fitted in finally and rationally
enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father
Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with sapphires, a
relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign priests at the
congress. This undoubtedly was the "silver with blue stones"; and Father
Brown undoubtedly was the little greenhorn in the train. Now there
was nothing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found out
Flambeau had also found out; Flambeau found out everything. Also there
was nothing wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau heard of a sapphire
cross he should try to steal it; that was the most natural thing in all
natural history. And most certainly there was nothing wonderful about
the fact that Flambeau should have it all his own way with such a silly
sheep as the man with the umbrella and the parcels. He was the sort of
man whom anybody could lead on a string to the North Pole; it was not
surprising that an actor like Flambeau, dressed as another priest, could
lead him to Hampstead Heath. So far the crime seemed clear enough; and
while the detective pitied the priest for his helplessness, he almost
despised Flambeau for condescending to so gullible a victim. But when
Valentin thought of all that had happened in between, of all that had
led him to his triumph, he racked his brains for the smallest rhyme or
reason in it. What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from a
priest from Essex to do with chucking soup at wall paper? What had it
to do with calling nuts oranges, or with paying for windows first and
breaking them afterwards? He had come to the end of his chase; yet
somehow he had missed the middle of it. When he failed (which was
seldom), he had usually grasped the clue, but nevertheless missed the
criminal. Here he had grasped the criminal, but still he could not grasp
the clue.

The two figures that they followed were crawling like black flies
across the huge green contour of a hill. They were evidently sunk in
conversation, and perhaps did not notice where they were going; but they
were certainly going to the wilder and more silent heights of the Heath.
As their pursuers gained on them, the latter had to use the undignified
attitudes of the deer-stalker, to crouch behind clumps of trees and
even to crawl prostrate in deep grass. By these ungainly ingenuities the
hunters even came close enough to the quarry to hear the murmur of the
discussion, but no word could be distinguished except the word "reason"
recurring frequently in a high and almost childish voice. Once over
an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets, the detectives
actually lost the two figures they were following. They did not find the
trail again for an agonising ten minutes, and then it led round the brow
of a great dome of hill overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and desolate
sunset scenery. Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was
an old ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in
serious speech together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to
the darkening horizon; but the dome above was turning slowly from
peacock-green to peacock-blue, and the stars detached themselves more
and more like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin
contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, standing there
in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests for the first
time.

After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped by a
devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English policemen to the
wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner than seeking figs on
its thistles. For the two priests were talking exactly like priests,
piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of
theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round
face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his
head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more
innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white
Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's sentences,
which ended: "... what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the
heavens being incorruptible."

The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

"Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can
look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be
wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?"

"No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the
last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge
the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone
on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the
Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said:

"Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?"

"Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning sharply
in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of
truth."

Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with silent fury.
He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom
he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only to listen to the
metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons. In his impatience he lost
the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric, and when he listened
again it was again Father Brown who was speaking:

"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look
at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and
sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please.
Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon
is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all
that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason
and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of
pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'"

Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching
attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled by the one
great folly of his life. But something in the very silence of the tall
priest made him stop until the latter spoke. When at last he did speak,
he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees:

"Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our
reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only
bow my head."

Then, with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest shade his
attitude or voice, he added:

"Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We're all alone
here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll."

The utterly unaltered voice and attitude added a strange violence to
that shocking change of speech. But the guarder of the relic only seemed
to turn his head by the smallest section of the compass. He seemed still
to have a somewhat foolish face turned to the stars. Perhaps he had not
understood. Or, perhaps, he had understood and sat rigid with terror.

"Yes," said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the same still
posture, "yes, I am Flambeau."

Then, after a pause, he said:

"Come, will you give me that cross?"

"No," said the other, and the monosyllable had an odd sound.

Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions. The great
robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.

"No," he cried, "you won't give it me, you proud prelate. You won't give
it me, you little celibate simpleton. Shall I tell you why you won't
give it me? Because I've got it already in my own breast-pocket."

The small man from Essex turned what seemed to be a dazed face in the
dusk, and said, with the timid eagerness of "The Private Secretary":

"Are--are you sure?"

Flambeau yelled with delight.

"Really, you're as good as a three-act farce," he cried. "Yes, you
turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a duplicate of the
right parcel, and now, my friend, you've got the duplicate and I've got
the jewels. An old dodge, Father Brown--a very old dodge."

"Yes," said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair with the
same strange vagueness of manner. "Yes, I've heard of it before."

The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest with a
sort of sudden interest.

"You have heard of it?" he asked. "Where have you heard of it?"

"Well, I mustn't tell you his name, of course," said the little man
simply. "He was a penitent, you know. He had lived prosperously for
about twenty years entirely on duplicate brown paper parcels. And so,
you see, when I began to suspect you, I thought of this poor chap's way
of doing it at once."

"Began to suspect me?" repeated the outlaw with increased intensity.
"Did you really have the gumption to suspect me just because I brought
you up to this bare part of the heath?"

"No, no," said Brown with an air of apology. "You see, I suspected you
when we first met. It's that little bulge up the sleeve where you people
have the spiked bracelet."

"How in Tartarus," cried Flambeau, "did you ever hear of the spiked
bracelet?"

"Oh, one's little flock, you know!" said Father Brown, arching his
eyebrows rather blankly. "When I was a curate in Hartlepool, there were
three of them with spiked bracelets. So, as I suspected you from the
first, don't you see, I made sure that the cross should go safe, anyhow.
I'm afraid I watched you, you know. So at last I saw you change the
parcels. Then, don't you see, I changed them back again. And then I left
the right one behind."

"Left it behind?" repeated Flambeau, and for the first time there was
another note in his voice beside his triumph.

"Well, it was like this," said the little priest, speaking in the same
unaffected way. "I went back to that sweet-shop and asked if I'd left a
parcel, and gave them a particular address if it turned up. Well, I knew
I hadn't; but when I went away again I did. So, instead of running after
me with that valuable parcel, they have sent it flying to a friend of
mine in Westminster." Then he added rather sadly: "I learnt that, too,
from a poor fellow in Hartlepool. He used to do it with handbags he
stole at railway stations, but he's in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to
know, you know," he added, rubbing his head again with the same sort of
desperate apology. "We can't help being priests. People come and tell us
these things."

Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his inner pocket and rent it
in pieces. There was nothing but paper and sticks of lead inside it. He
sprang to his feet with a gigantic gesture, and cried:

"I don't believe you. I don't believe a bumpkin like you could manage
all that. I believe you've still got the stuff on you, and if you don't
give it up--why, we're all alone, and I'll take it by force!"

"No," said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, "you won't take it
by force. First, because I really haven't still got it. And, second,
because we are not alone."

Flambeau stopped in his stride forward.

"Behind that tree," said Father Brown, pointing, "are two strong
policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did they come here, do
you ask? Why, I brought them, of course! How did I do it? Why, I'll tell
you if you like! Lord bless you, we have to know twenty such things
when we work among the criminal classes! Well, I wasn't sure you were
a thief, and it would never do to make a scandal against one of our
own clergy. So I just tested you to see if anything would make you show
yourself. A man generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his
coffee; if he doesn't, he has some reason for keeping quiet. I changed
the salt and sugar, and you kept quiet. A man generally objects if
his bill is three times too big. If he pays it, he has some motive for
passing unnoticed. I altered your bill, and you paid it."

The world seemed waiting for Flambeau to leap like a tiger. But he was
held back as by a spell; he was stunned with the utmost curiosity.

"Well," went on Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, "as you wouldn't
leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to. At every
place we went to, I took care to do something that would get us talked
about for the rest of the day. I didn't do much harm--a splashed wall,
spilt apples, a broken window; but I saved the cross, as the cross will
always be saved. It is at Westminster by now. I rather wonder you didn't
stop it with the Donkey's Whistle."

"With the what?" asked Flambeau.

"I'm glad you've never heard of it," said the priest, making a face.
"It's a foul thing. I'm sure you're too good a man for a Whistler. I
couldn't have countered it even with the Spots myself; I'm not strong
enough in the legs."

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the other.

"Well, I did think you'd know the Spots," said Father Brown, agreeably
surprised. "Oh, you can't have gone so very wrong yet!"

"How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" cried Flambeau.

The shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his clerical
opponent.

"Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose," he said. "Has it never
struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins
is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a matter of
fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest."

"What?" asked the thief, almost gaping.

"You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It's bad theology."

And even as he turned away to collect his property, the three policemen
came out from under the twilight trees. Flambeau was an artist and a
sportsman. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.

"Do not bow to me, mon ami," said Valentin with silver clearness. "Let
us both bow to our master."

And they both stood an instant uncovered while the little Essex priest
blinked about for his umbrella.




The Secret Garden


Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner,
and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These were, however,
reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar,
and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table
in the entrance hall--a hall hung with weapons. Valentin's house was
perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house,
with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the
oddity--and perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that
there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which
was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large and elaborate,
and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was
no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall,
smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden,
perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn
to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned that he
was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making some last
arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these
duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with
precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about
their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French--and largely
over European--policial methods, his great influence had been honourably
used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the
red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with
grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on
the grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had
carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few
seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon
was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin
regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as
his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the
most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood,
at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his
guests had already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he
entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not
there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party;
he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a choleric old man with a
russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He
saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face
sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a
pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He
saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with
her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon,
a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a
forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty
of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating
the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had
recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more interest than any
of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without
receiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to
pay his respects to his host. This was Commandant O'Brien, of the
French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,
clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an
officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful
suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth
an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and
now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging
about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador's
family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked
away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each
other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No
one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin
was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose
friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and
triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that
multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small
religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for
the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr.
Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was
ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was
an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American
Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more "progressive"
than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought "progressive."
He thought Valentin "progressive," thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive
as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us
can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge
fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without
so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well
brushed back like a German's; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise
infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not
long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American;
his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with
all speed into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.

Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough. So long
as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer O'Brien, her
father was quite satisfied; and she had not done so, she had decorously
gone in with Dr. Simon. Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and
almost rude. He was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the
cigars, three of the younger men--Simon the doctor, Brown the priest,
and the detrimental O'Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform--all melted
away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory, then the
English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He was stung
every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp O'Brien might be
signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not attempt to imagine how. He
was left over the coffee with Brayne, the hoary Yankee who believed
in all religions, and Valentin, the grizzled Frenchman who believed in
none. They could argue with each other, but neither could appeal to
him. After a time this "progressive" logomachy had reached a crisis of
tedium; Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost
his way in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard
the high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull voice
of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he thought with
a curse, were probably arguing about "science and religion." But the
instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing--he saw what
was not there. He saw that Commandant O'Brien was absent, and that Lady
Margaret was absent too.

Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the
dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion of
protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n'er-do-well had become
something central and even mad in his mind. As he went towards the back
of the house, where was Valentin's study, he was surprised to meet his
daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second
enigma. If she had been with O'Brien, where was O'Brien! If she had
not been with O'Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and
passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the
mansion, and eventually found a servants' entrance that opened on to the
garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all
the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden.
A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn towards the study
door; a glint of moonlit silver on his facings picked him out as
Commandant O'Brien.

He vanished through the French windows into the house, leaving Lord
Galloway in an indescribable temper, at once virulent and vague. The
blue-and-silver garden, like a scene in a theatre, seemed to taunt him
with all that tyrannic tenderness against which his worldly authority
was at war. The length and grace of the Irishman's stride enraged him as
if he were a rival instead of a father; the moonlight maddened him.
He was trapped as if by magic into a garden of troubadours, a Watteau
fairyland; and, willing to shake off such amorous imbecilities by
speech, he stepped briskly after his enemy. As he did so he tripped over
some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with irritation
and then a second time with curiosity. The next instant the moon and the
tall poplars looked at an unusual sight--an elderly English diplomatist
running hard and crying or bellowing as he ran.

His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the beaming
glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon, who heard the nobleman's first
clear words. Lord Galloway was crying: "A corpse in the grass--a
blood-stained corpse." O'Brien at last had gone utterly out of his mind.

"We must tell Valentin at once," said the doctor, when the other had
brokenly described all that he had dared to examine. "It is fortunate
that he is here;" and even as he spoke the great detective entered the
study, attracted by the cry. It was almost amusing to note his typical
transformation; he had come with the common concern of a host and a
gentleman, fearing that some guest or servant was ill. When he was
told the gory fact, he turned with all his gravity instantly bright and
businesslike; for this, however abrupt and awful, was his business.

"Strange, gentlemen," he said as they hurried out into the garden, "that
I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth, and now one comes and
settles in my own back-yard. But where is the place?" They crossed the
lawn less easily, as a slight mist had begun to rise from the river; but
under the guidance of the shaken Galloway they found the body sunken
in deep grass--the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay
face downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad
in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp or
two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed. A scarlet
serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.

"At least," said Simon, with a deep and singular intonation, "he is none
of our party."

"Examine him, doctor," cried Valentin rather sharply. "He may not be
dead."

The doctor bent down. "He is not quite cold, but I am afraid he is dead
enough," he answered. "Just help me to lift him up."

They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground, and all doubts as
to his being really dead were settled at once and frightfully. The head
fell away. It had been entirely sundered from the body; whoever had
cut his throat had managed to sever the neck as well. Even Valentin
was slightly shocked. "He must have been as strong as a gorilla," he
muttered.

Not without a shiver, though he was used to anatomical abortions, Dr.
Simon lifted the head. It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw,
but the face was substantially unhurt. It was a ponderous, yellow face,
at once sunken and swollen, with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face
of a wicked Roman emperor, with, perhaps, a distant touch of a Chinese
emperor. All present seemed to look at it with the coldest eye of
ignorance. Nothing else could be noted about the man except that, as
they had lifted his body, they had seen underneath it the white gleam of
a shirt-front defaced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Simon said,
the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been
trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an occasion.

Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined with his closest
professional attention the grass and ground for some twenty yards round
the body, in which he was assisted less skillfully by the doctor, and
quite vaguely by the English lord. Nothing rewarded their grovellings
except a few twigs, snapped or chopped into very small lengths, which
Valentin lifted for an instant's examination and then tossed away.

"Twigs," he said gravely; "twigs, and a total stranger with his head cut
off; that is all there is on this lawn."

There was an almost creepy stillness, and then the unnerved Galloway
called out sharply:

"Who's that! Who's that over there by the garden wall!"

A small figure with a foolishly large head drew waveringly near them in
the moonlit haze; looked for an instant like a goblin, but turned out to
be the harmless little priest whom they had left in the drawing-room.

"I say," he said meekly, "there are no gates to this garden, do you
know."

Valentin's black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as they did
on principle at the sight of the cassock. But he was far too just a man
to deny the relevance of the remark. "You are right," he said. "Before
we find out how he came to be killed, we may have to find out how he
came to be here. Now listen to me, gentlemen. If it can be done without
prejudice to my position and duty, we shall all agree that certain
distinguished names might well be kept out of this. There are ladies,
gentlemen, and there is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as
a crime, then it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use
my own discretion. I am the head of the police; I am so public that I
can afford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear everyone of my own
guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else. Gentlemen, upon
your honour, you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon;
there are bedrooms for all. Simon, I think you know where to find my
man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a confidential man. Tell him to
leave another servant on guard and come to me at once. Lord Galloway,
you are certainly the best person to tell the ladies what has happened,
and prevent a panic. They also must stay. Father Brown and I will remain
with the body."

When this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a
bugle. Dr. Simon went through to the armoury and routed out Ivan, the
public detective's private detective. Galloway went to the drawing-room
and told the terrible news tactfully enough, so that by the time the
company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already
soothed. Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the
head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic
statues of their two philosophies of death.

Ivan, the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches, came out
of the house like a cannon ball, and came racing across the lawn to
Valentin like a dog to his master. His livid face was quite lively
with the glow of this domestic detective story, and it was with almost
unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master's permission to examine
the remains.

"Yes; look, if you like, Ivan," said Valentin, "but don't be long. We
must go in and thrash this out in the house."

Ivan lifted the head, and then almost let it drop.

"Why," he gasped, "it's--no, it isn't; it can't be. Do you know this
man, sir?"

"No," said Valentin indifferently; "we had better go inside."

Between them they carried the corpse to a sofa in the study, and then
all made their way to the drawing-room.

The detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hesitation;
but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize. He made a few rapid
notes upon paper in front of him, and then said shortly: "Is everybody
here?"

"Not Mr. Brayne," said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking round.

"No," said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. "And not Mr. Neil
O'Brien, I fancy. I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the
corpse was still warm."

"Ivan," said the detective, "go and fetch Commandant O'Brien and Mr.
Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is finishing a cigar in the dining-room;
Commandant O'Brien, I think, is walking up and down the conservatory. I
am not sure."

The faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before anyone could
stir or speak Valentin went on with the same soldierly swiftness of
exposition.

"Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his
head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you
think that to cut a man's throat like that would need great force? Or,
perhaps, only a very sharp knife?"

"I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all," said the
pale doctor.

"Have you any thought," resumed Valentin, "of a tool with which it could
be done?"

"Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven't," said the
doctor, arching his painful brows. "It's not easy to hack a neck through
even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a
battle-axe or an old headsman's axe, or an old two-handed sword."

"But, good heavens!" cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, "there
aren't any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here."

Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. "Tell me," he
said, still writing rapidly, "could it have been done with a long French
cavalry sabre?"

A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason,
curdled everyone's blood like the knocking in Macbeth. Amid that frozen
silence Dr. Simon managed to say: "A sabre--yes, I suppose it could."

"Thank you," said Valentin. "Come in, Ivan."

The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil
O'Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.

The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.
"What do you want with me?" he cried.

"Please sit down," said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. "Why, you
aren't wearing your sword. Where is it?"

"I left it on the library table," said O'Brien, his brogue deepening in
his disturbed mood. "It was a nuisance, it was getting--"

"Ivan," said Valentin, "please go and get the Commandant's sword from
the library." Then, as the servant vanished, "Lord Galloway says he saw
you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you
doing in the garden?"

The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. "Oh," he cried in
pure Irish, "admirin' the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy."

A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that
trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel
scabbard. "This is all I can find," he said.

"Put it on the table," said Valentin, without looking up.

There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman
silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess's weak
exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway's swollen hatred was
satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.

"I think I can tell you," cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering
voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. "I can tell you
what Mr. O'Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to
silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family
circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little
angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,"
she added, with rather a wan smile, "if he will care at all for it now.
For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing
like this."

Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in
what he imagined to be an undertone. "Hold your tongue, Maggie," he said
in a thunderous whisper. "Why should you shield the fellow? Where's his
sword? Where's his confounded cavalry--"

He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was
regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole
group.

"You old fool!" she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, "what
do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent
while with me. But if he wasn't innocent, he was still with me. If he
murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen--who must
at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own
daughter--"

Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those
satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw
the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish
adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was
full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous
paramours.

In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said: "Was it a
very long cigar?"

The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see
who had spoken.

"I mean," said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, "I
mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a
walking-stick."

Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in
Valentin's face as he lifted his head.

"Quite right," he remarked sharply. "Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne
again, and bring him here at once."

The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the
girl with an entirely new earnestness.

"Lady Margaret," he said, "we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude
and admiration for your act in rising above your lower dignity and
explaining the Commandant's conduct. But there is a hiatus still.
Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from the study to the
drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the
garden and the Commandant still walking there."

"You have to remember," replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her
voice, "that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely have come
back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he loitered behind--and
so got charged with murder."

"In those few moments," said Valentin gravely, "he might really--"

The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.

"Beg pardon, sir," he said, "but Mr. Brayne has left the house."

"Left!" cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.

"Gone. Scooted. Evaporated," replied Ivan in humorous French. "His hat
and coat are gone, too, and I'll tell you something to cap it all. I ran
outside the house to find any traces of him, and I found one, and a big
trace, too."

"What do you mean?" asked Valentin.

"I'll show you," said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked
cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in
the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan
went on quite quietly:

"I found this," he said, "flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road
to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr.
Brayne threw it when he ran away."

There was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre,
examined it, reflected with unaffected concentration of thought, and
then turned a respectful face to O'Brien. "Commandant," he said, "we
trust you will always produce this weapon if it is wanted for police
examination. Meanwhile," he added, slapping the steel back in the
ringing scabbard, "let me return you your sword."

At the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly
refrain from applause.

For Neil O'Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point of
existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again
in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien
had fallen from him; he was a man with many reasons for happiness. Lord
Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him an apology. Lady Margaret
was something better than a lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps
given him something better than an apology, as they drifted among the
old flowerbeds before breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted
and humane, for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of
suspicion was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the
strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of
the house--he had cast himself out.

Still, the riddle remained; and when O'Brien threw himself on a garden
seat beside Dr. Simon, that keenly scientific person at once resumed
it. He did not get much talk out of O'Brien, whose thoughts were on
pleasanter things.

"I can't say it interests me much," said the Irishman frankly,
"especially as it seems pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated this
stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and killed him with
my sword. Then he fled to the city, tossing the sword away as he went.
By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his
pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne's, and that seems to clinch it.
I don't see any difficulties about the business."

"There are five colossal difficulties," said the doctor quietly; "like
high walls within walls. Don't mistake me. I don't doubt that Brayne
did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that. But as to how he did it.
First difficulty: Why should a man kill another man with a great hulking
sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket knife and put it back
in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry?
Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer
no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the
evening; and a rat cannot get into Valentin's garden anywhere. How did
the dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same
conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?"

"And the fifth," said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who
was coming slowly up the path.

"Is a trifle, I suppose," said the doctor, "but I think an odd one. When
I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had
struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the
truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was
off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his
body in the moonlight?"

"Horrible!" said O'Brien, and shuddered.

The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had
waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he
said awkwardly:

"I say, I'm sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!"

"News?" repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his
glasses.

"Yes, I'm sorry," said Father Brown mildly. "There's been another
murder, you know."

Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.

"And, what's stranger still," continued the priest, with his dull eye
on the rhododendrons, "it's the same disgusting sort; it's another
beheading. They found the second head actually bleeding into the river,
a few yards along Brayne's road to Paris; so they suppose that he--"

"Great Heaven!" cried O'Brien. "Is Brayne a monomaniac?"

"There are American vendettas," said the priest impassively. Then he
added: "They want you to come to the library and see it."

Commandant O'Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling
decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage;
where were these extravagant amputations going to stop? First one
head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself
bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one. As he
crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon
Valentin's table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;
and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it
was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week
showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing
features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some
note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his
sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect
which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the
grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the
newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw
the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on
Valentin's table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,
the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from
under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.
Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of
a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking
enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the
man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The
second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that
morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin's men were still
seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed
to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O'Brien's
sensibilities in the least, went up to the second head and examined it
with his blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,
fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the face,
which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal type, had been
much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.

"Good morning, Commandant O'Brien," said Valentin, with quiet
cordiality. "You have heard of Brayne's last experiment in butchery, I
suppose?"

Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he
said, without looking up:

"I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too."

"Well, it seems common sense," said Valentin, with his hands in his
pockets. "Killed in the same way as the other. Found within a few yards
of the other. And sliced by the same weapon which we know he carried
away."

"Yes, yes; I know," replied Father Brown submissively. "Yet, you know, I
doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head."

"Why not?" inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.

"Well, doctor," said the priest, looking up blinking, "can a man cut off
his own head? I don't know."

O'Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor
sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white
hair.

"Oh, there's no doubt it's Brayne," said the priest quietly. "He had
exactly that chip in the left ear."

The detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady and
glittering eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply: "You seem
to know a lot about him, Father Brown."

"I do," said the little man simply. "I've been about with him for some
weeks. He was thinking of joining our church."

The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin's eyes; he strode towards
the priest with clenched hands. "And, perhaps," he cried, with a
blasting sneer, "perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money
to your church."

"Perhaps he was," said Brown stolidly; "it is possible."

"In that case," cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, "you may indeed
know a great deal about him. About his life and about his--"

Commandant O'Brien laid a hand on Valentin's arm. "Drop that slanderous
rubbish, Valentin," he said, "or there may be more swords yet."

But Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already
recovered himself. "Well," he said shortly, "people's private opinions
can wait. You gentlemen are still bound by your promise to stay; you
must enforce it on yourselves--and on each other. Ivan here will tell
you anything more you want to know; I must get to business and write to
the authorities. We can't keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writing
in my study if there is any more news."

"Is there any more news, Ivan?" asked Dr. Simon, as the chief of police
strode out of the room.

"Only one more thing, I think, sir," said Ivan, wrinkling up his grey
old face, "but that's important, too, in its way. There's that old
buffer you found on the lawn," and he pointed without pretence of
reverence at the big black body with the yellow head. "We've found out
who he is, anyhow."

"Indeed!" cried the astonished doctor, "and who is he?"

"His name was Arnold Becker," said the under-detective, "though he went
by many aliases. He was a wandering sort of scamp, and is known to have
been in America; so that was where Brayne got his knife into him. We
didn't have much to do with him ourselves, for he worked mostly in
Germany. We've communicated, of course, with the German police. But,
oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker,
whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it necessary to
guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it's a rum thing, gentlemen, but
when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my
life. If I hadn't seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes,
I'd have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of
course, I remembered his twin brother in Germany, and following up the
clue--"

The explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that nobody was
listening to him. The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at
Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet, and was holding his
temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.

"Stop, stop, stop!" he cried; "stop talking a minute, for I see half.
Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all?
Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase
any page in Aquinas once. Will my head split--or will it see? I see
half--I only see half."

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture
of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go on staring at
this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

When Father Brown's hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and
serious, like a child's. He heaved a huge sigh, and said: "Let us get
this said and done with as quickly as possible. Look here, this will
be the quickest way to convince you all of the truth." He turned to the
doctor. "Dr. Simon," he said, "you have a strong head-piece, and I heard
you this morning asking the five hardest questions about this business.
Well, if you will ask them again, I will answer them."

Simon's pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder, but
he answered at once. "Well, the first question, you know, is why a man
should kill another with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with
a bodkin?"

"A man cannot behead with a bodkin," said Brown calmly, "and for this
murder beheading was absolutely necessary."

"Why?" asked O'Brien, with interest.

"And the next question?" asked Father Brown.

"Well, why didn't the man cry out or anything?" asked the doctor;
"sabres in gardens are certainly unusual."

"Twigs," said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked
on the scene of death. "No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should
they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not
snapped off; they were chopped off. The murderer occupied his enemy
with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he could cut a branch in
mid-air, or what-not. Then, while his enemy bent down to see the result,
a silent slash, and the head fell."

"Well," said the doctor slowly, "that seems plausible enough. But my
next two questions will stump anyone."

The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

"You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,"
went on the doctor. "Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?"

Without turning round, the little priest answered: "There never was any
strange man in the garden."

There was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost childish
laughter relieved the strain. The absurdity of Brown's remark moved Ivan
to open taunts.

"Oh!" he cried; "then we didn't lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last
night? He hadn't got into the garden, I suppose?"

"Got into the garden?" repeated Brown reflectively. "No, not entirely."

"Hang it all," cried Simon, "a man gets into a garden, or he doesn't."

"Not necessarily," said the priest, with a faint smile. "What is the
nest question, doctor?"

"I fancy you're ill," exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; "but I'll ask the
next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?"

"He didn't get out of the garden," said the priest, still looking out of
the window.

"Didn't get out of the garden?" exploded Simon.

"Not completely," said Father Brown.

Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. "A man gets out of a
garden, or he doesn't," he cried.

"Not always," said Father Brown.

Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. "I have no time to spare on
such senseless talk," he cried angrily. "If you can't understand a man
being on one side of a wall or the other, I won't trouble you further."

"Doctor," said the cleric very gently, "we have always got on very
pleasantly together. If only for the sake of old friendship, stop and
tell me your fifth question."

The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: "The
head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done
after death."

"Yes," said the motionless priest, "it was done so as to make you assume
exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume. It was done to
make you take for granted that the head belonged to the body."

The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved
horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all
the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural fancy has begotten. A
voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: "Keep out
of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid
the evil garden where died the man with two heads." Yet, while these
shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish
soul, his Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the
odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window,
with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow they could see
it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite sensibly, as if there
were no Gaelic souls on earth.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you did not find the strange body of Becker in
the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. In face
of Dr. Simon's rationalism, I still affirm that Becker was only partly
present. Look here!" (pointing to the black bulk of the mysterious
corpse) "you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this
man?"

He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in
its place the white-maned head beside it. And there, complete, unified,
unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

"The murderer," went on Brown quietly, "hacked off his enemy's head and
flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the
sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to
clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he insisted on a private
inquest) you all imagined a totally new man."

"Clap on another head!" said O'Brien staring. "What other head? Heads
don't grow on garden bushes, do they?"

"No," said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots; "there
is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket of the
guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide Valentin, was
standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute
more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an honest man, if being
mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see in that
cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to
break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for
it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne's crazy
millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did
little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that
Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and
that was quite a different thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the
impoverished and pugnacious Church of France; he would support six
Nationalist newspapers like The Guillotine. The battle was already
balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk. He resolved
to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the
greatest of detectives to commit his only crime. He abstracted the
severed head of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home
in his official box. He had that last argument with Brayne, that Lord
Galloway did not hear the end of; that failing, he led him out into the
sealed garden, talked about swordsmanship, used twigs and a sabre for
illustration, and--"

Ivan of the Scar sprang up. "You lunatic," he yelled; "you'll go to my
master now, if I take you by--"

"Why, I was going there," said Brown heavily; "I must ask him to
confess, and all that."

Driving the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice, they
rushed together into the sudden stillness of Valentin's study.

The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to hear
their turbulent entrance. They paused a moment, and then something in
the look of that upright and elegant back made the doctor run forward
suddenly. A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of
pills at Valentin's elbow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and
on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato.




The Queer Feet


If you meet a member of that select club, "The Twelve True Fishermen,"
entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe,
as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not
black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address
such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it
to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed. But
you will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worth
telling.

If (to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were to meet
a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask
him what he thought was the most singular luck of his life, he would
probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon
Hotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely
by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is perhaps a little
proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his, and it is possible that
he might refer to it. But since it is immeasurably unlikely that you
will ever rise high enough in the social world to find "The Twelve
True Fishermen," or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and
criminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at
all unless you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual
dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical
society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that
topsy-turvy product--an "exclusive" commercial enterprise. That is, it
was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning
people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning
enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively
create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend
money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable
hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society
would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there
were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor
was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday
afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of a
square in Belgravia. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenient
one. But its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a
particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was held to be of
vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four people
could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the
celebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort of
veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London.
Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could
only be enjoyed in warm weather; and this making the enjoyment yet more
difficult made it yet more desired. The existing owner of the hotel was
a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it
difficult to get into. Of course he combined with this limitation in the
scope of his enterprise the most careful polish in its performance.
The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and the
demeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the
English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the
fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It was
much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in
that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness,
as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed, there was generally at
least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented to dine
anywhere but in such a place, for it insisted on a luxurious privacy;
and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club
was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual
dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures,
as if they were in a private house, especially the celebrated set
of fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the insignia of the
society, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish,
and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were always
laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most
magnificent in that magnificent repast. The society had a vast number
of ceremonies and observances, but it had no history and no object; that
was where it was so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything
in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers; unless you were already a
certain sort of person, you never even heard of them. It had been in
existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president
was the Duke of Chester.

If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel,
the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything
about it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my
friend Father Brown came to find himself in that golden galley. As far
as that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. There is in
the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the most
refined retreats with the dreadful information that all men are
brothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was
Father Brown's trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had
been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish
employer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send
for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father
Brown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that that cleric
kept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in writing out a note
or statement for the conveying of some message or the righting of some
wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence which he would
have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with a
room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind
man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any
difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual
stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something
just cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon
Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance.
There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as
startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a
new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover,
the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere
glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr.
Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, the
disgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass
down a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures,
and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right
into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar
passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately
on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts upon
the lounge--a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel bar
which probably once occupied its place.

In this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in this
place ever appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond the
office, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak
room, the last boundary of the gentlemen's domain. But between the
office and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet,
sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters,
such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining to lend him
sixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that
he permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a
mere priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which Father
Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this
one, only it will never be known. I can merely state that it was very
nearly as long, and that the last two or three paragraphs of it were the
least exciting and absorbing.

For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a
little to allow his thoughts to wander and his animal senses, which were
commonly keen, to awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawing
on; his own forgotten little room was without a light, and perhaps the
gathering gloom, as occasionally happens, sharpened the sense of sound.
As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document,
he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside,
just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train. When he
became conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the ordinary
patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikely
matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to
the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds dreamily, he got to
his feet and listened intently, with his head a little on one side.
Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands, now not merely
listening, but listening and thinking also.

The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear in
any hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was something very strange
about them. There were no other footsteps. It was always a very silent
house, for the few familiar guests went at once to their own apartments,
and the well-trained waiters were told to be almost invisible until
they were wanted. One could not conceive any place where there was less
reason to apprehend anything irregular. But these footsteps were so
odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular. Father
Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table, like a man
trying to learn a tune on the piano.

First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man
might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped
and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter
of the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the last
echoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light,
hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was
certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been said)
there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small
but unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that
cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question
his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen
men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in order
to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other
description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs. The
man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order
to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slow
at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other. Neither
suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and
darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell
seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of
vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural or
symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance? Or some entirely
new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself with
more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it
certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk
with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant or
messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer
orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly
drunk, but generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand
or sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with
a kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring what
noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of this earth. It was
a gentleman of western Europe, and probably one who had never worked for
his living.

Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker
one, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked
that though this step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless,
almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated
in his mind with secrecy, but with something else--something that he
could not remember. He was maddened by one of those half-memories that
make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift
walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in
his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on the
passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the other
into the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, and
found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full of
purple cloud cleft by livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil as
a dog smells rats.

The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its
supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should
lock the door, and would come later to release him. He told himself that
twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds
outside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left to
finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as to
catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once more
into the almost completed record. He had written for about twenty
minutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light;
then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had
walked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked.
This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming
along the corridor, like the pads of a fleeing and leaping panther.
Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearing
excitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office like a sort
of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old slow,
swaggering stamp.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to
be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The
attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the
only guests were at dinner and his office was a sinecure. After groping
through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloak room
opened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter or
half-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handed
umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately above
the semicircular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination on
Father Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim
sunset window behind him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on the
man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an air
of not taking up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like
a shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive.
His face, now flung back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious,
the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners good humoured
and confident; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shade
below his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd
way. The moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against the
sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out
with amiable authority: "I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have
to go away at once."

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look
for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in his
life. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange
gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing:
"I haven't got any silver; you can keep this." And he threw down half a
sovereign, and caught up his coat.

Father Brown's figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant
he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost
it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.
Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not
approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was real
inspiration--important at rare crises--when whosoever shall lose his
head the same shall save it.

"I think, sir," he said civilly, "that you have some silver in your
pocket."

The tall gentleman stared. "Hang it," he cried, "if I choose to give you
gold, why should you complain?"

"Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold," said the priest
mildly; "that is, in large quantities."

The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more
curiously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked back
at Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyond
Brown's head, still coloured with the after-glow of the storm. Then he
seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaulted
over as easily as an acrobat and towered above the priest, putting one
tremendous hand upon his collar.

"Stand still," he said, in a hacking whisper. "I don't want to threaten
you, but--"

"I do want to threaten you," said Father Brown, in a voice like a
rolling drum, "I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and
the fire that is not quenched."

"You're a rum sort of cloak-room clerk," said the other.

"I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau," said Brown, "and I am ready to hear
your confession."

The other stood gasping for a few moments, and then staggered back into
a chair.

The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had
proceeded with placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu; and
if I did it would not convey anything to anybody. It was written in
a sort of super-French employed by cooks, but quite unintelligible to
Frenchmen. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvres
should be various and manifold to the point of madness. They were taken
seriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the whole
dinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soup
course should be light and unpretending--a sort of simple and austere
vigil for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange,
slight talk which governs the British Empire, which governs it in
secret, and yet would scarcely enlighten an ordinary Englishman even if
he could overhear it. Cabinet ministers on both sides were alluded to
by their Christian names with a sort of bored benignity. The Radical
Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom the whole Tory party was supposed to
be cursing for his extortions, was praised for his minor poetry, or his
saddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all Liberals
were supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole,
praised--as a Liberal. It seemed somehow that politicians were very
important. And yet, anything seemed important about them except their
politics. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who
still wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all that
phantasmal and yet fixed society. He had never done anything--not even
anything wrong. He was not fast; he was not even particularly rich.
He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party could
ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would
have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a
young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth,
with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and
enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and
his principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it,
and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that
this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a
club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly,
like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated
them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company
by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal
and a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.
He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain
old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the
empire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent
bachelor, with rooms in the Albany--which he was.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table,
and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace
in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of
the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of
the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was
closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat in
the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end
of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the
custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand
lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat
proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he
had never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and
fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required
to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.
Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of
courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent,
to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important
course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was--how shall I
put it?--a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told
that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes
of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape
of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting
fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The
Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish
forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost
as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know.
This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it was
only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual
remark: "They can't do this anywhere but here."

"Nowhere," said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker
and nodding his venerable head a number of times. "Nowhere, assuredly,
except here. It was represented to me that at the Cafe Anglais--"

Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal
of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. "It
was represented to me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais.
Nothing like it, sir," he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a
hanging judge. "Nothing like it."

"Overrated place," said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look
of him) for the first time for some months.

"Oh, I don't know," said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, "it's
jolly good for some things. You can't beat it at--"

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His
stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly
gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery
which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything
unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if
the inanimate world disobeyed--if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every
face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.
It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible
modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historic
aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty
bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would
have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he
was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near
to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrong
with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did not
want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They
wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter,
after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round
and ran madly out of the room.

When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in
company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated
with southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving the
second waiter, and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth
waiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr. Audley felt it necessary to
break the silence in the interests of Tact. He used a very loud cough,
instead of a presidential hammer, and said: "Splendid work young
Moocher's doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world could
have--"

A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in
his ear: "So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?"

The chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever
coming towards them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the good
proprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no means
usual. Generally it was a genial copper-brown; now it was a sickly
yellow.

"You will pardon me, Mr. Audley," he said, with asthmatic
breathlessness. "I have great apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they are
cleared away with the knife and fork on them!"

"Well, I hope so," said the chairman, with some warmth.

"You see him?" panted the excited hotel keeper; "you see the waiter who
took them away? You know him?"

"Know the waiter?" answered Mr. Audley indignantly. "Certainly not!"

Mr. Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. "I never send him,"
he said. "I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away
the plates, and he find them already away."

Mr. Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the
empire wants; none of the company could say anything except the man of
wood--Colonel Pound--who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. He
rose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his
eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he had
half-forgotten how to speak. "Do you mean," he said, "that somebody has
stolen our silver fish service?"

The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater
helplessness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.

"Are all your waiters here?" demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh
accent.

"Yes; they're all here. I noticed it myself," cried the young duke,
pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. "Always count 'em as I
come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall."

"But surely one cannot exactly remember," began Mr. Audley, with heavy
hesitation.

"I remember exactly, I tell you," cried the duke excitedly. "There never
have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no
more than fifteen tonight, I'll swear; no more and no less."

The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise.
"You say--you say," he stammered, "that you see all my fifteen waiters?"

"As usual," assented the duke. "What is the matter with that!"

"Nothing," said Lever, with a deepening accent, "only you did not. For
one of zem is dead upstairs."

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be
(so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked
for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of
them--the duke, I think--even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth:
"Is there anything we can do?"

"He has had a priest," said the Jew, not untouched.

Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For a
few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter might
be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that
oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. But
the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; broke
it abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair
and strode to the door. "If there was a fifteenth man here, friends," he
said, "that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front
and back doors and secure everything; then we'll talk. The twenty-four
pearls of the club are worth recovering."

Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly
to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the
stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.

At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that
he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of
the silver.

The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down the
passages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the
proprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit. Colonel Pound,
with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted down
the corridor leading to the servants' quarters, as the more likely line
of escape. As they did so they passed the dim alcove or cavern of
the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably an
attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.

"Hallo, there!" called out the duke. "Have you seen anyone pass?"

The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said:
"Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen."

They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went to the back
of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver,
which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the
form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.

"You--you--" began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last.
Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that
the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second,
that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone had
passed violently through. "Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room,
aren't they?" remarked the clergyman, with cheerful composure.

"Did--did you steal those things?" stammered Mr. Audley, with staring
eyes.

"If I did," said the cleric pleasantly, "at least I am bringing them
back again."

"But you didn't," said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken
window.

"To make a clean breast of it, I didn't," said the other, with some
humour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. "But you know
who did," said the, colonel.

"I don't know his real name," said the priest placidly, "but I know
something of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritual
difficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to
throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented."

"Oh, I say--repented!" cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of
laughter.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. "Odd, isn't
it," he said, "that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many
who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for
God or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon
my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are
your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are
all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men."

"Did you catch this man?" asked the colonel, frowning.

Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. "Yes," he said, "I
caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long
enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring
him back with a twitch upon the thread."

There was a long silence. All the other men present drifted away
to carry the recovered silver to their comrades, or to consult the
proprietor about the queer condition of affairs. But the grim-faced
colonel still sat sideways on the counter, swinging his long, lank legs
and biting his dark moustache.

At last he said quietly to the priest: "He must have been a clever
fellow, but I think I know a cleverer."

"He was a clever fellow," answered the other, "but I am not quite sure
of what other you mean."

"I mean you," said the colonel, with a short laugh. "I don't want to get
the fellow jailed; make yourself easy about that. But I'd give a good
many silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair, and how
you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you're the most up-to-date devil
of the present company."

Father Brown seemed rather to like the saturnine candour of the soldier.
"Well," he said, smiling, "I mustn't tell you anything of the man's
identity, or his own story, of course; but there's no particular reason
why I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out for
myself."

He hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity, and sat beside
Colonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate. He
began to tell the story as easily as if he were telling it to an old
friend by a Christmas fire.

"You see, colonel," he said, "I was shut up in that small room there
doing some writing, when I heard a pair of feet in this passage doing a
dance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funny
little steps, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager; then came slow,
careless, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar.
But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in
rotation; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. I
wondered at first idly and then wildly why a man should act these two
parts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, colonel. It
was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something, who strolls
about rather because he is physically alert than because he is mentally
impatient. I knew that I knew the other walk, too, but I could not
remember what it was. What wild creature had I met on my travels that
tore along on tiptoe in that extraordinary style? Then I heard a clink
of plates somewhere; and the answer stood up as plain as St. Peter's. It
was the walk of a waiter--that walk with the body slanted forward, the
eyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, the
coat tails and napkin flying. Then I thought for a minute and a half
more. And I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if I
were going to commit it."

Colonel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker's mild grey eyes
were fixed upon the ceiling with almost empty wistfulness.

"A crime," he said slowly, "is like any other work of art. Don't look
surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from
an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has
one indispensable mark--I mean, that the centre of it is simple, however
much the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus, in Hamlet, let us say,
the grotesqueness of the grave-digger, the flowers of the mad girl, the
fantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost and the grin of
the skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain
tragic figure of a man in black. Well, this also," he said, getting
slowly down from his seat with a smile, "this also is the plain tragedy
of a man in black. Yes," he went on, seeing the colonel look up in some
wonder, "the whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as in
Hamlet, there are the rococo excrescences--yourselves, let us say. There
is the dead waiter, who was there when he could not be there. There is
the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted
into air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite
simple fact--some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification
comes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it. This
large and subtle and (in the ordinary course) most profitable crime, was
built on the plain fact that a gentleman's evening dress is the same as
a waiter's. All the rest was acting, and thundering good acting, too."

"Still," said the colonel, getting up and frowning at his boots, "I am
not sure that I understand."

"Colonel," said Father Brown, "I tell you that this archangel of
impudence who stole your forks walked up and down this passage twenty
times in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He
did not go and hide in dim corners where suspicion might have searched
for him. He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and
everywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask me
what he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight.
You were waiting with all the other grand people in the reception room
at the end of the passage there, with the terrace just beyond. Whenever
he came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter,
with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out on to the
terrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towards
the office and the waiters' quarters. By the time he had come under the
eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man in
every inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled among
the servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seen
in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the
dinner party should pace all parts of the house like an animal at the
Zoo; they know that nothing marks the Smart Set more than a habit of
walking where one chooses. When he was magnificently weary of walking
down that particular passage he would wheel round and pace back past
the office; in the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as by
a blast of magic, and went hurrying forward again among the Twelve
Fishermen, an obsequious attendant. Why should the gentlemen look at
a chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking
gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the
proprietor's private quarters he called out breezily for a syphon of
soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said genially that he would carry
it himself, and he did; he carried it quickly and correctly through the
thick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course, it could not
have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of
the fish course.

"His worst moment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then he
contrived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a way
that for that important instant the waiters thought him a gentleman,
while the gentlemen thought him a waiter. The rest went like winking. If
any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languid
aristocrat. He had only to time himself two minutes before the fish was
cleared, become a swift servant, and clear it himself. He put the plates
down on a sideboard, stuffed the silver in his breast pocket, giving it
a bulgy look, and ran like a hare (I heard him coming) till he came to
the cloak room. There he had only to be a plutocrat again--a plutocrat
called away suddenly on business. He had only to give his ticket to
the cloak-room attendant, and go out again elegantly as he had come in.
Only--only I happened to be the cloak-room attendant."

"What did you do to him?" cried the colonel, with unusual intensity.
"What did he tell you?"

"I beg your pardon," said the priest immovably, "that is where the story
ends."

"And the interesting story begins," muttered Pound. "I think I
understand his professional trick. But I don't seem to have got hold of
yours."

"I must be going," said Father Brown.

They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where they
saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bounding
buoyantly along towards them.

"Come along, Pound," he cried breathlessly. "I've been looking for you
everywhere. The dinner's going again in spanking style, and old Audley
has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to
start some new ceremony, don't you know, to commemorate the occasion. I
say, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?"

"Why," said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, "I
should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of
black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a
waiter."

"Oh, hang it all!" said the young man, "a gentleman never looks like a
waiter."

"Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose," said Colonel Pound, with the
same lowering laughter on his face. "Reverend sir, your friend must have
been very smart to act the gentleman."

Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the
night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.

"Yes," he said; "it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do
you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to
be a waiter."

And saying "Good evening," he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace
of pleasures. The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk
walk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.




The Flying Stars


"The most beautiful crime I ever committed," Flambeau would say in his
highly moral old age, "was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.
It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to
provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I
found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe,
as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long
rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather
find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of
the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his
riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame
him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some
cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich
and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get
his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars,
and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of
Millet.

"Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English
middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old
middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage
drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name
on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the
species. I really think my imitation of Dickens's style was dexterous
and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening."

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and
even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly
incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must
study it. From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when
the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with
the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds
on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown
eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in
brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But
for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.

The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby
light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with
the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood the stable,
on the other an alley or cloister of laurels led to the larger garden
behind. The young lady, having scattered bread for the birds (for
the fourth or fifth time that day, because the dog ate it), passed
unobtrusively down the lane of laurels and into a glimmering plantation
of evergreens behind. Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or
ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it
fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.

"Oh, don't jump, Mr. Crook," she called out in some alarm; "it's much
too high."

The individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall,
angular young man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush,
intelligent and even distinguished lineaments, but a sallow and almost
alien complexion. This showed the more plainly because he wore an
aggressive red tie, the only part of his costume of which he seemed to
take any care. Perhaps it was a symbol. He took no notice of the girl's
alarmed adjuration, but leapt like a grasshopper to the ground beside
her, where he might very well have broken his legs.

"I think I was meant to be a burglar," he said placidly, "and I have no
doubt I should have been if I hadn't happened to be born in that nice
house next door. I can't see any harm in it, anyhow."

"How can you say such things!" she remonstrated.

"Well," said the young man, "if you're born on the wrong side of the
wall, I can't see that it's wrong to climb over it."

"I never know what you will say or do next," she said.

"I don't often know myself," replied Mr. Crook; "but then I am on the
right side of the wall now."

"And which is the right side of the wall?" asked the young lady,
smiling.

"Whichever side you are on," said the young man named Crook.

As they went together through the laurels towards the front garden
a motor horn sounded thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of
splendid speed, great elegance, and a pale green colour swept up to the
front doors like a bird and stood throbbing.

"Hullo, hullo!" said the young man with the red tie, "here's somebody
born on the right side, anyhow. I didn't know, Miss Adams, that your
Santa Claus was so modern as this."

"Oh, that's my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer. He always comes on Boxing
Day."

Then, after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of
enthusiasm, Ruby Adams added:

"He is very kind."

John Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and
it was not his fault if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in
certain articles in The Clarion or The New Age Sir Leopold had been
dealt with austerely. But he said nothing and grimly watched the
unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long process. A large,
neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat
manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they
deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some
very carefully protected parcel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs
of all the beasts of the forest, and scarves of all the colours of
the rainbow were unwrapped one by one, till they revealed something
resembling the human form; the form of a friendly, but foreign-looking
old gentleman, with a grey goat-like beard and a beaming smile, who
rubbed his big fur gloves together.

Long before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch
had opened in the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young
lady) had come out himself to invite his eminent guest inside. He was a
tall, sunburnt, and very silent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a
fez, making him look like one of the English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt.
With him was his brother-in-law, lately come from Canada, a big and
rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a yellow beard, by name
James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the
priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife
had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had
been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about
the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had
always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him
to such family gatherings.

In the large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for
Sir Leopold and the removal of his wraps. Porch and vestibule, indeed,
were unduly large in proportion to the house, and formed, as it were, a
big room with the front door at one end, and the bottom of the staircase
at the other. In front of the large hall fire, over which hung the
colonel's sword, the process was completed and the company, including
the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer. That venerable
financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his
well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat
pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his
Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory
that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them
all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a
crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet
lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set
the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently
and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim
admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole
group.

"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to
the tails of his coat. "I had to be careful of 'em coming down. They're
the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because
they've been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track;
but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have
kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It
was quite possible."

"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie. "I
shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em. When they ask for bread, and
you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for
themselves."

"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a
curious glow. "You've only talked like that since you became a horrid
what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants
to embrace the chimney-sweep?"

"A saint," said Father Brown.

"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means
a Socialist."

"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook,
with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who
preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who
desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a
man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for
it."

"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own
your own soot."

Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. "Does one
want to own soot?" he asked.

"One might," answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. "I've heard
that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas
when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot--applied externally."

"Oh, splendid," cried Ruby. "Oh, I wish you'd do it to this company."

The boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in
applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable
deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors. The priest
opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens,
monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet
sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back
scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure
standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat,
evidently a common messenger. "Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?" he
asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr. Blount started, and
stopped in his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident
astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared,
and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.

"I'm sick at being such a nuisance, colonel," he said, with the cheery
colonial conventions; "but would it upset you if an old acquaintance
called on me here tonight on business? In point of fact it's Florian,
that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out
West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business
for me, though I hardly guess what."

"Of course, of course," replied the colonel carelessly--"My dear chap,
any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition."

"He'll black his face, if that's what you mean," cried Blount, laughing.
"I don't doubt he'd black everyone else's eyes. I don't care; I'm not
refined. I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top
hat."

"Not on mine, please," said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.

"Well, well," observed Crook, airily, "don't let's quarrel. There are
lower jokes than sitting on a top hat."

Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and
evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his
most sarcastic, magisterial manner: "No doubt you have found something
much lower than sitting on a top hat. What is it, pray?"

"Letting a top hat sit on you, for instance," said the Socialist.

"Now, now, now," cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian
benevolence, "don't let's spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let's
do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on
hats, if you don't like those--but something of the sort. Why couldn't
we have a proper old English pantomime--clown, columbine, and so on. I
saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it's blazed in my
brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country
only last year, and I find the thing's extinct. Nothing but a lot of
snivelling fairy plays. I want a hot poker and a policeman made into
sausages, and they give me princesses moralising by moonlight, Blue
Birds, or something. Blue Beard's more in my line, and him I like best
when he turned into the pantaloon."

"I'm all for making a policeman into sausages," said John Crook. "It's a
better definition of Socialism than some recently given. But surely the
get-up would be too big a business."

"Not a scrap," cried Blount, quite carried away. "A harlequinade's the
quickest thing we can do, for two reasons. First, one can gag to any
degree; and, second, all the objects are household things--tables and
towel-horses and washing baskets, and things like that."

"That's true," admitted Crook, nodding eagerly and walking about.
"But I'm afraid I can't have my policeman's uniform? Haven't killed a
policeman lately."

Blount frowned thoughtfully a space, and then smote his thigh. "Yes,
we can!" he cried. "I've got Florian's address here, and he knows every
costumier in London. I'll phone him to bring a police dress when he
comes." And he went bounding away to the telephone.

"Oh, it's glorious, godfather," cried Ruby, almost dancing. "I'll be
columbine and you shall be pantaloon."

The millionaire held himself stiff with a sort of heathen solemnity. "I
think, my dear," he said, "you must get someone else for pantaloon."

"I will be pantaloon, if you like," said Colonel Adams, taking his cigar
out of his mouth, and speaking for the first and last time.

"You ought to have a statue," cried the Canadian, as he came back,
radiant, from the telephone. "There, we are all fitted. Mr. Crook shall
be clown; he's a journalist and knows all the oldest jokes. I can
be harlequin, that only wants long legs and jumping about. My friend
Florian 'phones he's bringing the police costume; he's changing on the
way. We can act it in this very hall, the audience sitting on those
broad stairs opposite, one row above another. These front doors can be
the back scene, either open or shut. Shut, you see an English interior.
Open, a moonlit garden. It all goes by magic." And snatching a chance
piece of billiard chalk from his pocket, he ran it across the hall
floor, half-way between the front door and the staircase, to mark the
line of the footlights.

How even such a banquet of bosh was got ready in the time remained
a riddle. But they went at it with that mixture of recklessness and
industry that lives when youth is in a house; and youth was in that
house that night, though not all may have isolated the two faces and
hearts from which it flamed. As always happens, the invention grew
wilder and wilder through the very tameness of the bourgeois conventions
from which it had to create. The columbine looked charming in an
outstanding skirt that strangely resembled the large lamp-shade in the
drawing-room. The clown and pantaloon made themselves white with flour
from the cook, and red with rouge from some other domestic, who remained
(like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already
clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented
from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover
himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would certainly have done
so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn
at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds. Indeed, her uncle,
James Blount, was getting almost out of hand in his excitement; he was
like a schoolboy. He put a paper donkey's head unexpectedly on Father
Brown, who bore it patiently, and even found some private manner of
moving his ears. He even essayed to put the paper donkey's tail to the
coat-tails of Sir Leopold Fischer. This, however, was frowned down.
"Uncle is too absurd," cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she
had seriously placed a string of sausages. "Why is he so wild?"

"He is harlequin to your columbine," said Crook. "I am only the clown
who makes the old jokes."

"I wish you were the harlequin," she said, and left the string of
sausages swinging.

Father Brown, though he knew every detail done behind the scenes,
and had even evoked applause by his transformation of a pillow into a
pantomime baby, went round to the front and sat among the audience
with all the solemn expectation of a child at his first matinee. The
spectators were few, relations, one or two local friends, and the
servants; Sir Leopold sat in the front seat, his full and still
fur-collared figure largely obscuring the view of the little cleric
behind him; but it has never been settled by artistic authorities
whether the cleric lost much. The pantomime was utterly chaotic, yet not
contemptible; there ran through it a rage of improvisation which came
chiefly from Crook the clown. Commonly he was a clever man, and he was
inspired tonight with a wild omniscience, a folly wiser than the world,
that which comes to a young man who has seen for an instant a particular
expression on a particular face. He was supposed to be the clown, but
he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an
author), the prompter, the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and, above
all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance
he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some
popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front
doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit
garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the
great Florian, dressed up as a policeman. The clown at the piano played
the constabulary chorus in the "Pirates of Penzance," but it was drowned
in the deafening applause, for every gesture of the great comic actor
was an admirable though restrained version of the carriage and manner
of the police. The harlequin leapt upon him and hit him over the helmet;
the pianist playing "Where did you get that hat?" he faced about in
admirably simulated astonishment, and then the leaping harlequin hit him
again (the pianist suggesting a few bars of "Then we had another one").
Then the harlequin rushed right into the arms of the policeman and fell
on top of him, amid a roar of applause. Then it was that the strange
actor gave that celebrated imitation of a dead man, of which the fame
still lingers round Putney. It was almost impossible to believe that a
living person could appear so limp.

The athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed
him like an Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous
tunes from the piano. When the harlequin heaved the comic constable
heavily off the floor the clown played "I arise from dreams of thee."
When he shuffled him across his back, "With my bundle on my shoulder,"
and when the harlequin finally let fall the policeman with a most
convincing thud, the lunatic at the instrument struck into a jingling
measure with some words which are still believed to have been, "I sent a
letter to my love and on the way I dropped it."

At about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown's view was obscured
altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height
and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets. Then he sat down
nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again. For an instant it
seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then
he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in
silence out of the room.

The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not
inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious
foe. With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards
out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and
stillness. The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been
too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery
as it danced away under a brilliant moon. The audience was closing in
with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched,
and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel's study.

He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled
by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel
Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed
whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough
to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against
the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.

"This is a very painful matter, Father Brown," said Adams. "The truth
is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from
my friend's tail-coat pocket. And as you--"

"As I," supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, "was sitting just
behind him--"

"Nothing of the sort shall be suggested," said Colonel Adams, with a
firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been
suggested. "I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman
might give."

"Which is turning out his pockets," said Father Brown, and proceeded to
do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver
crucifix, a small breviary, and a stick of chocolate.

The colonel looked at him long, and then said, "Do you know, I should
like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your
pockets. My daughter is one of your people, I know; well, she has
lately--" and he stopped.

"She has lately," cried out old Fischer, "opened her father's house to
a cut-throat Socialist, who says openly he would steal anything from a
richer man. This is the end of it. Here is the richer man--and none the
richer."

"If you want the inside of my head you can have it," said Brown rather
wearily. "What it's worth you can say afterwards. But the first thing I
find in that disused pocket is this: that men who mean to steal diamonds
don't talk Socialism. They are more likely," he added demurely, "to
denounce it."

Both the others shifted sharply and the priest went on:

"You see, we know these people, more or less. That Socialist would no
more steal a diamond than a Pyramid. We ought to look at once to the one
man we don't know. The fellow acting the policeman--Florian. Where is he
exactly at this minute, I wonder."

The pantaloon sprang erect and strode out of the room. An interlude
ensued, during which the millionaire stared at the priest, and the
priest at his breviary; then the pantaloon returned and said, with
staccato gravity, "The policeman is still lying on the stage. The
curtain has gone up and down six times; he is still lying there."

Father Brown dropped his book and stood staring with a look of blank
mental ruin. Very slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and
then he made the scarcely obvious answer.

"Please forgive me, colonel, but when did your wife die?"

"Wife!" replied the staring soldier, "she died this year two months. Her
brother James arrived just a week too late to see her."

The little priest bounded like a rabbit shot. "Come on!" he cried in
quite unusual excitement. "Come on! We've got to go and look at that
policeman!"

They rushed on to the now curtained stage, breaking rudely past the
columbine and clown (who seemed whispering quite contentedly), and
Father Brown bent over the prostrate comic policeman.

"Chloroform," he said as he rose; "I only guessed it just now."

There was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly,
"Please say seriously what all this means."

Father Brown suddenly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and
only struggled with it for instants during the rest of his speech.
"Gentlemen," he gasped, "there's not much time to talk. I must run after
the criminal. But this great French actor who played the policeman--this
clever corpse the harlequin waltzed with and dandled and threw about--he
was--" His voice again failed him, and he turned his back to run.

"He was?" called Fischer inquiringly.

"A real policeman," said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.

There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden,
in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire
sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the
south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo
of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost
irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden
trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as
impossible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million
moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch
of him on fire. But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short
tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only
stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has
unmistakably called up to him.

"Well, Flambeau," says the voice, "you really look like a Flying Star;
but that always means a Falling Star at last."

The silver, sparkling figure above seems to lean forward in the laurels
and, confident of escape, listens to the little figure below.

"You never did anything better, Flambeau. It was clever to come from
Canada (with a Paris ticket, I suppose) just a week after Mrs. Adams
died, when no one was in a mood to ask questions. It was cleverer to
have marked down the Flying Stars and the very day of Fischer's coming.
But there's no cleverness, but mere genius, in what followed. Stealing
the stones, I suppose, was nothing to you. You could have done it by
sleight of hand in a hundred other ways besides that pretence of putting
a paper donkey's tail to Fischer's coat. But in the rest you eclipsed
yourself."

The silvery figure among the green leaves seems to linger as if
hypnotised, though his escape is easy behind him; he is staring at the
man below.

"Oh, yes," says the man below, "I know all about it. I know you not
only forced the pantomime, but put it to a double use. You were going
to steal the stones quietly; news came by an accomplice that you were
already suspected, and a capable police officer was coming to rout you
up that very night. A common thief would have been thankful for the
warning and fled; but you are a poet. You already had the clever notion
of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellery. Now, you saw
that if the dress were a harlequin's the appearance of a policeman
would be quite in keeping. The worthy officer started from Putney police
station to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this
world. When the front door opened he walked straight on to the stage of
a Christmas pantomime, where he could be kicked, clubbed, stunned and
drugged by the dancing harlequin, amid roars of laughter from all
the most respectable people in Putney. Oh, you will never do anything
better. And now, by the way, you might give me back those diamonds."

The green branch on which the glittering figure swung, rustled as if in
astonishment; but the voice went on:

"I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this
life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy
they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but
no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes
down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills
and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an
honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.
Maurice Blum started out as an anarchist of principle, a father of the
poor; he ended a greasy spy and tale-bearer that both sides used and
despised. Harry Burke started his free money movement sincerely enough;
now he's sponging on a half-starved sister for endless brandies and
sodas. Lord Amber went into wild society in a sort of chivalry; now he's
paying blackmail to the lowest vultures in London. Captain Barillon
was the great gentleman-apache before your time; he died in a madhouse,
screaming with fear of the "narks" and receivers that had betrayed
him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free behind you,
Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey.
But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up
in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops
will be very bare."

Everything continued still, as if the small man below held the other in
the tree in some long invisible leash; and he went on:

"Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing
mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving
suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are
separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will
do meaner things than that before you die."

Three flashing diamonds fell from the tree to the turf. The small man
stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of
the tree was emptied of its silver bird.

The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of
all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in
his height of good humour, even told the priest that though he himself
had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to
be cloistered and ignorant of this world.




The Invisible Man


In the cool blue twilight of two steep streets in Camden Town, the shop
at the corner, a confectioner's, glowed like the butt of a cigar. One
should rather say, perhaps, like the butt of a firework, for the light
was of many colours and some complexity, broken up by many mirrors and
dancing on many gilt and gaily-coloured cakes and sweetmeats. Against
this one fiery glass were glued the noses of many gutter-snipes, for
the chocolates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metallic
colours which are almost better than chocolate itself; and the huge
white wedding-cake in the window was somehow at once remote and
satisfying, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat.
Such rainbow provocations could naturally collect the youth of the
neighbourhood up to the ages of ten or twelve. But this corner was also
attractive to youth at a later stage; and a young man, not less than
twenty-four, was staring into the same shop window. To him, also,
the shop was of fiery charm, but this attraction was not wholly to be
explained by chocolates; which, however, he was far from despising.

He was a tall, burly, red-haired young man, with a resolute face but
a listless manner. He carried under his arm a flat, grey portfolio of
black-and-white sketches, which he had sold with more or less success
to publishers ever since his uncle (who was an admiral) had disinherited
him for Socialism, because of a lecture which he had delivered against
that economic theory. His name was John Turnbull Angus.

Entering at last, he walked through the confectioner's shop to the back
room, which was a sort of pastry-cook restaurant, merely raising his hat
to the young lady who was serving there. She was a dark, elegant, alert
girl in black, with a high colour and very quick, dark eyes; and after
the ordinary interval she followed him into the inner room to take his
order.

His order was evidently a usual one. "I want, please," he said with
precision, "one halfpenny bun and a small cup of black coffee." An
instant before the girl could turn away he added, "Also, I want you to
marry me."

The young lady of the shop stiffened suddenly and said, "Those are jokes
I don't allow."

The red-haired young man lifted grey eyes of an unexpected gravity.

"Really and truly," he said, "it's as serious--as serious as the
halfpenny bun. It is expensive, like the bun; one pays for it. It is
indigestible, like the bun. It hurts."

The dark young lady had never taken her dark eyes off him, but seemed
to be studying him with almost tragic exactitude. At the end of her
scrutiny she had something like the shadow of a smile, and she sat down
in a chair.

"Don't you think," observed Angus, absently, "that it's rather cruel to
eat these halfpenny buns? They might grow up into penny buns. I shall
give up these brutal sports when we are married."

The dark young lady rose from her chair and walked to the window,
evidently in a state of strong but not unsympathetic cogitation. When at
last she swung round again with an air of resolution she was bewildered
to observe that the young man was carefully laying out on the table
various objects from the shop-window. They included a pyramid of highly
coloured sweets, several plates of sandwiches, and the two decanters
containing that mysterious port and sherry which are peculiar to
pastry-cooks. In the middle of this neat arrangement he had carefully
let down the enormous load of white sugared cake which had been the huge
ornament of the window.

"What on earth are you doing?" she asked.

"Duty, my dear Laura," he began.

"Oh, for the Lord's sake, stop a minute," she cried, "and don't talk to
me in that way. I mean, what is all that?"

"A ceremonial meal, Miss Hope."

"And what is that?" she asked impatiently, pointing to the mountain of
sugar.

"The wedding-cake, Mrs. Angus," he said.

The girl marched to that article, removed it with some clatter, and put
it back in the shop window; she then returned, and, putting her elegant
elbows on the table, regarded the young man not unfavourably but with
considerable exasperation.

"You don't give me any time to think," she said.

"I'm not such a fool," he answered; "that's my Christian humility."

She was still looking at him; but she had grown considerably graver
behind the smile.

"Mr. Angus," she said steadily, "before there is a minute more of this
nonsense I must tell you something about myself as shortly as I can.'"

"Delighted," replied Angus gravely. "You might tell me something about
myself, too, while you are about it."

"Oh, do hold your tongue and listen," she said. "It's nothing that I'm
ashamed of, and it isn't even anything that I'm specially sorry about.
But what would you say if there were something that is no business of
mine and yet is my nightmare?"

"In that case," said the man seriously, "I should suggest that you bring
back the cake."

"Well, you must listen to the story first," said Laura, persistently.
"To begin with, I must tell you that my father owned the inn called the
'Red Fish' at Ludbury, and I used to serve people in the bar."

"I have often wondered," he said, "why there was a kind of a Christian
air about this one confectioner's shop."

"Ludbury is a sleepy, grassy little hole in the Eastern Counties, and
the only kind of people who ever came to the 'Red Fish' were occasional
commercial travellers, and for the rest, the most awful people you can
see, only you've never seen them. I mean little, loungy men, who had
just enough to live on and had nothing to do but lean about in bar-rooms
and bet on horses, in bad clothes that were just too good for them.
Even these wretched young rotters were not very common at our house; but
there were two of them that were a lot too common--common in every sort
of way. They both lived on money of their own, and were wearisomely idle
and over-dressed. But yet I was a bit sorry for them, because I half
believe they slunk into our little empty bar because each of them had a
slight deformity; the sort of thing that some yokels laugh at. It wasn't
exactly a deformity either; it was more an oddity. One of them was
a surprisingly small man, something like a dwarf, or at least like a
jockey. He was not at all jockeyish to look at, though; he had a round
black head and a well-trimmed black beard, bright eyes like a bird's; he
jingled money in his pockets; he jangled a great gold watch chain; and
he never turned up except dressed just too much like a gentleman to
be one. He was no fool though, though a futile idler; he was curiously
clever at all kinds of things that couldn't be the slightest use; a sort
of impromptu conjuring; making fifteen matches set fire to each other
like a regular firework; or cutting a banana or some such thing into a
dancing doll. His name was Isidore Smythe; and I can see him still, with
his little dark face, just coming up to the counter, making a jumping
kangaroo out of five cigars.

"The other fellow was more silent and more ordinary; but somehow he
alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and
slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might
almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of
the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked
straight at you, you didn't know where you were yourself, let alone what
he was looking at. I fancy this sort of disfigurement embittered the
poor chap a little; for while Smythe was ready to show off his monkey
tricks anywhere, James Welkin (that was the squinting man's name) never
did anything except soak in our bar parlour, and go for great walks
by himself in the flat, grey country all round. All the same, I think
Smythe, too, was a little sensitive about being so small, though he
carried it off more smartly. And so it was that I was really puzzled, as
well as startled, and very sorry, when they both offered to marry me in
the same week.

"Well, I did what I've since thought was perhaps a silly thing. But,
after all, these freaks were my friends in a way; and I had a horror of
their thinking I refused them for the real reason, which was that they
were so impossibly ugly. So I made up some gas of another sort, about
never meaning to marry anyone who hadn't carved his way in the world. I
said it was a point of principle with me not to live on money that
was just inherited like theirs. Two days after I had talked in this
well-meaning sort of way, the whole trouble began. The first thing I
heard was that both of them had gone off to seek their fortunes, as if
they were in some silly fairy tale.

"Well, I've never seen either of them from that day to this. But I've
had two letters from the little man called Smythe, and really they were
rather exciting."

"Ever heard of the other man?" asked Angus.

"No, he never wrote," said the girl, after an instant's hesitation.
"Smythe's first letter was simply to say that he had started out walking
with Welkin to London; but Welkin was such a good walker that the little
man dropped out of it, and took a rest by the roadside. He happened to
be picked up by some travelling show, and, partly because he was nearly
a dwarf, and partly because he was really a clever little wretch, he
got on quite well in the show business, and was soon sent up to the
Aquarium, to do some tricks that I forget. That was his first letter.
His second was much more of a startler, and I only got it last week."

The man called Angus emptied his coffee-cup and regarded her with mild
and patient eyes. Her own mouth took a slight twist of laughter as
she resumed, "I suppose you've seen on the hoardings all about this
'Smythe's Silent Service'? Or you must be the only person that hasn't.
Oh, I don't know much about it, it's some clockwork invention for doing
all the housework by machinery. You know the sort of thing: 'Press a
Button--A Butler who Never Drinks.' 'Turn a Handle--Ten Housemaids who
Never Flirt.' You must have seen the advertisements. Well, whatever
these machines are, they are making pots of money; and they are making
it all for that little imp whom I knew down in Ludbury. I can't help
feeling pleased the poor little chap has fallen on his feet; but the
plain fact is, I'm in terror of his turning up any minute and telling me
he's carved his way in the world--as he certainly has."

"And the other man?" repeated Angus with a sort of obstinate quietude.

Laura Hope got to her feet suddenly. "My friend," she said, "I think
you are a witch. Yes, you are quite right. I have not seen a line of the
other man's writing; and I have no more notion than the dead of what or
where he is. But it is of him that I am frightened. It is he who is all
about my path. It is he who has half driven me mad. Indeed, I think he
has driven me mad; for I have felt him where he could not have been, and
I have heard his voice when he could not have spoken."

"Well, my dear," said the young man, cheerfully, "if he were Satan
himself, he is done for now you have told somebody. One goes mad all
alone, old girl. But when was it you fancied you felt and heard our
squinting friend?"

"I heard James Welkin laugh as plainly as I hear you speak," said the
girl, steadily. "There was nobody there, for I stood just outside the
shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once. I had
forgotten how he laughed, though his laugh was as odd as his squint. I
had not thought of him for nearly a year. But it's a solemn truth that a
few seconds later the first letter came from his rival."

"Did you ever make the spectre speak or squeak, or anything?" asked
Angus, with some interest.

Laura suddenly shuddered, and then said, with an unshaken voice, "Yes.
Just when I had finished reading the second letter from Isidore Smythe
announcing his success. Just then, I heard Welkin say, 'He shan't have
you, though.' It was quite plain, as if he were in the room. It is
awful, I think I must be mad."

"If you really were mad," said the young man, "you would think you must
be sane. But certainly there seems to me to be something a little rum
about this unseen gentleman. Two heads are better than one--I spare you
allusions to any other organs and really, if you would allow me, as
a sturdy, practical man, to bring back the wedding-cake out of the
window--"

Even as he spoke, there was a sort of steely shriek in the street
outside, and a small motor, driven at devilish speed, shot up to the
door of the shop and stuck there. In the same flash of time a small man
in a shiny top hat stood stamping in the outer room.

Angus, who had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental
hygiene, revealed the strain of his soul by striding abruptly out of
the inner room and confronting the new-comer. A glance at him was quite
sufficient to confirm the savage guesswork of a man in love. This
very dapper but dwarfish figure, with the spike of black beard carried
insolently forward, the clever unrestful eyes, the neat but very nervous
fingers, could be none other than the man just described to him: Isidore
Smythe, who made dolls out of banana skins and match-boxes; Isidore
Smythe, who made millions out of undrinking butlers and unflirting
housemaids of metal. For a moment the two men, instinctively
understanding each other's air of possession, looked at each other with
that curious cold generosity which is the soul of rivalry.

Mr. Smythe, however, made no allusion to the ultimate ground of their
antagonism, but said simply and explosively, "Has Miss Hope seen that
thing on the window?"

"On the window?" repeated the staring Angus.

"There's no time to explain other things," said the small millionaire
shortly. "There's some tomfoolery going on here that has to be
investigated."

He pointed his polished walking-stick at the window, recently depleted
by the bridal preparations of Mr. Angus; and that gentleman was
astonished to see along the front of the glass a long strip of paper
pasted, which had certainly not been on the window when he looked
through it some time before. Following the energetic Smythe outside into
the street, he found that some yard and a half of stamp paper had been
carefully gummed along the glass outside, and on this was written in
straggly characters, "If you marry Smythe, he will die."

"Laura," said Angus, putting his big red head into the shop, "you're not
mad."

"It's the writing of that fellow Welkin," said Smythe gruffly. "I
haven't seen him for years, but he's always bothering me. Five times in
the last fortnight he's had threatening letters left at my flat, and I
can't even find out who leaves them, let alone if it is Welkin himself.
The porter of the flats swears that no suspicious characters have been
seen, and here he has pasted up a sort of dado on a public shop window,
while the people in the shop--"

"Quite so," said Angus modestly, "while the people in the shop were
having tea. Well, sir, I can assure you I appreciate your common sense
in dealing so directly with the matter. We can talk about other things
afterwards. The fellow cannot be very far off yet, for I swear there was
no paper there when I went last to the window, ten or fifteen minutes
ago. On the other hand, he's too far off to be chased, as we don't even
know the direction. If you'll take my advice, Mr. Smythe, you'll put
this at once in the hands of some energetic inquiry man, private rather
than public. I know an extremely clever fellow, who has set up in
business five minutes from here in your car. His name's Flambeau, and
though his youth was a bit stormy, he's a strictly honest man now, and
his brains are worth money. He lives in Lucknow Mansions, Hampstead."

"That is odd," said the little man, arching his black eyebrows. "I live,
myself, in Himylaya Mansions, round the corner. Perhaps you might care
to come with me; I can go to my rooms and sort out these queer Welkin
documents, while you run round and get your friend the detective."

"You are very good," said Angus politely. "Well, the sooner we act the
better."

Both men, with a queer kind of impromptu fairness, took the same sort of
formal farewell of the lady, and both jumped into the brisk little
car. As Smythe took the handles and they turned the great corner of the
street, Angus was amused to see a gigantesque poster of "Smythe's
Silent Service," with a picture of a huge headless iron doll, carrying a
saucepan with the legend, "A Cook Who is Never Cross."

"I use them in my own flat," said the little black-bearded man,
laughing, "partly for advertisements, and partly for real convenience.
Honestly, and all above board, those big clockwork dolls of mine do
bring your coals or claret or a timetable quicker than any live servants
I've ever known, if you know which knob to press. But I'll never deny,
between ourselves, that such servants have their disadvantages, too."

"Indeed?" said Angus; "is there something they can't do?"

"Yes," replied Smythe coolly; "they can't tell me who left those
threatening letters at my flat."

The man's motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his
domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising
quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something
tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of
road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves
came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they say
in the modern religions. For, indeed, they were cresting a corner of
London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so
picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats
they sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by
the level sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the
crescent known as Himylaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a
window; for they found that pile of flats sitting above London as above
a green sea of slate. Opposite to the mansions, on the other side of the
gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure more like a steep hedge or dyke
than a garden, and some way below that ran a strip of artificial water,
a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered fortress. As the car
swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of
a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve,
Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only
human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational
sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if
they were figures in a story.

The little car shot up to the right house like a bullet, and shot out
its owner like a bomb shell. He was immediately inquiring of a tall
commissionaire in shining braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves,
whether anybody or anything had been seeking his apartments. He was
assured that nobody and nothing had passed these officials since his
last inquiries; whereupon he and the slightly bewildered Angus were shot
up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor.

"Just come in for a minute," said the breathless Smythe. "I want to show
you those Welkin letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch
your friend." He pressed a button concealed in the wall, and the door
opened of itself.

It opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting
features, ordinarily speaking, were the rows of tall half-human
mechanical figures that stood up on both sides like tailors' dummies.
Like tailors' dummies they were headless; and like tailors' dummies
they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the shoulders, and a
pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not
much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station
that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for
carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or
black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only
automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On
this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of
these domestic dummies lay something more interesting than most of the
mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of paper scrawled
with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost as soon
as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red ink
on it actually was not dry, and the message ran, "If you have been to
see her today, I shall kill you."

There was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, "Would
you like a little whiskey? I rather feel as if I should."

"Thank you; I should like a little Flambeau," said Angus, gloomily.
"This business seems to me to be getting rather grave. I'm going round
at once to fetch him."

"Right you are," said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. "Bring him
round here as quick as you can."

But as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a
button, and one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid
along a groove in the floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter.
There did seem something a trifle weird about leaving the little man
alone among those dead servants, who were coming to life as the door
closed.

Six steps down from Smythe's landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing
something with a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified
with a prospective bribe, that he would remain in that place until the
return with the detective, and would keep count of any kind of stranger
coming up those stairs. Dashing down to the front hall he then laid
similar charges of vigilance on the commissionaire at the front door,
from whom he learned the simplifying circumstances that there was no
back door. Not content with this, he captured the floating policeman
and induced him to stand opposite the entrance and watch it; and finally
paused an instant for a pennyworth of chestnuts, and an inquiry as to
the probable length of the merchant's stay in the neighbourhood.

The chestnut seller, turning up the collar of his coat, told him he
should probably be moving shortly, as he thought it was going to snow.
Indeed, the evening was growing grey and bitter, but Angus, with all his
eloquence, proceeded to nail the chestnut man to his post.

"Keep yourself warm on your own chestnuts," he said earnestly. "Eat
up your whole stock; I'll make it worth your while. I'll give you a
sovereign if you'll wait here till I come back, and then tell me
whether any man, woman, or child has gone into that house where the
commissionaire is standing."

He then walked away smartly, with a last look at the besieged tower.

"I've made a ring round that room, anyhow," he said. "They can't all
four of them be Mr. Welkin's accomplices."

Lucknow Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill
of houses, of which Himylaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr.
Flambeau's semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented
in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold
hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service. Flambeau, who was
a friend of Angus, received him in a rococo artistic den behind his
office, of which the ornaments were sabres, harquebuses, Eastern
curiosities, flasks of Italian wine, savage cooking-pots, a plumy
Persian cat, and a small dusty-looking Roman Catholic priest, who looked
particularly out of place.

"This is my friend Father Brown," said Flambeau. "I've often wanted you
to meet him. Splendid weather, this; a little cold for Southerners like
me."

"Yes, I think it will keep clear," said Angus, sitting down on a
violet-striped Eastern ottoman.

"No," said the priest quietly, "it has begun to snow."

And, indeed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, foreseen by the man of
chestnuts, began to drift across the darkening windowpane.

"Well," said Angus heavily. "I'm afraid I've come on business, and
rather jumpy business at that. The fact is, Flambeau, within a stone's
throw of your house is a fellow who badly wants your help; he's
perpetually being haunted and threatened by an invisible enemy--a
scoundrel whom nobody has even seen." As Angus proceeded to tell the
whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, beginning with Laura's story, and
going on with his own, the supernatural laugh at the corner of two empty
streets, the strange distinct words spoken in an empty room, Flambeau
grew more and more vividly concerned, and the little priest seemed to be
left out of it, like a piece of furniture. When it came to the scribbled
stamp-paper pasted on the window, Flambeau rose, seeming to fill the
room with his huge shoulders.

"If you don't mind," he said, "I think you had better tell me the rest
on the nearest road to this man's house. It strikes me, somehow, that
there is no time to be lost."

"Delighted," said Angus, rising also, "though he's safe enough for the
present, for I've set four men to watch the only hole to his burrow."

They turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them
with the docility of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheerful way,
like one making conversation, "How quick the snow gets thick on the
ground."

As they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with silver,
Angus finished his story; and by the time they reached the crescent with
the towering flats, he had leisure to turn his attention to the four
sentinels. The chestnut seller, both before and after receiving a
sovereign, swore stubbornly that he had watched the door and seen no
visitor enter. The policeman was even more emphatic. He said he had had
experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn't so
green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he looked
out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all
three men gathered round the gilded commissionaire, who still stood
smiling astride of the porch, the verdict was more final still.

"I've got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in
these flats," said the genial and gold-laced giant, "and I'll swear
there's been nobody to ask since this gentleman went away."

The unimportant Father Brown, who stood back, looking modestly at the
pavement, here ventured to say meekly, "Has nobody been up and down
stairs, then, since the snow began to fall? It began while we were all
round at Flambeau's."

"Nobody's been in here, sir, you can take it from me," said the
official, with beaming authority.

"Then I wonder what that is?" said the priest, and stared at the ground
blankly like a fish.

The others all looked down also; and Flambeau used a fierce exclamation
and a French gesture. For it was unquestionably true that down the
middle of the entrance guarded by the man in gold lace, actually between
the arrogant, stretched legs of that colossus, ran a stringy pattern of
grey footprints stamped upon the white snow.

"God!" cried Angus involuntarily, "the Invisible Man!"

Without another word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flambeau
following; but Father Brown still stood looking about him in the
snow-clad street as if he had lost interest in his query.

Flambeau was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big
shoulders; but the Scotchman, with more reason, if less intuition,
fumbled about on the frame of the door till he found the invisible
button; and the door swung slowly open.

It showed substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown
darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crimson
shafts of sunset, and one or two of the headless machines had been moved
from their places for this or that purpose, and stood here and there
about the twilit place. The green and red of their coats were all
darkened in the dusk; and their likeness to human shapes slightly
increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of them all,
exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay something
that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red
ink.

With a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said
"Murder!" and, plunging into the flat, had explored, every corner and
cupboard of it in five minutes. But if he expected to find a corpse he
found none. Isidore Smythe was not in the place, either dead or alive.
After the most tearing search the two men met each other in the outer
hall, with streaming faces and staring eyes. "My friend," said Flambeau,
talking French in his excitement, "not only is your murderer invisible,
but he makes invisible also the murdered man."

Angus looked round at the dim room full of dummies, and in some Celtic
corner of his Scotch soul a shudder started. One of the life-size dolls
stood immediately overshadowing the blood stain, summoned, perhaps,
by the slain man an instant before he fell. One of the high-shouldered
hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little lifted, and Angus had
suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe's own iron child had struck
him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed their
master. But even so, what had they done with him?

"Eaten him?" said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an
instant at the idea of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all
that acephalous clockwork.

He recovered his mental health by an emphatic effort, and said to
Flambeau, "Well, there it is. The poor fellow has evaporated like a
cloud and left a red streak on the floor. The tale does not belong to
this world."

"There is only one thing to be done," said Flambeau, "whether it belongs
to this world or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend."

They descended, passing the man with the pail, who again asseverated
that he had let no intruder pass, down to the commissionaire and the
hovering chestnut man, who rigidly reasserted their own watchfulness.
But when Angus looked round for his fourth confirmation he could not see
it, and called out with some nervousness, "Where is the policeman?"

"I beg your pardon," said Father Brown; "that is my fault. I just sent
him down the road to investigate something--that I just thought worth
investigating."

"Well, we want him back pretty soon," said Angus abruptly, "for the
wretched man upstairs has not only been murdered, but wiped out."

"How?" asked the priest.

"Father," said Flambeau, after a pause, "upon my soul I believe it is
more in your department than mine. No friend or foe has entered the
house, but Smythe is gone, as if stolen by the fairies. If that is not
supernatural, I--"

As he spoke they were all checked by an unusual sight; the big blue
policeman came round the corner of the crescent, running. He came
straight up to Brown.

"You're right, sir," he panted, "they've just found poor Mr. Smythe's
body in the canal down below."

Angus put his hand wildly to his head. "Did he run down and drown
himself?" he asked.

"He never came down, I'll swear," said the constable, "and he wasn't
drowned either, for he died of a great stab over the heart."

"And yet you saw no one enter?" said Flambeau in a grave voice.

"Let us walk down the road a little," said the priest.

As they reached the other end of the crescent he observed abruptly,
"Stupid of me! I forgot to ask the policeman something. I wonder if they
found a light brown sack."

"Why a light brown sack?" asked Angus, astonished.

"Because if it was any other coloured sack, the case must begin over
again," said Father Brown; "but if it was a light brown sack, why, the
case is finished."

"I am pleased to hear it," said Angus with hearty irony. "It hasn't
begun, so far as I am concerned."

"You must tell us all about it," said Flambeau with a strange heavy
simplicity, like a child.

Unconsciously they were walking with quickening steps down the long
sweep of road on the other side of the high crescent, Father Brown
leading briskly, though in silence. At last he said with an almost
touching vagueness, "Well, I'm afraid you'll think it so prosy. We
always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can't begin this
story anywhere else.

"Have you ever noticed this--that people never answer what you say? They
answer what you mean--or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says
to another in a country house, 'Is anybody staying with you?' the lady
doesn't answer 'Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and
so on,' though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind
her chair. She says 'There is nobody staying with us,' meaning nobody of
the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks,
'Who is staying in the house?' then the lady will remember the butler,
the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never
get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly.
When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the
Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They
meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go
into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him."

"An invisible man?" inquired Angus, raising his red eyebrows. "A
mentally invisible man," said Father Brown.

A minute or two after he resumed in the same unassuming voice, like a
man thinking his way. "Of course you can't think of such a man, until
you do think of him. That's where his cleverness comes in. But I came
to think of him through two or three little things in the tale Mr. Angus
told us. First, there was the fact that this Welkin went for long walks.
And then there was the vast lot of stamp paper on the window. And then,
most of all, there were the two things the young lady said--things that
couldn't be true. Don't get annoyed," he added hastily, noting a sudden
movement of the Scotchman's head; "she thought they were true. A person
can't be quite alone in a street a second before she receives a letter.
She can't be quite alone in a street when she starts reading a letter
just received. There must be somebody pretty near her; he must be
mentally invisible."

"Why must there be somebody near her?" asked Angus.

"Because," said Father Brown, "barring carrier-pigeons, somebody must
have brought her the letter."

"Do you really mean to say," asked Flambeau, with energy, "that Welkin
carried his rival's letters to his lady?"

"Yes," said the priest. "Welkin carried his rival's letters to his lady.
You see, he had to."

"Oh, I can't stand much more of this," exploded Flambeau. "Who is this
fellow? What does he look like? What is the usual get-up of a mentally
invisible man?"

"He is dressed rather handsomely in red, blue and gold," replied the
priest promptly with precision, "and in this striking, and even showy,
costume he entered Himylaya Mansions under eight human eyes; he killed
Smythe in cold blood, and came down into the street again carrying the
dead body in his arms--"

"Reverend sir," cried Angus, standing still, "are you raving mad, or am
I?"

"You are not mad," said Brown, "only a little unobservant. You have not
noticed such a man as this, for example."

He took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of
an ordinary passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the
shade of the trees.

"Nobody ever notices postmen somehow," he said thoughtfully; "yet they
have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small
corpse can be stowed quite easily."

The postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled
against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very
ordinary appearance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder,
all three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint.

              * * * * *

Flambeau went back to his sabres, purple rugs and Persian cat, having
many things to attend to. John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at
the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely
comfortable. But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the
stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other
will never be known.




The Honour of Israel Gow


A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown,
wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley
and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the
glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the
world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner
of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the
sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods
that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black
as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy
devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on
the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow
which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other
of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison
called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of
doom in the Calvinist.

The priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his
friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with
another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late
Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative
of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them
terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the
sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in
chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up around
Mary Queen of Scots.

The rhyme in the country-side attested the motive and the result of
their machinations candidly:

     As green sap to the simmer trees
     Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle
Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all
eccentricities were exhausted. The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his
tribal tradition by doing the only thing that was left for him to do; he
disappeared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all accounts he was
still in the castle, if he was anywhere. But though his name was in the
church register and the big red Peerage, nobody ever saw him under the
sun.

If anyone saw him it was a solitary man-servant, something between a
groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like
assumed him to be dumb; while the more penetrating declared him to be
half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin,
but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the name of Israel Gow, and was
the one silent servant on that deserted estate. But the energy with
which he dug potatoes, and the regularity with which he disappeared
into the kitchen gave people an impression that he was providing for the
meals of a superior, and that the strange earl was still concealed in
the castle. If society needed any further proof that he was there, the
servant persistently asserted that he was not at home. One morning the
provost and the minister (for the Glengyles were Presbyterian) were
summoned to the castle. There they found that the gardener, groom and
cook had added to his many professions that of an undertaker, and had
nailed up his noble master in a coffin. With how much or how little
further inquiry this odd fact was passed, did not as yet very plainly
appear; for the thing had never been legally investigated till Flambeau
had gone north two or three days before. By then the body of Lord
Glengyle (if it was the body) had lain for some time in the little
churchyard on the hill.

As Father Brown passed through the dim garden and came under the
shadow of the chateau, the clouds were thick and the whole air damp
and thundery. Against the last stripe of the green-gold sunset he saw
a black human silhouette; a man in a chimney-pot hat, with a big spade
over his shoulder. The combination was queerly suggestive of a sexton;
but when Brown remembered the deaf servant who dug potatoes, he thought
it natural enough. He knew something of the Scotch peasant; he knew the
respectability which might well feel it necessary to wear "blacks" for
an official inquiry; he knew also the economy that would not lose an
hour's digging for that. Even the man's start and suspicious stare as
the priest went by were consonant enough with the vigilance and jealousy
of such a type.

The great door was opened by Flambeau himself, who had with him a lean
man with iron-grey hair and papers in his hand: Inspector Craven from
Scotland Yard. The entrance hall was mostly stripped and empty; but the
pale, sneering faces of one or two of the wicked Ogilvies looked down
out of black periwigs and blackening canvas.

Following them into an inner room, Father Brown found that the allies
had been seated at a long oak table, of which their end was covered with
scribbled papers, flanked with whisky and cigars. Through the whole of
its remaining length it was occupied by detached objects arranged at
intervals; objects about as inexplicable as any objects could be. One
looked like a small heap of glittering broken glass. Another looked like
a high heap of brown dust. A third appeared to be a plain stick of wood.

"You seem to have a sort of geological museum here," he said, as he sat
down, jerking his head briefly in the direction of the brown dust and
the crystalline fragments.

"Not a geological museum," replied Flambeau; "say a psychological
museum."

"Oh, for the Lord's sake," cried the police detective laughing, "don't
let's begin with such long words."

"Don't you know what psychology means?" asked Flambeau with friendly
surprise. "Psychology means being off your chump."

"Still I hardly follow," replied the official.

"Well," said Flambeau, with decision, "I mean that we've only found out
one thing about Lord Glengyle. He was a maniac."

The black silhouette of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the
window, dimly outlined against the darkening sky. Father Brown stared
passively at it and answered:

"I can understand there must have been something odd about the man, or
he wouldn't have buried himself alive--nor been in such a hurry to bury
himself dead. But what makes you think it was lunacy?"

"Well," said Flambeau, "you just listen to the list of things Mr. Craven
has found in the house."

"We must get a candle," said Craven, suddenly. "A storm is getting up,
and it's too dark to read."

"Have you found any candles," asked Brown smiling, "among your
oddities?"

Flambeau raised a grave face, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend.

"That is curious, too," he said. "Twenty-five candles, and not a trace
of a candlestick."

In the rapidly darkening room and rapidly rising wind, Brown went along
the table to where a bundle of wax candles lay among the other scrappy
exhibits. As he did so he bent accidentally over the heap of red-brown
dust; and a sharp sneeze cracked the silence.

"Hullo!" he said, "snuff!"

He took one of the candles, lit it carefully, came back and stuck it in
the neck of the whisky bottle. The unrestful night air, blowing through
the crazy window, waved the long flame like a banner. And on every side
of the castle they could hear the miles and miles of black pine wood
seething like a black sea around a rock.

"I will read the inventory," began Craven gravely, picking up one of
the papers, "the inventory of what we found loose and unexplained in the
castle. You are to understand that the place generally was dismantled
and neglected; but one or two rooms had plainly been inhabited in a
simple but not squalid style by somebody; somebody who was not the
servant Gow. The list is as follows:

"First item. A very considerable hoard of precious stones, nearly
all diamonds, and all of them loose, without any setting whatever. Of
course, it is natural that the Ogilvies should have family jewels; but
those are exactly the jewels that are almost always set in particular
articles of ornament. The Ogilvies would seem to have kept theirs loose
in their pockets, like coppers.

"Second item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or
even a pouch, but lying in heaps on the mantelpieces, on the sideboard,
on the piano, anywhere. It looks as if the old gentleman would not take
the trouble to look in a pocket or lift a lid.

"Third item. Here and there about the house curious little heaps of
minute pieces of metal, some like steel springs and some in the form of
microscopic wheels. As if they had gutted some mechanical toy.

"Fourth item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks
because there is nothing else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note
how very much queerer all this is than anything we anticipated. For the
central riddle we are prepared; we have all seen at a glance that there
was something wrong about the last earl. We have come here to find out
whether he really lived here, whether he really died here, whether that
red-haired scarecrow who did his burying had anything to do with his
dying. But suppose the worst in all this, the most lurid or melodramatic
solution you like. Suppose the servant really killed the master, or
suppose the master isn't really dead, or suppose the master is dressed
up as the servant, or suppose the servant is buried for the master;
invent what Wilkie Collins' tragedy you like, and you still have not
explained a candle without a candlestick, or why an elderly gentleman of
good family should habitually spill snuff on the piano. The core of
the tale we could imagine; it is the fringes that are mysterious. By no
stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds
and wax and loose clockwork."

"I think I see the connection," said the priest. "This Glengyle was
mad against the French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien
regime, and was trying to re-enact literally the family life of the last
Bourbons. He had snuff because it was the eighteenth century luxury;
wax candles, because they were the eighteenth century lighting; the
mechanical bits of iron represent the locksmith hobby of Louis XVI; the
diamonds are for the Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette."

Both the other men were staring at him with round eyes. "What a
perfectly extraordinary notion!" cried Flambeau. "Do you really think
that is the truth?"

"I am perfectly sure it isn't," answered Father Brown, "only you said
that nobody could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles.
I give you that connection off-hand. The real truth, I am very sure,
lies deeper."

He paused a moment and listened to the wailing of the wind in the
turrets. Then he said, "The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived
a second and darker life as a desperate housebreaker. He did not have
any candlesticks because he only used these candles cut short in the
little lantern he carried. The snuff he employed as the fiercest French
criminals have used pepper: to fling it suddenly in dense masses in
the face of a captor or pursuer. But the final proof is in the curious
coincidence of the diamonds and the small steel wheels. Surely that
makes everything plain to you? Diamonds and small steel wheels are the
only two instruments with which you can cut out a pane of glass."

The bough of a broken pine tree lashed heavily in the blast against the
windowpane behind them, as if in parody of a burglar, but they did not
turn round. Their eyes were fastened on Father Brown.

"Diamonds and small wheels," repeated Craven ruminating. "Is that all
that makes you think it the true explanation?"

"I don't think it the true explanation," replied the priest placidly;
"but you said that nobody could connect the four things. The true
tale, of course, is something much more humdrum. Glengyle had found,
or thought he had found, precious stones on his estate. Somebody had
bamboozled him with those loose brilliants, saying they were found in
the castle caverns. The little wheels are some diamond-cutting affair.
He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with the help of
a few shepherds or rude fellows on these hills. Snuff is the one great
luxury of such Scotch shepherds; it's the one thing with which you can
bribe them. They didn't have candlesticks because they didn't want them;
they held the candles in their hands when they explored the caves."

"Is that all?" asked Flambeau after a long pause. "Have we got to the
dull truth at last?"

"Oh, no," said Father Brown.

As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of
mockery Father Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:

"I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly
connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false
philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle
Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe.
But are there no other exhibits?"

Craven laughed, and Flambeau rose smiling to his feet and strolled down
the long table.

"Items five, six, seven, etc.," he said, "and certainly more varied than
instructive. A curious collection, not of lead pencils, but of the lead
out of lead pencils. A senseless stick of bamboo, with the top rather
splintered. It might be the instrument of the crime. Only, there isn't
any crime. The only other things are a few old missals and little
Catholic pictures, which the Ogilvies kept, I suppose, from the Middle
Ages--their family pride being stronger than their Puritanism. We
only put them in the museum because they seem curiously cut about and
defaced."

The heady tempest without drove a dreadful wrack of clouds across
Glengyle and threw the long room into darkness as Father Brown picked up
the little illuminated pages to examine them. He spoke before the drift
of darkness had passed; but it was the voice of an utterly new man.

"Mr. Craven," said he, talking like a man ten years younger, "you have
got a legal warrant, haven't you, to go up and examine that grave?
The sooner we do it the better, and get to the bottom of this horrible
affair. If I were you I should start now."

"Now," repeated the astonished detective, "and why now?"

"Because this is serious," answered Brown; "this is not spilt snuff or
loose pebbles, that might be there for a hundred reasons. There is only
one reason I know of for this being done; and the reason goes down to
the roots of the world. These religious pictures are not just dirtied
or torn or scrawled over, which might be done in idleness or bigotry, by
children or by Protestants. These have been treated very carefully--and
very queerly. In every place where the great ornamented name of God
comes in the old illuminations it has been elaborately taken out. The
only other thing that has been removed is the halo round the head of the
Child Jesus. Therefore, I say, let us get our warrant and our spade and
our hatchet, and go up and break open that coffin."

"What do you mean?" demanded the London officer.

"I mean," answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise
slightly in the roar of the gale. "I mean that the great devil of the
universe may be sitting on the top tower of this castle at this moment,
as big as a hundred elephants, and roaring like the Apocalypse. There is
black magic somewhere at the bottom of this."

"Black magic," repeated Flambeau in a low voice, for he was too
enlightened a man not to know of such things; "but what can these other
things mean?"

"Oh, something damnable, I suppose," replied Brown impatiently. "How
should I know? How can I guess all their mazes down below? Perhaps you
can make a torture out of snuff and bamboo. Perhaps lunatics lust after
wax and steel filings. Perhaps there is a maddening drug made of lead
pencils! Our shortest cut to the mystery is up the hill to the grave."

His comrades hardly knew that they had obeyed and followed him till a
blast of the night wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden.
Nevertheless they had obeyed him like automata; for Craven found
a hatchet in his hand, and the warrant in his pocket; Flambeau was
carrying the heavy spade of the strange gardener; Father Brown was
carrying the little gilt book from which had been torn the name of God.

The path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under
that stress of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could
see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond
seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal
gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were
whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that
infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient
sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that
the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of
the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that
irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.

"You see," said Father Brown in low but easy tone, "Scotch people before
Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they're a curious lot
still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped
demons. That," he added genially, "is why they jumped at the Puritan
theology."

"My friend," said Flambeau, turning in a kind of fury, "what does all
that snuff mean?"

"My friend," replied Brown, with equal seriousness, "there is one mark
of all genuine religions: materialism. Now, devil-worship is a perfectly
genuine religion."

They had come up on the grassy scalp of the hill, one of the few bald
spots that stood clear of the crashing and roaring pine forest. A mean
enclosure, partly timber and partly wire, rattled in the tempest to tell
them the border of the graveyard. But by the time Inspector Craven had
come to the corner of the grave, and Flambeau had planted his spade
point downwards and leaned on it, they were both almost as shaken as the
shaky wood and wire. At the foot of the grave grew great tall
thistles, grey and silver in their decay. Once or twice, when a ball
of thistledown broke under the breeze and flew past him, Craven jumped
slightly as if it had been an arrow.

Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into
the wet clay below. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

"Go on," said the priest very gently. "We are only trying to find the
truth. What are you afraid of?"

"I am afraid of finding it," said Flambeau.

The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was
meant to be conversational and cheery. "I wonder why he really did hide
himself like that. Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?"

"Something worse than that," said Flambeau.

"And what do you imagine," asked the other, "would be worse than a
leper?"

"I don't imagine it," said Flambeau.

He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked
voice, "I'm afraid of his not being the right shape."

"Nor was that piece of paper, you know," said Father Brown quietly, "and
we survived even that piece of paper."

Flambeau dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away
the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed
grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude
timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped
forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then
he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like
Flambeau's till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay
glimmering in the grey starlight.

"Bones," said Craven; and then he added, "but it is a man," as if that
were something unexpected.

"Is he," asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, "is he
all right?"

"Seems so," said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and
decaying skeleton in the box. "Wait a minute."

A vast heave went over Flambeau's huge figure. "And now I come to think
of it," he cried, "why in the name of madness shouldn't he be all right?
What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold mountains? I think
it's the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all
an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It's like the dream of an atheist.
Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees--"

"God!" cried the man by the coffin, "but he hasn't got a head."

While the others stood rigid the priest, for the first time, showed a
leap of startled concern.

"No head!" he repeated. "No head?" as if he had almost expected some
other deficiency.

Half-witted visions of a headless baby born to Glengyle, of a headless
youth hiding himself in the castle, of a headless man pacing those
ancient halls or that gorgeous garden, passed in panorama through their
minds. But even in that stiffened instant the tale took no root in them
and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood listening to the loud
woods and the shrieking sky quite foolishly, like exhausted animals.
Thought seemed to be something enormous that had suddenly slipped out of
their grasp.

"There are three headless men," said Father Brown, "standing round this
open grave."

The pale detective from London opened his mouth to speak, and left it
open like a yokel, while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he
looked at the axe in his hands as if it did not belong to him, and
dropped it.

"Father," said Flambeau in that infantile and heavy voice he used very
seldom, "what are we to do?"

His friend's reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun going off.

"Sleep!" cried Father Brown. "Sleep. We have come to the end of the
ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps
believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is
a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has
fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that
can fall on them."

Craven's parted lips came together to say, "What do you mean?"

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: "We have
found the truth; and the truth makes no sense."

He went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reckless
step very rare with him, and when they reached the castle again he threw
himself upon sleep with the simplicity of a dog.

Despite his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than
anyone else except the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big
pipe and watching that expert at his speechless labours in the kitchen
garden. Towards daybreak the rocking storm had ended in roaring rains,
and the day came with a curious freshness. The gardener seemed even
to have been conversing, but at sight of the detectives he planted
his spade sullenly in a bed and, saying something about his breakfast,
shifted along the lines of cabbages and shut himself in the kitchen.
"He's a valuable man, that," said Father Brown. "He does the potatoes
amazingly. Still," he added, with a dispassionate charity, "he has his
faults; which of us hasn't? He doesn't dig this bank quite regularly.
There, for instance," and he stamped suddenly on one spot. "I'm really
very doubtful about that potato."

"And why?" asked Craven, amused with the little man's hobby.

"I'm doubtful about it," said the other, "because old Gow was doubtful
about it himself. He put his spade in methodically in every place but
just this. There must be a mighty fine potato just here."

Flambeau pulled up the spade and impetuously drove it into the place.
He turned up, under a load of soil, something that did not look like a
potato, but rather like a monstrous, over-domed mushroom. But it struck
the spade with a cold click; it rolled over like a ball, and grinned up
at them.

"The Earl of Glengyle," said Brown sadly, and looked down heavily at the
skull.

Then, after a momentary meditation, he plucked the spade from Flambeau,
and, saying "We must hide it again," clamped the skull down in the
earth. Then he leaned his little body and huge head on the great handle
of the spade, that stood up stiffly in the earth, and his eyes were
empty and his forehead full of wrinkles. "If one could only conceive,"
he muttered, "the meaning of this last monstrosity." And leaning on
the large spade handle, he buried his brows in his hands, as men do in
church.

All the corners of the sky were brightening into blue and silver; the
birds were chattering in the tiny garden trees; so loud it seemed as if
the trees themselves were talking. But the three men were silent enough.

"Well, I give it all up," said Flambeau at last boisterously. "My brain
and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it. Snuff,
spoilt Prayer Books, and the insides of musical boxes--what--"

Brown threw up his bothered brow and rapped on the spade handle with an
intolerance quite unusual with him. "Oh, tut, tut, tut, tut!" he
cried. "All that is as plain as a pikestaff. I understood the snuff
and clockwork, and so on, when I first opened my eyes this morning. And
since then I've had it out with old Gow, the gardener, who is neither so
deaf nor so stupid as he pretends. There's nothing amiss about the loose
items. I was wrong about the torn mass-book, too; there's no harm in
that. But it's this last business. Desecrating graves and stealing dead
men's heads--surely there's harm in that? Surely there's black magic
still in that? That doesn't fit in to the quite simple story of the
snuff and the candles." And, striding about again, he smoked moodily.

"My friend," said Flambeau, with a grim humour, "you must be careful
with me and remember I was once a criminal. The great advantage of that
estate was that I always made up the story myself, and acted it as quick
as I chose. This detective business of waiting about is too much for my
French impatience. All my life, for good or evil, I have done things at
the instant; I always fought duels the next morning; I always paid bills
on the nail; I never even put off a visit to the dentist--"

Father Brown's pipe fell out of his mouth and broke into three pieces
on the gravel path. He stood rolling his eyes, the exact picture of
an idiot. "Lord, what a turnip I am!" he kept saying. "Lord, what a
turnip!" Then, in a somewhat groggy kind of way, he began to laugh.

"The dentist!" he repeated. "Six hours in the spiritual abyss, and all
because I never thought of the dentist! Such a simple, such a beautiful
and peaceful thought! Friends, we have passed a night in hell; but now
the sun is risen, the birds are singing, and the radiant form of the
dentist consoles the world."

"I will get some sense out of this," cried Flambeau, striding forward,
"if I use the tortures of the Inquisition."

Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary disposition to
dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child,
"Oh, let me be silly a little. You don't know how unhappy I have been.
And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all.
Only a little lunacy, perhaps--and who minds that?"

He spun round once more, then faced them with gravity.

"This is not a story of crime," he said; "rather it is the story of a
strange and crooked honesty. We are dealing with the one man on earth,
perhaps, who has taken no more than his due. It is a study in the savage
living logic that has been the religion of this race.

"That old local rhyme about the house of Glengyle--

     As green sap to the simmer trees
     Is red gold to the Ogilvies--

was literal as well as metaphorical. It did not merely mean that the
Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they literally
gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments and utensils in
that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn.
In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the
castle. Diamonds without their gold rings; candles without their gold
candlesticks; snuff without the gold snuff-boxes; pencil-leads without
the gold pencil-cases; a walking stick without its gold top; clockwork
without the gold clocks--or rather watches. And, mad as it sounds,
because the halos and the name of God in the old missals were of real
gold; these also were taken away."

The garden seemed to brighten, the grass to grow gayer in the
strengthening sun, as the crazy truth was told. Flambeau lit a cigarette
as his friend went on.

"Were taken away," continued Father Brown; "were taken away--but not
stolen. Thieves would never have left this mystery. Thieves would have
taken the gold snuff-boxes, snuff and all; the gold pencil-cases, lead
and all. We have to deal with a man with a peculiar conscience, but
certainly a conscience. I found that mad moralist this morning in the
kitchen garden yonder, and I heard the whole story.

"The late Archibald Ogilvie was the nearest approach to a good man
ever born at Glengyle. But his bitter virtue took the turn of the
misanthrope; he moped over the dishonesty of his ancestors, from which,
somehow, he generalised a dishonesty of all men. More especially he
distrusted philanthropy or free-giving; and he swore if he could
find one man who took his exact rights he should have all the gold of
Glengyle. Having delivered this defiance to humanity he shut himself
up, without the smallest expectation of its being answered. One day,
however, a deaf and seemingly senseless lad from a distant village
brought him a belated telegram; and Glengyle, in his acrid pleasantry,
gave him a new farthing. At least he thought he had done so, but when
he turned over his change he found the new farthing still there and a
sovereign gone. The accident offered him vistas of sneering speculation.
Either way, the boy would show the greasy greed of the species. Either
he would vanish, a thief stealing a coin; or he would sneak back with
it virtuously, a snob seeking a reward. In the middle of that night Lord
Glengyle was knocked up out of his bed--for he lived alone--and forced
to open the door to the deaf idiot. The idiot brought with him, not
the sovereign, but exactly nineteen shillings and eleven-pence
three-farthings in change.

"Then the wild exactitude of this action took hold of the mad lord's
brain like fire. He swore he was Diogenes, that had long sought an
honest man, and at last had found one. He made a new will, which I have
seen. He took the literal youth into his huge, neglected house, and
trained him up as his solitary servant and--after an odd manner--his
heir. And whatever that queer creature understands, he understood
absolutely his lord's two fixed ideas: first, that the letter of right
is everything; and second, that he himself was to have the gold of
Glengyle. So far, that is all; and that is simple. He has stripped the
house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not gold; not so much as
a grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old illumination, fully
satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I understood; but I
could not understand this skull business. I was really uneasy about that
human head buried among the potatoes. It distressed me--till Flambeau
said the word.

"It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he
has taken the gold out of the tooth."

And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he saw that
strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated grave, the
plaid round his throat thrashing out in the mountain wind; the sober top
hat on his head.




The Wrong Shape


Certain of the great roads going north out of London continue far into
the country a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a street,
with great gaps in the building, but preserving the line. Here will be a
group of shops, followed by a fenced field or paddock, and then a famous
public-house, and then perhaps a market garden or a nursery garden, and
then one large private house, and then another field and another inn,
and so on. If anyone walks along one of these roads he will pass a house
which will probably catch his eye, though he may not be able to explain
its attraction. It is a long, low house, running parallel with the road,
painted mostly white and pale green, with a veranda and sun-blinds, and
porches capped with those quaint sort of cupolas like wooden umbrellas
that one sees in some old-fashioned houses. In fact, it is an
old-fashioned house, very English and very suburban in the good old
wealthy Clapham sense. And yet the house has a look of having been built
chiefly for the hot weather. Looking at its white paint and sun-blinds
one thinks vaguely of pugarees and even of palm trees. I cannot trace
the feeling to its root; perhaps the place was built by an Anglo-Indian.

Anyone passing this house, I say, would be namelessly fascinated by it;
would feel that it was a place about which some story was to be told.
And he would have been right, as you shall shortly hear. For this is the
story--the story of the strange things that did really happen in it in
the Whitsuntide of the year 18--:

Anyone passing the house on the Thursday before Whit-Sunday at about
half-past four p.m. would have seen the front door open, and Father
Brown, of the small church of St. Mungo, come out smoking a large pipe
in company with a very tall French friend of his called Flambeau, who
was smoking a very small cigarette. These persons may or may not be of
interest to the reader, but the truth is that they were not the only
interesting things that were displayed when the front door of the
white-and-green house was opened. There are further peculiarities about
this house, which must be described to start with, not only that the
reader may understand this tragic tale, but also that he may realise
what it was that the opening of the door revealed.

The whole house was built upon the plan of a T, but a T with a very long
cross piece and a very short tail piece. The long cross piece was the
frontage that ran along in face of the street, with the front door
in the middle; it was two stories high, and contained nearly all
the important rooms. The short tail piece, which ran out at the back
immediately opposite the front door, was one story high, and consisted
only of two long rooms, the one leading into the other. The first of
these two rooms was the study in which the celebrated Mr. Quinton wrote
his wild Oriental poems and romances. The farther room was a glass
conservatory full of tropical blossoms of quite unique and almost
monstrous beauty, and on such afternoons as these glowing with gorgeous
sunlight. Thus when the hall door was open, many a passer-by literally
stopped to stare and gasp; for he looked down a perspective of rich
apartments to something really like a transformation scene in a fairy
play: purple clouds and golden suns and crimson stars that were at once
scorchingly vivid and yet transparent and far away.

Leonard Quinton, the poet, had himself most carefully arranged this
effect; and it is doubtful whether he so perfectly expressed his
personality in any of his poems. For he was a man who drank and bathed
in colours, who indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect
of form--even of good form. This it was that had turned his genius
so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those bewildering carpets
or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a
fortunate chaos, having nothing to typify or to teach. He had attempted,
not perhaps with complete artistic success, but with acknowledged
imagination and invention, to compose epics and love stories reflecting
the riot of violent and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens
of burning gold or blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with
twelve-turbaned mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green;
of gigantic jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which
burned with ancient and strange-hued fires.

In short (to put the matter from the more common point of view), he
dealt much in eastern heavens, rather worse than most western hells; in
eastern monarchs, whom we might possibly call maniacs; and in eastern
jewels which a Bond Street jeweller (if the hundred staggering negroes
brought them into his shop) might possibly not regard as genuine.
Quinton was a genius, if a morbid one; and even his morbidity appeared
more in his life than in his work. In temperament he was weak and
waspish, and his health had suffered heavily from oriental experiments
with opium. His wife--a handsome, hard-working, and, indeed, over-worked
woman objected to the opium, but objected much more to a live Indian
hermit in white and yellow robes, whom her husband insisted on
entertaining for months together, a Virgil to guide his spirit through
the heavens and the hells of the east.

It was out of this artistic household that Father Brown and his friend
stepped on to the door-step; and to judge from their faces, they stepped
out of it with much relief. Flambeau had known Quinton in wild student
days in Paris, and they had renewed the acquaintance for a week-end; but
apart from Flambeau's more responsible developments of late, he did not
get on well with the poet now. Choking oneself with opium and writing
little erotic verses on vellum was not his notion of how a gentleman
should go to the devil. As the two paused on the door-step, before
taking a turn in the garden, the front garden gate was thrown open with
violence, and a young man with a billycock hat on the back of his head
tumbled up the steps in his eagerness. He was a dissipated-looking youth
with a gorgeous red necktie all awry, as if he had slept in it, and he
kept fidgeting and lashing about with one of those little jointed canes.

"I say," he said breathlessly, "I want to see old Quinton. I must see
him. Has he gone?"

"Mr. Quinton is in, I believe," said Father Brown, cleaning his pipe,
"but I do not know if you can see him. The doctor is with him at
present."

The young man, who seemed not to be perfectly sober, stumbled into the
hall; and at the same moment the doctor came out of Quinton's study,
shutting the door and beginning to put on his gloves.

"See Mr. Quinton?" said the doctor coolly. "No, I'm afraid you can't. In
fact, you mustn't on any account. Nobody must see him; I've just given
him his sleeping draught."

"No, but look here, old chap," said the youth in the red tie, trying
affectionately to capture the doctor by the lapels of his coat. "Look
here. I'm simply sewn up, I tell you. I--"

"It's no good, Mr. Atkinson," said the doctor, forcing him to fall back;
"when you can alter the effects of a drug I'll alter my decision," and,
settling on his hat, he stepped out into the sunlight with the other
two. He was a bull-necked, good-tempered little man with a small
moustache, inexpressibly ordinary, yet giving an impression of capacity.

The young man in the billycock, who did not seem to be gifted with any
tact in dealing with people beyond the general idea of clutching hold of
their coats, stood outside the door, as dazed as if he had been thrown
out bodily, and silently watched the other three walk away together
through the garden.

"That was a sound, spanking lie I told just now," remarked the medical
man, laughing. "In point of fact, poor Quinton doesn't have his sleeping
draught for nearly half an hour. But I'm not going to have him bothered
with that little beast, who only wants to borrow money that he wouldn't
pay back if he could. He's a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs.
Quinton's brother, and she's as fine a woman as ever walked."

"Yes," said Father Brown. "She's a good woman."

"So I propose to hang about the garden till the creature has cleared
off," went on the doctor, "and then I'll go in to Quinton with the
medicine. Atkinson can't get in, because I locked the door."

"In that case, Dr. Harris," said Flambeau, "we might as well walk round
at the back by the end of the conservatory. There's no entrance to it
that way, but it's worth seeing, even from the outside."

"Yes, and I might get a squint at my patient," laughed the doctor, "for
he prefers to lie on an ottoman right at the end of the conservatory
amid all those blood-red poinsettias; it would give me the creeps. But
what are you doing?"

Father Brown had stopped for a moment, and picked up out of the long
grass, where it had almost been wholly hidden, a queer, crooked Oriental
knife, inlaid exquisitely in coloured stones and metals.

"What is this?" asked Father Brown, regarding it with some disfavour.

"Oh, Quinton's, I suppose," said Dr. Harris carelessly; "he has all
sorts of Chinese knickknacks about the place. Or perhaps it belongs to
that mild Hindoo of his whom he keeps on a string."

"What Hindoo?" asked Father Brown, still staring at the dagger in his
hand.

"Oh, some Indian conjuror," said the doctor lightly; "a fraud, of
course."

"You don't believe in magic?" asked Father Brown, without looking up.

"O crickey! magic!" said the doctor.

"It's very beautiful," said the priest in a low, dreaming voice; "the
colours are very beautiful. But it's the wrong shape."

"What for?" asked Flambeau, staring.

"For anything. It's the wrong shape in the abstract. Don't you ever feel
that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the
shapes are mean and bad--deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked
things in a Turkey carpet."

"Mon Dieu!" cried Flambeau, laughing.

"They are letters and symbols in a language I don't know; but I know
they stand for evil words," went on the priest, his voice growing lower
and lower. "The lines go wrong on purpose--like serpents doubling to
escape."

"What the devil are you talking about?" said the doctor with a loud
laugh.

Flambeau spoke quietly to him in answer. "The Father sometimes gets this
mystic's cloud on him," he said; "but I give you fair warning that I
have never known him to have it except when there was some evil quite
near."

"Oh, rats!" said the scientist.

"Why, look at it," cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked knife at
arm's length, as if it were some glittering snake. "Don't you see it is
the wrong shape? Don't you see that it has no hearty and plain purpose?
It does not point like a spear. It does not sweep like a scythe. It does
not look like a weapon. It looks like an instrument of torture."

"Well, as you don't seem to like it," said the jolly Harris, "it had
better be taken back to its owner. Haven't we come to the end of this
confounded conservatory yet? This house is the wrong shape, if you
like."

"You don't understand," said Father Brown, shaking his head. "The shape
of this house is quaint--it is even laughable. But there is nothing
wrong about it."

As they spoke they came round the curve of glass that ended the
conservatory, an uninterrupted curve, for there was neither door nor
window by which to enter at that end. The glass, however, was clear, and
the sun still bright, though beginning to set; and they could see not
only the flamboyant blossoms inside, but the frail figure of the poet
in a brown velvet coat lying languidly on the sofa, having, apparently,
fallen half asleep over a book. He was a pale, slight man, with loose,
chestnut hair and a fringe of beard that was the paradox of his face,
for the beard made him look less manly. These traits were well known
to all three of them; but even had it not been so, it may be doubted
whether they would have looked at Quinton just then. Their eyes were
riveted on another object.

Exactly in their path, immediately outside the round end of the glass
building, was standing a tall man, whose drapery fell to his feet in
faultless white, and whose bare, brown skull, face, and neck gleamed in
the setting sun like splendid bronze. He was looking through the glass
at the sleeper, and he was more motionless than a mountain.

"Who is that?" cried Father Brown, stepping back with a hissing intake
of his breath.

"Oh, it is only that Hindoo humbug," growled Harris; "but I don't know
what the deuce he's doing here."

"It looks like hypnotism," said Flambeau, biting his black moustache.

"Why are you unmedical fellows always talking bosh about hypnotism?"
cried the doctor. "It looks a deal more like burglary."

"Well, we will speak to it, at any rate," said Flambeau, who was always
for action. One long stride took him to the place where the Indian
stood. Bowing from his great height, which overtopped even the
Oriental's, he said with placid impudence:

"Good evening, sir. Do you want anything?"

Quite slowly, like a great ship turning into a harbour, the great yellow
face turned, and looked at last over its white shoulder. They were
startled to see that its yellow eyelids were quite sealed, as in sleep.
"Thank you," said the face in excellent English. "I want nothing." Then,
half opening the lids, so as to show a slit of opalescent eyeball,
he repeated, "I want nothing." Then he opened his eyes wide with a
startling stare, said, "I want nothing," and went rustling away into the
rapidly darkening garden.

"The Christian is more modest," muttered Father Brown; "he wants
something."

"What on earth was he doing?" asked Flambeau, knitting his black brows
and lowering his voice.

"I should like to talk to you later," said Father Brown.

The sunlight was still a reality, but it was the red light of evening,
and the bulk of the garden trees and bushes grew blacker and blacker
against it. They turned round the end of the conservatory, and walked in
silence down the other side to get round to the front door. As they went
they seemed to wake something, as one startles a bird, in the deeper
corner between the study and the main building; and again they saw the
white-robed fakir slide out of the shadow, and slip round towards the
front door. To their surprise, however, he had not been alone.
They found themselves abruptly pulled up and forced to banish their
bewilderment by the appearance of Mrs. Quinton, with her heavy golden
hair and square pale face, advancing on them out of the twilight. She
looked a little stern, but was entirely courteous.

"Good evening, Dr. Harris," was all she said.

"Good evening, Mrs. Quinton," said the little doctor heartily. "I am
just going to give your husband his sleeping draught."

"Yes," she said in a clear voice. "I think it is quite time." And she
smiled at them, and went sweeping into the house.

"That woman's over-driven," said Father Brown; "that's the kind of woman
that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful."

The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of
interest. "Did you ever study medicine?" he asked.

"You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered
the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."

"Well," said the doctor, "I think I'll go and give Quinton his stuff."

They had turned the corner of the front facade, and were approaching the
front doorway. As they turned into it they saw the man in the white robe
for the third time. He came so straight towards the front door that
it seemed quite incredible that he had not just come out of the study
opposite to it. Yet they knew that the study door was locked.

Father Brown and Flambeau, however, kept this weird contradiction to
themselves, and Dr. Harris was not a man to waste his thoughts on the
impossible. He permitted the omnipresent Asiatic to make his exit, and
then stepped briskly into the hall. There he found a figure which he had
already forgotten. The inane Atkinson was still hanging about, humming
and poking things with his knobby cane. The doctor's face had a spasm of
disgust and decision, and he whispered rapidly to his companion: "I must
lock the door again, or this rat will get in. But I shall be out again
in two minutes."

He rapidly unlocked the door and locked it again behind him, just
balking a blundering charge from the young man in the billycock. The
young man threw himself impatiently on a hall chair. Flambeau looked at
a Persian illumination on the wall; Father Brown, who seemed in a sort
of daze, dully eyed the door. In about four minutes the door was opened
again. Atkinson was quicker this time. He sprang forward, held the door
open for an instant, and called out: "Oh, I say, Quinton, I want--"

From the other end of the study came the clear voice of Quinton, in
something between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.

"Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace. I'm writing a
song about peacocks."

Before the door closed half a sovereign came flying through the
aperture; and Atkinson, stumbling forward, caught it with singular
dexterity.

"So that's settled," said the doctor, and, locking the door savagely, he
led the way out into the garden.

"Poor Leonard can get a little peace now," he added to Father Brown;
"he's locked in all by himself for an hour or two."

"Yes," answered the priest; "and his voice sounded jolly enough when we
left him." Then he looked gravely round the garden, and saw the loose
figure of Atkinson standing and jingling the half-sovereign in his
pocket, and beyond, in the purple twilight, the figure of the Indian
sitting bolt upright upon a bank of grass with his face turned towards
the setting sun. Then he said abruptly: "Where is Mrs. Quinton!"

"She has gone up to her room," said the doctor. "That is her shadow on
the blind."

Father Brown looked up, and frowningly scrutinised a dark outline at the
gas-lit window.

"Yes," he said, "that is her shadow," and he walked a yard or two and
threw himself upon a garden seat.

Flambeau sat down beside him; but the doctor was one of those energetic
people who live naturally on their legs. He walked away, smoking, into
the twilight, and the two friends were left together.

"My father," said Flambeau in French, "what is the matter with you?"

Father Brown was silent and motionless for half a minute, then he said:
"Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in the air of this
place. I think it's that Indian--at least, partly."

He sank into silence, and watched the distant outline of the Indian, who
still sat rigid as if in prayer. At first sight he seemed motionless,
but as Father Brown watched him he saw that the man swayed ever so
slightly with a rhythmic movement, just as the dark tree-tops swayed
ever so slightly in the wind that was creeping up the dim garden paths
and shuffling the fallen leaves a little.

The landscape was growing rapidly dark, as if for a storm, but they
could still see all the figures in their various places. Atkinson was
leaning against a tree with a listless face; Quinton's wife was still
at her window; the doctor had gone strolling round the end of the
conservatory; they could see his cigar like a will-o'-the-wisp; and the
fakir still sat rigid and yet rocking, while the trees above him began
to rock and almost to roar. Storm was certainly coming.

"When that Indian spoke to us," went on Brown in a conversational
undertone, "I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his
universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he
said 'I want nothing,' it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia
does not give itself away. Then he said again, 'I want nothing,' and
I knew that he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos,
that he needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the
third time, 'I want nothing,' he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew
that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and
his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation,
the mere destruction of everything or anything--"

Two drops of rain fell; and for some reason Flambeau started and looked
up, as if they had stung him. And the same instant the doctor down by
the end of the conservatory began running towards them, calling out
something as he ran.

As he came among them like a bombshell the restless Atkinson happened to
be taking a turn nearer to the house front; and the doctor clutched him
by the collar in a convulsive grip. "Foul play!" he cried; "what have
you been doing to him, you dog?"

The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a soldier in
command.

"No fighting," he cried coolly; "we are enough to hold anyone we want
to. What is the matter, doctor?"

"Things are not right with Quinton," said the doctor, quite white. "I
could just see him through the glass, and I don't like the way he's
lying. It's not as I left him, anyhow."

"Let us go in to him," said Father Brown shortly. "You can leave Mr.
Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quinton's voice."

"I will stop here and watch him," said Flambeau hurriedly. "You go in
and see."

The doctor and the priest flew to the study door, unlocked it, and fell
into the room. In doing so they nearly fell over the large mahogany
table in the centre at which the poet usually wrote; for the place was
lit only by a small fire kept for the invalid. In the middle of this
table lay a single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The
doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and
crying, "Good God, look at that!" plunged toward the glass room beyond,
where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory
of the sunset.

Father Brown read the words three times before he put down the paper.
The words were: "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" They were
in the quite inimitable, not to say illegible, handwriting of Leonard
Quinton.

Then Father Brown, still keeping the paper in his hand, strode towards
the conservatory, only to meet his medical friend coming back with a
face of assurance and collapse. "He's done it," said Harris.

They went together through the gorgeous unnatural beauty of cactus
and azalea and found Leonard Quinton, poet and romancer, with his head
hanging downward off his ottoman and his red curls sweeping the ground.
Into his left side was thrust the queer dagger that they had picked up
in the garden, and his limp hand still rested on the hilt.

Outside the storm had come at one stride, like the night in Coleridge,
and garden and glass roof were darkened with driving rain. Father Brown
seemed to be studying the paper more than the corpse; he held it close
to his eyes; and seemed trying to read it in the twilight. Then he held
it up against the faint light, and, as he did so, lightning stared at
them for an instant so white that the paper looked black against it.

Darkness full of thunder followed, and after the thunder Father Brown's
voice said out of the dark: "Doctor, this paper is the wrong shape."

"What do you mean?" asked Doctor Harris, with a frowning stare.

"It isn't square," answered Brown. "It has a sort of edge snipped off at
the corner. What does it mean?"

"How the deuce should I know?" growled the doctor. "Shall we move this
poor chap, do you think? He's quite dead."

"No," answered the priest; "we must leave him as he lies and send for
the police." But he was still scrutinising the paper.

As they went back through the study he stopped by the table and picked
up a small pair of nail scissors. "Ah," he said, with a sort of relief,
"this is what he did it with. But yet--" And he knitted his brows.

"Oh, stop fooling with that scrap of paper," said the doctor
emphatically. "It was a fad of his. He had hundreds of them. He cut all
his paper like that," as he pointed to a stack of sermon paper still
unused on another and smaller table. Father Brown went up to it and held
up a sheet. It was the same irregular shape.

"Quite so," he said. "And here I see the corners that were snipped off."
And to the indignation of his colleague he began to count them.

"That's all right," he said, with an apologetic smile. "Twenty-three
sheets cut and twenty-two corners cut off them. And as I see you are
impatient we will rejoin the others."

"Who is to tell his wife?" asked Dr. Harris. "Will you go and tell her
now, while I send a servant for the police?"

"As you will," said Father Brown indifferently. And he went out to the
hall door.

Here also he found a drama, though of a more grotesque sort. It showed
nothing less than his big friend Flambeau in an attitude to which he
had long been unaccustomed, while upon the pathway at the bottom of the
steps was sprawling with his boots in the air the amiable Atkinson, his
billycock hat and walking cane sent flying in opposite directions along
the path. Atkinson had at length wearied of Flambeau's almost paternal
custody, and had endeavoured to knock him down, which was by no means a
smooth game to play with the Roi des Apaches, even after that monarch's
abdication.

Flambeau was about to leap upon his enemy and secure him once more, when
the priest patted him easily on the shoulder.

"Make it up with Mr. Atkinson, my friend," he said. "Beg a mutual pardon
and say 'Good night.' We need not detain him any longer." Then, as
Atkinson rose somewhat doubtfully and gathered his hat and stick and
went towards the garden gate, Father Brown said in a more serious voice:
"Where is that Indian?"

They all three (for the doctor had joined them) turned involuntarily
towards the dim grassy bank amid the tossing trees purple with twilight,
where they had last seen the brown man swaying in his strange prayers.
The Indian was gone.

"Confound him," cried the doctor, stamping furiously. "Now I know that
it was that nigger that did it."

"I thought you didn't believe in magic," said Father Brown quietly.

"No more I did," said the doctor, rolling his eyes. "I only know that
I loathed that yellow devil when I thought he was a sham wizard. And I
shall loathe him more if I come to think he was a real one."

"Well, his having escaped is nothing," said Flambeau. "For we could
have proved nothing and done nothing against him. One hardly goes to
the parish constable with a story of suicide imposed by witchcraft or
auto-suggestion."

Meanwhile Father Brown had made his way into the house, and now went to
break the news to the wife of the dead man.

When he came out again he looked a little pale and tragic, but what
passed between them in that interview was never known, even when all was
known.

Flambeau, who was talking quietly with the doctor, was surprised to see
his friend reappear so soon at his elbow; but Brown took no notice, and
merely drew the doctor apart. "You have sent for the police, haven't
you?" he asked.

"Yes," answered Harris. "They ought to be here in ten minutes."

"Will you do me a favour?" said the priest quietly. "The truth is, I
make a collection of these curious stories, which often contain, as in
the case of our Hindoo friend, elements which can hardly be put into a
police report. Now, I want you to write out a report of this case for
my private use. Yours is a clever trade," he said, looking the doctor
gravely and steadily in the face. "I sometimes think that you know some
details of this matter which you have not thought fit to mention. Mine
is a confidential trade like yours, and I will treat anything you write
for me in strict confidence. But write the whole."

The doctor, who had been listening thoughtfully with his head a little
on one side, looked the priest in the face for an instant, and said:
"All right," and went into the study, closing the door behind him.

"Flambeau," said Father Brown, "there is a long seat there under the
veranda, where we can smoke out of the rain. You are my only friend in
the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you."

They established themselves comfortably in the veranda seat; Father
Brown, against his common habit, accepted a good cigar and smoked it
steadily in silence, while the rain shrieked and rattled on the roof of
the veranda.

"My friend," he said at length, "this is a very queer case. A very queer
case."

"I should think it was," said Flambeau, with something like a shudder.

"You call it queer, and I call it queer," said the other, "and yet
we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes up two
different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery
in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about
miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because
it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil)
instead of indirectly through nature or human wills. Now, you mean that
this business is marvellous because it is miraculous, because it is
witchcraft worked by a wicked Indian. Understand, I do not say that
it was not spiritual or diabolic. Heaven and hell only know by what
surrounding influences strange sins come into the lives of men. But for
the present my point is this: If it was pure magic, as you think,
then it is marvellous; but it is not mysterious--that is, it is not
complicated. The quality of a miracle is mysterious, but its manner
is simple. Now, the manner of this business has been the reverse of
simple."

The storm that had slackened for a little seemed to be swelling again,
and there came heavy movements as of faint thunder. Father Brown let
fall the ash of his cigar and went on:

"There has been in this incident," he said, "a twisted, ugly, complex
quality that does not belong to the straight bolts either of heaven
or hell. As one knows the crooked track of a snail, I know the crooked
track of a man."

The white lightning opened its enormous eye in one wink, the sky shut up
again, and the priest went on:

"Of all these crooked things, the crookedest was the shape of that piece
of paper. It was crookeder than the dagger that killed him."

"You mean the paper on which Quinton confessed his suicide," said
Flambeau.

"I mean the paper on which Quinton wrote, 'I die by my own hand,'"
answered Father Brown. "The shape of that paper, my friend, was the
wrong shape; the wrong shape, if ever I have seen it in this wicked
world."

"It only had a corner snipped off," said Flambeau, "and I understand
that all Quinton's paper was cut that way."

"It was a very odd way," said the other, "and a very bad way, to my
taste and fancy. Look here, Flambeau, this Quinton--God receive his
soul!--was perhaps a bit of a cur in some ways, but he really was an
artist, with the pencil as well as the pen. His handwriting, though hard
to read, was bold and beautiful. I can't prove what I say; I can't prove
anything. But I tell you with the full force of conviction that he could
never have cut that mean little piece off a sheet of paper. If he had
wanted to cut down paper for some purpose of fitting in, or binding
up, or what not, he would have made quite a different slash with the
scissors. Do you remember the shape? It was a mean shape. It was a wrong
shape. Like this. Don't you remember?"

And he waved his burning cigar before him in the darkness, making
irregular squares so rapidly that Flambeau really seemed to see them as
fiery hieroglyphics upon the darkness--hieroglyphics such as his friend
had spoken of, which are undecipherable, yet can have no good meaning.

"But," said Flambeau, as the priest put his cigar in his mouth again
and leaned back, staring at the roof, "suppose somebody else did use the
scissors. Why should somebody else, cutting pieces off his sermon paper,
make Quinton commit suicide?"

Father Brown was still leaning back and staring at the roof, but he took
his cigar out of his mouth and said: "Quinton never did commit suicide."

Flambeau stared at him. "Why, confound it all," he cried, "then why did
he confess to suicide?"

The priest leant forward again, settled his elbows on his knees, looked
at the ground, and said, in a low, distinct voice: "He never did confess
to suicide."

Flambeau laid his cigar down. "You mean," he said, "that the writing was
forged?"

"No," said Father Brown. "Quinton wrote it all right."

"Well, there you are," said the aggravated Flambeau; "Quinton wrote, 'I
die by my own hand,' with his own hand on a plain piece of paper."

"Of the wrong shape," said the priest calmly.

"Oh, the shape be damned!" cried Flambeau. "What has the shape to do
with it?"

"There were twenty-three snipped papers," resumed Brown unmoved, "and
only twenty-two pieces snipped off. Therefore one of the pieces had
been destroyed, probably that from the written paper. Does that suggest
anything to you?"

A light dawned on Flambeau's face, and he said: "There was something
else written by Quinton, some other words. 'They will tell you I die by
my own hand,' or 'Do not believe that--'"

"Hotter, as the children say," said his friend. "But the piece was
hardly half an inch across; there was no room for one word, let alone
five. Can you think of anything hardly bigger than a comma which the man
with hell in his heart had to tear away as a testimony against him?"

"I can think of nothing," said Flambeau at last.

"What about quotation marks?" said the priest, and flung his cigar far
into the darkness like a shooting star.

All words had left the other man's mouth, and Father Brown said, like
one going back to fundamentals:

"Leonard Quinton was a romancer, and was writing an Oriental romance
about wizardry and hypnotism. He--"

At this moment the door opened briskly behind them, and the doctor came
out with his hat on. He put a long envelope into the priest's hands.

"That's the document you wanted," he said, "and I must be getting home.
Good night."

"Good night," said Father Brown, as the doctor walked briskly to the
gate. He had left the front door open, so that a shaft of gaslight fell
upon them. In the light of this Brown opened the envelope and read the
following words:



    DEAR FATHER BROWN,--Vicisti Galilee. Otherwise, damn your
    eyes, which are very penetrating ones. Can it be possible that
    there is something in all that stuff of yours after all?


    I am a man who has ever since boyhood believed in Nature and
    in all natural functions and instincts, whether men called them
    moral or immoral. Long before I became a doctor, when I was a
    schoolboy keeping mice and spiders, I believed that to be a good
    animal is the best thing in the world. But just now I am shaken;
    I have believed in Nature; but it seems as if Nature could betray
    a man. Can there be anything in your bosh? I am really getting
    morbid.


    I loved Quinton's wife. What was there wrong in that? Nature
    told me to, and it's love that makes the world go round. I also
    thought quite sincerely that she would be happier with a clean
    animal like me than with that tormenting little lunatic. What was
    there wrong in that? I was only facing facts, like a man of
    science. She would have been happier.


    According to my own creed I was quite free to kill Quinton,
    which was the best thing for everybody, even himself. But as a
    healthy animal I had no notion of killing myself. I resolved,
    therefore, that I would never do it until I saw a chance that
    would leave me scot free. I saw that chance this morning.


    I have been three times, all told, into Quinton's study today.
    The first time I went in he would talk about nothing but the weird
    tale, called "The Cure of a Saint," which he was writing, which
    was all about how some Indian hermit made an English colonel kill
    himself by thinking about him. He showed me the last sheets, and
    even read me the last paragraph, which was something like this:
    "The conqueror of the Punjab, a mere yellow skeleton, but still
    gigantic, managed to lift himself on his elbow and gasp in his
    nephew's ear: 'I die by my own hand, yet I die murdered!'" It so
    happened by one chance out of a hundred, that those last words
    were written at the top of a new sheet of paper. I left the room,
    and went out into the garden intoxicated with a frightful
    opportunity.


    We walked round the house; and two more things happened in my
    favour. You suspected an Indian, and you found a dagger which the
    Indian might most probably use. Taking the opportunity to stuff
    it in my pocket I went back to Quinton's study, locked the door,
    and gave him his sleeping draught. He was against answering
    Atkinson at all, but I urged him to call out and quiet the fellow,
    because I wanted a clear proof that Quinton was alive when I left
    the room for the second time. Quinton lay down in the conservatory,
    and I came through the study. I am a quick man with my hands, and
    in a minute and a half I had done what I wanted to do. I had
    emptied all the first part of Quinton's romance into the fireplace,
    where it burnt to ashes. Then I saw that the quotation marks
    wouldn't do, so I snipped them off, and to make it seem likelier,
    snipped the whole quire to match. Then I came out with the
    knowledge that Quinton's confession of suicide lay on the front
    table, while Quinton lay alive but asleep in the conservatory
    beyond.


    The last act was a desperate one; you can guess it: I pretended
    to have seen Quinton dead and rushed to his room. I delayed you
    with the paper, and, being a quick man with my hands, killed
    Quinton while you were looking at his confession of suicide. He
    was half-asleep, being drugged, and I put his own hand on the
    knife and drove it into his body. The knife was of so queer a
    shape that no one but an operator could have calculated the angle
    that would reach his heart. I wonder if you noticed this.


    When I had done it, the extraordinary thing happened. Nature
    deserted me. I felt ill. I felt just as if I had done something
    wrong. I think my brain is breaking up; I feel some sort of
    desperate pleasure in thinking I have told the thing to somebody;
    that I shall not have to be alone with it if I marry and have
    children. What is the matter with me?... Madness... or can one
    have remorse, just as if one were in Byron's poems! I cannot
    write any more.

                   James Erskine Harris.


Father Brown carefully folded up the letter, and put it in his breast
pocket just as there came a loud peal at the gate bell, and the wet
waterproofs of several policemen gleamed in the road outside.




The Sins of Prince Saradine


When Flambeau took his month's holiday from his office in Westminster
he took it in a small sailing-boat, so small that it passed much of its
time as a rowing-boat. He took it, moreover, in little rivers in the
Eastern counties, rivers so small that the boat looked like a magic
boat, sailing on land through meadows and cornfields. The vessel was
just comfortable for two people; there was room only for necessities,
and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his special philosophy
considered necessary. They reduced themselves, apparently, to four
essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers,
if he should want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he
should faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die. With this
light luggage he crawled down the little Norfolk rivers, intending to
reach the Broads at last, but meanwhile delighting in the overhanging
gardens and meadows, the mirrored mansions or villages, lingering to
fish in the pools and corners, and in some sense hugging the shore.

Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday; but, like a
true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of half purpose, which
he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but
just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it. Years ago, when he
had been a king of thieves and the most famous figure in Paris, he had
often received wild communications of approval, denunciation, or even
love; but one had, somehow, stuck in his memory. It consisted simply of
a visiting-card, in an envelope with an English postmark. On the back of
the card was written in French and in green ink: "If you ever retire and
become respectable, come and see me. I want to meet you, for I have met
all the other great men of my time. That trick of yours of getting one
detective to arrest the other was the most splendid scene in French
history." On the front of the card was engraved in the formal fashion,
"Prince Saradine, Reed House, Reed Island, Norfolk."

He had not troubled much about the prince then, beyond ascertaining that
he had been a brilliant and fashionable figure in southern Italy. In his
youth, it was said, he had eloped with a married woman of high rank; the
escapade was scarcely startling in his social world, but it had clung to
men's minds because of an additional tragedy: the alleged suicide of the
insulted husband, who appeared to have flung himself over a precipice in
Sicily. The prince then lived in Vienna for a time, but his more recent
years seemed to have been passed in perpetual and restless travel. But
when Flambeau, like the prince himself, had left European celebrity
and settled in England, it occurred to him that he might pay a surprise
visit to this eminent exile in the Norfolk Broads. Whether he should
find the place he had no idea; and, indeed, it was sufficiently small
and forgotten. But, as things fell out, he found it much sooner than he
expected.

They had moored their boat one night under a bank veiled in high grasses
and short pollarded trees. Sleep, after heavy sculling, had come to them
early, and by a corresponding accident they awoke before it was light.
To speak more strictly, they awoke before it was daylight; for a large
lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their
heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright.
Both men had simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin
and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing
up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to
be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. Somehow it
reminded them of the dado of a nursery wall-paper. The drop of the
river-bed sufficed to sink them under the roots of all shrubs and
flowers and make them gaze upwards at the grass. "By Jove!" said
Flambeau, "it's like being in fairyland."

Father Brown sat bolt upright in the boat and crossed himself. His
movement was so abrupt that his friend asked him, with a mild stare,
what was the matter.

"The people who wrote the mediaeval ballads," answered the priest, "knew
more about fairies than you do. It isn't only nice things that happen in
fairyland."

"Oh, bosh!" said Flambeau. "Only nice things could happen under such an
innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing what does really come.
We may die and rot before we ever see again such a moon or such a mood."

"All right," said Father Brown. "I never said it was always wrong to
enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous."

They pushed slowly up the brightening river; the glowing violet of the
sky and the pale gold of the moon grew fainter and fainter, and faded
into that vast colourless cosmos that precedes the colours of the dawn.
When the first faint stripes of red and gold and grey split the horizon
from end to end they were broken by the black bulk of a town or village
which sat on the river just ahead of them. It was already an easy
twilight, in which all things were visible, when they came under the
hanging roofs and bridges of this riverside hamlet. The houses, with
their long, low, stooping roofs, seemed to come down to drink at the
river, like huge grey and red cattle. The broadening and whitening
dawn had already turned to working daylight before they saw any living
creature on the wharves and bridges of that silent town. Eventually they
saw a very placid and prosperous man in his shirt sleeves, with a face
as round as the recently sunken moon, and rays of red whisker around the
low arc of it, who was leaning on a post above the sluggish tide. By
an impulse not to be analysed, Flambeau rose to his full height in the
swaying boat and shouted at the man to ask if he knew Reed Island or
Reed House. The prosperous man's smile grew slightly more expansive,
and he simply pointed up the river towards the next bend of it. Flambeau
went ahead without further speech.

The boat took many such grassy corners and followed many such reedy and
silent reaches of river; but before the search had become monotonous
they had swung round a specially sharp angle and come into the silence
of a sort of pool or lake, the sight of which instinctively arrested
them. For in the middle of this wider piece of water, fringed on every
side with rushes, lay a long, low islet, along which ran a long, low
house or bungalow built of bamboo or some kind of tough tropic cane.
The upstanding rods of bamboo which made the walls were pale yellow, the
sloping rods that made the roof were of darker red or brown, otherwise
the long house was a thing of repetition and monotony. The early morning
breeze rustled the reeds round the island and sang in the strange ribbed
house as in a giant pan-pipe.

"By George!" cried Flambeau; "here is the place, after all! Here is Reed
Island, if ever there was one. Here is Reed House, if it is anywhere. I
believe that fat man with whiskers was a fairy."

"Perhaps," remarked Father Brown impartially. "If he was, he was a bad
fairy."

But even as he spoke the impetuous Flambeau had run his boat ashore in
the rattling reeds, and they stood in the long, quaint islet beside the
odd and silent house.

The house stood with its back, as it were, to the river and the only
landing-stage; the main entrance was on the other side, and looked down
the long island garden. The visitors approached it, therefore, by a
small path running round nearly three sides of the house, close under
the low eaves. Through three different windows on three different sides
they looked in on the same long, well-lit room, panelled in light wood,
with a large number of looking-glasses, and laid out as for an elegant
lunch. The front door, when they came round to it at last, was flanked
by two turquoise-blue flower pots. It was opened by a butler of the
drearier type--long, lean, grey and listless--who murmured that Prince
Saradine was from home at present, but was expected hourly; the house
being kept ready for him and his guests. The exhibition of the card with
the scrawl of green ink awoke a flicker of life in the parchment face of
the depressed retainer, and it was with a certain shaky courtesy that
he suggested that the strangers should remain. "His Highness may be here
any minute," he said, "and would be distressed to have just missed any
gentleman he had invited. We have orders always to keep a little cold
lunch for him and his friends, and I am sure he would wish it to be
offered."

Moved with curiosity to this minor adventure, Flambeau assented
gracefully, and followed the old man, who ushered him ceremoniously into
the long, lightly panelled room. There was nothing very notable about
it, except the rather unusual alternation of many long, low windows with
many long, low oblongs of looking-glass, which gave a singular air
of lightness and unsubstantialness to the place. It was somehow like
lunching out of doors. One or two pictures of a quiet kind hung in the
corners, one a large grey photograph of a very young man in uniform,
another a red chalk sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau
whether the soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly
in the negative; it was the prince's younger brother, Captain Stephen
Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up suddenly
and lose all taste for conversation.

After lunch had tailed off with exquisite coffee and liqueurs,
the guests were introduced to the garden, the library, and the
housekeeper--a dark, handsome lady, of no little majesty, and rather
like a plutonic Madonna. It appeared that she and the butler were
the only survivors of the prince's original foreign menage the other
servants now in the house being new and collected in Norfolk by the
housekeeper. This latter lady went by the name of Mrs. Anthony, but
she spoke with a slight Italian accent, and Flambeau did not doubt that
Anthony was a Norfolk version of some more Latin name. Mr. Paul,
the butler, also had a faintly foreign air, but he was in tongue and
training English, as are many of the most polished men-servants of the
cosmopolitan nobility.

Pretty and unique as it was, the place had about it a curious luminous
sadness. Hours passed in it like days. The long, well-windowed rooms
were full of daylight, but it seemed a dead daylight. And through all
other incidental noises, the sound of talk, the clink of glasses, or the
passing feet of servants, they could hear on all sides of the house the
melancholy noise of the river.

"We have taken a wrong turning, and come to a wrong place," said Father
Brown, looking out of the window at the grey-green sedges and the silver
flood. "Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person
in the wrong place."

Father Brown, though commonly a silent, was an oddly sympathetic little
man, and in those few but endless hours he unconsciously sank deeper
into the secrets of Reed House than his professional friend. He had that
knack of friendly silence which is so essential to gossip; and saying
scarcely a word, he probably obtained from his new acquaintances all
that in any case they would have told. The butler indeed was naturally
uncommunicative. He betrayed a sullen and almost animal affection
for his master; who, he said, had been very badly treated. The chief
offender seemed to be his highness's brother, whose name alone would
lengthen the old man's lantern jaws and pucker his parrot nose into a
sneer. Captain Stephen was a ne'er-do-well, apparently, and had drained
his benevolent brother of hundreds and thousands; forced him to fly from
fashionable life and live quietly in this retreat. That was all Paul,
the butler, would say, and Paul was obviously a partisan.

The Italian housekeeper was somewhat more communicative, being, as Brown
fancied, somewhat less content. Her tone about her master was faintly
acid; though not without a certain awe. Flambeau and his friend were
standing in the room of the looking-glasses examining the red sketch
of the two boys, when the housekeeper swept in swiftly on some domestic
errand. It was a peculiarity of this glittering, glass-panelled place
that anyone entering was reflected in four or five mirrors at once; and
Father Brown, without turning round, stopped in the middle of a sentence
of family criticism. But Flambeau, who had his face close up to the
picture, was already saying in a loud voice, "The brothers Saradine, I
suppose. They both look innocent enough. It would be hard to say which
is the good brother and which the bad." Then, realising the lady's
presence, he turned the conversation with some triviality, and strolled
out into the garden. But Father Brown still gazed steadily at the red
crayon sketch; and Mrs. Anthony still gazed steadily at Father Brown.

She had large and tragic brown eyes, and her olive face glowed darkly
with a curious and painful wonder--as of one doubtful of a stranger's
identity or purpose. Whether the little priest's coat and creed touched
some southern memories of confession, or whether she fancied he knew
more than he did, she said to him in a low voice as to a fellow plotter,
"He is right enough in one way, your friend. He says it would be hard
to pick out the good and bad brothers. Oh, it would be hard, it would be
mighty hard, to pick out the good one."

"I don't understand you," said Father Brown, and began to move away.

The woman took a step nearer to him, with thunderous brows and a sort of
savage stoop, like a bull lowering his horns.

"There isn't a good one," she hissed. "There was badness enough in the
captain taking all that money, but I don't think there was much goodness
in the prince giving it. The captain's not the only one with something
against him."

A light dawned on the cleric's averted face, and his mouth formed
silently the word "blackmail." Even as he did so the woman turned an
abrupt white face over her shoulder and almost fell. The door had opened
soundlessly and the pale Paul stood like a ghost in the doorway. By
the weird trick of the reflecting walls, it seemed as if five Pauls had
entered by five doors simultaneously.

"His Highness," he said, "has just arrived."

In the same flash the figure of a man had passed outside the first
window, crossing the sunlit pane like a lighted stage. An instant
later he passed at the second window and the many mirrors repainted in
successive frames the same eagle profile and marching figure. He was
erect and alert, but his hair was white and his complexion of an odd
ivory yellow. He had that short, curved Roman nose which generally
goes with long, lean cheeks and chin, but these were partly masked by
moustache and imperial. The moustache was much darker than the beard,
giving an effect slightly theatrical, and he was dressed up to the same
dashing part, having a white top hat, an orchid in his coat, a yellow
waistcoat and yellow gloves which he flapped and swung as he walked.
When he came round to the front door they heard the stiff Paul open it,
and heard the new arrival say cheerfully, "Well, you see I have come."
The stiff Mr. Paul bowed and answered in his inaudible manner; for a
few minutes their conversation could not be heard. Then the butler said,
"Everything is at your disposal;" and the glove-flapping Prince Saradine
came gaily into the room to greet them. They beheld once more that
spectral scene--five princes entering a room with five doors.

The prince put the white hat and yellow gloves on the table and offered
his hand quite cordially.

"Delighted to see you here, Mr. Flambeau," he said. "Knowing you very
well by reputation, if that's not an indiscreet remark."

"Not at all," answered Flambeau, laughing. "I am not sensitive. Very few
reputations are gained by unsullied virtue."

The prince flashed a sharp look at him to see if the retort had any
personal point; then he laughed also and offered chairs to everyone,
including himself.

"Pleasant little place, this, I think," he said with a detached air.
"Not much to do, I fear; but the fishing is really good."

The priest, who was staring at him with the grave stare of a baby, was
haunted by some fancy that escaped definition. He looked at the grey,
carefully curled hair, yellow white visage, and slim, somewhat foppish
figure. These were not unnatural, though perhaps a shade prononcé, like
the outfit of a figure behind the footlights. The nameless interest
lay in something else, in the very framework of the face; Brown was
tormented with a half memory of having seen it somewhere before. The
man looked like some old friend of his dressed up. Then he suddenly
remembered the mirrors, and put his fancy down to some psychological
effect of that multiplication of human masks.

Prince Saradine distributed his social attentions between his guests
with great gaiety and tact. Finding the detective of a sporting turn and
eager to employ his holiday, he guided Flambeau and Flambeau's boat down
to the best fishing spot in the stream, and was back in his own canoe
in twenty minutes to join Father Brown in the library and plunge equally
politely into the priest's more philosophic pleasures. He seemed to know
a great deal both about the fishing and the books, though of these not
the most edifying; he spoke five or six languages, though chiefly the
slang of each. He had evidently lived in varied cities and very motley
societies, for some of his cheerfullest stories were about gambling
hells and opium dens, Australian bushrangers or Italian brigands. Father
Brown knew that the once-celebrated Saradine had spent his last few
years in almost ceaseless travel, but he had not guessed that the
travels were so disreputable or so amusing.

Indeed, with all his dignity of a man of the world, Prince Saradine
radiated to such sensitive observers as the priest, a certain atmosphere
of the restless and even the unreliable. His face was fastidious, but
his eye was wild; he had little nervous tricks, like a man shaken by
drink or drugs, and he neither had, nor professed to have, his hand
on the helm of household affairs. All these were left to the two old
servants, especially to the butler, who was plainly the central pillar
of the house. Mr. Paul, indeed, was not so much a butler as a sort of
steward or, even, chamberlain; he dined privately, but with almost
as much pomp as his master; he was feared by all the servants; and he
consulted with the prince decorously, but somewhat unbendingly--rather
as if he were the prince's solicitor. The sombre housekeeper was a mere
shadow in comparison; indeed, she seemed to efface herself and wait only
on the butler, and Brown heard no more of those volcanic whispers which
had half told him of the younger brother who blackmailed the elder.
Whether the prince was really being thus bled by the absent captain,
he could not be certain, but there was something insecure and secretive
about Saradine that made the tale by no means incredible.

When they went once more into the long hall with the windows and the
mirrors, yellow evening was dropping over the waters and the willowy
banks; and a bittern sounded in the distance like an elf upon his
dwarfish drum. The same singular sentiment of some sad and evil
fairyland crossed the priest's mind again like a little grey cloud. "I
wish Flambeau were back," he muttered.

"Do you believe in doom?" asked the restless Prince Saradine suddenly.

"No," answered his guest. "I believe in Doomsday."

The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a singular
manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. "What do you mean?" he
asked.

"I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry," answered
Father Brown. "The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything;
they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come
on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."

The prince made an inexplicable noise like an animal; in his shadowed
face the eyes were shining queerly. A new and shrewd thought exploded
silently in the other's mind. Was there another meaning in Saradine's
blend of brilliancy and abruptness? Was the prince--Was he perfectly
sane? He was repeating, "The wrong person--the wrong person," many more
times than was natural in a social exclamation.

Then Father Brown awoke tardily to a second truth. In the mirrors before
him he could see the silent door standing open, and the silent Mr. Paul
standing in it, with his usual pallid impassiveness.

"I thought it better to announce at once," he said, with the same stiff
respectfulness as of an old family lawyer, "a boat rowed by six men
has come to the landing-stage, and there's a gentleman sitting in the
stern."

"A boat!" repeated the prince; "a gentleman?" and he rose to his feet.

There was a startled silence punctuated only by the odd noise of the
bird in the sedge; and then, before anyone could speak again, a new
face and figure passed in profile round the three sunlit windows, as
the prince had passed an hour or two before. But except for the accident
that both outlines were aquiline, they had little in common. Instead
of the new white topper of Saradine, was a black one of antiquated or
foreign shape; under it was a young and very solemn face, clean shaven,
blue about its resolute chin, and carrying a faint suggestion of the
young Napoleon. The association was assisted by something old and odd
about the whole get-up, as of a man who had never troubled to change
the fashions of his fathers. He had a shabby blue frock coat, a red,
soldierly looking waistcoat, and a kind of coarse white trousers common
among the early Victorians, but strangely incongruous today. From all
this old clothes-shop his olive face stood out strangely young and
monstrously sincere.

"The deuce!" said Prince Saradine, and clapping on his white hat he went
to the front door himself, flinging it open on the sunset garden.

By that time the new-comer and his followers were drawn up on the lawn
like a small stage army. The six boatmen had pulled the boat well up on
shore, and were guarding it almost menacingly, holding their oars erect
like spears. They were swarthy men, and some of them wore earrings. But
one of them stood forward beside the olive-faced young man in the red
waistcoat, and carried a large black case of unfamiliar form.

"Your name," said the young man, "is Saradine?"

Saradine assented rather negligently.

The new-comer had dull, dog-like brown eyes, as different as possible
from the restless and glittering grey eyes of the prince. But once
again Father Brown was tortured with a sense of having seen somewhere a
replica of the face; and once again he remembered the repetitions of
the glass-panelled room, and put down the coincidence to that. "Confound
this crystal palace!" he muttered. "One sees everything too many times.
It's like a dream."

"If you are Prince Saradine," said the young man, "I may tell you that
my name is Antonelli."

"Antonelli," repeated the prince languidly. "Somehow I remember the
name."

"Permit me to present myself," said the young Italian.

With his left hand he politely took off his old-fashioned top-hat; with
his right he caught Prince Saradine so ringing a crack across the
face that the white top hat rolled down the steps and one of the blue
flower-pots rocked upon its pedestal.

The prince, whatever he was, was evidently not a coward; he sprang at
his enemy's throat and almost bore him backwards to the grass. But his
enemy extricated himself with a singularly inappropriate air of hurried
politeness.

"That is all right," he said, panting and in halting English. "I have
insulted. I will give satisfaction. Marco, open the case."

The man beside him with the earrings and the big black case proceeded
to unlock it. He took out of it two long Italian rapiers, with splendid
steel hilts and blades, which he planted point downwards in the lawn.
The strange young man standing facing the entrance with his yellow and
vindictive face, the two swords standing up in the turf like two crosses
in a cemetery, and the line of the ranked towers behind, gave it all an
odd appearance of being some barbaric court of justice. But everything
else was unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold
still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as announcing
some small but dreadful destiny.

"Prince Saradine," said the man called Antonelli, "when I was an infant
in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother; my father was
the more fortunate. You did not kill him fairly, as I am going to kill
you. You and my wicked mother took him driving to a lonely pass in
Sicily, flung him down a cliff, and went on your way. I could imitate
you if I chose, but imitating you is too vile. I have followed you all
over the world, and you have always fled from me. But this is the end
of the world--and of you. I have you now, and I give you the chance you
never gave my father. Choose one of those swords."

Prince Saradine, with contracted brows, seemed to hesitate a moment,
but his ears were still singing with the blow, and he sprang forward
and snatched at one of the hilts. Father Brown had also sprung forward,
striving to compose the dispute; but he soon found his personal presence
made matters worse. Saradine was a French freemason and a fierce
atheist, and a priest moved him by the law of contraries. And for the
other man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man
with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner
than a puritan--a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the
earth; a man of the stone age--a man of stone.

One hope remained, the summoning of the household; and Father Brown ran
back into the house. He found, however, that all the under servants
had been given a holiday ashore by the autocrat Paul, and that only the
sombre Mrs. Anthony moved uneasily about the long rooms. But the moment
she turned a ghastly face upon him, he resolved one of the riddles of
the house of mirrors. The heavy brown eyes of Antonelli were the heavy
brown eyes of Mrs. Anthony; and in a flash he saw half the story.

"Your son is outside," he said without wasting words; "either he or the
prince will be killed. Where is Mr. Paul?"

"He is at the landing-stage," said the woman faintly. "He is--he
is--signalling for help."

"Mrs. Anthony," said Father Brown seriously, "there is no time for
nonsense. My friend has his boat down the river fishing. Your son's boat
is guarded by your son's men. There is only this one canoe; what is Mr.
Paul doing with it?"

"Santa Maria! I do not know," she said; and swooned all her length on
the matted floor.

Father Brown lifted her to a sofa, flung a pot of water over her,
shouted for help, and then rushed down to the landing-stage of the
little island. But the canoe was already in mid-stream, and old Paul
was pulling and pushing it up the river with an energy incredible at his
years.

"I will save my master," he cried, his eyes blazing maniacally. "I will
save him yet!"

Father Brown could do nothing but gaze after the boat as it struggled
up-stream and pray that the old man might waken the little town in time.

"A duel is bad enough," he muttered, rubbing up his rough dust-coloured
hair, "but there's something wrong about this duel, even as a duel. I
feel it in my bones. But what can it be?"

As he stood staring at the water, a wavering mirror of sunset, he
heard from the other end of the island garden a small but unmistakable
sound--the cold concussion of steel. He turned his head.

Away on the farthest cape or headland of the long islet, on a strip of
turf beyond the last rank of roses, the duellists had already crossed
swords. Evening above them was a dome of virgin gold, and, distant as
they were, every detail was picked out. They had cast off their coats,
but the yellow waistcoat and white hair of Saradine, the red waistcoat
and white trousers of Antonelli, glittered in the level light like the
colours of the dancing clockwork dolls. The two swords sparkled from
point to pommel like two diamond pins. There was something frightful
in the two figures appearing so little and so gay. They looked like two
butterflies trying to pin each other to a cork.

Father Brown ran as hard as he could, his little legs going like a
wheel. But when he came to the field of combat he found he was born too
late and too early--too late to stop the strife, under the shadow of the
grim Sicilians leaning on their oars, and too early to anticipate any
disastrous issue of it. For the two men were singularly well matched,
the prince using his skill with a sort of cynical confidence, the
Sicilian using his with a murderous care. Few finer fencing matches can
ever have been seen in crowded amphitheatres than that which tinkled and
sparkled on that forgotten island in the reedy river. The dizzy fight
was balanced so long that hope began to revive in the protesting priest;
by all common probability Paul must soon come back with the police. It
would be some comfort even if Flambeau came back from his fishing, for
Flambeau, physically speaking, was worth four other men. But there was
no sign of Flambeau, and, what was much queerer, no sign of Paul or the
police. No other raft or stick was left to float on; in that lost
island in that vast nameless pool, they were cut off as on a rock in the
Pacific.

Almost as he had the thought the ringing of the rapiers quickened to a
rattle, the prince's arms flew up, and the point shot out behind between
his shoulder-blades. He went over with a great whirling movement, almost
like one throwing the half of a boy's cart-wheel. The sword flew from
his hand like a shooting star, and dived into the distant river. And
he himself sank with so earth-shaking a subsidence that he broke a
big rose-tree with his body and shook up into the sky a cloud of red
earth--like the smoke of some heathen sacrifice. The Sicilian had made
blood-offering to the ghost of his father.

The priest was instantly on his knees by the corpse; but only to make
too sure that it was a corpse. As he was still trying some last hopeless
tests he heard for the first time voices from farther up the river, and
saw a police boat shoot up to the landing-stage, with constables and
other important people, including the excited Paul. The little priest
rose with a distinctly dubious grimace.

"Now, why on earth," he muttered, "why on earth couldn't he have come
before?"

Some seven minutes later the island was occupied by an invasion
of townsfolk and police, and the latter had put their hands on the
victorious duellist, ritually reminding him that anything he said might
be used against him.

"I shall not say anything," said the monomaniac, with a wonderful and
peaceful face. "I shall never say anything more. I am very happy, and I
only want to be hanged."

Then he shut his mouth as they led him away, and it is the strange but
certain truth that he never opened it again in this world, except to say
"Guilty" at his trial.

Father Brown had stared at the suddenly crowded garden, the arrest of
the man of blood, the carrying away of the corpse after its examination
by the doctor, rather as one watches the break-up of some ugly dream; he
was motionless, like a man in a nightmare. He gave his name and address
as a witness, but declined their offer of a boat to the shore, and
remained alone in the island garden, gazing at the broken rose bush
and the whole green theatre of that swift and inexplicable tragedy. The
light died along the river; mist rose in the marshy banks; a few belated
birds flitted fitfully across.

Stuck stubbornly in his sub-consciousness (which was an unusually
lively one) was an unspeakable certainty that there was something still
unexplained. This sense that had clung to him all day could not be fully
explained by his fancy about "looking-glass land." Somehow he had not
seen the real story, but some game or masque. And yet people do not get
hanged or run through the body for the sake of a charade.

As he sat on the steps of the landing-stage ruminating he grew conscious
of the tall, dark streak of a sail coming silently down the shining
river, and sprang to his feet with such a backrush of feeling that he
almost wept.

"Flambeau!" he cried, and shook his friend by both hands again and
again, much to the astonishment of that sportsman, as he came on shore
with his fishing tackle. "Flambeau," he said, "so you're not killed?"

"Killed!" repeated the angler in great astonishment. "And why should I
be killed?"

"Oh, because nearly everybody else is," said his companion rather
wildly. "Saradine got murdered, and Antonelli wants to be hanged, and
his mother's fainted, and I, for one, don't know whether I'm in this
world or the next. But, thank God, you're in the same one." And he took
the bewildered Flambeau's arm.

As they turned from the landing-stage they came under the eaves of the
low bamboo house, and looked in through one of the windows, as they
had done on their first arrival. They beheld a lamp-lit interior well
calculated to arrest their eyes. The table in the long dining-room
had been laid for dinner when Saradine's destroyer had fallen like a
stormbolt on the island. And the dinner was now in placid progress, for
Mrs. Anthony sat somewhat sullenly at the foot of the table, while at
the head of it was Mr. Paul, the major domo, eating and drinking of the
best, his bleared, bluish eyes standing queerly out of his face, his
gaunt countenance inscrutable, but by no means devoid of satisfaction.

With a gesture of powerful impatience, Flambeau rattled at the window,
wrenched it open, and put an indignant head into the lamp-lit room.

"Well," he cried. "I can understand you may need some refreshment,
but really to steal your master's dinner while he lies murdered in the
garden--"

"I have stolen a great many things in a long and pleasant life," replied
the strange old gentleman placidly; "this dinner is one of the few
things I have not stolen. This dinner and this house and garden happen
to belong to me."

A thought flashed across Flambeau's face. "You mean to say," he began,
"that the will of Prince Saradine--"

"I am Prince Saradine," said the old man, munching a salted almond.

Father Brown, who was looking at the birds outside, jumped as if he were
shot, and put in at the window a pale face like a turnip.

"You are what?" he repeated in a shrill voice.

"Paul, Prince Saradine, A vos ordres," said the venerable person
politely, lifting a glass of sherry. "I live here very quietly, being
a domestic kind of fellow; and for the sake of modesty I am called Mr.
Paul, to distinguish me from my unfortunate brother Mr. Stephen. He
died, I hear, recently--in the garden. Of course, it is not my fault
if enemies pursue him to this place. It is owing to the regrettable
irregularity of his life. He was not a domestic character."

He relapsed into silence, and continued to gaze at the opposite wall
just above the bowed and sombre head of the woman. They saw plainly
the family likeness that had haunted them in the dead man. Then his old
shoulders began to heave and shake a little, as if he were choking, but
his face did not alter.

"My God!" cried Flambeau after a pause, "he's laughing!"

"Come away," said Father Brown, who was quite white. "Come away from
this house of hell. Let us get into an honest boat again."

Night had sunk on rushes and river by the time they had pushed off from
the island, and they went down-stream in the dark, warming themselves
with two big cigars that glowed like crimson ships' lanterns. Father
Brown took his cigar out of his mouth and said:

"I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's a
primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he
discovered that two enemies are better than one."

"I do not follow that," answered Flambeau.

"Oh, it's really simple," rejoined his friend. "Simple, though anything
but innocent. Both the Saradines were scamps, but the prince, the
elder, was the sort of scamp that gets to the top, and the younger, the
captain, was the sort that sinks to the bottom. This squalid officer
fell from beggar to blackmailer, and one ugly day he got his hold upon
his brother, the prince. Obviously it was for no light matter, for
Prince Paul Saradine was frankly 'fast,' and had no reputation to lose
as to the mere sins of society. In plain fact, it was a hanging matter,
and Stephen literally had a rope round his brother's neck. He had
somehow discovered the truth about the Sicilian affair, and could prove
that Paul murdered old Antonelli in the mountains. The captain raked in
the hush money heavily for ten years, until even the prince's splendid
fortune began to look a little foolish.

"But Prince Saradine bore another burden besides his blood-sucking
brother. He knew that the son of Antonelli, a mere child at the time of
the murder, had been trained in savage Sicilian loyalty, and lived only
to avenge his father, not with the gibbet (for he lacked Stephen's legal
proof), but with the old weapons of vendetta. The boy had practised arms
with a deadly perfection, and about the time that he was old enough to
use them Prince Saradine began, as the society papers said, to travel.
The fact is that he began to flee for his life, passing from place
to place like a hunted criminal; but with one relentless man upon his
trail. That was Prince Paul's position, and by no means a pretty one.
The more money he spent on eluding Antonelli the less he had to silence
Stephen. The more he gave to silence Stephen the less chance there was
of finally escaping Antonelli. Then it was that he showed himself a
great man--a genius like Napoleon.

"Instead of resisting his two antagonists, he surrendered suddenly to
both of them. He gave way like a Japanese wrestler, and his foes fell
prostrate before him. He gave up the race round the world, and he gave
up his address to young Antonelli; then he gave up everything to his
brother. He sent Stephen money enough for smart clothes and easy travel,
with a letter saying roughly: 'This is all I have left. You have cleaned
me out. I still have a little house in Norfolk, with servants and a
cellar, and if you want more from me you must take that. Come and take
possession if you like, and I will live there quietly as your friend
or agent or anything.' He knew that the Sicilian had never seen the
Saradine brothers save, perhaps, in pictures; he knew they were somewhat
alike, both having grey, pointed beards. Then he shaved his own face
and waited. The trap worked. The unhappy captain, in his new clothes,
entered the house in triumph as a prince, and walked upon the Sicilian's
sword.

"There was one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature. Evil
spirits like Saradine often blunder by never expecting the virtues of
mankind. He took it for granted that the Italian's blow, when it came,
would be dark, violent and nameless, like the blow it avenged; that the
victim would be knifed at night, or shot from behind a hedge, and so
die without speech. It was a bad minute for Prince Paul when Antonelli's
chivalry proposed a formal duel, with all its possible explanations. It
was then that I found him putting off in his boat with wild eyes. He was
fleeing, bareheaded, in an open boat before Antonelli should learn who
he was.

"But, however agitated, he was not hopeless. He knew the adventurer and
he knew the fanatic. It was quite probable that Stephen, the adventurer,
would hold his tongue, through his mere histrionic pleasure in playing a
part, his lust for clinging to his new cosy quarters, his rascal's
trust in luck, and his fine fencing. It was certain that Antonelli, the
fanatic, would hold his tongue, and be hanged without telling tales
of his family. Paul hung about on the river till he knew the fight
was over. Then he roused the town, brought the police, saw his two
vanquished enemies taken away forever, and sat down smiling to his
dinner."

"Laughing, God help us!" said Flambeau with a strong shudder. "Do they
get such ideas from Satan?"

"He got that idea from you," answered the priest.

"God forbid!" ejaculated Flambeau. "From me! What do you mean!"

The priest pulled a visiting-card from his pocket and held it up in the
faint glow of his cigar; it was scrawled with green ink.

"Don't you remember his original invitation to you?" he asked, "and the
compliment to your criminal exploit? 'That trick of yours,' he says,
'of getting one detective to arrest the other'? He has just copied your
trick. With an enemy on each side of him, he slipped swiftly out of the
way and let them collide and kill each other."

Flambeau tore Prince Saradine's card from the priest's hands and rent it
savagely in small pieces.

"There's the last of that old skull and crossbones," he said as he
scattered the pieces upon the dark and disappearing waves of the stream;
"but I should think it would poison the fishes."

The last gleam of white card and green ink was drowned and darkened;
a faint and vibrant colour as of morning changed the sky, and the moon
behind the grasses grew paler. They drifted in silence.

"Father," said Flambeau suddenly, "do you think it was all a dream?"

The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but
remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through
the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the next moment it
swayed their little boat and swelled their sail, and carried them onward
down the winding river to happier places and the homes of harmless men.




The Hammer of God


The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep
that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small
mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with
fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to
this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was "The Blue Boar," the only
inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden
and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke;
though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev.
and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some
austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon.
Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting
in evening dress on the bench outside "The Blue Boar," drinking what
the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on
Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.

The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating
from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine.
But it is a great mistake to suppose that such houses stand high
in chivalric tradition. Few except the poor preserve traditions.
Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions. The Bohuns had been
Mohocks under Queen Anne and Mashers under Queen Victoria. But like more
than one of the really ancient houses, they had rotted in the last two
centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even
come a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly
human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic
resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous
clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with
hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and
leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they
looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long
yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to
jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into his face. Over his evening clothes
he wore a curious pale yellow coat that looked more like a very light
dressing gown than an overcoat, and on the back of his head was stuck an
extraordinary broad-brimmed hat of a bright green colour, evidently some
oriental curiosity caught up at random. He was proud of appearing in
such incongruous attires--proud of the fact that he always made them
look congruous.

His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but
he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven,
cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his
religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was
a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of
God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another
and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his
brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the
man's practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an
ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and
was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but
in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry.
He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of
the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother's
cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the
colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations.
There only remained the blacksmith's shop, and though the blacksmith was
a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals
about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look
across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.

"Good morning, Wilfred," he said. "Like a good landlord I am watching
sleeplessly over my people. I am going to call on the blacksmith."

Wilfred looked at the ground, and said: "The blacksmith is out. He is
over at Greenford."

"I know," answered the other with silent laughter; "that is why I am
calling on him."

"Norman," said the cleric, with his eye on a pebble in the road, "are
you ever afraid of thunderbolts?"

"What do you mean?" asked the colonel. "Is your hobby meteorology?"

"I mean," said Wilfred, without looking up, "do you ever think that God
might strike you in the street?"

"I beg your pardon," said the colonel; "I see your hobby is folk-lore."

"I know your hobby is blasphemy," retorted the religious man, stung in
the one live place of his nature. "But if you do not fear God, you have
good reason to fear man."

The elder raised his eyebrows politely. "Fear man?" he said.

"Barnes the blacksmith is the biggest and strongest man for forty
miles round," said the clergyman sternly. "I know you are no coward or
weakling, but he could throw you over the wall."

This struck home, being true, and the lowering line by mouth and nostril
darkened and deepened. For a moment he stood with the heavy sneer on his
face. But in an instant Colonel Bohun had recovered his own cruel good
humour and laughed, showing two dog-like front teeth under his yellow
moustache. "In that case, my dear Wilfred," he said quite carelessly,
"it was wise for the last of the Bohuns to come out partially in
armour."

And he took off the queer round hat covered with green, showing that
it was lined within with steel. Wilfred recognised it indeed as a light
Japanese or Chinese helmet torn down from a trophy that hung in the old
family hall.

"It was the first hat to hand," explained his brother airily; "always
the nearest hat--and the nearest woman."

"The blacksmith is away at Greenford," said Wilfred quietly; "the time
of his return is unsettled."

And with that he turned and went into the church with bowed head,
crossing himself like one who wishes to be quit of an unclean spirit.
He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall
Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round
of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks.
As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling
figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of
the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For
the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of
the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or
for anything else. He was always called "Mad Joe," and seemed to have
no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white
face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the
priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing
or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of
prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.

Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go
out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him
with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last thing he saw was the
colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of Joe, with the serious
appearance of trying to hit it.

This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent
the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and new thoughts.
He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought him under a coloured
window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue window
with an angel carrying lilies. There he began to think less about the
half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think
less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his horrible
hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of
silver blossoms and sapphire sky.

In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village
cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet
with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter would have brought
Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in many villages,
an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary
than Mad Joe's. It was a morning of theological enigmas.

"What is it?" asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a
trembling hand for his hat.

The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from him, was quite startlingly
respectful, and even, as it were, huskily sympathetic.

"You must excuse me, sir," he said in a hoarse whisper, "but we didn't
think it right not to let you know at once. I'm afraid a rather dreadful
thing has happened, sir. I'm afraid your brother--"

Wilfred clenched his frail hands. "What devilry has he done now?" he
cried in voluntary passion.

"Why, sir," said the cobbler, coughing, "I'm afraid he's done nothing,
and won't do anything. I'm afraid he's done for. You had really better
come down, sir."

The curate followed the cobbler down a short winding stair which brought
them out at an entrance rather higher than the street. Bohun saw the
tragedy in one glance, flat underneath him like a plan. In the yard
of the smithy were standing five or six men mostly in black, one in
an inspector's uniform. They included the doctor, the Presbyterian
minister, and the priest from the Roman Catholic chapel, to which the
blacksmith's wife belonged. The latter was speaking to her, indeed,
very rapidly, in an undertone, as she, a magnificent woman with red-gold
hair, was sobbing blindly on a bench. Between these two groups, and
just clear of the main heap of hammers, lay a man in evening dress,
spread-eagled and flat on his face. From the height above Wilfred could
have sworn to every item of his costume and appearance, down to the
Bohun rings upon his fingers; but the skull was only a hideous splash,
like a star of blackness and blood.

Wilfred Bohun gave but one glance, and ran down the steps into the yard.
The doctor, who was the family physician, saluted him, but he scarcely
took any notice. He could only stammer out: "My brother is dead. What
does it mean? What is this horrible mystery?" There was an unhappy
silence; and then the cobbler, the most outspoken man present, answered:
"Plenty of horror, sir," he said; "but not much mystery."

"What do you mean?" asked Wilfred, with a white face.

"It's plain enough," answered Gibbs. "There is only one man for forty
miles round that could have struck such a blow as that, and he's the man
that had most reason to."

"We must not prejudge anything," put in the doctor, a tall,
black-bearded man, rather nervously; "but it is competent for me to
corroborate what Mr. Gibbs says about the nature of the blow, sir; it
is an incredible blow. Mr. Gibbs says that only one man in this district
could have done it. I should have said myself that nobody could have
done it."

A shudder of superstition went through the slight figure of the curate.
"I can hardly understand," he said.

"Mr. Bohun," said the doctor in a low voice, "metaphors literally fail
me. It is inadequate to say that the skull was smashed to bits like an
eggshell. Fragments of bone were driven into the body and the ground
like bullets into a mud wall. It was the hand of a giant."

He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he
added: "The thing has one advantage--that it clears most people of
suspicion at one stroke. If you or I or any normally made man in the
country were accused of this crime, we should be acquitted as an infant
would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson column."

"That's what I say," repeated the cobbler obstinately; "there's only one
man that could have done it, and he's the man that would have done it.
Where's Simeon Barnes, the blacksmith?"

"He's over at Greenford," faltered the curate.

"More likely over in France," muttered the cobbler.

"No; he is in neither of those places," said a small and colourless
voice, which came from the little Roman priest who had joined the group.
"As a matter of fact, he is coming up the road at this moment."

The little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly
brown hair and a round and stolid face. But if he had been as splendid
as Apollo no one would have looked at him at that moment. Everyone
turned round and peered at the pathway which wound across the plain
below, along which was indeed walking, at his own huge stride and with
a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon the smith. He was a bony and gigantic
man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard. He was
walking and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never
specially cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.

"My God!" cried the atheistic cobbler, "and there's the hammer he did it
with."

"No," said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache,
speaking for the first time. "There's the hammer he did it with over
there by the church wall. We have left it and the body exactly as they
are."

All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in
silence at the tool where it lay. It was one of the smallest and the
lightest of the hammers, and would not have caught the eye among the
rest; but on the iron edge of it were blood and yellow hair.

After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and there was
a new note in his dull voice. "Mr. Gibbs was hardly right," he said, "in
saying that there is no mystery. There is at least the mystery of why so
big a man should attempt so big a blow with so little a hammer."

"Oh, never mind that," cried Gibbs, in a fever. "What are we to do with
Simeon Barnes?"

"Leave him alone," said the priest quietly. "He is coming here of
himself. I know those two men with him. They are very good fellows from
Greenford, and they have come over about the Presbyterian chapel."

Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the church,
and strode into his own yard. Then he stood there quite still, and the
hammer fell from his hand. The inspector, who had preserved impenetrable
propriety, immediately went up to him.

"I won't ask you, Mr. Barnes," he said, "whether you know anything about
what has happened here. You are not bound to say. I hope you don't know,
and that you will be able to prove it. But I must go through the form
of arresting you in the King's name for the murder of Colonel Norman
Bohun."

"You are not bound to say anything," said the cobbler in officious
excitement. "They've got to prove everything. They haven't proved yet
that it is Colonel Bohun, with the head all smashed up like that."

"That won't wash," said the doctor aside to the priest. "That's out of
the detective stories. I was the colonel's medical man, and I knew his
body better than he did. He had very fine hands, but quite peculiar
ones. The second and third fingers were the same length. Oh, that's the
colonel right enough."

As he glanced at the brained corpse upon the ground the iron eyes of the
motionless blacksmith followed them and rested there also.

"Is Colonel Bohun dead?" said the smith quite calmly. "Then he's
damned."

"Don't say anything! Oh, don't say anything," cried the atheist cobbler,
dancing about in an ecstasy of admiration of the English legal system.
For no man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

The blacksmith turned on him over his shoulder the august face of a
fanatic.

"It's well for you infidels to dodge like foxes because the world's law
favours you," he said; "but God guards His own in His pocket, as you
shall see this day."

Then he pointed to the colonel and said: "When did this dog die in his
sins?"

"Moderate your language," said the doctor.

"Moderate the Bible's language, and I'll moderate mine. When did he
die?"

"I saw him alive at six o'clock this morning," stammered Wilfred Bohun.

"God is good," said the smith. "Mr. Inspector, I have not the slightest
objection to being arrested. It is you who may object to arresting me.
I don't mind leaving the court without a stain on my character. You do
mind perhaps leaving the court with a bad set-back in your career."

The solid inspector for the first time looked at the blacksmith with a
lively eye; as did everybody else, except the short, strange priest, who
was still looking down at the little hammer that had dealt the dreadful
blow.

"There are two men standing outside this shop," went on the blacksmith
with ponderous lucidity, "good tradesmen in Greenford whom you all know,
who will swear that they saw me from before midnight till daybreak and
long after in the committee room of our Revival Mission, which sits all
night, we save souls so fast. In Greenford itself twenty people could
swear to me for all that time. If I were a heathen, Mr. Inspector, I
would let you walk on to your downfall. But as a Christian man I feel
bound to give you your chance, and ask you whether you will hear my
alibi now or in court."

The inspector seemed for the first time disturbed, and said, "Of course
I should be glad to clear you altogether now."

The smith walked out of his yard with the same long and easy stride, and
returned to his two friends from Greenford, who were indeed friends of
nearly everyone present. Each of them said a few words which no one ever
thought of disbelieving. When they had spoken, the innocence of Simeon
stood up as solid as the great church above them.

One of those silences struck the group which are more strange and
insufferable than any speech. Madly, in order to make conversation, the
curate said to the Catholic priest:

"You seem very much interested in that hammer, Father Brown."

"Yes, I am," said Father Brown; "why is it such a small hammer?"

The doctor swung round on him.

"By George, that's true," he cried; "who would use a little hammer with
ten larger hammers lying about?"

Then he lowered his voice in the curate's ear and said: "Only the kind
of person that can't lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force
or courage between the sexes. It's a question of lifting power in the
shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with a light hammer and
never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a heavy one."

Wilfred Bohun was staring at him with a sort of hypnotised horror,
while Father Brown listened with his head a little on one side, really
interested and attentive. The doctor went on with more hissing emphasis:

"Why do these idiots always assume that the only person who hates the
wife's lover is the wife's husband? Nine times out of ten the person
who most hates the wife's lover is the wife. Who knows what insolence or
treachery he had shown her--look there!"

He made a momentary gesture towards the red-haired woman on the bench.
She had lifted her head at last and the tears were drying on her
splendid face. But the eyes were fixed on the corpse with an electric
glare that had in it something of idiocy.

The Rev. Wilfred Bohun made a limp gesture as if waving away all desire
to know; but Father Brown, dusting off his sleeve some ashes blown from
the furnace, spoke in his indifferent way.

"You are like so many doctors," he said; "your mental science is really
suggestive. It is your physical science that is utterly impossible. I
agree that the woman wants to kill the co-respondent much more than the
petitioner does. And I agree that a woman will always pick up a small
hammer instead of a big one. But the difficulty is one of physical
impossibility. No woman ever born could have smashed a man's skull
out flat like that." Then he added reflectively, after a pause: "These
people haven't grasped the whole of it. The man was actually wearing an
iron helmet, and the blow scattered it like broken glass. Look at that
woman. Look at her arms."

Silence held them all up again, and then the doctor said rather sulkily:
"Well, I may be wrong; there are objections to everything. But I stick
to the main point. No man but an idiot would pick up that little hammer
if he could use a big hammer."

With that the lean and quivering hands of Wilfred Bohun went up to his
head and seemed to clutch his scanty yellow hair. After an instant they
dropped, and he cried: "That was the word I wanted; you have said the
word."

Then he continued, mastering his discomposure: "The words you said were,
'No man but an idiot would pick up the small hammer.'"

"Yes," said the doctor. "Well?"

"Well," said the curate, "no man but an idiot did." The rest stared
at him with eyes arrested and riveted, and he went on in a febrile and
feminine agitation.

"I am a priest," he cried unsteadily, "and a priest should be no shedder
of blood. I--I mean that he should bring no one to the gallows. And I
thank God that I see the criminal clearly now--because he is a criminal
who cannot be brought to the gallows."

"You will not denounce him?" inquired the doctor.

"He would not be hanged if I did denounce him," answered Wilfred with
a wild but curiously happy smile. "When I went into the church this
morning I found a madman praying there--that poor Joe, who has been
wrong all his life. God knows what he prayed; but with such strange folk
it is not incredible to suppose that their prayers are all upside down.
Very likely a lunatic would pray before killing a man. When I last saw
poor Joe he was with my brother. My brother was mocking him."

"By Jove!" cried the doctor, "this is talking at last. But how do you
explain--"

The Rev. Wilfred was almost trembling with the excitement of his
own glimpse of the truth. "Don't you see; don't you see," he cried
feverishly; "that is the only theory that covers both the queer things,
that answers both the riddles. The two riddles are the little hammer and
the big blow. The smith might have struck the big blow, but would not
have chosen the little hammer. His wife would have chosen the little
hammer, but she could not have struck the big blow. But the madman might
have done both. As for the little hammer--why, he was mad and might have
picked up anything. And for the big blow, have you never heard, doctor,
that a maniac in his paroxysm may have the strength of ten men?"

The doctor drew a deep breath and then said, "By golly, I believe you've
got it."

Father Brown had fixed his eyes on the speaker so long and steadily
as to prove that his large grey, ox-like eyes were not quite so
insignificant as the rest of his face. When silence had fallen he said
with marked respect: "Mr. Bohun, yours is the only theory yet propounded
which holds water every way and is essentially unassailable. I think,
therefore, that you deserve to be told, on my positive knowledge, that
it is not the true one." And with that the old little man walked away
and stared again at the hammer.

"That fellow seems to know more than he ought to," whispered the doctor
peevishly to Wilfred. "Those popish priests are deucedly sly."

"No, no," said Bohun, with a sort of wild fatigue. "It was the lunatic.
It was the lunatic."

The group of the two clerics and the doctor had fallen away from
the more official group containing the inspector and the man he had
arrested. Now, however, that their own party had broken up, they heard
voices from the others. The priest looked up quietly and then looked
down again as he heard the blacksmith say in a loud voice:

"I hope I've convinced you, Mr. Inspector. I'm a strong man, as you say,
but I couldn't have flung my hammer bang here from Greenford. My hammer
hasn't got wings that it should come flying half a mile over hedges and
fields."

The inspector laughed amicably and said: "No, I think you can be
considered out of it, though it's one of the rummiest coincidences I
ever saw. I can only ask you to give us all the assistance you can in
finding a man as big and strong as yourself. By George! you might be
useful, if only to hold him! I suppose you yourself have no guess at the
man?"

"I may have a guess," said the pale smith, "but it is not at a man."
Then, seeing the scared eyes turn towards his wife on the bench, he put
his huge hand on her shoulder and said: "Nor a woman either."

"What do you mean?" asked the inspector jocularly. "You don't think cows
use hammers, do you?"

"I think no thing of flesh held that hammer," said the blacksmith in a
stifled voice; "mortally speaking, I think the man died alone."

Wilfred made a sudden forward movement and peered at him with burning
eyes.

"Do you mean to say, Barnes," came the sharp voice of the cobbler, "that
the hammer jumped up of itself and knocked the man down?"

"Oh, you gentlemen may stare and snigger," cried Simeon; "you clergymen
who tell us on Sunday in what a stillness the Lord smote Sennacherib. I
believe that One who walks invisible in every house defended the honour
of mine, and laid the defiler dead before the door of it. I believe the
force in that blow was just the force there is in earthquakes, and no
force less."

Wilfred said, with a voice utterly undescribable: "I told Norman myself
to beware of the thunderbolt."

"That agent is outside my jurisdiction," said the inspector with a
slight smile.

"You are not outside His," answered the smith; "see you to it," and,
turning his broad back, he went into the house.

The shaken Wilfred was led away by Father Brown, who had an easy and
friendly way with him. "Let us get out of this horrid place, Mr. Bohun,"
he said. "May I look inside your church? I hear it's one of the oldest
in England. We take some interest, you know," he added with a comical
grimace, "in old English churches."

Wilfred Bohun did not smile, for humour was never his strong point. But
he nodded rather eagerly, being only too ready to explain the
Gothic splendours to someone more likely to be sympathetic than the
Presbyterian blacksmith or the atheist cobbler.

"By all means," he said; "let us go in at this side." And he led the way
into the high side entrance at the top of the flight of steps. Father
Brown was mounting the first step to follow him when he felt a hand on
his shoulder, and turned to behold the dark, thin figure of the doctor,
his face darker yet with suspicion.

"Sir," said the physician harshly, "you appear to know some secrets
in this black business. May I ask if you are going to keep them to
yourself?"

"Why, doctor," answered the priest, smiling quite pleasantly, "there is
one very good reason why a man of my trade should keep things to himself
when he is not sure of them, and that is that it is so constantly his
duty to keep them to himself when he is sure of them. But if you think
I have been discourteously reticent with you or anyone, I will go to the
extreme limit of my custom. I will give you two very large hints."

"Well, sir?" said the doctor gloomily.

"First," said Father Brown quietly, "the thing is quite in your
own province. It is a matter of physical science. The blacksmith is
mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the blow was divine, but certainly
in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no miracle, doctor, except
in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange and wicked and
yet half-heroic heart. The force that smashed that skull was a force
well known to scientists--one of the most frequently debated of the laws
of nature."

The doctor, who was looking at him with frowning intentness, only said:
"And the other hint?"

"The other hint is this," said the priest. "Do you remember the
blacksmith, though he believes in miracles, talking scornfully of the
impossible fairy tale that his hammer had wings and flew half a mile
across country?"

"Yes," said the doctor, "I remember that."

"Well," added Father Brown, with a broad smile, "that fairy tale was the
nearest thing to the real truth that has been said today." And with that
he turned his back and stumped up the steps after the curate.

The Reverend Wilfred, who had been waiting for him, pale and impatient,
as if this little delay were the last straw for his nerves, led him
immediately to his favourite corner of the church, that part of the
gallery closest to the carved roof and lit by the wonderful window
with the angel. The little Latin priest explored and admired everything
exhaustively, talking cheerfully but in a low voice all the time.
When in the course of his investigation he found the side exit and the
winding stair down which Wilfred had rushed to find his brother dead,
Father Brown ran not down but up, with the agility of a monkey, and his
clear voice came from an outer platform above.

"Come up here, Mr. Bohun," he called. "The air will do you good."

Bohun followed him, and came out on a kind of stone gallery or balcony
outside the building, from which one could see the illimitable plain
in which their small hill stood, wooded away to the purple horizon
and dotted with villages and farms. Clear and square, but quite small
beneath them, was the blacksmith's yard, where the inspector still stood
taking notes and the corpse still lay like a smashed fly.

"Might be the map of the world, mightn't it?" said Father Brown.

"Yes," said Bohun very gravely, and nodded his head.

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building
plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to
suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of
the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems
to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. This
church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old
fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it
from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw
it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.
For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible
aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the
dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things
great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. Details of stone,
enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields
and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a corner
seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and
villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men
were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the
whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit
upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.

"I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these
high places even to pray," said Father Brown. "Heights were made to be
looked at, not to be looked from."

"Do you mean that one may fall over," asked Wilfred.

"I mean that one's soul may fall if one's body doesn't," said the other
priest.

"I scarcely understand you," remarked Bohun indistinctly.

"Look at that blacksmith, for instance," went on Father Brown calmly; "a
good man, but not a Christian--hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his
Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags,
and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven.
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley;
only small things from the peak."

"But he--he didn't do it," said Bohun tremulously.

"No," said the other in an odd voice; "we know he didn't do it."

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with
his pale grey eyes. "I knew a man," he said, "who began by worshipping
with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely
places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And
once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn
under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was
God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime."

Wilfred's face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white
as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

"He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the
sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling
with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like
insects. He saw one especially strutting just below him, insolent and
evident by a bright green hat--a poisonous insect."

Rooks cawed round the corners of the belfry; but there was no other
sound till Father Brown went on.

"This also tempted him, that he had in his hand one of the most awful
engines of nature; I mean gravitation, that mad and quickening rush by
which all earth's creatures fly back to her heart when released. See,
the inspector is strutting just below us in the smithy. If I were to
toss a pebble over this parapet it would be something like a bullet
by the time it struck him. If I were to drop a hammer--even a small
hammer--"

Wilfred Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him
in a minute by the collar.

"Not by that door," he said quite gently; "that door leads to hell."

Bohun staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful
eyes.

"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?"

"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all
devils in my heart. Listen to me," he said after a short pause. "I know
what you did--at least, I can guess the great part of it. When you left
your brother you were racked with no unrighteous rage, to the extent
even that you snatched up a small hammer, half inclined to kill him with
his foulness on his mouth. Recoiling, you thrust it under your buttoned
coat instead, and rushed into the church. You pray wildly in many
places, under the angel window, upon the platform above, and a higher
platform still, from which you could see the colonel's Eastern hat like
the back of a green beetle crawling about. Then something snapped in
your soul, and you let God's thunderbolt fall."

Wilfred put a weak hand to his head, and asked in a low voice: "How did
you know that his hat looked like a green beetle?"

"Oh, that," said the other with the shadow of a smile, "that was common
sense. But hear me further. I say I know all this; but no one else shall
know it. The next step is for you; I shall take no more steps; I will
seal this with the seal of confession. If you ask me why, there are many
reasons, and only one that concerns you. I leave things to you because
you have not yet gone very far wrong, as assassins go. You did not help
to fix the crime on the smith when it was easy; or on his wife, when
that was easy. You tried to fix it on the imbecile because you knew that
he could not suffer. That was one of the gleams that it is my business
to find in assassins. And now come down into the village, and go your
own way as free as the wind; for I have said my last word."

They went down the winding stairs in utter silence, and came out into
the sunlight by the smithy. Wilfred Bohun carefully unlatched the wooden
gate of the yard, and going up to the inspector, said: "I wish to give
myself up; I have killed my brother."




The Eye of Apollo


That singular smoky sparkle, at once a confusion and a transparency,
which is the strange secret of the Thames, was changing more and more
from its grey to its glittering extreme as the sun climbed to the zenith
over Westminster, and two men crossed Westminster Bridge. One man
was very tall and the other very short; they might even have been
fantastically compared to the arrogant clock-tower of Parliament and the
humbler humped shoulders of the Abbey, for the short man was in clerical
dress. The official description of the tall man was M. Hercule Flambeau,
private detective, and he was going to his new offices in a new pile of
flats facing the Abbey entrance. The official description of the short
man was the Reverend J. Brown, attached to St. Francis Xavier's Church,
Camberwell, and he was coming from a Camberwell deathbed to see the new
offices of his friend.

The building was American in its sky-scraping altitude, and American
also in the oiled elaboration of its machinery of telephones and lifts.
But it was barely finished and still understaffed; only three tenants
had moved in; the office just above Flambeau was occupied, as also
was the office just below him; the two floors above that and the three
floors below were entirely bare. But the first glance at the new tower
of flats caught something much more arresting. Save for a few relics of
scaffolding, the one glaring object was erected outside the office
just above Flambeau's. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye,
surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two or three
of the office windows.

"What on earth is that?" asked Father Brown, and stood still. "Oh, a
new religion," said Flambeau, laughing; "one of those new religions that
forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian
Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon
(I don't know what his name is, except that it can't be that) has taken
the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and
this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of
Apollo, and he worships the sun."

"Let him look out," said Father Brown. "The sun was the cruellest of all
the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?"

"As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs," answered Flambeau, "that
a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great
symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were
really healthy he could stare at the sun."

"If a man were really healthy," said Father Brown, "he would not bother
to stare at it."

"Well, that's all I can tell you about the new religion," went on
Flambeau carelessly. "It claims, of course, that it can cure all
physical diseases."

"Can it cure the one spiritual disease?" asked Father Brown, with a
serious curiosity.

"And what is the one spiritual disease?" asked Flambeau, smiling.

"Oh, thinking one is quite well," said his friend.

Flambeau was more interested in the quiet little office below him than
in the flamboyant temple above. He was a lucid Southerner, incapable
of conceiving himself as anything but a Catholic or an atheist; and new
religions of a bright and pallid sort were not much in his line. But
humanity was always in his line, especially when it was good-looking;
moreover, the ladies downstairs were characters in their way. The office
was kept by two sisters, both slight and dark, one of them tall and
striking. She had a dark, eager and aquiline profile, and was one of
those women whom one always thinks of in profile, as of the clean-cut
edge of some weapon. She seemed to cleave her way through life. She had
eyes of startling brilliancy, but it was the brilliancy of steel rather
than of diamonds; and her straight, slim figure was a shade too stiff
for its grace. Her younger sister was like her shortened shadow,
a little greyer, paler, and more insignificant. They both wore a
business-like black, with little masculine cuffs and collars. There are
thousands of such curt, strenuous ladies in the offices of London,
but the interest of these lay rather in their real than their apparent
position.

For Pauline Stacey, the elder, was actually the heiress of a crest
and half a county, as well as great wealth; she had been brought up in
castles and gardens, before a frigid fierceness (peculiar to the modern
woman) had driven her to what she considered a harsher and a higher
existence. She had not, indeed, surrendered her money; in that there
would have been a romantic or monkish abandon quite alien to her
masterful utilitarianism. She held her wealth, she would say, for use
upon practical social objects. Part of it she had put into her business,
the nucleus of a model typewriting emporium; part of it was distributed
in various leagues and causes for the advancement of such work among
women. How far Joan, her sister and partner, shared this slightly
prosaic idealism no one could be very sure. But she followed her leader
with a dog-like affection which was somehow more attractive, with its
touch of tragedy, than the hard, high spirits of the elder. For Pauline
Stacey had nothing to say to tragedy; she was understood to deny its
existence.

Her rigid rapidity and cold impatience had amused Flambeau very much on
the first occasion of his entering the flats. He had lingered outside
the lift in the entrance hall waiting for the lift-boy, who generally
conducts strangers to the various floors. But this bright-eyed falcon
of a girl had openly refused to endure such official delay. She said
sharply that she knew all about the lift, and was not dependent on
boys--or men either. Though her flat was only three floors above, she
managed in the few seconds of ascent to give Flambeau a great many of
her fundamental views in an off-hand manner; they were to the general
effect that she was a modern working woman and loved modern working
machinery. Her bright black eyes blazed with abstract anger against
those who rebuke mechanic science and ask for the return of romance.
Everyone, she said, ought to be able to manage machines, just as she
could manage the lift. She seemed almost to resent the fact of Flambeau
opening the lift-door for her; and that gentleman went up to his own
apartments smiling with somewhat mingled feelings at the memory of such
spit-fire self-dependence.

She certainly had a temper, of a snappy, practical sort; the gestures of
her thin, elegant hands were abrupt or even destructive.

Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found
she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the
middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids
of an ethical tirade about the "sickly medical notions" and the morbid
admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister
to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She
asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass
eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.

Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from
asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles
was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science
might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.

"That is so different," said Pauline Stacey, loftily. "Batteries and
motors and all those things are marks of the force of man--yes, Mr.
Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these
great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and
splendid--that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the
doctors sell--why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick
on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I
was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things
because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power
and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the
sun, and so they can't do it without blinking. But why among the stars
should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I
will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose."

"Your eyes," said Flambeau, with a foreign bow, "will dazzle the sun."
He took pleasure in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly
because it threw her a little off her balance. But as he went upstairs
to his floor he drew a deep breath and whistled, saying to himself: "So
she has got into the hands of that conjurer upstairs with his golden
eye." For, little as he knew or cared about the new religion of Kalon,
he had heard of his special notion about sun-gazing.

He soon discovered that the spiritual bond between the floors above and
below him was close and increasing. The man who called himself Kalon was
a magnificent creature, worthy, in a physical sense, to be the pontiff
of Apollo. He was nearly as tall even as Flambeau, and very much better
looking, with a golden beard, strong blue eyes, and a mane flung back
like a lion's. In structure he was the blonde beast of Nietzsche,
but all this animal beauty was heightened, brightened and softened by
genuine intellect and spirituality. If he looked like one of the great
Saxon kings, he looked like one of the kings that were also saints. And
this despite the cockney incongruity of his surroundings; the fact that
he had an office half-way up a building in Victoria Street; that the
clerk (a commonplace youth in cuffs and collars) sat in the outer room,
between him and the corridor; that his name was on a brass plate,
and the gilt emblem of his creed hung above his street, like the
advertisement of an oculist. All this vulgarity could not take away from
the man called Kalon the vivid oppression and inspiration that came
from his soul and body. When all was said, a man in the presence of
this quack did feel in the presence of a great man. Even in the loose
jacket-suit of linen that he wore as a workshop dress in his office he
was a fascinating and formidable figure; and when robed in the white
vestments and crowned with the golden circlet, in which he daily saluted
the sun, he really looked so splendid that the laughter of the street
people sometimes died suddenly on their lips. For three times in the day
the new sun-worshipper went out on his little balcony, in the face
of all Westminster, to say some litany to his shining lord: once at
daybreak, once at sunset, and once at the shock of noon. And it
was while the shock of noon still shook faintly from the towers of
Parliament and parish church that Father Brown, the friend of Flambeau,
first looked up and saw the white priest of Apollo.

Flambeau had seen quite enough of these daily salutations of Phoebus,
and plunged into the porch of the tall building without even looking
for his clerical friend to follow. But Father Brown, whether from a
professional interest in ritual or a strong individual interest in
tomfoolery, stopped and stared up at the balcony of the sun-worshipper,
just as he might have stopped and stared up at a Punch and Judy. Kalon
the Prophet was already erect, with argent garments and uplifted hands,
and the sound of his strangely penetrating voice could be heard all the
way down the busy street uttering his solar litany. He was already
in the middle of it; his eyes were fixed upon the flaming disc. It is
doubtful if he saw anything or anyone on this earth; it is substantially
certain that he did not see a stunted, round-faced priest who, in the
crowd below, looked up at him with blinking eyes. That was perhaps the
most startling difference between even these two far divided men. Father
Brown could not look at anything without blinking; but the priest of
Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of the eyelid.

"O sun," cried the prophet, "O star that art too great to be allowed
among the stars! O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot
that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white
flames and white flowers and white peaks. Father, who art more innocent
than all thy most innocent and quiet children; primal purity, into the
peace of which--"

A rush and crash like the reversed rush of a rocket was cloven with a
strident and incessant yelling. Five people rushed into the gate of
the mansions as three people rushed out, and for an instant they all
deafened each other. The sense of some utterly abrupt horror seemed for
a moment to fill half the street with bad news--bad news that was all
the worse because no one knew what it was. Two figures remained still
after the crash of commotion: the fair priest of Apollo on the balcony
above, and the ugly priest of Christ below him.

At last the tall figure and titanic energy of Flambeau appeared in the
doorway of the mansions and dominated the little mob. Talking at the top
of his voice like a fog-horn, he told somebody or anybody to go for a
surgeon; and as he turned back into the dark and thronged entrance his
friend Father Brown dipped in insignificantly after him. Even as he
ducked and dived through the crowd he could still hear the magnificent
melody and monotony of the solar priest still calling on the happy god
who is the friend of fountains and flowers.

Father Brown found Flambeau and some six other people standing round the
enclosed space into which the lift commonly descended. But the lift had
not descended. Something else had descended; something that ought to
have come by a lift.

For the last four minutes Flambeau had looked down on it; had seen
the brained and bleeding figure of that beautiful woman who denied the
existence of tragedy. He had never had the slightest doubt that it was
Pauline Stacey; and, though he had sent for a doctor, he had not the
slightest doubt that she was dead.

He could not remember for certain whether he had liked her or disliked
her; there was so much both to like and dislike. But she had been a
person to him, and the unbearable pathos of details and habit stabbed
him with all the small daggers of bereavement. He remembered her pretty
face and priggish speeches with a sudden secret vividness which is all
the bitterness of death. In an instant like a bolt from the blue, like
a thunderbolt from nowhere, that beautiful and defiant body had been
dashed down the open well of the lift to death at the bottom. Was it
suicide? With so insolent an optimist it seemed impossible. Was it
murder? But who was there in those hardly inhabited flats to murder
anybody? In a rush of raucous words, which he meant to be strong and
suddenly found weak, he asked where was that fellow Kalon. A voice,
habitually heavy, quiet and full, assured him that Kalon for the last
fifteen minutes had been away up on his balcony worshipping his god.
When Flambeau heard the voice, and felt the hand of Father Brown, he
turned his swarthy face and said abruptly:

"Then, if he has been up there all the time, who can have done it?"

"Perhaps," said the other, "we might go upstairs and find out. We have
half an hour before the police will move."

Leaving the body of the slain heiress in charge of the surgeons,
Flambeau dashed up the stairs to the typewriting office, found it
utterly empty, and then dashed up to his own. Having entered that, he
abruptly returned with a new and white face to his friend.

"Her sister," he said, with an unpleasant seriousness, "her sister seems
to have gone out for a walk."

Father Brown nodded. "Or, she may have gone up to the office of that sun
man," he said. "If I were you I should just verify that, and then let
us all talk it over in your office. No," he added suddenly, as if
remembering something, "shall I ever get over that stupidity of mine? Of
course, in their office downstairs."

Flambeau stared; but he followed the little father downstairs to the
empty flat of the Staceys, where that impenetrable pastor took a large
red-leather chair in the very entrance, from which he could see the
stairs and landings, and waited. He did not wait very long. In about
four minutes three figures descended the stairs, alike only in
their solemnity. The first was Joan Stacey, the sister of the dead
woman--evidently she had been upstairs in the temporary temple of
Apollo; the second was the priest of Apollo himself, his
litany finished, sweeping down the empty stairs in utter
magnificence--something in his white robes, beard and parted hair had
the look of Dore's Christ leaving the Pretorium; the third was Flambeau,
black browed and somewhat bewildered.

Miss Joan Stacey, dark, with a drawn face and hair prematurely touched
with grey, walked straight to her own desk and set out her papers with a
practical flap. The mere action rallied everyone else to sanity. If Miss
Joan Stacey was a criminal, she was a cool one. Father Brown regarded
her for some time with an odd little smile, and then, without taking his
eyes off her, addressed himself to somebody else.

"Prophet," he said, presumably addressing Kalon, "I wish you would tell
me a lot about your religion."

"I shall be proud to do it," said Kalon, inclining his still crowned
head, "but I am not sure that I understand."

"Why, it's like this," said Father Brown, in his frankly doubtful way:
"We are taught that if a man has really bad first principles, that must
be partly his fault. But, for all that, we can make some difference
between a man who insults his quite clear conscience and a man with a
conscience more or less clouded with sophistries. Now, do you really
think that murder is wrong at all?"

"Is this an accusation?" asked Kalon very quietly.

"No," answered Brown, equally gently, "it is the speech for the
defence."

In the long and startled stillness of the room the prophet of Apollo
slowly rose; and really it was like the rising of the sun. He filled
that room with his light and life in such a manner that a man felt he
could as easily have filled Salisbury Plain. His robed form seemed to
hang the whole room with classic draperies; his epic gesture seemed to
extend it into grander perspectives, till the little black figure of the
modern cleric seemed to be a fault and an intrusion, a round, black blot
upon some splendour of Hellas.

"We meet at last, Caiaphas," said the prophet. "Your church and mine are
the only realities on this earth. I adore the sun, and you the darkening
of the sun; you are the priest of the dying and I of the living God.
Your present work of suspicion and slander is worthy of your coat and
creed. All your church is but a black police; you are only spies and
detectives seeking to tear from men confessions of guilt, whether by
treachery or torture. You would convict men of crime, I would convict
them of innocence. You would convince them of sin, I would convince them
of virtue.

"Reader of the books of evil, one more word before I blow away your
baseless nightmares for ever. Not even faintly could you understand
how little I care whether you can convict me or no. The things you
call disgrace and horrible hanging are to me no more than an ogre in a
child's toy-book to a man once grown up. You said you were offering the
speech for the defence. I care so little for the cloudland of this life
that I will offer you the speech for the prosecution. There is but one
thing that can be said against me in this matter, and I will say it
myself. The woman that is dead was my love and my bride; not after such
manner as your tin chapels call lawful, but by a law purer and sterner
than you will ever understand. She and I walked another world from
yours, and trod palaces of crystal while you were plodding through
tunnels and corridors of brick. Well, I know that policemen, theological
and otherwise, always fancy that where there has been love there
must soon be hatred; so there you have the first point made for the
prosecution. But the second point is stronger; I do not grudge it you.
Not only is it true that Pauline loved me, but it is also true that this
very morning, before she died, she wrote at that table a will leaving me
and my new church half a million. Come, where are the handcuffs? Do you
suppose I care what foolish things you do with me? Penal servitude will
only be like waiting for her at a wayside station. The gallows will only
be going to her in a headlong car."

He spoke with the brain-shaking authority of an orator, and Flambeau
and Joan Stacey stared at him in amazed admiration. Father Brown's face
seemed to express nothing but extreme distress; he looked at the ground
with one wrinkle of pain across his forehead. The prophet of the sun
leaned easily against the mantelpiece and resumed:

"In a few words I have put before you the whole case against me--the
only possible case against me. In fewer words still I will blow it
to pieces, so that not a trace of it remains. As to whether I have
committed this crime, the truth is in one sentence: I could not have
committed this crime. Pauline Stacey fell from this floor to the
ground at five minutes past twelve. A hundred people will go into the
witness-box and say that I was standing out upon the balcony of my own
rooms above from just before the stroke of noon to a quarter-past--the
usual period of my public prayers. My clerk (a respectable youth from
Clapham, with no sort of connection with me) will swear that he sat
in my outer office all the morning, and that no communication passed
through. He will swear that I arrived a full ten minutes before the
hour, fifteen minutes before any whisper of the accident, and that I did
not leave the office or the balcony all that time. No one ever had so
complete an alibi; I could subpoena half Westminster. I think you had
better put the handcuffs away again. The case is at an end.

"But last of all, that no breath of this idiotic suspicion remain in the
air, I will tell you all you want to know. I believe I do know how my
unhappy friend came by her death. You can, if you choose, blame me for
it, or my faith and philosophy at least; but you certainly cannot
lock me up. It is well known to all students of the higher truths that
certain adepts and illuminati have in history attained the power of
levitation--that is, of being self-sustained upon the empty air. It is
but a part of that general conquest of matter which is the main element
in our occult wisdom. Poor Pauline was of an impulsive and ambitious
temper. I think, to tell the truth, she thought herself somewhat deeper
in the mysteries than she was; and she has often said to me, as we went
down in the lift together, that if one's will were strong enough, one
could float down as harmlessly as a feather. I solemnly believe that in
some ecstasy of noble thoughts she attempted the miracle. Her will, or
faith, must have failed her at the crucial instant, and the lower law
of matter had its horrible revenge. There is the whole story, gentlemen,
very sad and, as you think, very presumptuous and wicked, but certainly
not criminal or in any way connected with me. In the short-hand of the
police-courts, you had better call it suicide. I shall always call
it heroic failure for the advance of science and the slow scaling of
heaven."

It was the first time Flambeau had ever seen Father Brown vanquished. He
still sat looking at the ground, with a painful and corrugated brow, as
if in shame. It was impossible to avoid the feeling which the prophet's
winged words had fanned, that here was a sullen, professional suspecter
of men overwhelmed by a prouder and purer spirit of natural liberty and
health. At last he said, blinking as if in bodily distress: "Well, if
that is so, sir, you need do no more than take the testamentary paper
you spoke of and go. I wonder where the poor lady left it."

"It will be over there on her desk by the door, I think," said Kalon,
with that massive innocence of manner that seemed to acquit him wholly.
"She told me specially she would write it this morning, and I actually
saw her writing as I went up in the lift to my own room."

"Was her door open then?" asked the priest, with his eye on the corner
of the matting.

"Yes," said Kalon calmly.

"Ah! it has been open ever since," said the other, and resumed his
silent study of the mat.

"There is a paper over here," said the grim Miss Joan, in a somewhat
singular voice. She had passed over to her sister's desk by the doorway,
and was holding a sheet of blue foolscap in her hand. There was a sour
smile on her face that seemed unfit for such a scene or occasion, and
Flambeau looked at her with a darkening brow.

Kalon the prophet stood away from the paper with that loyal
unconsciousness that had carried him through. But Flambeau took it
out of the lady's hand, and read it with the utmost amazement. It did,
indeed, begin in the formal manner of a will, but after the words "I
give and bequeath all of which I die possessed" the writing abruptly
stopped with a set of scratches, and there was no trace of the name of
any legatee. Flambeau, in wonder, handed this truncated testament to his
clerical friend, who glanced at it and silently gave it to the priest of
the sun.

An instant afterwards that pontiff, in his splendid sweeping draperies,
had crossed the room in two great strides, and was towering over Joan
Stacey, his blue eyes standing from his head.

"What monkey tricks have you been playing here?" he cried. "That's not
all Pauline wrote."

They were startled to hear him speak in quite a new voice, with a Yankee
shrillness in it; all his grandeur and good English had fallen from him
like a cloak.

"That is the only thing on her desk," said Joan, and confronted him
steadily with the same smile of evil favour.

Of a sudden the man broke out into blasphemies and cataracts of
incredulous words. There was something shocking about the dropping of
his mask; it was like a man's real face falling off.

"See here!" he cried in broad American, when he was breathless with
cursing, "I may be an adventurer, but I guess you're a murderess. Yes,
gentlemen, here's your death explained, and without any levitation. The
poor girl is writing a will in my favour; her cursed sister comes in,
struggles for the pen, drags her to the well, and throws her down before
she can finish it. Sakes! I reckon we want the handcuffs after all."

"As you have truly remarked," replied Joan, with ugly calm, "your clerk
is a very respectable young man, who knows the nature of an oath; and
he will swear in any court that I was up in your office arranging some
typewriting work for five minutes before and five minutes after my
sister fell. Mr. Flambeau will tell you that he found me there."

There was a silence.

"Why, then," cried Flambeau, "Pauline was alone when she fell, and it
was suicide!"

"She was alone when she fell," said Father Brown, "but it was not
suicide."

"Then how did she die?" asked Flambeau impatiently.

"She was murdered."

"But she was alone," objected the detective.

"She was murdered when she was all alone," answered the priest.

All the rest stared at him, but he remained sitting in the same
old dejected attitude, with a wrinkle in his round forehead and an
appearance of impersonal shame and sorrow; his voice was colourless and
sad.

"What I want to know," cried Kalon, with an oath, "is when the police
are coming for this bloody and wicked sister. She's killed her flesh and
blood; she's robbed me of half a million that was just as sacredly mine
as--"

"Come, come, prophet," interrupted Flambeau, with a kind of sneer;
"remember that all this world is a cloudland."

The hierophant of the sun-god made an effort to climb back on his
pedestal. "It is not the mere money," he cried, "though that would equip
the cause throughout the world. It is also my beloved one's wishes. To
Pauline all this was holy. In Pauline's eyes--"

Father Brown suddenly sprang erect, so that his chair fell over flat
behind him. He was deathly pale, yet he seemed fired with a hope; his
eyes shone.

"That's it!" he cried in a clear voice. "That's the way to begin. In
Pauline's eyes--"

The tall prophet retreated before the tiny priest in an almost mad
disorder. "What do you mean? How dare you?" he cried repeatedly.

"In Pauline's eyes," repeated the priest, his own shining more and more.
"Go on--in God's name, go on. The foulest crime the fiends ever prompted
feels lighter after confession; and I implore you to confess. Go on, go
on--in Pauline's eyes--"

"Let me go, you devil!" thundered Kalon, struggling like a giant in
bonds. "Who are you, you cursed spy, to weave your spiders' webs round
me, and peep and peer? Let me go."

"Shall I stop him?" asked Flambeau, bounding towards the exit, for Kalon
had already thrown the door wide open.

"No; let him pass," said Father Brown, with a strange deep sigh that
seemed to come from the depths of the universe. "Let Cain pass by, for
he belongs to God."

There was a long-drawn silence in the room when he had left it, which
was to Flambeau's fierce wits one long agony of interrogation. Miss Joan
Stacey very coolly tidied up the papers on her desk.

"Father," said Flambeau at last, "it is my duty, not my curiosity
only--it is my duty to find out, if I can, who committed the crime."

"Which crime?" asked Father Brown.

"The one we are dealing with, of course," replied his impatient friend.

"We are dealing with two crimes," said Brown, "crimes of very different
weight--and by very different criminals."

Miss Joan Stacey, having collected and put away her papers, proceeded to
lock up her drawer. Father Brown went on, noticing her as little as she
noticed him.

"The two crimes," he observed, "were committed against the same weakness
of the same person, in a struggle for her money. The author of the
larger crime found himself thwarted by the smaller crime; the author of
the smaller crime got the money."

"Oh, don't go on like a lecturer," groaned Flambeau; "put it in a few
words."

"I can put it in one word," answered his friend.

Miss Joan Stacey skewered her business-like black hat on to her head
with a business-like black frown before a little mirror, and, as the
conversation proceeded, took her handbag and umbrella in an unhurried
style, and left the room.

"The truth is one word, and a short one," said Father Brown. "Pauline
Stacey was blind."

"Blind!" repeated Flambeau, and rose slowly to his whole huge stature.

"She was subject to it by blood," Brown proceeded. "Her sister would
have started eyeglasses if Pauline would have let her; but it was her
special philosophy or fad that one must not encourage such diseases by
yielding to them. She would not admit the cloud; or she tried to dispel
it by will. So her eyes got worse and worse with straining; but the
worst strain was to come. It came with this precious prophet, or
whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with
the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans
would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans
knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew
that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."

There was a pause, and the priest went on in a gentle and even broken
voice. "Whether or no that devil deliberately made her blind, there is
no doubt that he deliberately killed her through her blindness. The very
simplicity of the crime is sickening. You know he and she went up and
down in those lifts without official help; you know also how smoothly
and silently the lifts slide. Kalon brought the lift to the girl's
landing, and saw her, through the open door, writing in her slow,
sightless way the will she had promised him. He called out to her
cheerily that he had the lift ready for her, and she was to come out
when she was ready. Then he pressed a button and shot soundlessly up to
his own floor, walked through his own office, out on to his own balcony,
and was safely praying before the crowded street when the poor girl,
having finished her work, ran gaily out to where lover and lift were to
receive her, and stepped--"

"Don't!" cried Flambeau.

"He ought to have got half a million by pressing that button," continued
the little father, in the colourless voice in which he talked of such
horrors. "But that went smash. It went smash because there happened
to be another person who also wanted the money, and who also knew the
secret about poor Pauline's sight. There was one thing about that will
that I think nobody noticed: although it was unfinished and without
signature, the other Miss Stacey and some servant of hers had already
signed it as witnesses. Joan had signed first, saying Pauline could
finish it later, with a typical feminine contempt for legal forms.
Therefore, Joan wanted her sister to sign the will without real
witnesses. Why? I thought of the blindness, and felt sure she had wanted
Pauline to sign in solitude because she had wanted her not to sign at
all.

"People like the Staceys always use fountain pens; but this was
specially natural to Pauline. By habit and her strong will and memory
she could still write almost as well as if she saw; but she could not
tell when her pen needed dipping. Therefore, her fountain pens were
carefully filled by her sister--all except this fountain pen. This was
carefully not filled by her sister; the remains of the ink held out
for a few lines and then failed altogether. And the prophet lost
five hundred thousand pounds and committed one of the most brutal and
brilliant murders in human history for nothing."

Flambeau went to the open door and heard the official police ascending
the stairs. He turned and said: "You must have followed everything
devilish close to have traced the crime to Kalon in ten minutes."

Father Brown gave a sort of start.

"Oh! to him," he said. "No; I had to follow rather close to find out
about Miss Joan and the fountain pen. But I knew Kalon was the criminal
before I came into the front door."

"You must be joking!" cried Flambeau.

"I'm quite serious," answered the priest. "I tell you I knew he had done
it, even before I knew what he had done."

"But why?"

"These pagan stoics," said Brown reflectively, "always fail by their
strength. There came a crash and a scream down the street, and the
priest of Apollo did not start or look round. I did not know what it
was. But I knew that he was expecting it."




The Sign of the Broken Sword


The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers
silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak
and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely
tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The
black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless,
black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.
Even the square stone tower of the church looked northern to the point
of heathenry, as if it were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of
Iceland. It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard. But,
on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring.

It rose abruptly out of the ashen wastes of forest in a sort of hump or
shoulder of green turf that looked grey in the starlight. Most of the
graves were on a slant, and the path leading up to the church was
as steep as a staircase. On the top of the hill, in the one flat and
prominent place, was the monument for which the place was famous. It
contrasted strangely with the featureless graves all round, for it was
the work of one of the greatest sculptors of modern Europe; and yet his
fame was at once forgotten in the fame of the man whose image he had
made. It showed, by touches of the small silver pencil of starlight, the
massive metal figure of a soldier recumbent, the strong hands sealed
in an everlasting worship, the great head pillowed upon a gun. The
venerable face was bearded, or rather whiskered, in the old, heavy
Colonel Newcome fashion. The uniform, though suggested with the few
strokes of simplicity, was that of modern war. By his right side lay a
sword, of which the tip was broken off; on the left side lay a Bible. On
glowing summer afternoons wagonettes came full of Americans and cultured
suburbans to see the sepulchre; but even then they felt the vast forest
land with its one dumpy dome of churchyard and church as a place oddly
dumb and neglected. In this freezing darkness of mid-winter one would
think he might be left alone with the stars. Nevertheless, in the
stillness of those stiff woods a wooden gate creaked, and two dim
figures dressed in black climbed up the little path to the tomb.

So faint was that frigid starlight that nothing could have been
traced about them except that while they both wore black, one man was
enormously big, and the other (perhaps by contrast) almost startlingly
small. They went up to the great graven tomb of the historic warrior,
and stood for a few minutes staring at it. There was no human, perhaps
no living, thing for a wide circle; and a morbid fancy might well have
wondered if they were human themselves. In any case, the beginning of
their conversation might have seemed strange. After the first silence
the small man said to the other:

"Where does a wise man hide a pebble?"

And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach."

The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: "Where does a wise
man hide a leaf?"

And the other answered: "In the forest."

There was another stillness, and then the tall man resumed: "Do you mean
that when a wise man has to hide a real diamond he has been known to
hide it among sham ones?"

"No, no," said the little man with a laugh, "we will let bygones be
bygones."

He stamped his cold feet for a second or two, and then said: "I'm
not thinking of that at all, but of something else; something rather
peculiar. Just strike a match, will you?"

The big man fumbled in his pocket, and soon a scratch and a flare
painted gold the whole flat side of the monument. On it was cut in black
letters the well-known words which so many Americans had reverently
read: "Sacred to the Memory of General Sir Arthur St. Clare, Hero and
Martyr, who Always Vanquished his Enemies and Always Spared Them, and
Was Treacherously Slain by Them At Last. May God in Whom he Trusted both
Reward and Revenge him."

The match burnt the big man's fingers, blackened, and dropped. He was
about to strike another, but his small companion stopped him. "That's
all right, Flambeau, old man; I saw what I wanted. Or, rather, I didn't
see what I didn't want. And now we must walk a mile and a half along
the road to the next inn, and I will try to tell you all about it. For
Heaven knows a man should have a fire and ale when he dares tell such a
story."

They descended the precipitous path, they relatched the rusty gate, and
set off at a stamping, ringing walk down the frozen forest road. They
had gone a full quarter of a mile before the smaller man spoke again. He
said: "Yes; the wise man hides a pebble on the beach. But what does he
do if there is no beach? Do you know anything of that great St. Clare
trouble?"

"I know nothing about English generals, Father Brown," answered the
large man, laughing, "though a little about English policemen. I only
know that you have dragged me a precious long dance to all the shrines
of this fellow, whoever he is. One would think he got buried in
six different places. I've seen a memorial to General St. Clare in
Westminster Abbey. I've seen a ramping equestrian statue of General
St. Clare on the Embankment. I've seen a medallion of St. Clare in the
street he was born in, and another in the street he lived in; and now
you drag me after dark to his coffin in the village churchyard. I am
beginning to be a bit tired of his magnificent personality, especially
as I don't in the least know who he was. What are you hunting for in all
these crypts and effigies?"

"I am only looking for one word," said Father Brown. "A word that isn't
there."

"Well," asked Flambeau; "are you going to tell me anything about it?"

"I must divide it into two parts," remarked the priest. "First there is
what everybody knows; and then there is what I know. Now, what everybody
knows is short and plain enough. It is also entirely wrong."

"Right you are," said the big man called Flambeau cheerfully. "Let's
begin at the wrong end. Let's begin with what everybody knows, which
isn't true."

"If not wholly untrue, it is at least very inadequate," continued Brown;
"for in point of fact, all that the public knows amounts precisely to
this: The public knows that Arthur St. Clare was a great and successful
English general. It knows that after splendid yet careful campaigns
both in India and Africa he was in command against Brazil when the great
Brazilian patriot Olivier issued his ultimatum. It knows that on that
occasion St. Clare with a very small force attacked Olivier with a very
large one, and was captured after heroic resistance. And it knows that
after his capture, and to the abhorrence of the civilised world, St.
Clare was hanged on the nearest tree. He was found swinging there after
the Brazilians had retired, with his broken sword hung round his neck."

"And that popular story is untrue?" suggested Flambeau.

"No," said his friend quietly, "that story is quite true, so far as it
goes."

"Well, I think it goes far enough!" said Flambeau; "but if the popular
story is true, what is the mystery?"

They had passed many hundreds of grey and ghostly trees before the
little priest answered. Then he bit his finger reflectively and said:
"Why, the mystery is a mystery of psychology. Or, rather, it is a
mystery of two psychologies. In that Brazilian business two of the most
famous men of modern history acted flat against their characters. Mind
you, Olivier and St. Clare were both heroes--the old thing, and no
mistake; it was like the fight between Hector and Achilles. Now, what
would you say to an affair in which Achilles was timid and Hector was
treacherous?"

"Go on," said the large man impatiently as the other bit his finger
again.

"Sir Arthur St. Clare was a soldier of the old religious type--the type
that saved us during the Mutiny," continued Brown. "He was always more
for duty than for dash; and with all his personal courage was decidedly
a prudent commander, particularly indignant at any needless waste of
soldiers. Yet in this last battle he attempted something that a baby
could see was absurd. One need not be a strategist to see it was as wild
as wind; just as one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way
of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the
English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the
Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary
or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to
the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever
captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had
really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness.
Why the deuce should he diabolically revenge himself only once in his
life; and that for the one particular blow that could not have hurt him?
Well, there you have it. One of the wisest men in the world acted like
an idiot for no reason. One of the best men in the world acted like a
fiend for no reason. That's the long and the short of it; and I leave it
to you, my boy."

"No, you don't," said the other with a snort. "I leave it to you; and
you jolly well tell me all about it."

"Well," resumed Father Brown, "it's not fair to say that the public
impression is just what I've said, without adding that two things have
happened since. I can't say they threw a new light; for nobody can make
sense of them. But they threw a new kind of darkness; they threw the
darkness in new directions. The first was this. The family physician
of the St. Clares quarrelled with that family, and began publishing a
violent series of articles, in which he said that the late general was
a religious maniac; but as far as the tale went, this seemed to mean
little more than a religious man.

"Anyhow, the story fizzled out. Everyone knew, of course, that St. Clare
had some of the eccentricities of puritan piety. The second incident was
much more arresting. In the luckless and unsupported regiment which made
that rash attempt at the Black River there was a certain Captain Keith,
who was at that time engaged to St. Clare's daughter, and who afterwards
married her. He was one of those who were captured by Olivier, and,
like all the rest except the general, appears to have been bounteously
treated and promptly set free. Some twenty years afterwards this man,
then Lieutenant-Colonel Keith, published a sort of autobiography called
'A British Officer in Burmah and Brazil.' In the place where the reader
looks eagerly for some account of the mystery of St. Clare's disaster
may be found the following words: 'Everywhere else in this book I
have narrated things exactly as they occurred, holding as I do the
old-fashioned opinion that the glory of England is old enough to take
care of itself. The exception I shall make is in this matter of
the defeat by the Black River; and my reasons, though private, are
honourable and compelling. I will, however, add this in justice to the
memories of two distinguished men. General St. Clare has been accused
of incapacity on this occasion; I can at least testify that this action,
properly understood, was one of the most brilliant and sagacious of
his life. President Olivier by similar report is charged with savage
injustice. I think it due to the honour of an enemy to say that he acted
on this occasion with even more than his characteristic good feeling. To
put the matter popularly, I can assure my countrymen that St. Clare was
by no means such a fool nor Olivier such a brute as he looked. This is
all I have to say; nor shall any earthly consideration induce me to add
a word to it.'"

A large frozen moon like a lustrous snowball began to show through the
tangle of twigs in front of them, and by its light the narrator had
been able to refresh his memory of Captain Keith's text from a scrap of
printed paper. As he folded it up and put it back in his pocket Flambeau
threw up his hand with a French gesture.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit," he cried excitedly. "I believe I can guess it
at the first go."

He strode on, breathing hard, his black head and bull neck forward, like
a man winning a walking race. The little priest, amused and interested,
had some trouble in trotting beside him. Just before them the trees fell
back a little to left and right, and the road swept downwards across a
clear, moonlit valley, till it dived again like a rabbit into the wall
of another wood. The entrance to the farther forest looked small and
round, like the black hole of a remote railway tunnel. But it was within
some hundred yards, and gaped like a cavern before Flambeau spoke again.

"I've got it," he cried at last, slapping his thigh with his great hand.
"Four minutes' thinking, and I can tell your whole story myself."

"All right," assented his friend. "You tell it."

Flambeau lifted his head, but lowered his voice. "General Sir Arthur St.
Clare," he said, "came of a family in which madness was hereditary; and
his whole aim was to keep this from his daughter, and even, if possible,
from his future son-in-law. Rightly or wrongly, he thought the final
collapse was close, and resolved on suicide. Yet ordinary suicide would
blazon the very idea he dreaded. As the campaign approached the clouds
came thicker on his brain; and at last in a mad moment he sacrificed his
public duty to his private. He rushed rashly into battle, hoping to fall
by the first shot. When he found that he had only attained capture and
discredit, the sealed bomb in his brain burst, and he broke his own
sword and hanged himself."

He stared firmly at the grey facade of forest in front of him, with the
one black gap in it, like the mouth of the grave, into which their path
plunged. Perhaps something menacing in the road thus suddenly swallowed
reinforced his vivid vision of the tragedy, for he shuddered.

"A horrid story," he said.

"A horrid story," repeated the priest with bent head. "But not the real
story."

Then he threw back his head with a sort of despair and cried: "Oh, I
wish it had been."

The tall Flambeau faced round and stared at him.

"Yours is a clean story," cried Father Brown, deeply moved. "A sweet,
pure, honest story, as open and white as that moon. Madness and despair
are innocent enough. There are worse things, Flambeau."

Flambeau looked up wildly at the moon thus invoked; and from where he
stood one black tree-bough curved across it exactly like a devil's horn.

"Father--father," cried Flambeau with the French gesture and stepping
yet more rapidly forward, "do you mean it was worse than that?"

"Worse than that," said Paul like a grave echo. And they plunged into
the black cloister of the woodland, which ran by them in a dim tapestry
of trunks, like one of the dark corridors in a dream.

They were soon in the most secret entrails of the wood, and felt close
about them foliage that they could not see, when the priest said again:

"Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do
if there is no forest?"

"Well, well," cried Flambeau irritably, "what does he do?"

"He grows a forest to hide it in," said the priest in an obscure voice.
"A fearful sin."

"Look here," cried his friend impatiently, for the dark wood and the
dark saying got a little on his nerves; "will you tell me this story or
not? What other evidence is there to go on?"

"There are three more bits of evidence," said the other, "that I have
dug up in holes and corners; and I will give them in logical rather
than chronological order. First of all, of course, our authority for the
issue and event of the battle is in Olivier's own dispatches, which
are lucid enough. He was entrenched with two or three regiments on the
heights that swept down to the Black River, on the other side of which
was lower and more marshy ground. Beyond this again was gently rising
country, on which was the first English outpost, supported by others
which lay, however, considerably in its rear. The British forces as a
whole were greatly superior in numbers; but this particular regiment was
just far enough from its base to make Olivier consider the project of
crossing the river to cut it off. By sunset, however, he had decided to
retain his own position, which was a specially strong one. At daybreak
next morning he was thunderstruck to see that this stray handful of
English, entirely unsupported from their rear, had flung themselves
across the river, half by a bridge to the right, and the other half by a
ford higher up, and were massed upon the marshy bank below him.

"That they should attempt an attack with such numbers against such a
position was incredible enough; but Olivier noticed something yet more
extraordinary. For instead of attempting to seize more solid ground,
this mad regiment, having put the river in its rear by one wild charge,
did nothing more, but stuck there in the mire like flies in treacle.
Needless to say, the Brazilians blew great gaps in them with artillery,
which they could only return with spirited but lessening rifle fire. Yet
they never broke; and Olivier's curt account ends with a strong tribute
of admiration for the mystic valour of these imbeciles. 'Our line then
advanced finally,' writes Olivier, 'and drove them into the river;
we captured General St. Clare himself and several other officers. The
colonel and the major had both fallen in the battle. I cannot resist
saying that few finer sights can have been seen in history than the last
stand of this extraordinary regiment; wounded officers picking up the
rifles of dead soldiers, and the general himself facing us on horseback
bareheaded and with a broken sword.' On what happened to the general
afterwards Olivier is as silent as Captain Keith."

"Well," grunted Flambeau, "get on to the next bit of evidence."

"The next evidence," said Father Brown, "took some time to find, but it
will not take long to tell. I found at last in an almshouse down in the
Lincolnshire Fens an old soldier who not only was wounded at the Black
River, but had actually knelt beside the colonel of the regiment when
he died. This latter was a certain Colonel Clancy, a big bull of an
Irishman; and it would seem that he died almost as much of rage as of
bullets. He, at any rate, was not responsible for that ridiculous raid;
it must have been imposed on him by the general. His last edifying
words, according to my informant, were these: 'And there goes the damned
old donkey with the end of his sword knocked off. I wish it was his
head.' You will remark that everyone seems to have noticed this detail
about the broken sword blade, though most people regard it somewhat
more reverently than did the late Colonel Clancy. And now for the third
fragment."

Their path through the woodland began to go upward, and the speaker
paused a little for breath before he went on. Then he continued in the
same business-like tone:

"Only a month or two ago a certain Brazilian official died in England,
having quarrelled with Olivier and left his country. He was a well-known
figure both here and on the Continent, a Spaniard named Espado; I knew
him myself, a yellow-faced old dandy, with a hooked nose. For various
private reasons I had permission to see the documents he had left; he
was a Catholic, of course, and I had been with him towards the end.
There was nothing of his that lit up any corner of the black St. Clare
business, except five or six common exercise books filled with the diary
of some English soldier. I can only suppose that it was found by the
Brazilians on one of those that fell. Anyhow, it stopped abruptly the
night before the battle.

"But the account of that last day in the poor fellow's life was
certainly worth reading. I have it on me; but it's too dark to read it
here, and I will give you a resume. The first part of that entry is full
of jokes, evidently flung about among the men, about somebody called the
Vulture. It does not seem as if this person, whoever he was, was one of
themselves, nor even an Englishman; neither is he exactly spoken of as
one of the enemy. It sounds rather as if he were some local go-between
and non-combatant; perhaps a guide or a journalist. He has been closeted
with old Colonel Clancy; but is more often seen talking to the major.
Indeed, the major is somewhat prominent in this soldier's narrative;
a lean, dark-haired man, apparently, of the name of Murray--a north of
Ireland man and a Puritan. There are continual jests about the contrast
between this Ulsterman's austerity and the conviviality of
Colonel Clancy. There is also some joke about the Vulture wearing
bright-coloured clothes.

"But all these levities are scattered by what may well be called the
note of a bugle. Behind the English camp and almost parallel to the
river ran one of the few great roads of that district. Westward the road
curved round towards the river, which it crossed by the bridge before
mentioned. To the east the road swept backwards into the wilds, and some
two miles along it was the next English outpost. From this direction
there came along the road that evening a glitter and clatter of
light cavalry, in which even the simple diarist could recognise with
astonishment the general with his staff. He rode the great white horse
which you have seen so often in illustrated papers and Academy pictures;
and you may be sure that the salute they gave him was not merely
ceremonial. He, at least, wasted no time on ceremony, but, springing
from the saddle immediately, mixed with the group of officers, and fell
into emphatic though confidential speech. What struck our friend the
diarist most was his special disposition to discuss matters with Major
Murray; but, indeed, such a selection, so long as it was not marked, was
in no way unnatural. The two men were made for sympathy; they were men
who 'read their Bibles'; they were both the old Evangelical type of
officer. However this may be, it is certain that when the general
mounted again he was still talking earnestly to Murray; and that as
he walked his horse slowly down the road towards the river, the tall
Ulsterman still walked by his bridle rein in earnest debate. The
soldiers watched the two until they vanished behind a clump of trees
where the road turned towards the river. The colonel had gone back to
his tent, and the men to their pickets; the man with the diary lingered
for another four minutes, and saw a marvellous sight.

"The great white horse which had marched slowly down the road, as it had
marched in so many processions, flew back, galloping up the road towards
them as if it were mad to win a race. At first they thought it had run
away with the man on its back; but they soon saw that the general, a
fine rider, was himself urging it to full speed. Horse and man swept up
to them like a whirlwind; and then, reining up the reeling charger, the
general turned on them a face like flame, and called for the colonel
like the trumpet that wakes the dead.

"I conceive that all the earthquake events of that catastrophe tumbled
on top of each other rather like lumber in the minds of men such as our
friend with the diary. With the dazed excitement of a dream, they found
themselves falling--literally falling--into their ranks, and learned
that an attack was to be led at once across the river. The general and
the major, it was said, had found out something at the bridge, and there
was only just time to strike for life. The major had gone back at once
to call up the reserve along the road behind; it was doubtful if even
with that prompt appeal help could reach them in time. But they must
pass the stream that night, and seize the heights by morning. It is with
the very stir and throb of that romantic nocturnal march that the diary
suddenly ends."

Father Brown had mounted ahead; for the woodland path grew smaller,
steeper, and more twisted, till they felt as if they were ascending
a winding staircase. The priest's voice came from above out of the
darkness.

"There was one other little and enormous thing. When the general urged
them to their chivalric charge he half drew his sword from the scabbard;
and then, as if ashamed of such melodrama, thrust it back again. The
sword again, you see."

A half-light broke through the network of boughs above them, flinging
the ghost of a net about their feet; for they were mounting again to the
faint luminosity of the naked night. Flambeau felt truth all round him
as an atmosphere, but not as an idea. He answered with bewildered brain:
"Well, what's the matter with the sword? Officers generally have swords,
don't they?"

"They are not often mentioned in modern war," said the other
dispassionately; "but in this affair one falls over the blessed sword
everywhere."

"Well, what is there in that?" growled Flambeau; "it was a twopence
coloured sort of incident; the old man's blade breaking in his last
battle. Anyone might bet the papers would get hold of it, as they have.
On all these tombs and things it's shown broken at the point. I hope you
haven't dragged me through this Polar expedition merely because two men
with an eye for a picture saw St. Clare's broken sword."

"No," cried Father Brown, with a sharp voice like a pistol shot; "but
who saw his unbroken sword?"

"What do you mean?" cried the other, and stood still under the stars.
They had come abruptly out of the grey gates of the wood.

"I say, who saw his unbroken sword?" repeated Father Brown obstinately.
"Not the writer of the diary, anyhow; the general sheathed it in time."

Flambeau looked about him in the moonlight, as a man struck blind
might look in the sun; and his friend went on, for the first time with
eagerness:

"Flambeau," he cried, "I cannot prove it, even after hunting through the
tombs. But I am sure of it. Let me add just one more tiny fact that tips
the whole thing over. The colonel, by a strange chance, was one of the
first struck by a bullet. He was struck long before the troops came to
close quarters. But he saw St. Clare's sword broken. Why was it broken?
How was it broken? My friend, it was broken before the battle."

"Oh!" said his friend, with a sort of forlorn jocularity; "and pray
where is the other piece?"

"I can tell you," said the priest promptly. "In the northeast corner of
the cemetery of the Protestant Cathedral at Belfast."

"Indeed?" inquired the other. "Have you looked for it?"

"I couldn't," replied Brown, with frank regret. "There's a great marble
monument on top of it; a monument to the heroic Major Murray, who fell
fighting gloriously at the famous Battle of the Black River."

Flambeau seemed suddenly galvanised into existence. "You mean," he cried
hoarsely, "that General St. Clare hated Murray, and murdered him on the
field of battle because--"

"You are still full of good and pure thoughts," said the other. "It was
worse than that."

"Well," said the large man, "my stock of evil imagination is used up."

The priest seemed really doubtful where to begin, and at last he said
again:

"Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest."

The other did not answer.

"If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to
hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest."

There was still no reply, and the priest added still more mildly and
quietly:

"And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead
bodies to hide it in."

Flambeau began to stamp forward with an intolerance of delay in time
or space; but Father Brown went on as if he were continuing the last
sentence:

"Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read
his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people
understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also
reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A
Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist
reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old
Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might
mean; and, for Heaven's sake, don't cant about it. It might mean a man
physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society,
and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of
course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he
found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted--lust, tyranny,
treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the
good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?

"In each of the hot and secret countries to which the man went he kept a
harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold; but certainly
he would have said with steady eyes that he did it to the glory of the
Lord. My own theology is sufficiently expressed by asking which Lord?
Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it opens door after door
in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers. This is the real
case against crime, that a man does not become wilder and wilder, but
only meaner and meaner. St. Clare was soon suffocated by difficulties of
bribery and blackmail; and needed more and more cash. And by the time of
the Battle of the Black River he had fallen from world to world to that
place which Dante makes the lowest floor of the universe."

"What do you mean?" asked his friend again.

"I mean that," retorted the cleric, and suddenly pointed at a puddle
sealed with ice that shone in the moon. "Do you remember whom Dante put
in the last circle of ice?"

"The traitors," said Flambeau, and shuddered. As he looked around at the
inhuman landscape of trees, with taunting and almost obscene outlines,
he could almost fancy he was Dante, and the priest with the rivulet of a
voice was, indeed, a Virgil leading him through a land of eternal sins.

The voice went on: "Olivier, as you know, was quixotic, and would not
permit a secret service and spies. The thing, however, was done, like
many other things, behind his back. It was managed by my old friend
Espado; he was the bright-clad fop, whose hook nose got him called the
Vulture. Posing as a sort of philanthropist at the front, he felt his
way through the English Army, and at last got his fingers on its one
corrupt man--please God!--and that man at the top. St. Clare was in foul
need of money, and mountains of it. The discredited family doctor was
threatening those extraordinary exposures that afterwards began and
were broken off; tales of monstrous and prehistoric things in Park Lane;
things done by an English Evangelist that smelt like human sacrifice and
hordes of slaves. Money was wanted, too, for his daughter's dowry; for
to him the fame of wealth was as sweet as wealth itself. He snapped the
last thread, whispered the word to Brazil, and wealth poured in from the
enemies of England. But another man had talked to Espado the Vulture as
well as he. Somehow the dark, grim young major from Ulster had guessed
the hideous truth; and when they walked slowly together down that road
towards the bridge Murray was telling the general that he must resign
instantly, or be court-martialled and shot. The general temporised with
him till they came to the fringe of tropic trees by the bridge; and
there by the singing river and the sunlit palms (for I can see the
picture) the general drew his sabre and plunged it through the body of
the major."

The wintry road curved over a ridge in cutting frost, with cruel black
shapes of bush and thicket; but Flambeau fancied that he saw beyond it
faintly the edge of an aureole that was not starlight and moonlight, but
some fire such as is made by men. He watched it as the tale drew to its
close.

"St. Clare was a hell-hound, but he was a hound of breed. Never, I'll
swear, was he so lucid and so strong as when poor Murray lay a cold lump
at his feet. Never in all his triumphs, as Captain Keith said truly, was
the great man so great as he was in this last world-despised defeat. He
looked coolly at his weapon to wipe off the blood; he saw the point he
had planted between his victim's shoulders had broken off in the body.
He saw quite calmly, as through a club windowpane, all that must follow.
He saw that men must find the unaccountable corpse; must extract
the unaccountable sword-point; must notice the unaccountable broken
sword--or absence of sword. He had killed, but not silenced. But his
imperious intellect rose against the facer; there was one way yet. He
could make the corpse less unaccountable. He could create a hill of
corpses to cover this one. In twenty minutes eight hundred English
soldiers were marching down to their death."

The warmer glow behind the black winter wood grew richer and brighter,
and Flambeau strode on to reach it. Father Brown also quickened his
stride; but he seemed merely absorbed in his tale.

"Such was the valour of that English thousand, and such the genius of
their commander, that if they had at once attacked the hill, even their
mad march might have met some luck. But the evil mind that played with
them like pawns had other aims and reasons. They must remain in the
marshes by the bridge at least till British corpses should be a
common sight there. Then for the last grand scene; the silver-haired
soldier-saint would give up his shattered sword to save further
slaughter. Oh, it was well organised for an impromptu. But I think (I
cannot prove), I think that it was while they stuck there in the bloody
mire that someone doubted--and someone guessed."

He was mute a moment, and then said: "There is a voice from nowhere that
tells me the man who guessed was the lover... the man to wed the old
man's child."

"But what about Olivier and the hanging?" asked Flambeau.

"Olivier, partly from chivalry, partly from policy, seldom encumbered
his march with captives," explained the narrator. "He released everybody
in most cases. He released everybody in this case."

"Everybody but the general," said the tall man.

"Everybody," said the priest.

Flambeau knit his black brows. "I don't grasp it all yet," he said.

"There is another picture, Flambeau," said Brown in his more mystical
undertone. "I can't prove it; but I can do more--I can see it. There is
a camp breaking up on the bare, torrid hills at morning, and Brazilian
uniforms massed in blocks and columns to march. There is the red
shirt and long black beard of Olivier, which blows as he stands, his
broad-brimmed hat in his hand. He is saying farewell to the great enemy
he is setting free--the simple, snow-headed English veteran, who
thanks him in the name of his men. The English remnant stand behind
at attention; beside them are stores and vehicles for the retreat.
The drums roll; the Brazilians are moving; the English are still like
statues. So they abide till the last hum and flash of the enemy have
faded from the tropic horizon. Then they alter their postures all at
once, like dead men coming to life; they turn their fifty faces upon the
general--faces not to be forgotten."

Flambeau gave a great jump. "Ah," he cried, "you don't mean--"

"Yes," said Father Brown in a deep, moving voice. "It was an English
hand that put the rope round St. Clare's neck; I believe the hand that
put the ring on his daughter's finger. They were English hands that
dragged him up to the tree of shame; the hands of men that had adored
him and followed him to victory. And they were English souls (God pardon
and endure us all!) who stared at him swinging in that foreign sun on
the green gallows of palm, and prayed in their hatred that he might drop
off it into hell."

As the two topped the ridge there burst on them the strong scarlet light
of a red-curtained English inn. It stood sideways in the road, as if
standing aside in the amplitude of hospitality. Its three doors stood
open with invitation; and even where they stood they could hear the hum
and laughter of humanity happy for a night.

"I need not tell you more," said Father Brown. "They tried him in the
wilderness and destroyed him; and then, for the honour of England and
of his daughter, they took an oath to seal up for ever the story of the
traitor's purse and the assassin's sword blade. Perhaps--Heaven help
them--they tried to forget it. Let us try to forget it, anyhow; here is
our inn."

"With all my heart," said Flambeau, and was just striding into the
bright, noisy bar when he stepped back and almost fell on the road.

"Look there, in the devil's name!" he cried, and pointed rigidly at the
square wooden sign that overhung the road. It showed dimly the crude
shape of a sabre hilt and a shortened blade; and was inscribed in false
archaic lettering, "The Sign of the Broken Sword."

"Were you not prepared?" asked Father Brown gently. "He is the god of
this country; half the inns and parks and streets are named after him
and his story."

"I thought we had done with the leper," cried Flambeau, and spat on the
road.

"You will never have done with him in England," said the priest, looking
down, "while brass is strong and stone abides. His marble statues will
erect the souls of proud, innocent boys for centuries, his village tomb
will smell of loyalty as of lilies. Millions who never knew him shall
love him like a father--this man whom the last few that knew him dealt
with like dung. He shall be a saint; and the truth shall never be told
of him, because I have made up my mind at last. There is so much good
and evil in breaking secrets, that I put my conduct to a test. All these
newspapers will perish; the anti-Brazil boom is already over; Olivier
is already honoured everywhere. But I told myself that if anywhere, by
name, in metal or marble that will endure like the pyramids, Colonel
Clancy, or Captain Keith, or President Olivier, or any innocent man was
wrongly blamed, then I would speak. If it were only that St. Clare was
wrongly praised, I would be silent. And I will."

They plunged into the red-curtained tavern, which was not only cosy, but
even luxurious inside. On a table stood a silver model of the tomb of
St. Clare, the silver head bowed, the silver sword broken. On the
walls were coloured photographs of the same scene, and of the system
of wagonettes that took tourists to see it. They sat down on the
comfortable padded benches.

"Come, it's cold," cried Father Brown; "let's have some wine or beer."

"Or brandy," said Flambeau.




The Three Tools of Death


Both by calling and conviction Father Brown knew better than most of us,
that every man is dignified when he is dead. But even he felt a pang of
incongruity when he was knocked up at daybreak and told that Sir Aaron
Armstrong had been murdered. There was something absurd and unseemly
about secret violence in connection with so entirely entertaining and
popular a figure. For Sir Aaron Armstrong was entertaining to the point
of being comic; and popular in such a manner as to be almost legendary.
It was like hearing that Sunny Jim had hanged himself; or that Mr.
Pickwick had died in Hanwell. For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist,
and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himself
on dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political and
social speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and "loud laughter"; his
bodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and
he dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal
or even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperous
total abstainer.

The established story of his conversion was familiar on the more
puritanic platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawn
away from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out of
both and become (as he modestly put it) what he was. Yet his wide
white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberless
dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe,
somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a
dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merry
of all the sons of men.

He had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, high
but not broad, a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrow
sides overhung the steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken by
passing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong, as he boisterously explained, had
no nerves. But if the train had often given a shock to the house, that
morning the tables were turned, and it was the house that gave a shock
to the train.

The engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angle
of the house impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of most
mechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had been
very rapid. A man clad completely in black, even (it was remembered)
to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge above
the engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill. This in
itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there came
out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterly
unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distinct
even when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was
"Murder!"

But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he
had heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.

The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many
features of the tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was Sir
Aaron Armstrong's man-servant Magnus. The baronet in his optimism had
often laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no one
was likely to laugh at him just now.

So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the
smoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the
body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid
scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled
presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very
little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any
living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered moments
brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could salute
as the dead man's secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in Bohemian
society and even famous in the Bohemian arts. In a manner more vague,
but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant. By the
time the third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter of
the dead man, had come already tottering and waving into the garden, the
engine-driver had put a stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown and
the train had panted on to get help from the next station.

Father Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of Patrick
Royce, the big ex-Bohemian secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth;
and that casual kind of Catholic that never remembers his religion
until he is really in a hole. But Royce's request might have been less
promptly complied with if one of the official detectives had not been a
friend and admirer of the unofficial Flambeau; and it was impossible to
be a friend of Flambeau without hearing numberless stories about Father
Brown. Hence, while the young detective (whose name was Merton) led
the little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was more
confidential than could be expected between two total strangers.

"As far as I can see," said Mr. Merton candidly, "there is no sense
to be made of it at all. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is a
solemn old fool; far too much of a fool to be an assassin. Royce has
been the baronet's best friend for years; and his daughter undoubtedly
adored him. Besides, it's all too absurd. Who would kill such a cheery
old chap as Armstrong? Who could dip his hands in the gore of an
after-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas."

"Yes, it was a cheery house," assented Father Brown. "It was a cheery
house while he was alive. Do you think it will be cheery now he is
dead?"

Merton started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivened
eye. "Now he is dead?" he repeated.

"Yes," continued the priest stolidly, "he was cheerful. But did he
communicate his cheerfulness? Frankly, was anyone else in the house
cheerful but he?"

A window in Merton's mind let in that strange light of surprise in which
we see for the first time things we have known all along. He had often
been to the Armstrongs', on little police jobs of the philanthropist;
and, now he came to think of it, it was in itself a depressing house.
The rooms were very high and very cold; the decoration mean and
provincial; the draughty corridors were lit by electricity that was
bleaker than moonlight. And though the old man's scarlet face and silver
beard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in turn, it did
not leave any warmth behind it. Doubtless this spectral discomfort in
the place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of its
owner; he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his own
warmth with him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he was
compelled to confess that they also were as shadows of their lord.
The moody man-servant, with his monstrous black gloves, was almost a
nightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid enough, a big bull of a
man, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured beard was
startlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead was
barred with premature wrinkles. He was good-natured enough also, but it
was a sad sort of good-nature, almost a heart-broken sort--he had the
general air of being some sort of failure in life. As for Armstrong's
daughter, it was almost incredible that she was his daughter; she was so
pallid in colour and sensitive in outline. She was graceful, but there
was a quiver in the very shape of her that was like the lines of an
aspen. Merton had sometimes wondered if she had learnt to quail at the
crash of the passing trains.

"You see," said Father Brown, blinking modestly, "I'm not sure that the
Armstrong cheerfulness is so very cheerful--for other people. You say
that nobody could kill such a happy old man, but I'm not sure; ne nos
inducas in tentationem. If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite
simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."

"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?"

"People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't
think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very
trying thing."

They walked some way in silence along the windy grassy bank by the rail,
and just as they came under the far-flung shadow of the tall Armstrong
house, Father Brown said suddenly, like a man throwing away a
troublesome thought rather than offering it seriously: "Of course, drink
is neither good nor bad in itself. But I can't help sometimes feeling
that men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine to sadden
them."

Merton's official superior, a grizzled and capable detective named
Gilder, was standing on the green bank waiting for the coroner, talking
to Patrick Royce, whose big shoulders and bristly beard and hair towered
above him. This was the more noticeable because Royce walked always
with a sort of powerful stoop, and seemed to be going about his small
clerical and domestic duties in a heavy and humbled style, like a
buffalo drawing a go-cart.

He raised his head with unusual pleasure at the sight of the priest, and
took him a few paces apart. Meanwhile Merton was addressing the
older detective respectfully indeed, but not without a certain boyish
impatience.

"Well, Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?"

"There is no mystery," replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelids
at the rooks.

"Well, there is for me, at any rate," said Merton, smiling.

"It is simple enough, my boy," observed the senior investigator,
stroking his grey, pointed beard. "Three minutes after you'd gone for
Mr. Royce's parson the whole thing came out. You know that pasty-faced
servant in the black gloves who stopped the train?"

"I should know him anywhere. Somehow he rather gave me the creeps."

"Well," drawled Gilder, "when the train had gone on again, that man had
gone too. Rather a cool criminal, don't you think, to escape by the very
train that went off for the police?"

"You're pretty sure, I suppose," remarked the young man, "that he really
did kill his master?"

"Yes, my son, I'm pretty sure," replied Gilder drily, "for the trifling
reason that he has gone off with twenty thousand pounds in papers that
were in his master's desk. No, the only thing worth calling a difficulty
is how he killed him. The skull seems broken as with some big weapon,
but there's no weapon at all lying about, and the murderer would have
found it awkward to carry it away, unless the weapon was too small to be
noticed."

"Perhaps the weapon was too big to be noticed," said the priest, with an
odd little giggle.

Gilder looked round at this wild remark, and rather sternly asked Brown
what he meant.

"Silly way of putting it, I know," said Father Brown apologetically.
"Sounds like a fairy tale. But poor Armstrong was killed with a giant's
club, a great green club, too big to be seen, and which we call the
earth. He was broken against this green bank we are standing on."

"How do you mean?" asked the detective quickly.

Father Brown turned his moon face up to the narrow facade of the house
and blinked hopelessly up. Following his eyes, they saw that right at
the top of this otherwise blind back quarter of the building, an attic
window stood open.

"Don't you see," he explained, pointing a little awkwardly like a child,
"he was thrown down from there?"

Gilder frowningly scrutinised the window, and then said: "Well, it is
certainly possible. But I don't see why you are so sure about it."

Brown opened his grey eyes wide. "Why," he said, "there's a bit of rope
round the dead man's leg. Don't you see that other bit of rope up there
caught at the corner of the window?"

At that height the thing looked like the faintest particle of dust
or hair, but the shrewd old investigator was satisfied. "You're quite
right, sir," he said to Father Brown; "that is certainly one to you."

Almost as he spoke a special train with one carriage took the curve
of the line on their left, and, stopping, disgorged another group
of policemen, in whose midst was the hangdog visage of Magnus, the
absconded servant.

"By Jove! they've got him," cried Gilder, and stepped forward with quite
a new alertness.

"Have you got the money!" he cried to the first policeman.

The man looked him in the face with a rather curious expression and
said: "No." Then he added: "At least, not here."

"Which is the inspector, please?" asked the man called Magnus.

When he spoke everyone instantly understood how this voice had stopped
a train. He was a dull-looking man with flat black hair, a colourless
face, and a faint suggestion of the East in the level slits in his eyes
and mouth. His blood and name, indeed, had remained dubious, ever since
Sir Aaron had "rescued" him from a waitership in a London restaurant,
and (as some said) from more infamous things. But his voice was as vivid
as his face was dead. Whether through exactitude in a foreign language,
or in deference to his master (who had been somewhat deaf), Magnus's
tones had a peculiarly ringing and piercing quality, and the whole group
quite jumped when he spoke.

"I always knew this would happen," he said aloud with brazen blandness.
"My poor old master made game of me for wearing black; but I always said
I should be ready for his funeral."

And he made a momentary movement with his two dark-gloved hands.

"Sergeant," said Inspector Gilder, eyeing the black hands with wrath,
"aren't you putting the bracelets on this fellow; he looks pretty
dangerous."

"Well, sir," said the sergeant, with the same odd look of wonder, "I
don't know that we can."

"What do you mean?" asked the other sharply. "Haven't you arrested him?"

A faint scorn widened the slit-like mouth, and the whistle of an
approaching train seemed oddly to echo the mockery.

"We arrested him," replied the sergeant gravely, "just as he was coming
out of the police station at Highgate, where he had deposited all his
master's money in the care of Inspector Robinson."

Gilder looked at the man-servant in utter amazement. "Why on earth did
you do that?" he asked of Magnus.

"To keep it safe from the criminal, of course," replied that person
placidly.

"Surely," said Gilder, "Sir Aaron's money might have been safely left
with Sir Aaron's family."

The tail of his sentence was drowned in the roar of the train as it went
rocking and clanking; but through all the hell of noises to which that
unhappy house was periodically subject, they could hear the syllables of
Magnus's answer, in all their bell-like distinctness: "I have no reason
to feel confidence in Sir Aaron's family."

All the motionless men had the ghostly sensation of the presence of some
new person; and Merton was scarcely surprised when he looked up and saw
the pale face of Armstrong's daughter over Father Brown's shoulder. She
was still young and beautiful in a silvery style, but her hair was of so
dusty and hueless a brown that in some shadows it seemed to have turned
totally grey.

"Be careful what you say," said Royce gruffly, "you'll frighten Miss
Armstrong."

"I hope so," said the man with the clear voice.

As the woman winced and everyone else wondered, he went on: "I am
somewhat used to Miss Armstrong's tremors. I have seen her trembling off
and on for years. And some said she was shaking with cold and some she
was shaking with fear, but I know she was shaking with hate and wicked
anger--fiends that have had their feast this morning. She would have
been away by now with her lover and all the money but for me. Ever since
my poor old master prevented her from marrying that tipsy blackguard--"

"Stop," said Gilder very sternly. "We have nothing to do with your
family fancies or suspicions. Unless you have some practical evidence,
your mere opinions--"

"Oh! I'll give you practical evidence," cut in Magnus, in his hacking
accent. "You'll have to subpoena me, Mr. Inspector, and I shall have to
tell the truth. And the truth is this: An instant after the old man was
pitched bleeding out of the window, I ran into the attic, and found
his daughter swooning on the floor with a red dagger still in her hand.
Allow me to hand that also to the proper authorities." He took from his
tail-pocket a long horn-hilted knife with a red smear on it, and handed
it politely to the sergeant. Then he stood back again, and his slits of
eyes almost faded from his face in one fat Chinese sneer.

Merton felt an almost bodily sickness at the sight of him; and he
muttered to Gilder: "Surely you would take Miss Armstrong's word against
his?"

Father Brown suddenly lifted a face so absurdly fresh that it looked
somehow as if he had just washed it. "Yes," he said, radiating
innocence, "but is Miss Armstrong's word against his?"

The girl uttered a startled, singular little cry; everyone looked at
her. Her figure was rigid as if paralysed; only her face within its
frame of faint brown hair was alive with an appalling surprise. She
stood like one of a sudden lassooed and throttled.

"This man," said Mr. Gilder gravely, "actually says that you were found
grasping a knife, insensible, after the murder."

"He says the truth," answered Alice.

The next fact of which they were conscious was that Patrick Royce strode
with his great stooping head into their ring and uttered the singular
words: "Well, if I've got to go, I'll have a bit of pleasure first."

His huge shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus's
bland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish.
Two or three of the police instantly put their hands on Royce; but to
the rest it seemed as if all reason had broken up and the universe were
turning into a brainless harlequinade.

"None of that, Mr. Royce," Gilder had called out authoritatively. "I
shall arrest you for assault."

"No, you won't," answered the secretary in a voice like an iron gong,
"you will arrest me for murder."

Gilder threw an alarmed glance at the man knocked down; but since that
outraged person was already sitting up and wiping a little blood off a
substantially uninjured face, he only said shortly: "What do you mean?"

"It is quite true, as this fellow says," explained Royce, "that Miss
Armstrong fainted with a knife in her hand. But she had not snatched the
knife to attack her father, but to defend him."

"To defend him," repeated Gilder gravely. "Against whom?"

"Against me," answered the secretary.

Alice looked at him with a complex and baffling face; then she said in a
low voice: "After it all, I am still glad you are brave."

"Come upstairs," said Patrick Royce heavily, "and I will show you the
whole cursed thing."

The attic, which was the secretary's private place (and rather a small
cell for so large a hermit), had indeed all the vestiges of a violent
drama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flung
away; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quite
empty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and a
length of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly across
the windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on the
carpet.

"I was drunk," said Royce; and this simplicity in the prematurely
battered man somehow had the pathos of the first sin of a baby.

"You all know about me," he continued huskily; "everybody knows how my
story began, and it may as well end like that too. I was called a clever
man once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remains
of a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in his
own way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn't let me marry Alice here; and it
will always be said that he was right enough. Well, you can form your
own conclusions, and you won't want me to go into details. That is my
whisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quite
emptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on the
corpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown. You need not
set detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in this
world. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough!"

At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large man
to lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered by
the remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands and
knees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind of
undignified prayers. Being a person utterly insensible to the social
figure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright round
face up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with a
very comic human head.

"I say," he said good-naturedly, "this really won't do at all, you know.
At the beginning you said we'd found no weapon. But now we're finding
too many; there's the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and the
pistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of a
window! It won't do. It's not economical." And he shook his head at the
ground as a horse does grazing.

Inspector Gilder had opened his mouth with serious intentions, but
before he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone on
quite volubly.

"And now three quite impossible things. First, these holes in the
carpet, where the six bullets have gone in. Why on earth should anybody
fire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy's head, the
thing that's grinning at him. He doesn't pick a quarrel with his feet,
or lay siege to his slippers. And then there's the rope"--and having
done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his
pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees--"in what conceivable
intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man's neck and
finally put it round his leg? Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that,
or he would be sleeping like a log by now. And, plainest of all, the
whisky bottle. You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle,
and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half and
leaving the other. That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do."

He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accused
murderer in tones of limpid penitence: "I'm awfully sorry, my dear sir,
but your tale is really rubbish."

"Sir," said Alice Armstrong in a low tone to the priest, "can I speak to
you alone for a moment?"

This request forced the communicative cleric out of the gangway, and
before he could speak in the next room, the girl was talking with
strange incisiveness.

"You are a clever man," she said, "and you are trying to save Patrick,
I know. But it's no use. The core of all this is black, and the more
things you find out the more there will be against the miserable man I
love."

"Why?" asked Brown, looking at her steadily.

"Because," she answered equally steadily, "I saw him commit the crime
myself."

"Ah!" said the unmoved Brown, "and what did he do?"

"I was in this room next to them," she explained; "both doors were
closed, but I suddenly heard a voice, such as I had never heard on
earth, roaring 'Hell, hell, hell,' again and again, and then the two
doors shook with the first explosion of the revolver. Thrice again the
thing banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full of
smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick's hand; and I
saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes. Then he leapt
on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and,
grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over his
head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Then
it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.
I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed to
cut the rope before I fainted."

"I see," said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility. "Thank you."

As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly
into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick
Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspector
submissively:

"Might I say a word to the prisoner in your presence; and might he take
off those funny cuffs for a minute?"

"He is a very powerful man," said Merton in an undertone. "Why do you
want them taken off?"

"Why, I thought," replied the priest humbly, "that perhaps I might have
the very great honour of shaking hands with him."

Both detectives stared, and Father Brown added: "Won't you tell them
about it, sir?"

The man on the chair shook his tousled head, and the priest turned
impatiently.

"Then I will," he said. "Private lives are more important than public
reputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their
dead."

He went to the fatal window, and blinked out of it as he went on
talking.

"I told you that in this case there were too many weapons and only one
death. I tell you now that they were not weapons, and were not used to
cause death. All those grisly tools, the noose, the bloody knife, the
exploding pistol, were instruments of a curious mercy. They were not
used to kill Sir Aaron, but to save him."

"To save him!" repeated Gilder. "And from what?"

"From himself," said Father Brown. "He was a suicidal maniac."

"What?" cried Merton in an incredulous tone. "And the Religion of
Cheerfulness--"

"It is a cruel religion," said the priest, looking out of the window.
"Why couldn't they let him weep a little, like his fathers before him?
His plans stiffened, his views grew cold; behind that merry mask was
the empty mind of the atheist. At last, to keep up his hilarious public
level, he fell back on that dram-drinking he had abandoned long ago. But
there is this horror about alcoholism in a sincere teetotaler: that he
pictures and expects that psychological inferno from which he has warned
others. It leapt upon poor Armstrong prematurely, and by this morning
he was in such a case that he sat here and cried he was in hell, in so
crazy a voice that his daughter did not know it. He was mad for death,
and with the monkey tricks of the mad he had scattered round him death
in many shapes--a running noose and his friend's revolver and a knife.
Royce entered accidentally and acted in a flash. He flung the knife
on the mat behind him, snatched up the revolver, and having no time to
unload it, emptied it shot after shot all over the floor. The suicide
saw a fourth shape of death, and made a dash for the window. The rescuer
did the only thing he could--ran after him with the rope and tried to
tie him hand and foot. Then it was that the unlucky girl ran in, and
misunderstanding the struggle, strove to slash her father free. At first
she only slashed poor Royce's knuckles, from which has come all the
little blood in this affair. But, of course, you noticed that he left
blood, but no wound, on that servant's face? Only before the poor woman
swooned, she did hack her father loose, so that he went crashing through
that window into eternity."

There was a long stillness slowly broken by the metallic noises of
Gilder unlocking the handcuffs of Patrick Royce, to whom he said: "I
think I should have told the truth, sir. You and the young lady are
worth more than Armstrong's obituary notices."

"Confound Armstrong's notices," cried Royce roughly. "Don't you see it
was because she mustn't know?"

"Mustn't know what?" asked Merton.

"Why, that she killed her father, you fool!" roared the other. "He'd
have been alive now but for her. It might craze her to know that."

"No, I don't think it would," remarked Father Brown, as he picked up his
hat. "I rather think I should tell her. Even the most murderous blunders
don't poison life like sins; anyhow, I think you may both be the happier
now. I've got to go back to the Deaf School."

As he went out on to the gusty grass an acquaintance from Highgate
stopped him and said:

"The Coroner has arrived. The inquiry is just going to begin."

"I've got to get back to the Deaf School," said Father Brown. "I'm sorry
I can't stop for the inquiry."





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Title: A Short History of England


Author: G. K. Chesterton



Release Date: March 25, 2007  [eBook #20897]

Language: English


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND***


E-text prepared by Sigal Alon, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND

by

G. K. CHESTERTON







London
Chatto & Windus
MCMXVII

Printed in England by
William Clowes and Sons, Limited,
London and Beccles.
All rights reserved




CONTENTS

                                         PAGE
    I. INTRODUCTION                          1

   II. THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN               6

  III. THE AGE OF LEGENDS                   19

   IV. THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS         30

    V. ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS      43

   VI. THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES              58

  VII. THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS      71

 VIII. THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND         86

   IX. NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS     104

    X. THE WAR OF THE USURPERS             119

   XI. THE REBELLION OF THE RICH           133

  XII. SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS     151

 XIII. THE AGE OF THE PURITANS             163

  XIV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS            179

   XV. THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS    195

  XVI. ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS     209

 XVII. THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN         223

XVIII. CONCLUSION                          238




A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND




I

INTRODUCTION


It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a
sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who
make no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the
public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that a
history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been
written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called the
anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written
against the people; and in them the populace is either ignored or
elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his
book "A Short History of the English People"; but he seems to have
thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For
instance, he calls one very large part of his story "Puritan England."
But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to
call the rise of Henry of Navarre "Puritan France." And some of our
extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling
the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda "Puritan Ireland."

But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular
histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is
an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about
England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present
industrial system was being built up, and the general information given
about the preceding centuries, which we call broadly mediæval. Of the
sort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient for the side-show of
the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. A
popular Encyclopædia appeared some years ago, professing among other
things to teach English History to the masses; and in this I came upon a
series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to be
all authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarily
imaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for
portraits of men like Henry II. or Edward I.; but this did not seem to
have been found, or even sought. And wandering to the image that stood
for Stephen of Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one of
those helmets with steel brims curved like a crescent, which went with
the age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head
was that of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were mediæval; and any
old helmet was good enough for Stephen.

Now suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for the
portrait of Charles I. and found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had
been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the _Daily
Sketch_ of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to
say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike
portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there
must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary
was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and
ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the
Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and
complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all,
that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in
anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how
our populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.

Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than
this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as
the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. But
the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the
omission, of mediæval civilization in such histories as this, lies in
the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is
left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a
carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great
Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous
solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not
taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the
parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and
of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one
charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the
carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, to
coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance,
the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools
practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears
in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine
anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers
did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the
adventure of Courtrai, where the mediæval shopkeepers more than won
their spurs--for they won the spurs of their enemies.

I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of
this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the
lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened
mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and
his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how
his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods,
caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the
light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he
enjoys; and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet
more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the
sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect
(and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of
his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His
family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could
have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and
named "Dedischado," on the shield of the unknown knight.




II

THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN


The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being
the end of the world. Its extremity was _ultima Thule_, the other end of
nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit
up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the
remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than
possession.

The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms
upon the edge of everything there was really something that can only be
called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it is
at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can
one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the
sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to
miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole,
leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric
tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet
dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands.
Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the
Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have
something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland
Germans, or from the _bon sens français_ which can be at will trenchant
or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts
of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity,
something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things.
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex
their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their
coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is
expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the
English by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with
the symbol of language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a
dumb ox of thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There is
something double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters.
Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the
imperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely,
but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and
emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. But
they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of
home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation
or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme
which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of
all English poems--"Over the hills and far away."

The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he
was the detached demigod of "Cæsar and Cleopatra," was certainly a Latin
of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with all
the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Cæsar's brief
account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which is
more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible
thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic
shapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them.
Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may
count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the
island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests
the presence of something which generally grows out of Nature-worship--I
mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern
controversy Cæsar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was
"Celtic"; and some of the place-names have even given rise to a
suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not
capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of
pronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my own very simple
purpose. And indeed their importance has been very much exaggerated.
Cæsar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; but
when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turned
Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular
indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What
they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and
given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that
matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know
that in a short time they were Roman.

Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragment
such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than
increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is
still very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like
writing a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be
a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing
about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are
Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for they
are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than
a row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but
grown like fungoids upon this original work of man; and our woods are
mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and the
roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and
brick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers are
the colours of a Roman pavement.

Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she
has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial.
What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or
no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened
immediately after. Being Roman did _not_ mean being subject, in the
sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that
the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible
hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and
conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to us
to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the
lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman
Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britons
were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being
Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In
truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people came
to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic origin
was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself
obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it
could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the
Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had
to have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire
necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not
very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving
emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length
the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was
Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation
which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to
protect or to tear down.

About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The
present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the
most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body
on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a
commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another
historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything
more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even
pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long
afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held,
perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediævalism, and therefore still
haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen,
because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary
that the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it might fail. Hence
the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed
Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law
might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere
military lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter.
Therefore the mediæval poet is eager to show that Roman government was
simply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point
of the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government
was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God
among the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving a
colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen repose
in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort of
eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly
remembered through the first half of English history; for it is the
whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.

The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense
remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be
conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began it
largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the
most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly
existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But
there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still
less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change was
passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and
equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at
the expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp
that the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was
slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of
the Empire and by the strengthening of the Church.

Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on
the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the
servile or "useful" arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to
cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce the
cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She
was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than
the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan
simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much
less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history
of England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the
Great; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the
barbarian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint's mysticism was
moved at finding them ornamental; and "Non Angli sed Angeli" meant more
nearly "Not slaves, but souls." It is to the point, in passing, to note
that in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, the
serfs were always referred to as "souls." The great Pope's phrase,
hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in
the best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults,
worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a
historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with
aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion of
aristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first.
The Irish bull that "One man is as good as another and a great deal
better" contains a truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was the
link between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the
saint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not conscious
of his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferiority
than they are.

But while a million little priests and monks like mice were already
nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process was
going on, which has here been called the weakening of the Empire. It is
a process which is to this day very difficult to explain. But it
affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially the
institution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heaviest
in Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain,
however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English
history has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to
tell it without reference to that corporate Christendom in which it took
part and pride. I fully accept the truth in Mr. Kipling's question of
"What can they know of England who only England know?" and merely differ
from the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study of
Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though very
difficult, to frame in few words some idea of what happened to the whole
European race.

Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing
in it. The centre had been growing fainter and fainter, and now the
centre disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, and
now she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the Pope and his
constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became
like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result
rather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but
there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and
therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his
great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The
Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.

By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this
decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of
antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial
chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall
speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism
tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind
of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The
later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly
resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at
last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more
distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is,
he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the
land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the
old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a
difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man
being a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his
throne-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his
slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow
changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His
status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.

What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of
letters, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration
of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this
decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of
wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as
things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic
locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even
in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we
are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of
barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of
the borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began
by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay
Britain.

It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman
civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces;
but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great
cities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than
the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were
connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of
Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under
barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who
lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The
whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances,
generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to
go away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help
from ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now the
duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they
naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the
trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller
pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green
when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen
than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are
supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is
the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to
say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.




III

THE AGE OF LEGENDS


We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel,
and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale.
We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in _Cranford_, after
tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick.
Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who
had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.
Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in
British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do
with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and
engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite
modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we
are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as
tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is
no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a
labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest
but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in
the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age
comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the
echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve
to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Cæsar was
long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the
one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has
something decidedly comic about it; as if Cæsar's "Et tu, Brute," might
be translated, "What, _you_ here?" But in one respect the fable is quite
as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman
foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that
seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the
elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues
through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in
all our speech there was no word more Roman than "romance."

The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean
that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the
civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack.
Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise
than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the
official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been
largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It
may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its
new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description
of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately
irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.

There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of
this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down
to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association
between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been
full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the
Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked
backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our
time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope--which perhaps must
be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped--but
it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make
a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he
could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state;
the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance
and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And
this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all
the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the
most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be
an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was
left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.

We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free
cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards
a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it
was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman
roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests
another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the
forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being
double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not
merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is
precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of
reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has
sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the
idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the
adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.

The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time
none of the _heroes_ are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became
omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the
faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as they
had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian
rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he
killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all.
Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of
Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they
spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It
is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to
enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great
Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard
of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; or
of the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred
the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was
not so great as the work he had to do.

But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the
age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by
instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much
more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the
stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to
realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards
answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an
attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he
will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to
correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this
part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on
the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told,
and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is
made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of
the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely
because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to
reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to
Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not
be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had
been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine
times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to
tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and
that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they
were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes
rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was
an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of
Noah's Ark.

The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last
few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not
dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious
instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone
labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minataur, which was
conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people this
would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack's
Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply the
fact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely ever is
remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is
always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been;
for all the past is a part of faith. What did they believe of their
fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are
new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot
find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very
practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of
these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and
his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things
in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are
to understand our fathers who first made this country anything like
itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was
not their real past, it was their real memory.

After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for
these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of
Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem to
have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came
to that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of the
Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up
upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made
his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called
Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or
something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently
regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at
Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his
staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas
Day.

A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul
of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations
that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a
supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances.
Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of
seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible
fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph
carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of
the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury;
and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not
only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and
branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was
especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur
feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was
afterwards imitated or invented by mediæval knighthood. Both the cup and
the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the
chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely
universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other
tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very
word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round
Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type;
for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the
king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a
level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but
not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of
heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying
chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which
appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.

Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries
as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of
universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all
ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and
numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests
of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for
the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these
tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which
runs,


     "When good King Arthur ruled this land
     He was a noble king,
     He stole three pecks of barley meal,"


is much nearer the true mediæval note than the aristocratic stateliness
of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there
is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by
those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of
tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning
all the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can
arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it.
Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would
go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are
explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary
thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what
word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant,
may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would
be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a
native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would
not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced from
documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena,
and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious
story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded action
of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be
nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of
the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.




IV

THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS


It is a quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as a
condemnation; but not the word "long-sighted," which we should probably
use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of
vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded
modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that
is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested
only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large
proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs
for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the
enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations
and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history
or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these
it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most
local sort. In any case, it is as well to record even so simple a
conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.

But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the
criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same
figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries
in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and
long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations.
They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned
first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and
their name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic
pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted
people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and
knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage
veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves.
I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily
a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refers
all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old
people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old
people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing
about this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it be
possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the
three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of
every conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of the
oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one
of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for
"long-sighted" or "short-sighted." Suppose, in short, the question that
had torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some
spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think
we should find it hard to believe that this physical difference had
really played so fundamental a part in human history. And that is
exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the
Teutons and the Latins.

I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from
falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe that
whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference
to any one who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortal
appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to have
killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or made
slaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except this
one. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family;
there were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary office; there
were passions rooted in locality, special emotions about sea-folk or
mountain-folk; there were historic memories of a cause or an alliance;
there was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of a
cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, there
was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment a
motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed;
they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began
even to have a cant.

The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity
of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and
repeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape from
the singularity of this event, the possibility that it never happened.
In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the
Teutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small touches
which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on the
Teuton with a phrase like "the basis of their society was the free man";
and on the Roman with a phrase like "the mines, if worked by forced
labour, must have been a source of endless oppression." The simple fact
being that the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the
Teuton free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then but
now; and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated his
slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a "strange
disappointment" that Gildas, the only British chronicler, does not
describe the great Teutonic system. In the opinion of Gildas, a
modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of _non Angli sed
diaboli_. The modern Teutonist is "disappointed" that the contemporary
authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps
from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that
there was nothing else to be seen.

In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with
what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations
which civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems,
whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts the
chain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at the
world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose
borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which
were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what
we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely
hagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether
the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least
possible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost the
only Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they found
patrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britons
because they did not look for them; and if they moved among pure
Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was,
indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards the
marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always
found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the
lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found the
thing that counts most in English history is this: that some of the
kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which not
only existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer
thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex.
And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the
map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the
most real of them all.

The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which
corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized
king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this
fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the
rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those
mystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to "continue
the work of Penda" in Ealing: fortunately not on any large scale. What
that prince believed or disbelieved it is now impossible and perhaps
unnecessary to discover; but this last stand of his central kingdom is
not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to the
fact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts. The
eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had
already made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The western
grew from whatever was left of the British Christianity. The two
clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augustinians ultimately
prevailed. But the work from the west had already been enormous. It is
possible that some prestige went with the possession of Glastonbury,
which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury there
was an even grander and more impressive power. There irradiated to all
Europe at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland. There the
Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kels
four hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole
people had been a spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like a
picnic; and thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost
literally like men running with good news. This must be remembered
through the development of that dark dual destiny that has bound us to
Ireland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity which was not
from the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom it
was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but created by
Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements were
gathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the
more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the
secular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always
Romanist.

But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate
subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things
had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings are
unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid
ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not only
always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all
castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on the
ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that
extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the
key of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of
our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English
reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in
which it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primary
nature is therefore quite indispensable.

In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certain
ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later times
produced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain
points; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or the
Communists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the
Christian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as being
special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She
reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good,
without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took
the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious
world; and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or
property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the
interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who would
not mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The very
word "monk" is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to mean
community--one might call it sociability. What happened was that this
communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual
life; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how
this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It
is hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in private
life we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by being
outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that
monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts
and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody
else would do; that the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the plagues
of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan
literature, and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the
poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find
it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to
men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves
poor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introduced
representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a
semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own
institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand
men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act or
faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of
Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its
monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and
enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century,
there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all
their work was in vain.

That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved
another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything
away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first
barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark
and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded
by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual
central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a
clock. It was really a race between the driving energy of the
missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of
the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped
before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization
which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished
unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed
like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the
crown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and
towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The
story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair
and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats
alternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats.
It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown,
that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary
part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the
tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king's younger
brother. There is, from the first, something humble and even accidental
about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his early life
lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, and
readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of
all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of
persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would
bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with no
ambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple,
concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which he
piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.

He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph
and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a
lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards those
wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been
driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that are
his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned
with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the
broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; and
in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp
of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as
successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was
successful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the
conqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here penned
behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish
conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty of
Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at
the baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of the treaty.
In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly
wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the
religious element in this part of English history, for without it there
would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could
clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that
followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than the
Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such
did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute was
really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did not
get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred's religious exaction that
remained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only remembered
by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the king
who put his own crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrendered
to heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.




V

ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS


The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to
the name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it there
as the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call the
practical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. It
can only be described as the strength of the weak kings.

It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well
as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything
that he learnt at school, and consider the English monarchy as it would
then appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with the
ancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simpler
times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from the
dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, and
the tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going upon
some open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley to
Windsor, or visiting some old seats of culture, such as Oxford or
Cambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would find would
be Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by modern aristocracy, but still
enjoying its mediæval wealth and remembering its mediæval origin. If he
asked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboy
would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI.
If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the college
chapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, he
would probably ask about it, and be told it was King's College. If he
asked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into
the library and looked up Henry VI. in an encyclopædia, he would find
that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him,
was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the varying and
contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher.
The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. His
desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. And yet
his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and
remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all
the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon
the wind.

Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI., was not only an invalid but almost
an idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino, and that the awe
men had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental
deficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders on
anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in the
great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered the
retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief needed
things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the
claims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in their
dominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the same
people; and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king is
praised the more highly of the two. And exactly as in the case of the
last Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practical
meaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to the
constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot is
the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the
sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors in
the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of
Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify
the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his
conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story
abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. But over
the bier of the decrepit zany, who died without striking a blow, over
this and this alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven, and declaring
the true approval of the power that rules the world.

The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more
than in the false reputation of the "English" of that day. As I have
indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at
all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who has
presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But
there was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britain
before the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a blood
probably more Germanic and certainly less French than the same
communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation which
is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon
is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood
is supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the
Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their
racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the same
thing, heathen. But as a fact these "Teutons" were the mystics. The
Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as they
were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed,
they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles
obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English.
But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular
disposition to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our
hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus
opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence,
and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the
golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very
valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the
capacity of ancestors.

Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his
early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French
king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute
one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history,
are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have
been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane
fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during
its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a
lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable
than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady
Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large
possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also
when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the
negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy
misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing
what was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank the
Normans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists
ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Norman
adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chance position; and
had faith not only in his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in his
enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus the
Norman Bruce becomes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow
becomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as
remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and
adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other national
histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to
follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; his
claim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even his
symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty
forms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it is very much
nearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to call
Harold the last of them.

An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without record
in that dim epoch, has made much of the fact that the Norman edges of
France, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetrated
by the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and that the ducal house of
Normandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to a
Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creative
legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may be
connected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But if
the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can
obviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation.
And it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since been
shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the
Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting (and more
ruling) was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by the
Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of such
invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real value to the
Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality,
so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that the
duchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But
the debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even the
personal importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master,
he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of
Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And
Lanfranc was an Italian--like Julius Cæsar. The Norman is not in history
a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is
a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made
them, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; and
what entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has in
history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of
England. He was what Julius Cæsar was, and what St. Augustine was: he
was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.

William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connection
which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the
English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not
we shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even
improbable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given,
is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal
chaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the
Ancient Britons to sing "Rule Britannia." William further clinched his
case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most
probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke's hospitality
after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke's
claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we
shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care.
The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably
affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army; but it
did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the
people; and Harold's people quite as much as William's. Harold's people
presumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive of
the very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry
asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is
here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this
celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known
historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does,
indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the
difficulties of William's enterprise in the felling of forests for
shipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the
charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the
destructive resistance of Harold's army. But it was really after Duke
William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he
did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not
until these later operations that we have the note of the new and
scientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon
London he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut
off the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender.
He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have
accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief
return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England
under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northern
counties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These
things are the foundations of historical England; but of these things
the pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux
Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it
tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely
that Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especially
that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold.
And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may
fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient
symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the
King of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the
secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal,
and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons
Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to
his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to
obscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest,
which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism.

That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace of
fashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the past
rather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the very
term "mediæval" is used for almost anything from Early English to Early
Victorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is
like applying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description of
Feudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an impediment
in the main mediæval movement, is confused by current debates about
quite modern things--especially that modern thing, the English
squirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy. For
it is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute and
is pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was a
tenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel
instead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their
landlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modern
sense; every one was practically as well as theoretically a tenant of
the King; and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a Pope or
an Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem a
simplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so
simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the
nature of Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history,
but especially English history.

There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we call
mediæval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or the
great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its
very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason
themselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its
premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about
who had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and was
never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already
flourished before the mediæval renascence began. It was, if not the
forest the mediævals had to clear, at least the rude timber with which
they had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages
before the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians resisted by
semi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism was
mostly a very human thing; the nearest contemporary name for it was
homage, a word which almost means humanity. On the other hand, mediæval
logic, never quite reconciled to it, could become in its extremes
inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and pure reason
that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism of
the Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a
garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but
only a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king;
but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And
it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism in
English history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English have
had and held.

The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned
everything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and
"divine right," which meant in substance a natural authority. In one
aspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that is
recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in
theory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much
more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could
arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith.
Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital that
while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments
of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence
the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be a
demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for
the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and
Harold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet
always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and
terrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as
treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual
battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than
in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the
whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island
idiosyncracies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or
whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the
feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the _Civitas
Dei_, or ideal mediæval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men
long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.

There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in
criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are
not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this
chapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it,
even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be called
the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded
immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his huge
success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death.
It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular
autocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered
the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the
sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from the
highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of
Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox
startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were
puppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of
the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular
idol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or
were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it
was not precisely personal government. The King was already a
thing--like the Republic. Indeed the mediæval Republics were rigid with
divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was too
personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense
in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his two
sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost like
that before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves
became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a
saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by that
very energy our barons became our kings.




VI

THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES


The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St.
Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George.
His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at
the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in
Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new England
which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character in
English history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology
as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history.
And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human
revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this
paradox, of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thus
passing from a chronicle to a romance.

In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I
have just read in a newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other good
things, must not come from outside." To call a spiritual thing external
and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if
our subject of study is mediæval and not modern, we must pit against
this apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in
the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from
outside--like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my
sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a
blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity,
believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb;
nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying
its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks
are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled
by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things
outside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what
any version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is
the modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding
a German name for everything; eating his language, or in other words
biting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediævals more free and sane
than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most
beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger
but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned and
thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionately
patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron
saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an
Irishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the
numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by
comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred,
and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against
an impossible monster.

That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance
and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only
from the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing,
had thriven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Cæsar to
the churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now the
eagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they were
seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had
stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had
begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England
along with all the West would distend a book like this into huge
disproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it
in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The
inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown
in the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with the
implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the
escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, a
pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a
responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearly
one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of
an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not
unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best.
But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly
illustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In this
case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the
fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's contemporary in France, had the name
of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yet
Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course,
that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things of the
highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.

Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and
swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern
lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at
once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of the
Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the
final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the
accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more
European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highest
motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an
idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made
flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the
questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian
conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or
mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion,
a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was
something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of
mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from
the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his
soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the
popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed,
in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father of
Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from
the genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry
charge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a
note on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history of
England, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain many
digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly
necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity like
a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our
corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the
parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask why
this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will
soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that
the ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was
filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts.

It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam
that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born
in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came
from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic
quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if
less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The
Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion
of the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced in
abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra.
In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive,
but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It was
full of local affections, which found form in that system of _fences_
which runs like a pattern through everything mediæval, from heraldry to
the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs
and statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons;
something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the
interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome
they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a
recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficient
do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese
called the white man "a sky-breaker." The mediæval spirit loved its part
in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something
else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace
of _Benedictus benedicat_, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan
triumphantly retorted _Franciscus Franciscat_. It is something of a
parable of mediæval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it
would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did.
But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and
_Benedictus benedicat_ is very precisely the motto of the earliest
mediævalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something
which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed
bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for
them the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Every
beyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the
human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of
Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam.
England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from
Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not
merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the
priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which
was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in the
pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her
creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she
looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in
the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the
deserts, to whom all places were the same.

It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the
Crusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from these
particular feelings of his fathers; and the real quarrel of Christendom
and Islam, the fire-baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise be
seized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel
between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlier
quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not see
why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; but
he has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a
roof-tree; he thought of the holiness as holy, not of the places as
places. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that
forbade him rest, shut him off from all that was breaking out and
blossoming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turks an
empire without ever giving them a nation.

Now, the effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy
was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the
nations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly, we
learnt enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yet
more enormously from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of the
good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him. But
in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamant
to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they
were till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious and
the most representative reaction was the reaction which produced the
best of what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques of
Gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East as
an environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the
Western mind, but stimulated it rather to break the Moslem commandment
than to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled, like a
caricaturist, to cover all that faceless ornament with faces; to give
heads to all those headless serpents and birds to all these lifeless
trees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy
as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol,
became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stone
sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts
made more statues than they destroyed.

The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip is far more
like his place in true history than the place of the mere denationalized
ne'er-do-weel given him in our utilitarian school books. Indeed the
vulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the
"educated" opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. King
Richard, as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous difference to
England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himself
conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of King
John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England
something which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it is
incomprehensible throughout that period--the reputation of being in the
very vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, the
attachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to this
period. Richard was not only a knight but a troubadour; and culture and
courtesy were linked up with the idea of English valour. The mediæval
Englishman was even proud of being polite; which is at least no worse
than being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmen
in our later centuries have meant by their common sense.

Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt to
bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a
military system which already existed; to turn its discipline into an
initiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparative
grace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus of
the dignity of woman, to which the word "chivalry" is often narrowed, or
perhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps in
the more polished civilization of the Saracens. Moslems denied even
souls to women; perhaps from the same instinct which recoiled from the
sacred birth, with its inevitable glorification of the mother; perhaps
merely because, having originally had tents rather than houses, they had
slaves rather than housewives. It is false to say that the chivalric
view of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in which
there must always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is the
worst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a general
sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusade
itself, for example, is more present and potent as a dream even than as
a reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts
the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a
mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his queen
was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his
contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to
sneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and
labelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of the
Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more
flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward's time, or whether they
pause to meditate on the legend of a husband's sorrow, to be found in
the very name of Charing Cross.

But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned
only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an
etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially
was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called
riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the
time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the
Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much
a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving
eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves
often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall
best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children's Crusade.
They were full of all that the modern world worships in children,
because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the
rudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that we
all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for
instance, in the lanced and latticed interiors of Memling, but it is
ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; something
that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They
fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the
edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is
perspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a
word, their world, like a child's, is full of foreshortening, as of a
short cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures.
Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is
impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an
atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish
visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils and
feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much
nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer
than Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without
pausing for a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious
transfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can but
faintly be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with secularity and
religion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writer
should give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting
how one died of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious
accident of decapitation, and throughout all his record should never
once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.




VII

THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS


It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in
all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are
"late," and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are
always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This
fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common
coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say
that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel
Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris
Exhibition. Most of the mediæval remains familiar to the modern reader
are necessarily "late," such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but
they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and
even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which
lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history
backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages
backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet
is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards
from Cædmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the
authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of
Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want
to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to
ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns
to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as
mediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be
asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what
were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were, of course,
taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though
much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept
it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived
from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good
man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete
stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its
very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older
society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original
freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar
like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on
the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a
chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass
band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that
he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such
pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the
Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be
realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a
sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of
labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather
the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be
approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects
of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.

The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands in
the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular
revels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten
god, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends
did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at
Margate thinks about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the
bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as
the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs.
Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society is
thus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If there be
a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic
history, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious
and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England
with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of
his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of
ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of
Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas when they had never even
heard of Becket.

It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal
tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying
effort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red
King's hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, and
which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questions
he disputed with Anselm--leaving out the question Anselm cared most
about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as, "Why was God a
man?" All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating
lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unless
it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers
seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in
this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of
St. Thomas of Canterbury.

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy,
brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always
stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and
omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French
detective story; when Justice opens a handbag or Justice runs after a
cab. Henry II. really produced this impression of being a police force
in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the
bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood,
however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice
cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in
popular phrases about the King's English or the King's highway. But
though it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be
humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of
Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always a
Revolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings like
Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only,
of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and
feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by
what was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen
not only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these men
rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without
the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Church
the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and
embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet
there was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundations
like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world.
An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its
political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of
innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as
was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting
poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of
revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi and stripped
him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution
suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry's brilliant and luxurious
Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and a bloody end.

Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very
practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his
friend's side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and
constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth century
have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of
illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Church
against that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St.
Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and
moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that
much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with
visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great
visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned
his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore
told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King
about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous
clerks" should be punished by the State or the Church. And this was
indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must
reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand--the nature
of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the
permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.

It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact
about the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the
State could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a
divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty.
It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it
did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were
put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn
in two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop's
was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious
disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the
historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance,
that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, was
practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle
lingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities
handed over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious
offences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but
the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a
hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.

Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St.
Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic
charity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the
victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of
the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect the
Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to
him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King as
capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic,
the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he
was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and
runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable
truth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly
impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediæval
story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle's vision of a stormy
strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men
were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too
strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke
upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself.
Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of
our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival.
He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a
colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal
oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at
least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times.
But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was
a symbol of him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his heirs
from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He
thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests'
Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental
defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and,
I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal
murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a
traitor and who created a saint.

At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an
epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence
as for half the facts of history; and any one denying them must deny
them upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to modern
civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can
imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St.
Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidental
to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant
when Henry II. was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy.
The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediæval
actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The
Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the
all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance
of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant
humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of
sanity. The point is worth stressing, because without it moderns make
neither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, for
instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and
frauds were further blackened by "low superstition," which led him to be
dragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy
of God. Mediævals would simply have said that such a man might well
scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could
make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be
added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought
it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for being
horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.

But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to
ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King's justice lost more by the
death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of
Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of
the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the King
recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings and
justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a
possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous
stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive
support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.

It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a
rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat
cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other
historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors
on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience
which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who
helps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest
largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy
was certainly a mediæval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a
reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when they
were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was
a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable
little homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power,
though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in
France, would in England as in France have prevented the few from
seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England
it broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas
may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained
and startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what was
meant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and rather peculiar
thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.

In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is
not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror
collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the
great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the
chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional
fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first
time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry's
second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stamped
it with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that John was
a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was
much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited
Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he
was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the
kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense
subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented
long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong.
Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's time starved men in
dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as a
symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son
it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the
power; but there did begin to appear a _case_ for their seizing it, for
contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in
one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as
an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had
generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the
Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning
was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island
as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the
baronial party began to have something like a principle, which is the
backbone of a policy. Much conventional history that connects their
councils with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as it
would be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those which the
barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast for
the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiast
for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence
of mind; but it was with true presence of mind, in the responsible and
even religious sense which had made his father so savage a Crusader
against heretics, that he laid about him with his great sword before he
fell at Evesham.

Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away
from despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something
like a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy
not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the history
of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French motto
of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," and noting that the English have
sincerely loved the first and lost the other two.

In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown
and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a
complication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man can
understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket
were left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacious
theocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left
untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and
with them he was more active dead than alive--yes, even more busy. In
the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by
the common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in
the last chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the
strangest things grew homely, and men fed on travellers' tales when
there were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of
martyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the most
ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes; with a bishop flayed by
Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews and
another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a small matter
that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his death
but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least
something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in
the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and
slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something
was judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown a
mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on the
English kings.




VIII

THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND


The mental trick by which the first half of English history has been
wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one. It consists in
telling only the story of the professional destroyers and then
complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at the
best a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity;
and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was
more difficult. What we call the Judges' circuits were first rather the
King's raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary
civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social
enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King could
not take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far from
denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but
the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is
cruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same
reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as
the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as
the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediævalism commonly
looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of
the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the
fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that any
other ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He
despises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which he
despises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts of
war were sterile, without even admitting the possibility that the arts
of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the
arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages stand
singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man
must recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate
it. The melodramatic things currently called mediæval are much older and
more universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture.
The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the
gladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merely
their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediæval, was copied
from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its
application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow
mediæval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing
common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire
of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle
Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian
communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of
production, of the making, building and growing of all the good things
of life.

For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediæval
England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing
cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which
affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one
practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may
have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for
worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We
cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch,
even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with
the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government
always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely
imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are
necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or
rather a pattern. The mediævals not only had self-government, but their
self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of
the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of
state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in
existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local
Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the
same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent
centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate
imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a
thing that breaks things--even if they admit it is right to break them.
But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an
artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the
modern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of
my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve.
It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed from
the terminology of the mediæval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild
System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with
the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social
institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent
rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional
countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by
the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that
stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some
power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.

In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universal
landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be
said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilization was on a wholly
new and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions or
apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a
solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least of
outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised
land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if we
go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. There
had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something
unknown to the august civilization of the Roman Empire--a peasantry. At
the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now
grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the
fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors
as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas
even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it,
no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This
startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the
pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making
new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the
mediæval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as
anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and
active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the
religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man
of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and
innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame,
worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe;
and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work
ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in
this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to
state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a
statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great
slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The
Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a
climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have already
suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which was
the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man's
dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a
stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a
thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit
explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain
the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without
which we cannot understand how this great popular civilization was
created--or how it was destroyed.

What we call the manors were originally the _villae_ of the pagan
lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however
it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords'
claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claim
to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or
customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy
not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be remembered
that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the
whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a
mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only
obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of
freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development
are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long
in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land was
entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the
support of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the
modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely
that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the
end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the
lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that
in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very
fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited
something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a
competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom
from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his
presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among
whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a
trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner
had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was
almost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had
been built strong enough to be his dungeon.

The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land
began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord,
the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One
the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they
enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the
momentously important mediæval institutions of the Common Land, owned
side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The
mediævals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists;
but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of
the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that our
romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests
and the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on the
common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediævalism
believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the
communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants.
It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A
Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we
call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth
like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a
balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a
healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of
imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social
justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that
slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant
proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without
any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant
condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to
what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity.
Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediæval men busy
upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a
craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced
by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an
earthquake.

Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the
egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term to
measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can
only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life
is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words
which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one
example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian
Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to
such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The
puzzling and truncated monosyllable "Esq." is a pathetic relic of a
remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could
well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above
all things an incomplete and probationary position--the tadpole of
knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assured
position--the status of the owners and rulers of rural England
throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates till
they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire
does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remains on
our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable
hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history, which have
turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a
mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be
unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something
singularly forlorn about the modern word "Mister." Even in sound it has
a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word
from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound
inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore
the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much
shorn. There is something of the same dismal _diminuendo_ in the
evolution of a Master into a Mister.

The very vital importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was,
very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own
employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would
join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his
own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But
the word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use
of the word "master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite other
and greater than a "boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now
means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of
Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a
landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a goldmine may
be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway
travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist
if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful
capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but
economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist,
not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest
grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the
business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch,
all the mediæval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the
journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the
universities, they were grades through which every common man could
pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes.
This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice
marrying his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised at
such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic
indignation when his daughter married a B.A.

When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly
egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-day
are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City
Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative
wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is good
about them is not what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shall
find something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is
unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has
ever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few big
businesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste in
cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the
glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In
another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do
deserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large number
of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charities
and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite
different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of the
Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to
resist inequality--or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last
generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure,
not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every
bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of
any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It
was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their
shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the
weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row
of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth
of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of
the Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent a
small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything
whatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to a
bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not be
reinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in an
industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the
single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type
itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of
equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of
payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern
Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do,
upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world
in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass.
There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant
his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a
nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools
of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and pots
and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not by
devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent
systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.

That the most mediæval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not
fight for the same ideal of æsthetic finish is true and certainly
tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the
tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property,
seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character
of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property,
seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is,
of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly
be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in
which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should
not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and
three men had harems. A married community means a community where most
people are married; not a community where one or two people are very
much married. A propertied community means a community where most people
have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in
fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and
peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that
the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment.
The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the
period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different
value of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of
ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in
no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual
wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large--the
wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic
estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent
history of England.

The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things
like the Guild system, and not the system from the government. In
sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, of
course, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral
paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights
and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not least
in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in
connection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a
combative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things and
those of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on
the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it
was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not
vice versâ. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising
can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor
and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that
the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid to
insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government,
was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman's tool
became the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests
that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt
of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something very
like this did happen in the interlude of this mediæval democracy,
fermenting under the crust of mediæval monarchy and aristocracy; where
productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds
often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic
uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or
even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster's
pearl buttons.

Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now
foreign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be made
here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics
which are conventially the whole of history. The first, and for that age
the most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel of
Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, the
Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that "recognition" for which
the railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, without
success. By this they had the authority of the King, the central or
national government; and this was of great moral weight with mediævals,
who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative
escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin
to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the
freedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a
wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church is
something of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread
through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still
merely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saint
long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from
these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were
chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediæval
experiments: the Parliament.

We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I., when
they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local
taxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read a
little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole
secret of the lost mediæval civilization. We had only to ask what
burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately
have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of
which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder
that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title
of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective
corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the
explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the
Parliament was the one among these mediæval creations which ultimately
consented to betray and to destroy the rest.




IX

NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS


If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was
and is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way
of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather the
most commonplace, of all the uses of the word "Christian." There is, of
course, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses.
Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more
recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a
modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it
has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it
means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not
actually say to Jim Hawkins, "I feel myself out of touch with a certain
type of civilization"; but he did say, "I haven't tasted Christian
food." The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and
trousers do not indeed say, "We perceive a divergence between her
culture and our own"; but they do say, "Why can't she dress like a
Christian?" That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and
even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a
very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized
thing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the
Christian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive
and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint,
and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a
process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement
between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did
not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism
came, to doubt if they were Christians.

There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internal
structure of mediævalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the
greater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace and
war, most (though by no means all) of what was mediæval was monarchical.
To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great
background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figures
of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with
the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation but
more like one city--and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or
Paris one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have
chronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What
followed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages
and the dawn of mediævalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism.
And it is the paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen was
superficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct
which saw him also to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of
northern heathenry the civilization spread with a simplier progress. But
it was not till the end of the Middle Ages, and close on the
Reformation, that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond
Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permitted
himself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclined
to suggest that for some reason it didn't "take" even then.

The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the
case of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently
curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As
these fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to face
them, were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find that
their own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have been
overruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the true
creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tended
to real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost
without knowing it; and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or
a title-deed found he spoke for the forests and the songs of a whole
country-side. In England especially the transition is typified in the
accident which raised to the throne one of the noblest men of the Middle
Ages.

Edward I. came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken the
Cross and fought the Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simon
de Montfort in those baronial wars which, as we have seen, were the
first sign (however faint) of a serious theory that England should be
ruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de
Montfort, and more solidly, to develop the great mediæval institution of
a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existing
parish democracies, and was first merely the summoning of local
representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was one
with the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a thread
of theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing.
But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings,
and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with his
parliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people (which has
never been at all the same thing), but on the whole he was supremely the
representative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficult
question may be considered here, though it marks the end of a story
that began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty certain that he was
never more truly a representative king, one might say a republican king,
than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is so much
misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a gifted
and historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it.

The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular.
They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready
for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it is
certain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to say
that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed that
suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea
that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about
King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a
story against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted
on as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously
regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews' position
was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized
people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and
even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as
the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be
accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced
as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the
fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real
case for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed.
Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at
least equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that _mutual_ charge
of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that in
popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused as
uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse
on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept
when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the
rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth,
flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw
him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his
people.

Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far
from false. He was the most just and conscientious type of mediæval
monarch; and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the new
force which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died.
While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it must be
remembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past,
that much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment of
dynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In
this spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the
Scottish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quite
honestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedantic mind made the
proviso that the Scottish king as such was already under his suzerainty,
and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him;
for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day Nationalism.
Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight named
Wallace soon furnished it with one of those legends which are more
important than history. In a way that was then at least equally
practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the
patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained even
throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but the
heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national cause
by one of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king a
mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a
new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words the
great king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of the
battle; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventually
buried with the epitaph, "Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer
of the Scots." It was a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite to
its intention. He was their hammer, but he did not break but make them;
for he smote them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword.

That coincidence or course of events, which must often be remarked in
this story, by which (for whatever reason) our most powerful kings did
not somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign,
when the baronial quarrels were resumed and the northern kingdom, under
Bruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise
the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we
find the new national tendency yet further developed. The great French
wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III.,
and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of
the time we must first realize that the third Edward made as strictly
legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made to
Scotland; the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally
conventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdom
as a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; superficially it was
an affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that the
people were sheep bought and sold is to misunderstand all mediæval
history; sheep have no trade union. The English arms owed much of their
force to the class of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry,
especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element which
had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai. But the point
is this; that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, the
soldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or glebe
law, were already talking about English law and French law. The French
were first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the
trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole
history of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had early
begun to call the nation the Greater Land. France was the first of
nations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is a
nation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equally
corporate; and a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories
of Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of
Agincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of
internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a later
page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were
continuous. And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt was
continuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the
great Elizabethans. The Henry V. of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry
V. of history; yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and more
genial but a more important person. For the tradition of the whole
adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry
into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and
not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of
the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the
Englishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like
Shakespeare's hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so,
he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary
impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only
expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that
they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended
to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day,
had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the
modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost
the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April of
patriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and a
cobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought first that it
was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as
sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm of
arrows, and cried, "St. George for Merry England."

Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of
patriotism it was the Autumn of mediæval society. In the next chapter I
shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization;
and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist on
the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in
the later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the
time far less happy than England--wasted by the treason of its nobles
and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of the
islanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed
at last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for the
coldest historian to call anything but a miracle.

It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism
eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to
be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change
which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great
thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise,
or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas
was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this
kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract
into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for
the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native
land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags
are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it
for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a
fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern
humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it
had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no
sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not
do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange
development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring.
It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it
if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be
unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is
the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The
recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized
reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in
sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national
disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a
passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.

It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in
which a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion and
abasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of the
people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. She
was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the
French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something
above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life
of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new
national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for
a defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself
ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I
spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It
is more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction of
this sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England.

I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my own country with
conventional and unconvincing compliments; but no one can understand
England who does not understand that such an episode as this, in which
she was so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with
a curious quality in which she is rather unusually in the right. No one
candidly comparing us with other countries can say we have specially
failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even the
prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least a
loose large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise not
only of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with much injustice
it has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great people
with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty
hero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for
our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they
afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had.
Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into
war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was
more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if
anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediævalism
of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could
weep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, with
or without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality,
the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the Scottish
patriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irish
patriots immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in
that matter he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. The
cases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned,
however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some
of our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have at
least done one fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we
have done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginian
slave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in our
final appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions of
war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universal
enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write a
book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely
in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not
believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being
an Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as the
crowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he
could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that he
broke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc.




X

THE WAR OF THE USURPERS


The poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats,
Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was
Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more
clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings to
govern wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I
do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of
the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal
of "non-resistance" to any national and legitimate power; though I
cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more
modern ideal of "non-resistance" even to a foreign and lawless power.
But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and
the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally
religious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many other
and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the
changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated
better than by taking Pope's easy epigram and pointing out that it is,
after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right divine of kings to
govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by
"a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be
right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right is
what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a
right to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to
choose his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to
express the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate
to make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be
right.

Now mediæval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediæval rule, was
roughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a
voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed
horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as
a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he
goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so
simple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion
to fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were very
controversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolating
items whether about _jus divinum_ or _primus inter pares_, to maintain
that the mediævals were almost anything; it has been seriously
maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influence
of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen,
encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was
meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man
tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The
precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is,
not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.

The advantage of "divine right," or irremovable legitimacy, is this;
that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. "_Roi ne puis_"; the
royal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one
respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional
moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same
vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most
emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very
markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do
not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that
tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the
lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more
expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star.
But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own
mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own
reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to
England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was
the fall of Richard II.

Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical;
they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though
the memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II.
incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial
ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediæval order. But divine
right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the
Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the
thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is
the main thing to be studied in later mediævalism. Richard himself was
possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weak
link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may
have been a real case against the _coup d'état_ which he effected in
1397, and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections
of disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first
true usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that
larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at
something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It
was certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the
greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this
book. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted
their hands to strike their masters, probably for the first and
certainly for the last time in history.

Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by
developing into something better. In one sense it did not die, but
rather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up a
row of sticks for a fence, and then find they had struck root and were
budding into small trees. They would be at once more valuable and less
manageable, especially less portable; and such a difference between a
stick and a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and a
serf--or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending to
become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social
evolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it
was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the
emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had
not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was
"unwritten," like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary,
not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who
now drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The new
peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of those
turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense of
unwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as
much of a scourge to England as they were to France. England was
despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the
extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuing
chapter, the balance of the better mediævalism was lost. Finally, a
furious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land,
thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin.
There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; and
the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They became
lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rule
already nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more direct
servitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people,
and the people rose in arms.

The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with the
beginning, and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far from
unimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians to
pretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler's
first blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic but
domestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and made the legend of the
whole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstration
on behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of the poor is
almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only bring a
printed form and a few long words to do the same thing without having
his head broken. The occasion of the protest, and the form which the
feudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a
part of a general process of pressing the population to servile labour,
which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government after
the rising had failed; the language in which it threatened to make the
state of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending the
failure in question are less in dispute. The mediæval populace showed
considerable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way to
London, and was met outside the city by a company containing the King
and the Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. The
treacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battle
and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, "They have
killed our leader"; when a strange thing happened; something which gives
us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the
Middle Ages. For one wild moment divine right was divine.

The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must have rung out to
that multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of his
fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some
strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he
cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all
they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the
breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are
not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend
of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to
be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and
Parliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people.
For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were
betrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, the
Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely a
governing body but a governing class. Parliament was as contemptuous of
the peasants in the fourteenth as of the Chartists in the nineteenth
century. This council, first summoned by the king like juries and many
other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about
taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore,
an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the
knife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small
one. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler
was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile
oligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale that
his blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. The
mediæval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not of
sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of their
Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St.
Paul.

It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an
object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if
ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries are
no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in mind, as against the
opposite idea of the _jus divinum_ or fixed authority, if we would
appreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was a
rebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had
just proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of the
people. But this is not the main point. The point is that by the removal
of Richard, a step above the parliament became possible for the first
time. The transition was tremendous; the crown became an object of
ambition. That which one could snatch another could snatch from him;
that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of York
could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable thing seated
out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations adventurers
strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above which was
something new in the mediæval imagination; an empty throne.

It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely
because he was a usurper, is the clue to many things, some of which we
should now call good, some bad, all of which we should probably call
good or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distant
things. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which was
the mixed matter we have already seen. It may have been in some ways
good for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an institution
which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom of
speech. It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yet
more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see much
later. It also led the Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which
was perhaps more popular; to make English the tongue of the court for
the first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-waving
of Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps,
on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of
clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of
mediævalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the
last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of these
heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in
themselves prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybody
can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a
Protestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer.
But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of
English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of English
Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to
Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch, and put it to his
own church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old
religious system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition
against Mary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these
fifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and a
defensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rather
a perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trial
of Joan of Arc.

But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch
that follows the fall of Richard II., and especially in those feuds that
found so ironic an imagery in English roses--and thorns. The
foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to
be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and
Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and
revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlike
widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes
exaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and
the unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral
difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic
time. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the
new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and
York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who
permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have said
everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by
counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But
this truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called
Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a
justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the
fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.

If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the
Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry,
there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course,
scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his much
meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a
hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably
the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and
sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the
crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre
shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as
much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered
nephews is not certain, and is told by those who also tell us he was
born with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson
cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the very
air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even
of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a
good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we
think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He
anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music,
and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity. He
did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only
pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was
nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine
contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this
particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a
ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would
also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we can
study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name;
an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face
has a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the
face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is
death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the
death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St.
Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First
Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards,
wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the
crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace
among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.

But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester,
there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the
mediæval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as
he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth--treason.
For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as
treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When
his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new
political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless
servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he
challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of
Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The
modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for
since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having
slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So
ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the
usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere,
found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.




XI

THE REBELLION OF THE RICH


Sir Thomas More, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes
in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a
hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylight
which for so many made mediævalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we
think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute
about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things a
Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern,
which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he
was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or
rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity
of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy
attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian
notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what
(for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the
immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours of
evolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage
might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggested
a sort of pacifism--though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving
it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of
mediæval abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be too
narrow rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not a
Protestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of a
Reformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern
minds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. His
friend Colet summed up that escape from mediævalism which might be
called the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern
debates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth of
this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog-Latin. It
would be nearer the truth to call the mediævals bi-lingual than to call
their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a
possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say that
he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this
Greek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its
balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that
he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably
infected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle
Ages; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of
barbaric, or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet
of "Chevy Chase." The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit,
loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that
generation in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem
a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of the
Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of More
we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an
English landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level
light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the
Renascence; England passing from the mediæval to the modern. Thus he
looked forth, and saw many things and said many things; they were all
worthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once a
horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that
landscape said: "Sheep are eating men."

This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and
enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curt
historical accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the translation of
the Bible, or the character of Henry VIII., or the characters of Henry
VIII.'s wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther and
the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant men, or
_vice versa_; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and rather
bewildering papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them
eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturesque
expression, was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way to
a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which had
hitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers were
being laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has
been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, by
Mr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be found in
the back files of _The New Witness_. He enunciated the paradox that the
very much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow instead
of one, was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the true
moral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so much
grass and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much
humanity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformation
traces it, to the growth of a new refinement, in a sense a more rational
refinement, in the governing class. The mediæval lord had been, by
comparison, a coarse fellow; he had merely lived in the largest kind of
farm-house after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drank
wine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale; and science had
not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this, one
of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot
come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In the
true Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, but
in the time of Henry VIII. the transformation was beginning. In the next
generation a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time, and
is very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. This
or that great lord was said to be "Italianate." It meant subtler shapes
of beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treated as
barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal,
mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it meant the
perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship,
the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things: rather it
was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious art
especially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul.
We must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an
explanation--and an excuse.

The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed at
Bosworth, and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of that
unkingly king, Henry VII. He was himself a "new man," and we shall see
the barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But even
the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction.
Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured
both as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upper
class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy,
which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled
to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as very
high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being
proud of their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocrats
have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants they
planned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for their
descendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the government
of the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every new
science or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economic
chances of pasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept away
the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudor
house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist
civilization is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts;
sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers;
specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are
eating men.

We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a real
revolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal
the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all
of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II. had really sprung
into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not
unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the
new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was already
common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royal
charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is
possible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come
as popular education and not the culture of a club of æsthetics. The New
Learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old
days of mediæval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school
of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of a
guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on
wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer
fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players
need not have been "the king's servants," but their own masters. The
great Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If
this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the
mediæval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to
show that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal
parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into their
dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be
exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive
events afterwards. When Henry VIII. came to the throne the guilds were
perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had
probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but
largely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediæval system
still stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but
all such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The
failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a
counter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich.

The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and even
personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of
Henry VIII. and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry
VIII. have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a
truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is
sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular
thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was
popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite
a glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all
the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a
maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, it
was rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this change
doubtless the inconsistency and even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings
played a great part. And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps with
the exception of the first and the last, he was almost as unlucky in his
wives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair
of the first divorce that broke the back of his honour, and
incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and
universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that
he did not regard himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of the
Pope; there is a shadow of the old story of Becket. He had defended the
Pope in diplomacy and the Church in controversy; and when he wearied of
his queen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn,
he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in that age of cynical
concessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is part
of that high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith in
human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really be
uppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Church
will not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy of the
best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the
cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter.
The Pope denied the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of
anger, dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable
that he did not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it is very
tenable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he was
Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say
that he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was a
pope. From this day really dates something that played a certain part in
history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widely
different from the mediæval one. It is a matter which further
embarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things in
Anglicanism, for it was a new note and yet one struck by the older
party. The supremacy of the King over the English national church was
not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the King, but became partly, and for
one period, a fad of the church. But apart from all controverted
questions, there is at least a human and historic sense in which the
continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not
only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he
cuts off England from England.

The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held
the scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the
modern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under the
dictum of _Ego et Rex Meus_; but he marks a stage in the English story
rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. _Ego et Rex
Meus_ might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we have
forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant.
Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simply
dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English were
amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a
butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; it
struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed
sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint
under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has
naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his
tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it must
have seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were a
martyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be called
unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the
soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun,
saying "I shall be above that fellow" with Franciscan familiarity, which
can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king
the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on
his wrath.

But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (as
noted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and
less clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts of
Henry's policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; but
it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that
the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerable
corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both from
the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story.
It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and
such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as they
often are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St.
Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was there
writing to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and he
talks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for those
concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact that
Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters had
been written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they do
not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good
bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the monks were
profligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth
in Cobbett's point that where monks were landlords, they did not become
rack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords.
Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as a
mere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst
element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a
touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easily
because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because
the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age)
was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partly
divided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it
nearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.

To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are
familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, or
even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of a
litter of little public-houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did
first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses
and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords
did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of
the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment as
lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords,
for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of
the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences
which had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to
learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their careless
hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, were themselves brought
down one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sort
of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. For a new
and wide philosophy was in the world, which still rules our society. By
this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simply
been turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is charity.

But the populace which had risen under Richard II. was not yet
disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, and
organized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half the
counties of England the people rose, and fought one final battle for the
vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty
fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant,
and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The
popular movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new note
of modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical
professional troops, actually brought in from foreign countries, who
destroyed English religion for hire. But, like the old popular rising,
it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising, it was
sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley; and the
government had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the people
with promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises and then
the people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modern
politicians in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt bore
the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practically
the restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy about
the fate of England if Tyler had triumphed, it proves, I think, one
thing; that his triumph, while it might or might not have led to
something that could be called a reform, would have rendered quite
impossible everything that we now know as the Reformation.

The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisition
of the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadow
of sympathy with the old religion, are agreed that it was uprooted by
means more horrible than have ever, perhaps, been employed in England
before or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by
spies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was carried out, not
only with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for
which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had
returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the
King's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the
conspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction
as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful
favour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for
being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. It
culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told
on an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose
defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste the
most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once
ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry had
knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people had
called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor.
This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it
was not really so.

For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still
stranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hints
before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably
weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no his
failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the
dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said to
have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for the
drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own
character. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it is
unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for
Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For
whether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all our
princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government,
and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two
generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years
afterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new
servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world;
and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiled
with the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave's own
descendants, to fall and to kill an English king.

The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King
as well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of the
new rich. They used the King's name, and could not have prevailed
without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had
plundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly
little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing,
actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, by
the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the
deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line
between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus
providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with
the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An
enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by
his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king,
and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he
would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not
even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every
human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal
protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what
occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization.
Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted
the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church.
Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the
great dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forth
in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred
when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the
sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediæval
Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the
soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple
incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself
plausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time,
were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing;
and it may be true that Cæsar was not feeling well on the morning of the
Ides of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as
true as saying that Cæsar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at
the foot of the statue of Pompey.




XII

SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS


The revolution that arose out of what is called the Renascence, and
ended in some countries in what is called the Reformation, did in the
internal politics of England one drastic and definite thing. That thing
was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thing
it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all the
problems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theological
theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for
difference of opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts,
will deny that the same time and temper which produced the religious
schism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme
Protestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was not
the motive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably be
content to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather the
punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not
complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when
Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent
case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and
last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst
for new things in the _noblesse_ of the Renascence and ended in the
Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a
new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in an
ever-increasing degree, was everything that could be held, directly or
indirectly, by the people _in spite of_ such an aristocracy. This fact
has filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the next
particular point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. The
King, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who
had crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The King is
left behind in the rush for wealth, and already can do nothing alone.
And of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI.'s,
affords a very arresting proof.

Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad name
even in popular history; and popular prejudice is generally more worthy
of study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrong
about her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was,
in the limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather
morbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad for many things,
but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when all
is said, that she set herself to burn out "No Popery" and managed to
burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especially
its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remain
like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the
series of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not
universal, public opinion from the old _régime_. It has been summarized
in the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of
them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and human
type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and
coward in the councils of Henry VIII. as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by
comparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, the
saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time
even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than
the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very
ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really
was. But this last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and
produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness, because of that other
great fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of this
time of transition.

What made all the difference was this: that even in this Catholic reign
the property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact
that Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond the
wildest dreams of fanaticism--that is the point. The very fact that she
was angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold
enough to ask for the rights of the Church--that is the test of the
time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not
allowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of other
people's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish
sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had
not gone to church, and sparing men who had gone there to steal the
church ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her own
religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere; not public
opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religious
humanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities
which she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the
new wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this early
pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown.
The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a
treasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow.

There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Mary
having "Calais" written on her heart, when the last relic of the
mediæval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic
half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often
pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old
enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwell
exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye
on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the
Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had
it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary
nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most
tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the
coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name
of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish
prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had
done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was
more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to
the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage
for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which
was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman,
standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt
falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.

Wooden _clichés_ about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious
days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the
crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some
imperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be far
truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great
poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as
small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled
until the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was far less
vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was not
Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginning
of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find
heroic--the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was
to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--a
victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was
Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable
since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It
was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only
when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as
undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate
the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can
only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of
the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The
Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate--logically, it is hard to see
what else he could say, having declared her mother's marriage invalid;
but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England
from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who
had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the
South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; only
technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged
with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in an
imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for its
centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a
navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed
island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors or
pirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon,
fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of
grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island,
and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and
abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that has
never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless
hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope.
The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small
thing which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is truly
a sense in which we may never be so small or so great again.

For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a
sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of
the Renascence or the end of the old mediæval civilization, no candid
critic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the reader
ask himself what strikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnificence,
and he will generally find it is something of which there were at least
traces in mediæval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The
Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies--its tempestuous
torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say
that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the
comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both
foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being
humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that the
givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearian love-stories
nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars
or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often
embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin
Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse
and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might
indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin
Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false
one. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited,
contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen,
the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virgin
queens. And it is certain that the mediævals would have understood much
better than the moderns the martyrdom of _Measure for Measure_. And as
with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mystical
monarchy glorified in _Richard II._ was soon to be dethroned much more
ruinously than in _Richard II._ The same Puritans who tore off the
pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the real
crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be
forbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummery.

Shakespeare died upon St. George's Day, and much of what St. George had
meant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or
of England died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest
pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been
involved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart had
dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conception
of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique and
as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism.
The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times
seven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very
idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate
rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of the
Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St.
Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; but
they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting
each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle on
St. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously
believe that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St.
Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modern
people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most
modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious
schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman division
appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who
were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who
were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after
St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the
new England; soon it was to mean something almost cosmically
conflicting, as if they were named after Baal or Thor. These are indeed
mere symbols; but the process of which they are symbols was very
practical and must be seriously followed. There entered with the
religious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; the
idea of _natural_ wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from the
nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first
fell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something
moved that men had almost forgotten.

Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose
and drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars.
Most of it was now formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint awe
of the culture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a light
frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begun
to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all
his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his
sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs,
but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian
scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild
doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic
war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy
Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old
religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The
continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more
complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were
complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the
full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; a
purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give
diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it
preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of
Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic
and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending its
own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be
right if we see the first throes of the modern international problems in
what is called the Thirty Years' War; whether we call it the revolt of
half-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the
coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north.
Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help
of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere
exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex
strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces
besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the
north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of
money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly
selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend
their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were
well paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time their
principality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name was
Hohenzollern.




XIII

THE AGE OF THE PURITANS


We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most
exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such
as "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names of
the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king
was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering
the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of
a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the
snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern
attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste
for theology in this generation--or rather in the last generation. Thus
the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for
what they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it
on others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it
themselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest in
their characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never by
any chance ask what "it" was that they wanted to impose or to practise.
Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the
Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the
Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with
indifference or more often detested with frenzy--such as religious
liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even
undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care
about--such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they
would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly
burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing
in which they were interested at all.

We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England
were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the only
truth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with the
individuals a generation or two after, to whom the wreck of the Armada
was already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous
and almost as remote as the deliverances of which they read so
realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The august
accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well
with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may
have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the
English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was
easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier
hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state may
fall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even if
their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to
the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the
Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiority
over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but
one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and
were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the
creatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious
creatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but
a great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly the
middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which
was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply
derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while they
led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce
nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly called
folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts,
rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no
great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.

All these things, however, are simply things that other people might
have noticed about them; they are not the most important things, and
certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the
movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first being
the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and
the second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the
first, especially as it was this which determined all that external
social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest
Puritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage,
possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four
alternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It
was the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the
mind of God. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle;
but it really applies, and he really applied it, to many things besides
the sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally applied
it, to art, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even to
good manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and his
Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophic
doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or
story-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the
tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of
genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion;
denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to read
his own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not only
Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness
of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an
English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and the
doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the
only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next
step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the
truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct
as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God
which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and
milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that
nothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; with
Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not
help him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny
beforehand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In the purer
types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read the
formula into all their parliamentary and legal formulæ. When we read,
"The Puritan party demanded reforms in the church," we must understand,
"The Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are
created to be lost and saved." When we read, "The Army selected persons
for their godliness," we must understand, "The Army selected those
persons who seemed most convinced that men are created to be lost and
saved." It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined
even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed
it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a
permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the
immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or
non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured
Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton,
without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "How
splendid! How glorious!... and oh what an escape!"

The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was
in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason,
turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet
it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a
small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In
relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an
aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the
elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and
alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we
have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican
virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above
all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues--publicity. One of
the Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the
unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: "This thing was
not done in a corner." But their most drastic idealism did nothing to
recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came
into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people.
They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the
Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may
have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never
to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular.
England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when
she was a republic.

The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history,
arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance,
between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism
which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion
of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made that
creed and perhaps that cultured world possible--the aristocratic revolt
under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a
son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from
hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at
once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal
passion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that
remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland;
and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at
Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist
matter in both countries--a mere brigandage of barons; and even John
Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely
anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of
Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become
popular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our
own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed
with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary
oligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When the
storm began to rise against Charles I., after the more or less
transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the
instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic
religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny
Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English
legend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a county
against the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed,
almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants.
They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real and
natural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed no
mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no Village Hampden in
Hampden Village.

The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland a more mediæval
and therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note of
their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I. was a Scot and a
pedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I. also was not a
little of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues
of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for the
things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, and
could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and
seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more
inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the
sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore
remembered--especially the black. From the first he fenced with his
Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner.
The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman
who wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened to
Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt
to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on the
scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of
the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first
carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the
Parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience
and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the same death as his great
servant.

Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramifications
generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the
great modern query of whether a King can raise taxes without the consent
of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great
Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which
Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators
always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires
made a legend of the mediæval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a
true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have
already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths
cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very
different certainty, and should be considered separately.

For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the
facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that
the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not
possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn
of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and
actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I. to raise
Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II.
to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from
Charles I. was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from
the village communities. It was the same institution which only two
generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of
popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular
utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and
trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly
had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively
the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of
Commons has itself been a House of Lords.

But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign
against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss
and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said
against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is
little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most
neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that
though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that
succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the
Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart
Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the
spread of a conflagration. Charles II., for instance, was a man of
strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was
quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a
philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost
awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It
was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than
the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of
rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English
safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was
_lettre de cachet_ as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the
law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably
have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse
off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with the
squire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was the
magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually
weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in
short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were
in a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remains
of mediæval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild.
Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements,
which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things
might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes
was a single monster and for France a single man.

As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism
was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of the
transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who
is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in
history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism.
He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his
life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he
emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of
the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of
the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of
the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy
became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised
and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity,
toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to
the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy
in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without
absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires,
a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not
without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an
impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very
unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his,
and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the
high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had
to compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather
than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with
bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness
regarded as beasts--or as the modern euphemism would put it, as
aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human
slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a
sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not a
representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was
rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or
vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision
between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century
movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when
the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into
the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell
said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God
who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as
overpowering as a nightmare--and as passing.

It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; it
was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what
followed Cromwell's death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic
compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a
mediæval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a
piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where
there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus the
Puritan régime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to
mediævalism--militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but
highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans
became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories
and Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in
the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A discovery
is an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd could
be turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds.
Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; but
they had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the
Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the
vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished
almost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed
valour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It
was the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and
perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal
symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they
tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in
the very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things they
invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is
called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest
Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from
an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed
disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the
nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work.
They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy;
and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very
sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were
ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very
secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of
them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the
sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western
shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the
whole story of Britain.




XIV

THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS


Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can
be little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II.
was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition to
his own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his
official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly
stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one of
the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. was fitted for the
more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth-century
than a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a
comedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of
Shakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pure
experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys
that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his
brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing
side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The
first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of
course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it
neared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will
deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more
irreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy to
trace.

The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had
ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities
that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type
and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that
priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught
talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very
variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great
degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic
continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism,
there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late
as the Civil War, was stuffed with "superstitions" which were Catholic
in the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similar
parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of
Continental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as
the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to
guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about its
presence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London.
By the time of Charles II., after the purge of the Puritan Terror, it
had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere
exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The
Monmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though an
insufficiently popular, backing. The "No Popery" force became the crowd
if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban
crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with
which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One of
these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) was
the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the
Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm that
finally swept away James II.

The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those
illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament
is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs
from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an
institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but
about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only
cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it
because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the
English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of
common people loved the Church of England without having even decided
what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediæval
Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility
which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely
different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an
Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth
century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but
the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the
Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was
treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many
entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility.
In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a
fashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When,
therefore, James II. seemed to menace this practising communion, he
aroused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of
the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean
the fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real sense
regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a
conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about
abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations
of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things
undreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus
to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century
Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the
Quakers; and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two things
shook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue which
made these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they were
philosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles
II. into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.

Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of
toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and
therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more
intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to
this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in
what proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost
maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, been
turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of
priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the
English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at
least by this time the English, like the French, persecutors were
oppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province of
government in which they were still more madly persecuting the
majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its
terrific character that lingering crime that was called the government
of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of
unnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of
the eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude
to the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of
the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. James
II., fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually
found refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince of
Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that
country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but
saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military
genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could
only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish,
in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government
occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter
on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that
the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the
English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it
incessantly for ever.

But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side
of secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to
whom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to have
any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they
had a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in a
certain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions.
And just as these men, the most unmediæval of mankind, could yet boast
about some mediæval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury,
so they could appeal to a true mediæval legend in the matter of a war
with France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole
could complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him with
traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was looking
for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the _naïveté_
of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he was
really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediæval
history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the
French could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black
Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, it
is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots will
always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves far
from unpatriotic; and James II. in particular may well be called the
founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France,
among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder
before and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided the
later Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England,
especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy.

The transformation through which the external relations of England
passed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two very
separate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king and
the second the accession of a German king. In the first were present all
the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the
second we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardly
call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like
a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and one
fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in
which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a
great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole
in the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they
were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as
he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He
was in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what
George was except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly
republican magistrate of what had once been a purely republican
experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth
century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King of
the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home--a savage personal ruler
scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of
acute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above
all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a
Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a
familiar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With George
there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there
before; something hardly mentioned in mediæval or Renascence writing,
except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.

The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two
foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is the
bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough
to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong
enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to help
themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too
much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great
figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear
about their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every
point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was
John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story
of Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how it
succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the
Counter-Revolution and how it failed.

Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that he combines
the presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the new
aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few
generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of
chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by
gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like
their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they
are--factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of
snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schools
were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution they were already
becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenth
century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too
generous, sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, but
rash and romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the names
of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the later reformers
defaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers had
defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way the
eighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity,
what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of pure
meanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing
that a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues
of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that he
picked his way through campaigns that have made him immortal with the
watchful spirit of a thieving camp-follower. When William landed at
Torbay on the invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to
add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with
wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to
defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army over
to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire,
but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon this
ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there was
scarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When
they afterwards surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of
them who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men who
defeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it was such men
who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe.

Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-century England is one
of greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, to
vary the metaphor, the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even
in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of
Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure; the fluctuation had
been all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and Warren
Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as
fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable
element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea.
But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations
of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something
which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity,
something called _Punica fides_. The great Royalist Strafford, going
disillusioned to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes." The
great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And least
of all in merchant princes."

Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big
in English history, but which with the recent winding of the course of
history has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannot
understand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, the
best English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet
modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of
it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as
well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is
full of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem "The Deserted
Village," and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in
"The Vicar of Wakefield." Swift is full of it; and found in it an
intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the time
of Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in
England. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to
rule.

This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many
aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the
virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields"
that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king
is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also
involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his
oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the
populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and
though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his
soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly
rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine
and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear
and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous
spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for
the Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed the
committee of the new régime of the gentry. And considering who it was
who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by
a trick.

The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into
it like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty
years afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith
in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment and
distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to
strengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He was
always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a
royal family, but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book
"The Patriot King," written in exile; and when he thought that George's
great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might be
more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such
unpromising instruments as George III. and Lord Bute; and when these
broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the _sed victa
Catoni_. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature.
But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no
better summary than this section from the first to the last of the
foiled _coups d'état_ of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peace
with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his
policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection with
Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of
Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which
has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch
Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative
sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his
own and his country's glory. He summarized the new England of the
Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that
movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was
most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways
what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also
an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was
consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that
all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically
what may be called a commercialist--one might almost say Carthaginian.
In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but
was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could
use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James
Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a
young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to
the English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the
strong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded
without friction the wealthier _bourgeoisie_; it was not there that the
social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator,
and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of great
senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases
they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in
calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all
this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland
state of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages
into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways
like a shadow of Chatham flung across the world--the sort of shadow that
is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose
paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long
and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham was
atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism was
in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal
theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other
commonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own
aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to be
wedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture,
as if to forbid the banns.




XV

THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS


We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that
rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this
folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes
arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling," or of his
pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful
as an acrobat's. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbal
form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the
link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feeling
of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and
pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the
eighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect
artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the
humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry; that century is
full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, which
have in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking to
a tune. Nelson's "In honour I gained them, in honour I will die with
them," has more rhythm than much that is called _vers libres_. Patrick
Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" might be a great line in Walt
Whitman.

It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend to
be bad speakers; but in fact the most English eighteenth-century epoch
blazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing in
France; there was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliament
had faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The
Parliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruption
were then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings, where
they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was
indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps the
constituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament
was snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank
and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it did
fulfil its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well. It did not
merely do things because they do not bear talking about--as it does now.
It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great
"talking-shop," not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips
and official places. And as with any other artist, the care the
eighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity,
not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and
elaborate as a lover's sonnet; but it is because Burke is really
enthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as
carefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius is
really angry--like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this
psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the English
aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthusiasm for liberty;
their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever their
immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when
they talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta.
Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who really
were patriots--or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to
put it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs;
Whigs by all the ideal definitions which identified the party with a
defence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces,
from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about
whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practical
test and reply. It might be tested in many ways: by the game laws and
enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and the
definition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it be really
questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an
aristocracy, and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historical
test is this: that when republicanism really entered the world, they
instantly waged two great wars with it--or (if the view be preferred) it
instantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealed
the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real
spark will show it is only ice. So when the red fire of the Revolution
touched the frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was instantly a
hissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt the ice, of the
water to quench the flame.

It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was
liberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said that
one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were not
stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figures
of a good man named Washington and a bad man named Boney. They at least
were aware that Washington's cause was not so obviously white nor
Napoleon's so obviously black as most books in general circulation would
indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius of
Washington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for the
German Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against both
Washington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. And
it was that they both stood for democracy.

Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of the
time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference,
especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour about
the English which appears especially in this, that while they often (as
in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they were
entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) to
make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case for
their having been more or less right. George III.'s Government laid
certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of
America. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and
precedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such
colonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive
sort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution.
The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with
liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred
beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great
chief of the new and very national _noblesse_, was typical of them in
being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the
colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favoured
colonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was
then the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how
wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even
North compromised; and though George III., being a fool, might himself
have refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect the
Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case for
the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel,
was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not with
a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war on
something much finer and more formidable than poor old George.
Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured
it primarily as a duel of George III. and George Washington; and, as we
have noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldom
false. King George's head was not much more useful on the throne than it
was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board was
really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold
not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy
which Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but
intolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden sign
stood, in short, for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the
Great; it stood for that Anglo-German alliance which, at a very much
later time in history, was to turn into the world-old Teutonic Race.

Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced the
quarrel. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrase
for wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony,
but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so small
a difference could never have changed the world, without the positive
effect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The real
case for the colonists is that they felt they could be something, which
they also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be.
England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of
concessions and constitutional privileges; but England could not allow
the colonists equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even with
each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because
Washington was a gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have conceived a
country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to grant
everything to America; but he would not have been ready to grant what
America eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he would
have been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, and
would always have been by any democracy. In a word, the Whigs were
liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; that
is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, with
a humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession
of America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not
know; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I
believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really
drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led
on by a light that went before.

That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to
the help of Washington. France was already in travail with the
tremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Her
doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time,
and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style
in which it was stated by Rousseau in the "Contrat Social," and by
Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence. Say the very word
"equality" in many modern countries, and four hundred fools will leap to
their feet at once to explain that some men can be found, on careful
examination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had not
noticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if Washington was not
well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to
expound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of a
parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean
that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely
equal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing about
them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a
certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put
symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear the
image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the most
practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King of
Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlain
all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were,
for instance, the mob of mediæval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal
duties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority
that would not admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich
man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully
furnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from these
truisms, and nobody in the world was further from them than the group of
the great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is in
substance simply the idea of the importance of man. But it was precisely
the notion of the importance of a mere man which seemed startling and
indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of
the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked into
Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full,
but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about the
difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their
time. If they can understand how two coins can count the same though one
is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men
can vote the same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however,
they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are
dull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull.

But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a
republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting
the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride
of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the
reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice,
the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection
with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast.
The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol
of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and
recast in a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could not
understand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of all
the liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical
reasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or
republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from
menacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent,
the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by
the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The
former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order to
keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing
enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and
pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as
France would never have devoured it, and threaten us across the sea
with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much
deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the
Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logic
as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The
Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had
turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an
Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He
was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien
thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally
subject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subject
to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one thing that
the English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriad
studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had
almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, "I shall go down to
history with my code in my hand;" but in practical effects, as distinct
from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code
will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature--somewhat
illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and
encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in
places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it
was natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokes
should rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more
silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here
that after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles that
are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by
two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the
resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is
Russian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that
which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spirit
of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried
and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as
Wellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally
confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo.
Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways
typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But
if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their
class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it
is enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed
Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and
experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, "He is not actually
a Mandarin," we should think that the Chinese system deserved its
reputation for being both rigid and remote.

But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with
it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some
truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he
was outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when he
was on the sea. There has run through the national psychology something
that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary
name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quite
undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy
especially wishes that his cornland or vineland were a desert; but many
an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we
might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He
awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of
the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a
contradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the
islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet.
There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of the
Armada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been a
small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had done
their work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving
like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with
his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word
for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of
his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic
completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets
the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a
loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary
heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And he
remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely
poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and
sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of
reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with
top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of
funereal efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to
those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who think
they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a
foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and
intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man
who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.




XVI

ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS


It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically
delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the
first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight is
not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety
of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism,
and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of
verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender
as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended,
might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten
about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine
and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most
threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth
to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have
too often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression "hearts of oak,"
for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England
of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it
covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into
bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry did
not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name
of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of
colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate,
almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some
part of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glow
passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more
than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large
humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as
their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon
a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great
and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist
gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine
quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and
words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh
before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never
heard before: "For England, home, and beauty."

When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at
the great gentry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the
difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with
by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life;
it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those
things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist
interval between mediæval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the
sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their
souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent
paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead;
those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered
eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very
formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other
complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism
was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club;
which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively
orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in
the middle-class masterpiece about "Northanger Abbey," where we actually
remember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey.
Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the
atheism of Jane Austen.

Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of
another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret
and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable
paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be
descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he
himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come
from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come
over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhat
shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own
exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans
or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off
founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the great
gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman
knights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might be
descended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs were
descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the
paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.

But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on
stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all
through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches
about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism,
through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period of
Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central
senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the
enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had
survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much
more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that
the Commons were destroying the commons. The very word "common," as we
have before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a mere
topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was
not worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingering
commons were connected only with stories about highwaymen, which still
linger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers;
but not of the real robbers.

This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained
human, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay
their own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than the
stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles; but the land
withered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at least
English, they were still in their way good-natured; but their position
was false, and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality.
The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to the
Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit
that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their
philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the result
was the White Terror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which
revealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields
in foreign lands. Cobbett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of the
small farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, was
thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English
soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful
meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were
indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it
is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our
history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of
soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry.

The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally
ignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw the
tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole;
consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern
history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet
by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this
time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that
a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightly
more sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of
sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of
the eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of the
nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were
some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant
became converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, and
accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his
agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by
accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his
factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory
Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial
experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the
comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed
the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field
against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to
the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the
Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only
relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust
fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the
agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other
black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he
would have been substantially right; for the great industrial disciple
of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam
engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade
Guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help
his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had
warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no
prosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter
into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict
sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and more
wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit,
industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the
old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new
experiments--beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic of
the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett,
that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and
industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The
people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There are
many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated
class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress
the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that
great mediæval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal
of which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with the
revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII.; and it was so with
the rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The real
mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show
one of the immortal marks of the real mob--ritualism. There is nothing
that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct
democratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriously
in the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or
a prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely
because it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore
symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but
the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish
grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to
break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which
perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive
agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county,
merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth.
Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a
certain national modification of the movement. There is something very
typical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without the
guillotine.

Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very
brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the
scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises
since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of
course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the
awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in
Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate
tool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at
all consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and
morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more
spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity.
Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's place,
unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him
in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irish
expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not been
worthy of _their_ immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the
national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by
pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her
poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity.
He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a
partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by
the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality,
but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant's plea. But
not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril,
but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them
that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate
Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the
oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did
not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm
Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in a
false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a
necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one,
and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded
in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have
never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a
Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our
vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine
identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an
Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures
as an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws to
Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for
Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own this tottering alternation has
continued; from the time when the great O'Connell, with his monster
meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to
the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to
listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by
blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of
special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an
idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that
the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and
may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave,
in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing
the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to
see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to
be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man among
politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings,
and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, as
Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his
work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against
Pitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels,
and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood,
shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald.

The effect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic.
Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was
preeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a
realist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum of
the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army
proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in
truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as
it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English,
even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal
version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England
not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in
what she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing
to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in
that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and
might be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely an
army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of
bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour
and the character that has run through the realities of English history,
and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It
has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street,
but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. An
illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived,
perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the
more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite
topsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit
it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police
court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionist
régime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV. was fat; but
we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic
contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort of
humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and
downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a
reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social
science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves
even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is
that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social
scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman's servant, and
some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the
status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such
trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for
us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our
statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a
trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers
of a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and their
holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange
sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what
nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the
darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in
France and Flanders who called out "Early Doors!" themselves in a
theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down
the doors of death.




XVII

THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN


The only way to write a popular history, as we have already remarked,
would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects of
our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the
street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to
take two objects we have known all our lives, as features of fashion or
respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a
top-hat; the other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair of
trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue
to what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is not
necessary to be an æsthete in order to regard both objects as the
reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side
of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the
lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and
too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to
see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a
hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy.
But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects,
which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally
conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them
casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least
rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism,
and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing
knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch
in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately
oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the
time--in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting point
is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies have
remained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got
into fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we
have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.

I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the
Victorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened.
The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into relief
the rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as they
were at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution as
something that changed the world; but its most important relation to
England is that it did not change England. A student of our history is
concerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it
did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the English
oligarchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in which
the Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion--until that
which shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all the
commonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupied in
marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained
republican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats.
Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical in
spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one power
might be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaic
fashion--the power in the North-East whose name was Prussia. And the
English were more and more learning that this growth need cause them no
alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and their
brothers in spirit.

The first thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century is that
Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war,
and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the
rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper importance to the
cautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and the
large unconscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon the
model of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be
considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real
reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did not
reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly
disappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. It
enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very
definite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance
between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealth
that the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date,
however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning of
democracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way ever
discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the
homoeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Well
into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who
was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine,
extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move
against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the
old popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The
politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed
votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed
votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have
been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed
quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of
parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary
oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by
that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the
concentration of colossal political funds in the private and
irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of
peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering
of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner
obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there
is a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of this
new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is
called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some
suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties,
there could be no system.

But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by
the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social
reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth
that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done
by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised
workhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the
black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our
literature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and
Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary
indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the
logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress
finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The
Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and
have everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to give
of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealth
were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever been
made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most
capricious operations of the _lettres de cachet_ there still hovered
some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for
something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who
cannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most
decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; for
no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell.

The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the
culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the
earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular
effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and
the mediæval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became
a problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, even
when the question of slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question
of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and
the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare
ground--even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a
veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actually
punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground
that he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, however, that he may find
his best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it
in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the
solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of
Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have the
luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New Poor
Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man
lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is
a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the
Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black
slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The
slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called
blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to
deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the
real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against
Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is
something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is
remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being
long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the
poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems.
It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil;
and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for
it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the
uttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth.

Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that it
seems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse
philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution
to combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national
because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The
modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it
is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the
English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of
Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has
an almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the past
by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man
who has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it is
even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on
earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman,
except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all who
know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade
Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who
look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it
the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediæval mysticism,
or even of mediæval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking
and even staggering tribute to mediæval morality. It has all the
clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed
atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion
that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in
celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain
hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the
monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never
heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the
very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who
puts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or even
a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.

The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a
ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracy
that Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is the
strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle
culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every
direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another
process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The
principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and
in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be
said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by
saying that the employers themselves, who already organized business,
began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed by
a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, "We are all Socialists
now." The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several
conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads the
hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists
proposed that the State should not merely interfere in business but
should take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or
at any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrender
their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from
politics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and
they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as
they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of
social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same
direction; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as
employees, and as something permanently different from employers. Of
these the obvious examples were Employers' Liability, Old Age Pensions,
and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, the
Insurance Act.

The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in
general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of
this period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good or
evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to
grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the
military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the
nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy--not to say a
mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a
man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named
after Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so that
it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud
of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by
Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced
this effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internal
policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was
dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now
clearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend the
German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces;
France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was
felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, a
thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most
influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid
success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods
which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery
of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but
cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethics
as well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made
disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople
and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers to
support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical
reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a
pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian
subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck.
Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions
of the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and one
especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was
"Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms."
But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as a
comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from
that Berlin Conference he should have said, "I bring you Peace with
Honour; peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; and
honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin."

But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany
was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of
dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the
test case, she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a
portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other
provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which
was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere
involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little
attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices
against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And
that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called
education--an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and
partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that
in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their
while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest
inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. The
government was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its
soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as
they manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; it
was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to
create a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect the
cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities and
the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said
that the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough as
the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman
remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to
think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize.

And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had
failed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, would
doubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the central
tradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry
which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our
epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools
and universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on a
large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy,
all-encircling like the sea, had always made us the natural allies of
the great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and
Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its
Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow;
that France was a dung-heap fated to decay--a dung-heap with a crowing
cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a
platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was
the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a
graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an
Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for
he had nothing to unlearn.

He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped
across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes all
the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization;
then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and
after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any
story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so
catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and
ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen,
burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where
their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The
English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long
despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered
history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years
into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of
politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic,
looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.




XVIII

CONCLUSION


In so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid
the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to
pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt
to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I
rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective
makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant
foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of
clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we
admire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often
that of "The Last Phase." So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable
to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal
in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a
golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to
Alfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because the
crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; and
many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same
visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the
Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue.

I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came
with the fall of Richard II., following on his failure to use mediæval
despotism in the interests of mediæval democracy. England, like the
other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death
of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its
refusal to die. Mediæval civilization had arisen out of the resistance
to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the more
subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local
government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and
taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England,
the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance.
They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. That
third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the
Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily
consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jurymen; but it soon
became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ
of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did
many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the
British Empire; it created something which was really far more
valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even
humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It had
sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately,
to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become
almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately
did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it
took the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) it
took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent
Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the
side of progress against decay. The question which many of them are now
inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is
whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against
civilization.

At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things,
we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the
barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the
Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be
on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted
Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain
tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of
civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or
covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind
him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should
judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is
slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German
regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I
can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present
reforms, but only by doing what the mediævals did after the other
barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups,
gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal
freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English
have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they
have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry
it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move
only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt
from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the
discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile
State. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion
of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic
barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world
should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that
they died for liberty.


THE END


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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Utopia of Usurers and other Essays, by
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Utopia of Usurers and other Essays

Author: Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Release Date: April, 2000 [EBook #2134]
Last Updated: July 26, 2012

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UTOPIA OF USURERS AND OTHER ESSAYS ***




Produced by Mike Pullen






UTOPIA OF USURERS AND OTHER ESSAYS

By Gilbert Keith Chesterton




CONTENTS

     A Song of Swords

     Utopia of Usurers
      I. Art and Advertisement
      II. Letters and the New Laureates
      III. Unbusinesslike Business
      IV. The War on Holidays
      V. The Church of the Servile State
      VI. Science and the Eugenists
      VII. The Evolution of the Prison
      VIII. The Lash for Labour
      IX. The Mask of Socialism


     The Escape
     The New Raid
     The New Name
     A Workman's History of England
     The French Revolution and the Irish
     Liberalism: A Sample
     The Fatigue of Fleet Street
     The Amnesty for Aggression
     Revive the Court Jester
     The Art of Missing the Point
     The Servile State Again
     The Empire of the Ignorant
     The Symbolism of Krupp
     The Tower of Bebel
     A Real Danger
     The Dregs of Puritanism
     The Tyranny of Bad Journalism
     The Poetry of the Revolution





A SONG OF SWORDS

  "A drove of cattle came into a village called Swords;
  and was stopped by the rioters."--Daily Paper.

  In the place called Swords on the Irish road
  It is told for a new renown
  How we held the horns of the cattle, and how
  We will hold the horns of the devils now
  Ere the lord of hell with the horn on his brow
  Is crowned in Dublin town.

  Light in the East and light in the West,
  And light on the cruel lords,
  On the souls that suddenly all men knew,
  And the green flag flew and the red flag flew,
  And many a wheel of the world stopped, too,
  When the cattle were stopped at Swords.

  Be they sinners or less than saints
  That smite in the street for rage,
  We know where the shame shines bright; we know
  You that they smite at, you their foe,
  Lords of the lawless wage and low,
  This is your lawful wage.

  You pinched a child to a torture price
  That you dared not name in words;
  So black a jest was the silver bit
  That your own speech shook for the shame of it,
  And the coward was plain as a cow they hit
  When the cattle have strayed at Swords.

  The wheel of the torrent of wives went round
  To break men's brotherhood;
  You gave the good Irish blood to grease
  The clubs of your country's enemies;
  you saw the brave man beat to the knees:
  And you saw that it was good.

  The rope of the rich is long and long--
  The longest of hangmen's cords;
  But the kings and crowds are holding their breath,
  In a giant shadow o'er all beneath
  Where God stands holding the scales of Death
  Between the cattle and Swords.

  Haply the lords that hire and lend
  The lowest of all men's lords,
  Who sell their kind like kine at a fair,
  Will find no head of their cattle there;
  But faces of men where cattle were:
  Faces of men--and Swords.




UTOPIA OF USURERS


I. Art and Advertisement

I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or
three articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and
profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look
ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in
the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by
the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the
doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has
revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is
falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say
again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must
hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that
it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists
as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they
claim philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than
Albu felt an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have
reached their position through their own organising ability. They
generally have to pay men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay
men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they
generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they
are going in for a "constructive social policy," they do not lie. They
really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in
for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still
half-constructed, the accursed thing which they construct.


The Example of the Arts

Now I propose to take, one after another, certain aspects and
departments of modern life, and describe what I think they will be like
in this paradise of plutocrats, this Utopia of gold and brass in which
the great story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what
I think our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain
human interests and institutions, such as art, science, jurisprudence,
or religion--unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the
sake of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts.

Most people have seen a picture called "Bubbles," which is used for the
advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced
into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the
caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was
not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap
destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had
been used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses
the whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment
here upon Millais's action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what
it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture
was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And
the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that
Victorian epoch can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere,
with all its faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as
a matter of course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an
emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they
were on his own account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of
having helped a soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he
was not proud of it. And that marks precisely the change from his time
to our own. Our merchants have really adopted the style of merchant
princes. They have begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the
State, as the emperors and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais's
time, broadly speaking, art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement
was supposed to mean inferior art. The head of a black man, painted
to advertise somebody's blacking, could be a rough symbol, like an inn
sign. The black man had only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting
the picture of a negro was expected to know that a black man is not so
black as he is painted. He was expected to render a thousand tints of
grey and brown and violet: for there is no such thing as a black man
just as there is no such thing as a white man. A fairly clear line
separated advertisement from art.


The First Effect

I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if
we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will
entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be
advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art;
much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put
it, if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in
advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head
of a negro advertising Somebody's Blacking now adays were finished
with as careful and subtle colours as one of the old and superstitious
painters would have wasted on the negro king who brought gifts to
Christ. But the improvement of advertisements is the degradation of
artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason: that
the artist will work, not only to please the rich, but only to increase
their riches; which is a considerable step lower. After all, it was as
a human being that a pope took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a
prince took pleasure in a statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for
the statuette; but he did not expect the statuette to pay him. It is my
impression that no cake of soap can be found anywhere in the cartoons
which the Pope ordered of Raphael. And no one who knows the small-minded
cynicism of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its
contempt of conscience, can doubt that the artist-advertiser will often
be assisting enterprises over which he will have no moral control, and
of which he could feel no moral approval. He will be working to spread
quack medicines, queer investments; and will work for Marconi instead of
Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will have to bend the proudest
and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the power to attract his
brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that picture by Millais is
a very allegorical picture. It is almost a prophecy of what uses are
awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will be of a kind
that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a kind that
may truly be described as Bubbles.


II. Letters and the New Laureates

In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and
fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of
our community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last (and
first) article, I took the case of Art and advertisement. I pointed out
that Art must be growing worse--merely because advertisement is growing
better. In those days Millais condescended to Pears' soap. In these days
I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here
I turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease
the art verges on artlessness.

The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something
one may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an
individual, but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of
individuals. Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of
there being only a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept
quite dark, though it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to
be not so much the Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not
to be so much South Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but
distressing fact that every class of political leadership, as it comes
to the front in its turn, catches the rays of this isolating lime-light;
and becomes a small aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic
complaint so badly as the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real
difference between Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much
in anything right or wrong in what he said, as in something elemental
and even mystical in the way he suggested a mob. But it must be plain,
even to those who agree with the more official policy, that for Mr.
Havelock Wilson the principal question was Mr. Havelock Wilson; and that
Mr. Sexton was mainly considering the dignity and fine feelings of Mr.
Sexton. You may say they were as sensitive as aristocrats, or as sulky
as babies; the point is that the feeling was personal. But Larkin, like
Danton, not only talks like ten thousand men talking, but he also has
some of the carelessness of the colossus of Arcis; "Que mon nom soit
fletri, que la France soit libre."


A Dance of Degradation

It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the
other parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it
would be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad
army, because it would be a snub to Lord Haldane to have a good army.
And no Tory is allowed to say "Marconi" for fear Mr. George should say
"Kynoch." But this curious personal element, with its appalling lack of
patriotism, has appeared in a new and curious form in another department
of life; the department of literature, especially periodical literature.
And the form it takes is the next example I shall give of the way in
which the capitalists are now appearing, more and more openly, as the
masters and princes of the community.

I will take a Victorian instance to mark the change; as I did in the
case of the advertisement of "Bubbles." It was said in my childhood, by
the more apoplectic and elderly sort of Tory, that W. E. Gladstone was
only a Free Trader because he had a partnership in Gilbey's foreign
wines. This was, no doubt, nonsense; but it had a dim symbolic, or
mainly prophetic, truth in it. It was true, to some extent even then,
and it has been increasingly true since, that the statesman was often an
ally of the salesman; and represented not only a nation of shopkeepers,
but one particular shop. But in Gladstone's time, even if this was true,
it was never the whole truth; and no one would have endured it being the
admitted truth. The politician was not solely an eloquent and persuasive
bagman travelling for certain business men; he was bound to mix even his
corruption with some intelligible ideals and rules of policy. And the
proof of it is this: that at least it was the statesman who bulked
large in the public eye; and his financial backer was entirely in the
background. Old gentlemen might choke over their port, with the moral
certainty that the Prime Minister had shares in a wine merchant's. But
the old gentleman would have died on the spot if the wine merchant had
really been made as important as the Prime Minister. If it had been
Sir Walter Gilbey whom Disraeli denounced, or Punch caricatured; if
Sir Walter Gilbey's favourite collars (with the design of which I am
unacquainted) had grown as large as the wings of an archangel; if
Sir Walter Gilbey had been credited with successfully eliminating the
British Oak with his little hatchet; if, near the Temple and the
Courts of Justice, our sight was struck by a majestic statue of a
wine merchant; or if the earnest Conservative lady who threw a
gingerbread-nut at the Premier had directed it towards the wine merchant
instead, the shock to Victorian England would have been very great
indeed.


Haloes for Employers

Now something very like that is happening; the mere wealthy employer is
beginning to have not only the power but some of the glory. I have
seen in several magazines lately, and magazines of a high class, the
appearance of a new kind of article. Literary men are being employed to
praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They
not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes--that they
have done for some time past--they also find moral defences for the
commercial schemers. They describe the capitalist's brain of steel and
heart of gold in a way that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in
the habit of reserving for romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In
one excellent magazine Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write
on letters like a man of letters, has some purple pages of praise of
Sir Joseph Lyons--the man who runs those teashop places. He incidentally
brought in a delightful passage about the beautiful souls possessed
by some people called Salmon and Gluckstein. I think I like best the
passage where he said that Lyons's charming social accomplishments
included a talent for "imitating a Jew." The article is accompanied with
a large and somewhat leering portrait of that shopkeeper, which makes
the parlour-trick in question particularly astonishing. Another literary
man, who certainly ought to know better, wrote in another paper a piece
of hero-worship about Mr. Selfridge. No doubt the fashion will spread,
and the art of words, as polished and pointed by Ruskin or Meredith,
will be perfected yet further to explore the labyrinthine heart of
Harrod; or compare the simple stoicism of Marshall with the saintly
charm of Snelgrove.

Any man can be praised--and rightly praised. If he only stands on two
legs he does something a cow cannot do. If a rich man can manage to
stand on two legs for a reasonable time, it is called self-control. If
he has only one leg, it is called (with some truth) self-sacrifice. I
could say something nice (and true) about every man I have ever met.
Therefore, I do not doubt I could find something nice about Lyons or
Selfridge if I searched for it. But I shall not. The nearest postman or
cab-man will provide me with just the same brain of steel and heart
of gold as these unlucky lucky men. But I do resent the whole age
of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets
becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath, nor led us
into any battle.


III. Unbusinesslike Business

The fairy tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all
taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots"
or "Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little
unlikely and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some
very solid and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted
that both in "Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" if I remember
aright, the ogre was not only an ogre but also a magician. And it will
generally be found that in all such popular narratives, the king, if he
is a wicked king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital
human truth enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government,
is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but
mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great
employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense,
an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As
they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a
fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to
rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people
that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become. He does,
in a manner, cast a spell, such as that which imprisoned princes and
princesses under the shapes of falcons or stags. He has truly turned men
into sheep, as Circe turned them into swine.

Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and
glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between
the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the
rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of
themselves and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds
of different doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground
departments (they must be hot; this is very important), and more people
than would be needed for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say:
"This way, madam," and "The next article, sir," it follows that
the goods are good. In short, they hold that the big businesses are
businesslike. They are not. Any housekeeper in a truthful mood, that
is to say, any housekeeper in a bad temper, will tell you that they are
not. But housekeepers, too, are human, and therefore inconsistent and
complex; and they do not always stick to truth and bad temper. They are
also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate; and
cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork.
But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy--in clockwork or in anything
else. A clock can be as wrong as the human head; and a clock can stop,
as suddenly as the human heart.

But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their
very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or emporia,
asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you
receive a very elaborately constructed parcel, containing a broken
parasol. You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what
a vast number of assistants and employees had combined to break that
parasol. You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and
departments and wonder in which of them the parasol that you never
ordered was broken. Or you want a toy elephant for your child on
Christmas Day; as children, like all nice and healthy people, are very
ritualistic. Some week or so after Twelfth Night, let us say, you have
the pleasure of removing three layers of pasteboards, five layers of
brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue paper and discovering the
fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile in an expansive spirit.
You feel that your soul has been broadened by the vision of incompetence
conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the more the colossal
and Omnipresent Brain of the Organiser of Industry, who amid all his
multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty of smashing
even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or, supposing you have
asked him to send you some two rolls of cocoa-nut matting: and supposing
(after a due interval for reflection) he duly delivers to you the five
rolls of wire netting. You take pleasure in the consideration of a
mystery: which coarse minds might have called a mistake. It consoles you
to know how big the business is: and what an enormous number of people
were needed to make such a mistake.

That is the romance that has been told about the big shops; in the
literature and art which they have bought, and which (as I said in
my recent articles) will soon be quite indistinguishable from their
ordinary advertisements. The literature is commercial; and it is
only fair to say that the commerce is often really literary. It is no
romance, but only rubbish.

The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally
incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are
omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of
a monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only
because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large
shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both
sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they
want; and may be forced to buy what they don't want. That the rapidly
approaching kingdom of the Capitalists will ruin art and letters, I
have already said. I say here that in the only sense that can be called
human, it will ruin trade, too.

I will not let Christmas go by, even when writing for a revolutionary
paper necessarily appealing to many with none of my religious
sympathies, without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who sent
to a great rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It arrived
broken. I think that is exactly all that business men have now the sense
to do.


IV. The War on Holidays

The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that
the reign of the capitalist will be the reign of the cad--that is, of
the unlicked type that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman--can
be excellently studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special
emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is
the worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of
holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to
work until they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as
well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to
grant what he would call "decent hours of labour." He may treat men like
dirt; but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let
it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but
unless he is a lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs
lie.

But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do
with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of ten hours day
and eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to
the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer
came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most
out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole
mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his
whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are
alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that
comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in
unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not
only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood
and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut
on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.


The Great Holiday

Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or
feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body
and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though
he seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to
whom a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday,
like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege.
But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion
of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye,
the word "recreation" would be like the word "resurrection," the blast
of a trumpet.


A man, being merely useful, is necessarily incomplete, especially if
he be a modern man and means by being useful being "utilitarian." A man
going into a modern club gives up his hat; a man going into a modern
factory gives up his head. He then goes in and works loyally for the old
firm to build up the great fabric of commerce (which can be done without
a head), but when he has done work he goes to the cloak-room, like the
man at the club, and gets his head back again; that is the germ of the
holiday. It may be urged that the club man who leaves his hat often goes
away with another hat; and perhaps it may be the same with the factory
hand who has left his head. A hand that has lost its head may affect the
fastidious as a mixed metaphor; but, God pardon us all, what an unmixed
truth! We could almost prove the whole ease from the habit of calling
human beings merely "hands" while they are working; as if the hand were
horribly cut off, like the hand that has offended; as if, while the
sinner entered heaven maimed, his unhappy hand still laboured laying
up riches for the lords of hell. But to return to the man whom we found
waiting for his head in the cloak-room. It may be urged, we say, that he
might take the wrong head, like the wrong hat; but here the similarity
ceases. For it has been observed by benevolent onlookers at life's drama
that the hat taken away by mistake is frequently better than the real
hat; whereas the head taken away after the hours of toil is certainly
worse: stained with the cobwebs and dust of this dustbin of all the
centuries.


The Supreme Adventure

All the words dedicated to places of eating and drinking are pure
and poetic words. Even the word "hotel" is the word hospital. And St.
Julien, whose claret I drank this Christmas, was the patron saint of
innkeepers, because (as far as I can make out) he was hospitable to
lepers. Now I do not say that the ordinary hotel-keeper in Piccadilly or
the Avenue de l'Opera would embrace a leper, slap him on the back, and
ask him to order what he liked; but I do say that hospitality is his
trade virtue. And I do also say it is well to keep before our eyes the
supreme adventure of a virtue. If you are brave, think of the man who
was braver than you. If you are kind, think of the man who was kinder
than you.

That is what was meant by having a patron saint. That is the link
between the poor saint who received bodily lepers and the great hotel
proprietor who (as a rule) receives spiritual lepers. But a word yet
weaker than "hotel" illustrates the same point--the word "restaurant."
There again you have the admission that there is a definite building or
statue to "restore"; that ineffaceable image of man that some call the
image of God. And that is the holiday; it is the restaurant or restoring
thing that, by a blast of magic, turns a man into himself.

This complete and reconstructed man is the nightmare of the modern
capitalist. His whole scheme would crack across like a mirror of
Shallot, if once a plain man were ready for his two plain duties--ready
to live and ready to die. And that horror of holidays which marks the
modern capitalist is very largely a horror of the vision of a whole
human being: something that is not a "hand" or a "head for figures." But
an awful creature who has met himself in the wilderness. The employers
will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to
think.

To anyone who knows any history it is wholly needless to say that
holidays have been destroyed. As Mr. Belloc, who knows much more
history than you or I, recently pointed out in the "Pall Mall Magazine,"
Shakespeare's title of "Twelfth Night: or What You Will" simply meant
that a winter carnival for everybody went on wildly till the twelfth
night after Christmas. Those of my readers who work for modern offices
or factories might ask their employers for twelve days' holidays after
Christmas. And they might let me know the reply.


V. THE CHURCH OF THE SERVILE STATE

I confess I cannot see why mere blasphemy by itself should be an excuse
for tyranny and treason; or how the mere isolated fact of a man not
believing in God should be a reason for my believing in Him.

But the rather spinsterish flutter among some of the old Freethinkers
has put one tiny ripple of truth in it; and that affects the idea which
I wish to emphasise even to monotony in these pages. I mean the idea
that the new community which the capitalists are now constructing will
be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate
nothing really independent of itself. Now, it is true that any positive
creed, true or false, would tend to be independent of itself. It might
be Roman Catholicism or Mahomedanism or Materialism; but, if strongly
held, it would be a thorn in the side of the Servile State. The Moslem
thinks all men immortal: the Materialist thinks all men mortal. But the
Moslem does not think the rich Sinbad will live forever; but the poor
Sinbad will die on his deathbed. The Materialist does not think that Mr.
Haeckel will go to heaven, while all the peasants will go to pot, like
their chickens. In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there
is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist
really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must
somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above
it--or he would be obviously below it. Take even the least attractive
and popular side of the larger religions to-day; take the mere vetoes
imposed by Islam on Atheism or Catholicism. The Moslem veto upon
intoxicants cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for
the capitalist (who presides at a Licensing Committee, and also at a
large dinner), it is absolutely necessary for him, to make a distinction
between gin and champagne. The Atheist veto upon all miracles cuts
across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist to
make a distinction between his wife (who is an aristocrat and consults
crystal gazers and star gazers in the West End), and vulgar miracles
claimed by gipsies or travelling showmen. The Catholic veto upon usury,
as defined in dogmatic councils, cuts across all classes. But it is
absolutely necessary to the capitalist to distinguish more delicately
between two kinds of usury; the kind he finds useful and the kind he
does not find useful. The religion of the Servile State must have no
dogmas or definitions. It cannot afford to have any definitions. For
definitions are very dreadful things: they do the two things that most
men, especially comfortable men, cannot endure. They fight; and they
fight fair.

Every religion, apart from open devil worship, must appeal to a virtue
or the pretence of a virtue. But a virtue, generally speaking, does some
good to everybody. It is therefore necessary to distinguish among
the people it was meant to benefit those whom it does benefit. Modern
broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. It was
meant to benefit the rich; and meant to benefit nobody else. And if you
think this unwarranted, I will put before you one plain question. There
are some pleasures of the poor that may also mean profits for the rich:
there are other pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the
rich? Watch this one contrast, and you will watch the whole creation of
a careful slavery.

In the last resort the two things called Beer and Soap end only in a
froth. They are both below the high notice of a real religion. But
there is just this difference: that the soap makes the factory more
satisfactory, while the beer only makes the workman more satisfied. Wait
and see if the Soap does not increase and the Beer decrease. Wait and
see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what
I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the
discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it. Many great religions,
Pagan and Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has
insisted on Soap. You will find it in the New Testament attributed to
the Pharisees.



VI. SCIENCE AND THE EUGENISTS

The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use
its own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very
completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the
enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved.
It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman's horse and all
his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without
visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this
enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or,
rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics.

The Eugenists get the ear of the humane but rather hazy cliques by
saying that the present "conditions" under which people work and breed
are bad for the race; but the modern mind will not generally stretch
beyond one step of reasoning, and the consequence which appears to
follow on the consideration of these "conditions" is by no means what
would originally have been expected. If somebody says: "A rickety cradle
may mean a rickety baby," the natural deduction, one would think, would
be to give the people a good cradle, or give them money enough to buy
one. But that means higher wages and greater equalisation of wealth; and
the plutocratic scientist, with a slightly troubled expression, turns
his eyes and pince-nez in another direction. Reduced to brutal terms of
truth, his difficulty is this and simply this: More food, leisure, and
money for the workman would mean a better workman, better even from the
point of view of anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure, and
money would also mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent
fire and a full pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend
a clock in, even from the customer's point of view, than a hovel with a
leaky roof and a cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full
pantry would also be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair
or mend a clock--a much better house to do nothing in--and doing nothing
is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man. All but the
hard-hearted must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the
rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work
and just thin enough to have to do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky
roof and the rickety cradle in a pensive manner, there one day came into
his mind a new and curious idea--one of the most strange, simple, and
horrible ideas that have ever risen from the deep pit of original sin.

The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended much,
without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion in
society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that extent
his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock easier,
or, at least, not much easier, without strengthening the hands of the
poor household, for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--to
that extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one sort
of furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and wife
could be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and
such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating
a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates
himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to
prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines
of heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral,
political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a
supply of strong and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent
conditions. As the mill-owners use the wind and the water to drive their
mills, they would use this natural force as something even cheaper; and
turn their wheels by diverting from its channel the blood of a man in
his youth. That is what Eugenics means; and that is all that it means.

Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become
us to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one:
of whether their calculations are well founded, and whether the men
of science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties.
Fortunately, it becomes clearer every day that they are, scientifically
speaking, building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves
breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men, but which
even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity of
men. That is, that though it is not true that all men are normal, it is
overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common Eugenic
arguments are drawn from extreme cases, which, even if human honour
and laughter allowed of their being eliminated, would not by their
elimination greatly affect the mass. For the rest, there remains the
enormous weakness in Eugenics, that if ordinary men's judgment or
liberty is to be discounted in relation to heredity, the judgment of
the judges must be discounted in relation to their heredity. The Eugenic
professor may or may not succeed in choosing a baby's parents; it is
quite certain that he cannot succeed in choosing his own parents. All
his thoughts, including his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the very principle
of those thoughts, flowing from a doubtful or tainted source. In short,
we should need a perfectly Wise Man to do the thing at all. And if he
were a Wise Man he would not do it.



VII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRISON

I have never understood why it is that those who talk most about
evolution, and talk it in the very age of fashionable evolutionism, do
not see the one way in which evolution really does apply to our modern
difficulty. There is, of course, an element of evolutionism in the
universe; and I know no religion or philosophy that ever entirely
ignored it. Evolution, popularly speaking, is that which happens to
unconscious things. They grow unconsciously; or fade unconsciously; or
rather, some parts of them grow and some parts of them fade; and at any
given moment there is almost always some presence of the fading thing,
and some incompleteness in the growing one. Thus, if I went to sleep
for a hundred years, like the Sleeping Beauty (I wish I could), I should
grow a beard--unlike the Sleeping Beauty. And just as I should grow
hair if I were asleep, I should grow grass if I were dead. Those whose
religion it was that God was asleep were perpetually impressed
and affected by the fact that he had a long beard. And those whose
philosophy it is that the universe is dead from the beginning (being
the grave of nobody in particular) think that is the way that grass can
grow. In any case, these developments only occur with dead or dreaming
things. What happens when everyone is asleep is called Evolution. What
happens when everyone is awake is called Revolution.

There was once an honest man, whose name I never knew, but whose face
I can almost see (it is framed in Victorian whiskers and fixed in a
Victorian neck-cloth), who was balancing the achievements of France and
England in civilisation and social efficiencies. And when he came to the
religious aspect he said that there were more stone and brick churches
used in France; but, on the other hand, there are more sects in England.
Whether such a lively disintegration is a proof of vitality in any
valuable sense I have always doubted. The sun may breed maggots in a
dead dog; but it is essential for such a liberation of life that the dog
should be unconscious or (to say the least of it) absent-minded. Broadly
speaking, you may call the thing corruption, if you happen to like dogs.
You may call it evolution, if you happen to like maggots. In either
case, it is what happens to things if you leave them alone.


The Evolutionists' Error

Now, the modern Evolutionists have made no real use of the idea of
evolution, especially in the matter of social prediction. They always
fall into what is (from their logical point of view) the error of
supposing that evolution knows what it is doing. They predict the State
of the future as a fruit rounded and polished. But the whole point of
evolution (the only point there is in it) is that no State will ever be
rounded and polished, because it will always contain some organs that
outlived their use, and some that have not yet fully found theirs. If we
wish to prophesy what will happen, we must imagine things now moderate
grown enormous; things now local grown universal; things now promising
grown triumphant; primroses bigger than sunflowers, and sparrows
stalking about like flamingoes.

In other words, we must ask what modern institution has a future before
it? What modern institution may have swollen to six times its present
size in the social heat and growth of the future? I do not think the
Garden City will grow: but of that I may speak in my next and last
article of this series. I do not think even the ordinary Elementary
School, with its compulsory education, will grow. Too many unlettered
people hate the teacher for teaching; and too many lettered people
hate the teacher for not teaching. The Garden City will not bear much
blossom; the young idea will not shoot, unless it shoots the teacher.
But the one flowering tree on the estate, the one natural expansion
which I think will expand, is the institution we call the Prison.


Prisons for All

If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive capitalist
community, I speak quite seriously when I say that I think Prison will
become an almost universal experience. It will not necessarily be a
cruel or shameful experience: on these points (I concede certainly for
the present purpose of debate) it may be a vastly improved experience.
The conditions in the prison, very possibly, will be made more humane.
But the prison will be made more humane only in order to contain more of
humanity. I think little of the judgment and sense of humour of any man
who can have watched recent police trials without realising that it is
no longer a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime; but,
now, solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an
imprisonment. It was so with Tom Mann; it was so with Larkin; it was so
with the poor atheist who was kept in gaol for saying something he
had been acquitted of saying: it is so in such cases day by day. We no
longer lock a man up for doing something; we lock him up in the hope
of his doing nothing. Given this principle, it is evidently possible
to make the mere conditions of punishment more moderate, or--(more
probably) more secret. There may really be more mercy in the Prison,
on condition that there is less justice in the Court. I should not be
surprised if, before we are done with all this, a man was allowed to
smoke in prison, on condition, of course, that he had been put in prison
for smoking.

Now that is the process which, in the absence of democratic protest,
will certainly proceed, will increase and multiply and replenish the
earth and subdue it. Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little
time: it will be difficult to make it disgraceful when men like Larkin
can be imprisoned for no reason at all, just as his celebrated ancestor
was hanged for no reason at all. But capitalist society, which naturally
does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of
disgrace: and it will still go on imprisoning for no reason at all. Or
rather for that rather simple reason that makes a cat spring or a rat
run away.

It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the
form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form
that every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their
servile principle in the case of the schools. Everyone goes to the
Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there. I
prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going
to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.



VIII. THE LASH FOR LABOUR

If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have
the right and habit of beating the grocer's assistant with a stick, or
that shop girls might be flogged, as they already can be fined, many
would regard it as rather a rash remark. It would be a rash remark.
Prophecy is always unreliable; unless we except the kind which is
avowedly irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy. But relatively
to nearly all the other prophecies that are being made around me to-day,
I should say my prediction stood an exceptionally good chance. In short,
I think the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to
see than the Superman or the Samurai, or the True Model Employer, or the
Perfect Fabian Official, or the citizen of the Collectivist State. And
it is best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which
is passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image
at the end of it. The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history,
have always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled
while Rome was burning, but he probably really paid more attention to
the fiddle than to the fire. The Roi Soleil, like many other soleils,
was most splendid to all appearance a little before sunset. And if I
ask myself what will be the ultimate and final fruit of all our
social reforms, garden cities, model employers, insurances, exchanges,
arbitration courts, and so on, then, I say, quite seriously, "I think it
will be labour under the lash."


The Sultan and the Sack

Let us arrange in some order a number of converging considerations that
all point in this direction. (1) It is broadly true, no doubt, that the
weapon of the employer has hitherto been the threat of dismissal, that
is, the threat of enforced starvation. He is a Sultan who need not order
the bastinado, so long as he can order the sack. But there are not a few
signs that this weapon is not quite so convenient and flexible a one
as his increasing rapacities require. The fact of the introduction of
fines, secretly or openly, in many shops and factories, proves that it
is convenient for the capitalists to have some temporary and adjustable
form of punishment besides the final punishment of pure ruin. Nor is it
difficult to see the commonsense of this from their wholly inhuman
point of view. The act of sacking a man is attended with the same
disadvantages as the act of shooting a man: one of which is that you can
get no more out of him. It is, I am told, distinctly annoying to blow a
fellow creature's brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember
that he was the only person who knew where to get the best Russian
cigarettes. So our Sultan, who is the orderer of the sack, is also the
bearer of the bow-string. A school in which there was no punishment,
except expulsion, would be a school in which it would be very difficult
to keep proper discipline; and the sort of discipline on which the
reformed capitalism will insist will be all of the type which in free
nations is imposed only on children. Such a school would probably be in
a chronic condition of breaking up for the holidays. And the reasons
for the insufficiency of this extreme instrument are also varied and
evident. The materialistic Sociologists, who talk about the survival of
the fittest and the weakest going to the wall (and whose way of looking
at the world is to put on the latest and most powerful scientific
spectacles, and then shut their eyes), frequently talk as if a
workman were simply efficient or non-efficient, as if a criminal were
reclaimable or irreclaimable. The employers have sense enough at least
to know better than that. They can see that a servant may be useful in
one way and exasperating in another; that he may be bad in one part of
his work and good in another; that he may be occasionally drunk and yet
generally indispensable. Just as a practical school-master would know
that a schoolboy can be at once the plague and the pride of the school.
Under these circumstances small and varying penalties are obviously the
most convenient things for the person keeping order; an underling can be
punished for coming late, and yet do useful work when he comes. It will
be possible to give a rap over the knuckles without wholly cutting
off the right hand that has offended. Under these circumstances the
employers have naturally resorted to fines. But there is a further
ground for believing that the process will go beyond fines before it is
completed.

(2) The fine is based on the old European idea that everybody possesses
private property in some reasonable degree; but not only is this not
true to-day, but it is not being made any truer, even by those who
honestly believe that they are mending matters. The great employers will
often do something towards improving what they call the "conditions"
of their workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully
arranged as a racehorse has, and still have no more personal property
than a racehorse. If you take an average poor seamstress or factory
girl, you will find that the power of chastising her through her
property has very considerable limits; it is almost as hard for the
employer of labour to tax her for punishment as it is for the Chancellor
of the Exchequer to tax her for revenue. The next most obvious thing to
think of, of course, would be imprisonment, and that might be effective
enough under simpler conditions. An old-fashioned shopkeeper might have
locked up his apprentice in his coal-cellar; but his coal-cellar would
be a real, pitch dark coal-cellar, and the rest of his house would be a
real human house. Everybody (especially the apprentice) would see a most
perceptible difference between the two. But, as I pointed out in the
article before this, the whole tendency of the capitalist legislation
and experiment is to make imprisonment much more general and automatic,
while making it, or professing to make it, more humane. In other words,
the hygienic prison and the servile factory will become so uncommonly
like each other that the poor man will hardly know or care whether he
is at the moment expiating an offence or merely swelling a dividend. In
both places there will be the same sort of shiny tiles. In neither place
will there be any cell so unwholesome as a coal-cellar or so wholesome
as a home. The weapon of the prison, therefore, like the weapon of
the fine, will be found to have considerable limitations to its
effectiveness when employed against the wretched reduced citizen of our
day. Whether it be property or liberty you cannot take from him what he
has not got. You cannot imprison a slave, because you cannot enslave a
slave.


The Barbarous Revival

(3) Most people, on hearing the suggestion that it may come to corporal
punishment at last (as it did in every slave system I ever heard of,
including some that were generally kindly, and even successful), will
merely be struck with horror and incredulity, and feel that such a
barbarous revival is unthinkable in the modern atmosphere. How far it
will be, or need be, a revival of the actual images and methods of
ruder times I will discuss in a moment. But first, as another of the
converging lines tending to corporal punishment, consider this: that for
some reason or other the old full-blooded and masculine humanitarianism
in this matter has weakened and fallen silent; it has weakened and
fallen silent in a very curious manner, the precise reason for which I
do not altogether understand. I knew the average Liberal, the average
Nonconformist minister, the average Labour Member, the average
middle-class Socialist, were, with all their good qualities, very
deficient in what I consider a respect for the human soul. But I did
imagine that they had the ordinary modern respect for the human body.
The fact, however, is clear and incontrovertible. In spite of the horror
of all humane people, in spite of the hesitation even of our corrupt and
panic-stricken Parliament, measures can now be triumphantly passed for
spreading or increasing the use of physical torture, and for applying
it to the newest and vaguest categories of crime. Thirty or forty years
ago, nay, twenty years ago, when Mr. F. Hugh O'Donnell and others forced
a Liberal Government to drop the cat-o-nine-tails like a scorpion, we
could have counted on a mass of honest hatred of such things. We cannot
count on it now.

(4) But lastly, it is not necessary that in the factories of the future
the institution of physical punishment should actually remind people of
the jambok or the knout. It could easily be developed out of the many
forms of physical discipline which are already used by employers on the
excuses of education or hygiene. Already in some factories girls are
obliged to swim whether they like it or not, or do gymnastics whether
they like it or not. By a simple extension of hours or complication of
exercises a pair of Swedish clubs could easily be so used as to leave
their victim as exhausted as one who had come off the rack. I think it
extremely likely that they will be.


IX. THE MASK OF SOCIALISM

The chief aim of all honest Socialists just now is to prevent the coming
of Socialism. I do not say it as a sneer, but, on the contrary, as a
compliment; a compliment to their political instinct and public spirit.
I admit it may be called an exaggeration; but there really is a sort of
sham Socialism that the modern politicians may quite possibly agree to
set up; if they do succeed in setting it up, the battle for the poor is
lost.

We must note, first of all, a general truth about the curious time we
live in. It will not be so difficult as some people may suppose to make
the Servile State look rather like Socialism, especially to the more
pedantic kind of Socialist. The reason is this. The old lucid and
trenchant expounder of Socialism, such as Blatchford or Fred Henderson,
always describes the economic power of the plutocrats as consisting in
private property. Of course, in a sense, this is quite true; though they
too often miss the point that private property, as such, is not the same
as property confined to the few. But the truth is that the situation has
grown much more subtle; perhaps too subtle, not to say too insane, for
straight-thinking theorists like Blatchford. The rich man to-day does
not only rule by using private property; he also rules by treating
public property as if it were private property. A man like Lord Murray
pulled the strings, especially the purse-strings; but the whole point of
his position was that all sorts of strings had got entangled. The secret
strength of the money he held did not lie merely in the fact that it was
his money. It lay precisely in the fact that nobody had any clear idea
of whether it was his money, or his successor's money, or his brother's
money, or the Marconi Company's money, or the Liberal Party's money,
or the English Nation's money. It was buried treasure; but it was not
private property. It was the acme of plutocracy because it was not
private property. Now, by following this precedent, this unprincipled
vagueness about official and unofficial moneys by the cheerful habit of
always mixing up the money in the pocket with the money in the till, it
would be quite possible to keep the rich as rich as ever in practice,
though they might have suffered confiscation in theory. Mr. Lloyd George
has four hundred a year as an M. P.; but he not only gets much more as a
Minister, but he might at any time get immeasurably more by speculating
on State secrets that are necessarily known to him. Some say that he has
even attempted something of the kind. Now, it would be quite possible to
cut Mr. George down, not to four hundred a year, but to fourpence a
day; and still leave him all these other and enormous financial
superiorities. It must be remembered that a Socialist State, in any way
resembling a modern State, must, however egalitarian it may be, have the
handling of huge sums, and the enjoyment of large conveniences; it is
not improbable that the same men will handle and enjoy in much the same
manner, though in theory they are doing it as instruments, and not as
individuals. For instance, the Prime Minister has a private house, which
is also (I grieve to inform that eminent Puritan) a public house. It
is supposed to be a sort of Government office; though people do not
generally give children's parties, or go to bed in a Government office.
I do not know where Mr. Herbert Samuel lives; but I have no doubt he
does himself well in the matter of decoration and furniture. On the
existing official parallel there is no need to move any of these
things in order to Socialise them. There is no need to withdraw one
diamond-headed nail from the carpet; or one golden teaspoon from the
tray. It is only necessary to call it an official residence, like
10 Downing-street. I think it is not at all improbable that this
Plutocracy, pretending to be a Bureaucracy, will be attempted or
achieved. Our wealthy rulers will be in the position which grumblers
in the world of sport sometimes attribute to some of the "gentlemen"
players. They assert that some of these are paid like any professional;
only their pay is called their expenses. This system might run side by
side with a theory of equal wages, as absolute as that once laid down by
Mr. Bernard Shaw. By the theory of the State, Mr. Herbert Samuel and Mr.
Lloyd George might be humble citizens, drudging for their fourpence
a day; and no better off than porters and coal-heavers. If there were
presented to our mere senses what appeared to be the form of Mr. Herbert
Samuel in an astrakhan coat and a motor-car, we should find the record
of the expenditure (if we could find it at all) under the heading of
"Speed Limit Extension Enquiry Commission." If it fell to our lot to
behold (with the eye of flesh) what seemed to be Mr. Lloyd George
lying in a hammock and smoking a costly cigar, we should know that the
expenditure would be divided between the "Condition of Rope and Netting
Investigation Department," and the "State of Cuban Tobacco Trade:
Imperial Inspector's Report."

Such is the society I think they will build unless we can knock it down
as fast as they build it. Everything in it, tolerable or intolerable,
will have but one use; and that use what our ancestors used to
call usance or usury. Its art may be good or bad, but it will be an
advertisement for usurers; its literature may be good or bad, but it
will appeal to the patronage of usurers; its scientific selection will
select according to the needs of usurers; its religion will be just
charitable enough to pardon usurers; its penal system will be just cruel
enough to crush all the critics of usurers: the truth of it will be
Slavery: and the title of it may quite possibly be Socialism.




THE ESCAPE

     We watched you building, stone by stone,
     The well-washed cells and well-washed graves
     We shall inhabit but not own
     When Britons ever shall be slaves;
     The water's waiting in the trough,
     The tame oats sown are portioned free,
     There is Enough, and just Enough,
     And all is ready now but we.


     But you have not caught us yet, my lords,
     You have us still to get.
     A sorry army you'd have got,
     Its flags are rags that float and rot,
     Its drums are empty pan and pot,
     Its baggage is--an empty cot;
     But you have not caught us yet.


     A little; and we might have slipped
     When came your rumours and your sales
     And the foiled rich men, feeble-lipped,
     Said and unsaid their sorry tales;
     Great God!  It needs a bolder brow
     To keep ten sheep inside a pen,
     And we are sheep no longer now;
     You are but Masters.  We are Men.


     We give you all good thanks, my lords,
     We buy at easy price;
     Thanks for the thousands that you stole,
     The bribes by wire, the bets on coal,
     The knowledge of that naked whole
     That hath delivered our flesh and soul
     Out of your Paradise.


     We had held safe your parks; but when
     Men taunted you with bribe and fee,
     We only saw the Lord of Men
     Grin like an Ape and climb a tree;
     And humbly had we stood without
     Your princely barns; did we not see
     In pointed faces peering out
     What Rats now own the granary.


     It is too late, too late, my lords,
     We give you back your grace:
     You cannot with all cajoling
     Make the wet ditch, or winds that sting,
     Lost pride, or the pawned wedding rings,
     Or drink or Death a blacker thing
     Than a smile upon your face.





THE NEW RAID

The two kinds of social reform, one of which might conceivably free
us at last while the other would certainly enslave us forever, are
exhibited in an easy working model in the two efforts that have been
made for the soldiers' wives--I mean the effort to increase their
allowance and the effort to curtail their alleged drinking. In the
preliminary consideration, at any rate, we must see the second question
as quite detached from our own sympathies on the special subject of
fermented liquor. It could be applied to any other pleasure or ornament
of life; it will be applied to every other pleasure and ornament of life
if the Capitalist campaign can succeed. The argument we know; but
it cannot be too often made clear. An employer, let us say, pays a
seamstress twopence a day, and she does not seem to thrive on it. So
little, perhaps, does she thrive on it that the employer has even some
difficulty in thriving upon her. There are only two things that he can
do, and the distinction between them cuts the whole social and political
world in two. It is a touchstone by which we can--not sometimes, but
always--distinguish economic equality from servile social reform. He can
give the girl some magnificent sum, such as sixpence a day, to do as she
likes with, and trust that her improved health and temper will work for
the benefit of his business. Or he may keep her to the original sum of a
shilling a week, but earmark each of the pennies to be used or not to
be used for a particular purpose. If she must not spend this penny on a
bunch of violets, or that penny on a novelette, or the other penny on
a toy for some baby, it is possible that she will concentrate her
expenditure more upon physical necessities, and so become, from the
employer's point of view, a more efficient person. Without the trouble
of adding twopence to her wages, he has added twopenny-worth to her
food. In short, she has the holy satisfaction of being worth more
without being paid more.

This Capitalist is an ingenious person, and has many polished
characteristics; but I think the most singular thing about him is his
staggering lack of shame. Neither the hour of death nor the day of
reckoning, neither the tent of exile nor the house of mourning, neither
chivalry nor patriotism, neither womanhood nor widowhood, is safe at
this supreme moment from his dirty little expedient of dieting the
slave. As similar bullies, when they collect the slum rents, put a
foot in the open door, these are always ready to push in a muddy wedge
wherever there is a slit in a sundered household or a crack in a broken
heart. To a man of any manhood nothing can be conceived more loathsome
and sacrilegious than even so much as asking whether a woman who has
given up all she loved to death and the fatherland has or has not shown
some weakness in her seeking for self-comfort. I know not in which of
the two cases I should count myself the baser for inquiring--a case
where the charge was false or a case where it was true. But the
philanthropic employer of the sort I describe is not a man of any
manhood; in a sense he is not a man at all. He shows some consciousness
of the fact when he calls his workers "men" as distinct from masters. He
cannot comprehend the gallantry of costermongers or the delicacy that is
quite common among cabmen. He finds this social reform by half-rations
on the whole to his mercantile profit, and it will be hard to get him to
think of anything else.

But there are people assisting him, people like the Duchess of
Marlborough, who know not their right hand from their left, and to these
we may legitimately address our remonstrance and a resume of some of
the facts they do not know. The Duchess of Marlborough is, I believe,
an American, and this separates her from the problem in a special way,
because the drink question in America is entirely different from the
drink question in England. But I wish the Duchess of Marlborough would
pin up in her private study, side by side with the Declaration of
Independence, a document recording the following simple truths: (1)
Beer, which is largely drunk in public-houses, is not a spirit or a grog
or a cocktail or a drug. It is the common English liquid for quenching
the thirst; it is so still among innumerable gentlemen, and, until very
lately, was so among innumerable ladies. Most of us remember dames of
the last generation whose manners were fit for Versailles, and who drank
ale or Stout as a matter of course. Schoolboys drank ale as a matter of
course, and their schoolmasters gave it to them as a matter of course.
To tell a poor woman that she must not have any until half the day is
over is simply cracked, like telling a dog or a child that he must
not have water. (2) The public-house is not a secret rendezvous of bad
characters. It is the open and obvious place for a certain purpose,
which all men used for that purpose until the rich began to be snobs
and the poor to become slaves. One might as well warn people against
Willesden Junction. (3) Many poor people live in houses where they
cannot, without great preparation, offer hospitality. (4) The climate of
these picturesque islands does not favour conducting long conversations
with one's oldest friends on an iron seat in the park. (5) Halfpast
eleven a.m. is not early in the day for a woman who gets up before six.
(6) The bodies and minds of these women belong to God and to themselves.




THE NEW NAME

Something has come into our community, which is strong enough to save
our community; but which has not yet got a name. Let no one fancy I
confess any unreality when I confess the namelessness. The morality
called Puritanism, the tendency called Liberalism, the reaction called
Tory Democracy, had not only long been powerful, but had practically
done most of their work, before these actual names were attached to
them. Nevertheless, I think it would be a good thing to have some
portable and practicable way of referring to those who think as we do
in our main concern. Which is, that men in England are ruled, at this
minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who
refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to
enslave.

Let me explain first why I am not satisfied with the word commonly used,
which I have often used myself; and which, in some contexts, is quite
the right word to use. I mean the word "rebel." Passing over the fact
that many who understand the justice of our cause (as a great many at
the Universities) would still use the word "rebel" in its old and strict
sense as meaning only a disturber of just rule. I pass to a much more
practical point. The word "rebel" understates our cause. It is much too
mild; it lets our enemies off much too easily. There is a tradition in
all western life and letters of Prometheus defying the stars, of man
at war with the Universe, and dreaming what nature had never dared to
dream. All this is valuable in its place and proportion. But it has
nothing whatever to do with our ease; or rather it very much weakens it.
The plutocrats will be only too pleased if we profess to preach a new
morality; for they know jolly well that they have broken the old one.
They will be only too pleased to be able to say that we, by our own
confession, are merely restless and negative; that we are only what we
call rebels and they call cranks. But it is not true; and we must not
concede it to them for a moment. The model millionaire is more of a
crank than the Socialists; just as Nero was more of a crank than the
Christians. And avarice has gone mad in the governing class to-day, just
as lust went mad in the circle of Nero. By all the working and orthodox
standards of sanity, capitalism is insane. I should not say to Mr.
Rockefeller "I am a rebel." I should say "I am a respectable man: and
you are not."


Our Lawless Enemies

But the vital point is that the confession of mere rebellion softens
the startling lawlessness of our enemies. Suppose a publisher's clerk
politely asked his employer for a rise in his salary; and, on being
refused, said he must leave the employment? Suppose the employer knocked
him down with a ruler, tied him up as a brown paper parcel, addressed
him (in a fine business hand) to the Governor of Rio Janeiro and then
asked the policeman to promise never to arrest him for what he had
done? That is a precise copy, in every legal and moral principle, of the
"deportation of the strikers." They were assaulted and kidnapped for not
accepting a contract, and for nothing else; and the act was so avowedly
criminal that the law had to be altered afterwards to cover the crime.
Now suppose some postal official, between here and Rio Janeiro, had
noticed a faint kicking inside the brown paper parcel, and had attempted
to ascertain the cause. And suppose the clerk could only explain, in a
muffled voice through the brown paper, that he was by constitution and
temperament a Rebel. Don't you see that he would be rather understating
his case? Don't you see he would be bearing his injuries much too
meekly? They might take him out of the parcel; but they would very
possibly put him into a mad-house instead. Symbolically speaking, that
is what they would like to do with us. Symbolically speaking, the dirty
misers who rule us will put us in a mad-house--unless we can put them
there.

Or suppose a bank cashier were admittedly allowed to take the money out
of the till, and put it loose in his pocket, more or less mixed up with
his own money; afterwards laying some of both (at different odds) on
"Blue Murder" for the Derby. Suppose when some depositor asked mildly
what day the accountants came, he smote that astonished inquirer on the
nose, crying: "Slanderer! Mud-slinger!" and suppose he then resigned his
position. Suppose no books were shown. Suppose when the new cashier came
to be initiated into his duties, the old cashier did not tell him about
the money, but confided it to the honour and delicacy of his own maiden
aunt at Cricklewood. Suppose he then went off in a yacht to visit
the whale fisheries of the North Sea. Well, in every moral and legal
principle, that is a precise account of the dealings with the Party
Funds. But what would the banker say? What would the clients say? One
thing, I think, I can venture to promise; the banker would not march up
and down the office exclaiming in rapture, "I'm a rebel! That's what I
am, a rebel!" And if he said to the first indignant depositor "You are
a rebel," I fear the depositor might answer, "You are a robber." We have
no need to elaborate arguments for breaking the law. The capitalists
have broken the law. We have no need of further moralities. They have
broken their own morality. It is as if you were to run down the street
shouting, "Communism! Communism! Share! Share!" after a man who had run
away with your watch.

We want a term that will tell everybody that there is, by the common
standard, frank fraud and cruelty pushed to their fierce extreme; and
that we are fighting THEM. We are not in a state of "divine discontent";
we are in an entirely human and entirely reasonable rage. We say we have
been swindled and oppressed, and we are quite ready and able to prove it
before any tribunal that allows us to call a swindler a swindler. It is
the protection of the present system that most of its tribunals do not.
I cannot at the moment think of any party name that would particularly
distinguish us from our more powerful and prosperous opponents, unless
it were the name the old Jacobites gave themselves; the Honest Party.


Captured Our Standards

I think it is plain that for the purpose of facing these new and
infamous modern facts, we cannot, with any safety, depend on any of the
old nineteenth century names; Socialist, or Communist, or Radical, or
Liberal, or Labour. They are all honourable names; they all stand, or
stood, for things in which we may still believe; we can still apply them
to other problems; but not to this one. We have no longer a monopoly
of these names. Let it be understood that I am not speaking here of the
philosophical problem of their meaning, but of the practical problem of
their use. When I called myself a Radical I knew Mr. Balfour would not
call himself a Radical; therefore there was some use in the word. When
I called myself a Socialist I knew Lord Penrhyn would not call himself
a Socialist; therefore there was some use in the word. But the
capitalists, in that aggressive march which is the main fact of our
time, have captured our standards, both in the military and philosophic
sense of the word. And it is useless for us to march under colours which
they can carry as well as we.

Do you believe in Democracy? The devils also believe and tremble. Do you
believe in Trades Unionism? The Labour Members also believe; and tremble
like a falling teetotum. Do you believe in the State? The Samuels also
believe, and grin. Do you believe in the centralisation of Empire? So
did Beit. Do you believe in the decentralisation of Empire? So does
Albu. Do you believe in the brotherhood of men: and do you, dear
brethren, believe that Brother Arthur Henderson does not? Do you cry,
"The world for the workers!" and do you imagine Philip Snowden would
not? What we need is a name that shall declare, not that the modern
treason and tyranny are bad, but that they are quite literally,
intolerable: and that we mean to act accordingly. I really think "the
Limits" would be as good a name as any. But, anyhow, something is born
among us that is as strong as an infant Hercules: and it is part of
my prejudices to want it christened. I advertise for godfathers and
godmothers.




A WORKMAN'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

A thing which does not exist and which is very much wanted is "A
Working-Man's History of England." I do not mean a history written
for working men (there are whole dustbins of them), I mean a history,
written by working men or from the working men's standpoint. I wish five
generations of a fisher's or a miner's family could incarnate themselves
in one man and tell the story.

It is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent
a literary artist as Mr. Laurence Housman, but I do not deal here so
specially with his well known conviction about Votes for Women, as with
another idea which is, I think, rather at the back of it, if not with
him at least with others; and which concerns this matter of the true
story of England. For the true story is so entirely different from the
false official story that the official classes tell that by this time
the working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience.
Either story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage,
which, therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing
that, so long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story,
it seems to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up
with Female Suffrage or not.

Now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately
educated people have absorbed from childhood is something like this.
That we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power
and wealth were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King's
power was broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that
this piece-meal improvement was brought about by one class after
another waking up to a sense of citizenship and demanding a place in
the national councils, frequently by riot or violence; and that in
consequence of such menacing popular action, the franchise was granted
to one class after another and used more and more to improve the social
conditions of those classes, until we practically became a democracy,
save for such exceptions as that of the women. I do not think anyone
will deny that something like that is the general idea of the educated
man who reads a newspaper and of the newspaper that he reads. That
is the view current at public schools and colleges; it is part of the
culture of all the classes that count for much in government; and there
is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end.


That Great Reform Bill

Wealth and political power were very much more popularly distributed
in the Middle Ages than they are now; but we will pass all that and
consider recent history. The franchise has never been largely and
liberally granted in England; half the males have no vote and are not
likely to get one. It was _never_ granted in reply to pressure from
awakened sections of the democracy; in every case there was a perfectly
clear motive for granting it solely for the convenience of the
aristocrats. The Great Reform Bill was not passed in response to such
riots as that which destroyed a Castle; nor did the men who destroyed
the Castle get any advantage whatever out of the Great Reform Bill. The
Great Reform Bill was passed in order to seal an alliance between the
landed aristocrats and the rich manufacturers of the north (an alliance
that rules us still); and the chief object of that alliance was to
_prevent_ the English populace getting any political power in the
general excitement after the French Revolution. No one can read
Macaulay's speech on the Chartists, for instance, and not see that this
is so. Disraeli's further extension of the suffrage was not effected
by the intellectual vivacity and pure republican theory of the
mid-Victorian agricultural labourer; it was effected by a politician
who saw an opportunity to dish the Whigs, and guessed that certain
orthodoxies in the more prosperous artisan might yet give him a balance
against the commercial Radicals. And while this very thin game of
wire-pulling with the mere abstraction of the vote was being worked
entirely by the oligarchs and entirely in their interests, the solid and
real thing that was going on was the steady despoiling of the poor
of all power or wealth, until they find themselves to-day upon the
threshold of slavery. That is The Working Man's History of England.

Now, as I have said, I care comparatively little what is done with the
mere voting part of the matter, so long as it is not claimed in such
a way as to allow the plutocrat to escape his responsibility for
his crimes, by pretending to be much more progressive, or much more
susceptible to popular protest, than he ever has been. And there is this
danger in many of those who have answered me. One of them, for
instance, says that women have been forced into their present industrial
situations by the same iron economic laws that have compelled men. I say
that men have not been compelled by iron economic laws, but in the main
by the coarse and Christless cynicism of other men. But, of course,
this way of talking is exactly in accordance with the fashionable
and official version of English history. Thus, you will read that the
monasteries, places where men of the poorest origin could be powerful,
grew corrupt and gradually decayed. Or you will read that the mediaeval
guilds of free workmen yielded at last to an inevitable economic law.
You will read this; and you will be reading lies. They might as well say
that Julius Caesar gradually decayed at the foot of Pompey's statue. You
might as well say that Abraham Lincoln yielded at last to an inevitable
economic law. The free mediaeval guilds did not decay; they were
murdered. Solid men with solid guns and halberds, armed with lawful
warrants from living statesmen broke up their corporations and took away
their hard cash from them. In the same way the people in Cradley Heath
are no more victims of a necessary economic law than the people in
Putumayo. They are victims of a very terrible creature, of whose sins
much has been said since the beginning of the world; and of whom it was
said of old, "Let us fall into the hands of God, for His mercies are
great; but let us not fall into the hands of Man."


The Capitalist Is in the Dock

Now it is this offering of a false economic excuse for the sweater that
is the danger in perpetually saying that the poor woman will use the
vote and that the poor man has not used it. The poor man is prevented
from using it; prevented by the rich man, and the poor woman would be
prevented in exactly the same gross and stringent style. I do not deny,
of course, that there is something in the English temperament, and in
the heritage of the last few centuries that makes the English workman
more tolerant of wrong than most foreign workmen would be. But this only
slightly modifies the main fact of the moral responsibility. To take an
imperfect parallel, if we said that negro slaves would have rebelled
if negroes had been more intelligent, we should be saying what is
reasonable. But if we were to say that it could by any possibility be
represented as being the negro's fault that he was at that moment
in America and not in Africa, we should be saying what is frankly
unreasonable. It is every bit as unreasonable to say the mere supineness
of the English workmen has put them in the capitalist slave-yard. The
capitalist has put them in the capitalist slaveyard; and very cunning
smiths have hammered the chains. It is just this creative criminality in
the authors of the system that we must not allow to be slurred over. The
capitalist is in the dock to-day; and so far as I at least can prevent
him, he shall not get out of it.




THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE IRISH

It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out
of the body politic. Some of its most indirect effects are the most
dangerous. One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most
Englishmen the Party System falsifies history, and especially the
history of revolutions. It falsifies history because it simplifies
history. It paints everything either Blue or Buff in the style of its
own silly circus politics: while a real revolution has as many colours
as the sunrise--or the end of the world. And if we do not get rid of
this error we shall make very bad blunders about the real revolution
which seems to grow more and more probable, especially among the Irish.
And any human familiarity with history will teach a man this first of
all: that Party practically does not exist in a real revolution. It is a
game for quiet times.

If you take a boy who has been to one of those big private schools which
are falsely called the Public Schools, and another boy who has been to
one of those large public schools which are falsely called the Board
Schools, you will find some differences between the two, chiefly a
difference in the management of the voice. But you will find they
are both English in a special way, and that their education has been
essentially the same. They are ignorant on the same subjects. They have
never heard of the same plain facts. They have been taught the wrong
answer to the same confusing question. There is one fundamental element
in the attitude of the Eton master talking about "playing the game,"
and the elementary teacher training gutter-snipes to sing, "What is the
Meaning of Empire Day?" And the name of that element is "unhistoric." It
knows nothing really about England, still less about Ireland or France,
and, least of all, of course, about anything like the French Revolution.


Revolution by Snap Division

Now what general notion does the ordinary English boy, thus taught to
utter one ignorance in one of two accents, get and keep through life
about the French Revolution? It is the notion of the English House of
Commons with an enormous Radical majority on one side of the table and
a small Tory minority on the other; the majority voting solid for a
Republic, the minority voting solid for a Monarchy; two teams tramping
through two lobbies with no difference between their methods and ours,
except that (owing to some habit peculiar to Gaul) the brief intervals
were brightened by a riot or a massacre, instead of by a whisky and soda
and a Marconi tip. Novels are much more reliable than histories in such
matters. For though an English novel about France does not tell the
truth about France, it does tell the truth about England; and more than
half the histories never tell the truth about anything. And popular
fiction, I think, bears witness to the general English impression. The
French Revolution is a snap division with an unusual turnover of votes.
On the one side stand a king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded
by nobles with rapiers drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are
wicked, all of whom are good-looking. Against these there is a formless
mob of human beings, wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all
blindly follow ruffians who are also rhetoricians; some of whom die
repentant and others unrepentant towards the end of the fourth act.
The leaders of this boiling mass of all men melted into one are called
Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and so on. And it is conceded that
their united frenzy may have been forced on them by the evils of the old
regime.

That, I think, is the commonest English view of the French Revolution;
and it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or
letter of the period. These human beings were human; varied, complex and
inconsistent. But the rich Englishman, ignorant of revolutions, would
hardly believe you if you told him some of the common human subtleties
of the case. Tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt in
disgust, while the king had worn it with a broad grin, so to speak; tell
him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of the Terror, said
quite sincerely to a noble, "I am more monarchist than you;" tell him
that the Terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by
the efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it--and he
will not believe these things. He will not believe them because he has
no humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself;
and so could never be inside another man. The truth is that in the
French affair everybody occupied an individual position. Every man
talked sincerely, if not because he was sincere, then because he was
angry. Robespierre talked even more about God than about the Republic
because he cared even more about God than about the Republic. Danton
talked even more about France than about the Republic because he cared
even more about France than about the Republic. Marat talked more about
Humanity than either, because that physician (though himself somewhat
needing a physician) really cared about it. The nobles were divided,
each man from the next. The attitude of the king was quite different
from the attitude of the queen; certainly much more different than any
differences between our Liberals and Tories for the last twenty years.
And it will sadden _some_ of my friends to remember that it was the king
who was the Liberal and the queen who was the Tory. There were not two
people, I think, in that most practical crisis who stood in precisely
the same attitude towards the situation. And that is why, between them,
they saved Europe. It is when you really perceive the unity of mankind
that you really perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a
very sacred truth, to say that when men really understand that they are
brothers they instantly begin to fight.


The Revival of Reality

Now these things are repeating themselves with an enormous reality in
the Irish Revolution. You will not be able to make a Party System out of
the matter. Everybody is in revolt; therefore everybody is telling the
truth. The Nationalists will go on caring most for the nation, as Danton
and the defenders of the frontier went on caring most for the nation.
The priests will go on caring most for religion, as Robespierre went on
caring most for religion. The Socialists will go on caring most for the
cure of physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is
out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the
modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that
there is something in the other person's position. And those drilled in
party discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is
nothing there is Satan.

For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real
battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and
Parnell bargained--each knowing the other to be a power. But in real
revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another
man until he has disagreed with him.




LIBERALISM: A SAMPLE

There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much
as Tom Pinch felt towards Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had
found him out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all
democrats, about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen
plutocracy of to-day. And one of the things that it was fashionable to
say of Dickens in drawing-rooms was that he had no subtlety, and could
not describe a complex frame of mind. Like most other things that are
said in drawing-rooms, it was a lie. Dickens was a very unequal writer,
and his successes alternate with his failures; but his successes
are subtle quite as often as they are simple. Thus, to take "Martin
Chuzzlewit" alone, I should call the joke about the Lord No-zoo a simple
joke: but I should call the joke about Mrs. Todgers's vision of a wooden
leg a subtle joke. And no frame of mind was ever so self-contradictory
and yet so realistic as that which Dickens describes when he says, in
effect, that, though Pinch knew now that there had never been such a
person as Pecksniff, in his ideal sense, he could not bring himself
to insult the very face and form that had contained the legend. The
parallel with Liberal journalism is not perfect; because it was once
honest; and Pecksniff presumably never was. And even when I come to feel
a final incompatibility of temper, Pecksniff was not so Pecksniffian as
he has since become. But the comparison is complete in so far as I share
all the reluctance of Mr. Pinch. Some old heathen king was advised by
one of the Celtic saints, I think, to burn what he had adored and adore
what he had burnt. I am quite ready, if anyone will prove I was wrong,
to adore what I have burnt; but I do really feel an unwillingness
verging upon weakness to burning what I have adored. I think it is a
weakness to be overcome in times as bad as these, when (as Mr. Orage
wrote with something like splendid common sense the other day) there is
such a lot to do and so few people who will do it. So I will devote
this article to considering one case of the astounding baseness to which
Liberal journalism has sunk.


Mental Breakdown in Fleet Street

One of the two or three streaks of light on our horizon can be perceived
in this: that the moral breakdown of these papers has been accompanied
by a mental breakdown also. The contemporary official paper, like the
"Daily News" or the "Daily Chronicle" (I mean in so far as it deals with
politics), simply cannot argue; and simply does not pretend to argue. It
considers the solution which it imagines that wealthy people want, and
it signifies the same in the usual manner; which is not by holding
up its hand, but by falling on its face. But there is no more curious
quality in its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of
hurry and fatigue, with which it flings down its argument--or rather its
refusal to argue. It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything.
It does not so much poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the
reader hasn't got one. For instance, one of these papers printed an
article on Sir Stuart Samuel, who, having broken the great Liberal
statute against corruption, will actually, perhaps, be asked to pay his
own fine--in spite of the fact that he can well afford to do so. The
article says, if I remember aright, that the decision will cause general
surprise and some indignation. That any modern Government making a very
rich capitalist obey the law will cause general surprise, may be true.
Whether it will cause general indignation rather depends on whether
our social intercourse is entirely confined to Park Lane, or any such
pigsties built of gold. But the journalist proceeds to say, his neck
rising higher and higher out of his collar, and his hair rising higher
and higher on his head, in short, his resemblance to the Dickens'
original increasing every instant, that he does not mean that the law
against corruption should be less stringent, but that the burden should
be borne by the whole community. This may mean that whenever a rich man
breaks the law, all the poor men ought to be made to pay his fine. But
I will suppose a slightly less insane meaning. I will suppose it means
that the whole power of the commonwealth should be used to prosecute an
offender of this kind. That, of course, can only mean that the matter
will be decided by that instrument which still pretends to represent
the whole power of the commonwealth. In other words, the Government will
judge the Government.

Now this is a perfectly plain piece of brute logic. We need not go into
the other delicious things in the article, as when it says that "in old
times Parliament had to be protected against Royal invasion by the man
in the street." Parliament has to be protected now against the man
in the street. Parliament is simply the most detested and the most
detestable of all our national institutions: all that is evident enough.
What is interesting is the blank and staring fallacy of the attempted
reply.


When the Journalist Is Ruined

A long while ago, before all the Liberals died, a Liberal introduced
a Bill to prevent Parliament being merely packed with the slaves of
financial interests. For that purpose he established the excellent
democratic principle that the private citizen, as such, might protest
against public corruption. He was called the Common Informer. I
believe the miserable party papers are really reduced to playing on the
degradation of the two words in modern language. Now the word "common"
in "Common Informer" means exactly what it means in "common sense" or
"Book of Common Prayer," or (above all) in "House of Commons." It
does not mean anything low or vulgar; any more than they do. The only
difference is that the House of Commons really is low and vulgar; and
the Common Informer isn't. It is just the same with the word "Informer."
It does not mean spy or sneak. It means one who gives information. It
means what "journalist" ought to mean. The only difference is that the
Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist
will be ruined if he does.

Now the quite plain point before the party journalist is this: If
he really means that a corrupt bargain between a Government and a
contractor ought to be judged by public opinion, he must (nowadays) mean
Parliament; that is, the caucus that controls Parliament. And he must
decide between one of two views. Either he means that there can be no
such thing as a corrupt Government. Or he means that it is one of the
characteristic qualities of a corrupt Government to denounce its own
corruption. I laugh; and I leave him his choice.




THE FATIGUE OF FLEET STREET

Why is the modern party political journalism so bad? It is worse even
than it intends to be. It praises its preposterous party leaders through
thick and thin; but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater
fools than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs
of public men, as they are snapshotted at public meetings. A sensitive
politician (if there is such a thing) would, I should think, want to
murder the man who snapshots him at those moments. For our general
impression of a man's gesture or play of feature is made up of a series
of vanishing instants, at any one of which he may look worse than our
general impression records. Mr. Augustine Birrell may have made quite a
sensible and amusing speech, in the course of which his audience would
hardly have noticed that he resettled his necktie. Snapshot him, and
he appears as convulsively clutching his throat in the agonies of
strangulation, and with his head twisted on one side as if he had been
hanged. Sir Edward Carson might make a perfectly good speech, which no
one thought wearisome, but might himself be just tired enough to shift
from one leg to the other. Snapshot him, and he appears as holding one
leg stiffly in the air and yawning enough to swallow the audience.
But it is in the prose narratives of the Press that we find most
manifestations of this strange ineptitude; this knack of exhibiting your
own favourites in an unlucky light. It is not so much that the party
journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell just enough of it
to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of their favourite
blunders is an amazing sort of bathos. They begin by telling you that
some statesman said something brilliant in style or biting in wit, at
which his hearers thrilled with terror or thundered with applause. And
then they tell you what it was that he said. Silly asses!


Insane Exaggeration

Here is an example from a leading Liberal paper touching the debates on
Home Rule. I am a Home Ruler; so my sympathies would be, if anything, on
the side of the Liberal paper upon that point. I merely quote it as
an example of this ridiculous way of writing, which, by insane
exaggeration, actually makes its hero look smaller than he is.

This was strange language to use about the "hypocritical sham," and Mr.
Asquith, knowing that the biggest battle of his career was upon him,
hit back without mercy. "I should like first to know," said he, with a
glance at his supporters, "whether my proposals are accepted?"

That's all. And I really do not see why poor Mr. Asquith should be
represented as having violated the Christian virtue of mercy by saying
that. I myself could compose a great many paragraphs upon the same
model, each containing its stinging and perhaps unscrupulous epigram.
As, for example:--"The Archbishop of Canterbury, realising that his
choice now lay between denying God and earning the crown of martyrdom by
dying in torments, spoke with a frenzy of religious passion that might
have seemed fanatical under circumstances less intense. 'The Children's
Service,' he said firmly, with his face to the congregation, 'will be
held at half-past four this afternoon as usual.'"

Or, we might have:--"Lord Roberts, recognising that he had now to face
Armageddon, and that if he lost this last battle against overwhelming
odds the independence of England would be extinguished forever,
addressed to his soldiers (looking at them and not falling off his
horse) a speech which brought their national passions to boiling point,
and might well have seemed blood-thirsty in quieter times. It ended with
the celebrated declaration that it was a fine day."

Or we might have the much greater excitement of reading something like
this:--"The Astronomer Royal, having realised that the earth would
certainly be smashed to pieces by a comet unless his requests in
connection with wireless telegraphy were seriously considered, gave an
address at the Royal Society which, under other circumstances, would
have seemed unduly dogmatic and emotional and deficient in scientific
agnosticism. This address (which he delivered without any attempt to
stand on his head) included a fierce and even ferocious declaration that
it is generally easier to see the stars by night than by day."

Now, I cannot see, on my conscience and reason, that any one of my
imaginary paragraphs is more ridiculous than the real one. Nobody can
believe that Mr. Asquith regards these belated and careful compromises
about Home Rule as "the biggest battle of his career." It is only
justice to him to say that he has had bigger battles than that. Nobody
can believe that any body of men, bodily present, either thundered or
thrilled at a man merely saying that he would like to know whether his
proposals were accepted. No; it would be far better for Parliament if
its doors were shut again, and reporters were excluded. In that case,
the outer public did hear genuine rumours of almost gigantic eloquence;
such as that which has perpetuated Pitt's reply against the charge of
youth, or Fox's bludgeoning of the idea of war as a compromise. It would
be much better to follow the old fashion and let in no reporters at all
than to follow the new fashion and select the stupidest reporters you
can find.


Their Load of Lies

Now, why do people in Fleet-street talk such tosh? People in
Fleet-street are not fools. Most of them have realised reality through
work; some through starvation; some through damnation, or something
damnably like it. I think it is simply and seriously true that they
are tired of their job. As the general said in M. Rostand's play, "la
fatigue!"

I do really believe that this is one of the ways in which God (don't get
flurried, Nature if you like) is unexpectedly avenged on things infamous
and unreasonable. And this method is that men's moral and even physical
tenacity actually give out under such a load of lies. They go on writing
their leading articles and their Parliamentary reports. They go on doing
it as a convict goes on picking oakum. But the point is not that we are
bored with their articles; the point is that they are. The work is done
worse because it is done weakly and without human enthusiasm. And it
is done weakly because of the truth we have told so many times in this
book: that it is not done for monarchy, for which men will die; or for
democracy, for which men will die; or even for aristocracy, for which
many men have died. It is done for a thing called Capitalism: which
stands out quite clearly in history in many curious ways. But the most
curious thing about it is that no man has loved it; and no man died for
it.




THE AMNESTY FOR AGGRESSION

If there is to rise out of all this red ruin something like a republic
of justice, it is essential that our views should be real views; that
is, glimpses of lives and landscapes outside ourselves. It is essential
that they should not be mere opium visions that begin and end in
smoke--and so often in cannon smoke. I make no apology, therefore, for
returning to the purely practical and realistic point I urged last week:
the fact that we shall lose everything we might have gained if we lose
the idea that the responsible person is responsible.

For instance, it is almost specially so with the one or two things in
which the British Government, or the British public, really are behaving
badly. The first, and worst of them, is the non-extension of the
Moratorium, or truce of debtor and creditor, to the very world where
there are the poorest debtors and the cruellest creditors. This is
infamous: and should be, if possible, more infamous to those who think
the war right than to those who think it wrong. Everyone knows that
the people who can least pay their debts are the people who are always
trying to. Among the poor a payment may be as rash as a speculation.
Among the rich a bankruptcy may be as safe as a bank. Considering the
class from which private soldiers are taken, there is an atrocious
meanness in the idea of buying their blood abroad, while we sell their
sticks at home. The English language, by the way, is full of delicate
paradoxes. We talk of the private soldiers because they are really
public soldiers; and we talk of the public schools because they are
really private schools. Anyhow, the wrong is of the sort that ought to
be resisted, as much in war as in peace.


Ought to Be Hammered

But as long as we speak of it as a cloudy conclusion, come to by an
anonymous club called Parliament, or a masked tribunal called the
Cabinet, we shall never get such a wrong righted. Somebody is officially
responsible for the unfairness; and that somebody ought to be hammered.
The other example, less important but more ludicrous, is the silly
boycott of Germans in England, extending even to German music. I do
not believe for a moment that the English people feel any such insane
fastidiousness. Are the English artists who practise the particularly
English art of water-colour to be forbidden to use Prussian blue? Are
all old ladies to shoot their Pomeranian dogs? But though England would
laugh at this, she will get the credit of it, and will continue: until
we ask who the actual persons are who feel sure that we should shudder
at a ballad of the Rhine. It is certain that we should find they
are capitalists. It is very probable that we should find they are
foreigners.

Some days ago the Official Council of the Independent Labour Party, or
the Independent Council of the Official Labour Party, or the Independent
and Official Council of the Labour Party (I have got quite nervous about
these names and distinctions; but they all seem to say the same thing)
began their manifesto by saying it would be difficult to assign the
degrees of responsibility which each nation had for the outbreak of the
war. Afterwards, a writer in the "Christian Commonwealth," lamenting
war in the name of Labour, but in the language of my own romantic
middle-class, said that all the nations must share the responsibility
for this great calamity of war. Now exactly as long as we go on talking
like that we shall have war after war, and calamity after calamity,
until the crack of doom. It simply amounts to a promise of pardon to
any person who will start a quarrel. It is an amnesty for assassins. The
moment any man assaults any other man he makes all the other men as
bad as himself. He has only to stab, and to vanish in a fog of
forgetfulness. The real eagles of iron, the predatory Empires, will be
delighted with this doctrine. They will applaud the Labour Concert or
Committee, or whatever it is called. They will willingly take all the
crime, with only a quarter of the conscience: they will be as ready to
share the memory as they are to share the spoil. The Powers will divide
responsibility as calmly as they divided Poland.


The Whole Loathsome Load

But I still stubbornly and meekly submit my point: that you cannot
end war without asking who began it. If you think somebody else, not
Germany, began it, then blame that somebody else: do not blame everybody
and nobody. Perhaps you think that a small sovereign people, fresh from
two triumphant wars, ought to discrown itself before sunrise; because
the nephew of a neighbouring Emperor has been shot by his own subjects.
Very well. Then blame Servia; and, to the extent of your influence, you
may be preventing small kingdoms being obstinate or even princes being
shot. Perhaps you think the whole thing was a huge conspiracy of Russia,
with France as a dupe and Servia as a pretext. Very well. Then blame
Russia; and, to the extent of your influence, you may be preventing
great Empires from making racial excuses for a raid. Perhaps you think
France wrong for feeling what you call "revenge," and I should
call recovery of stolen goods. Perhaps you blame Belgium for being
sentimental about her frontier; or England for being sentimental about
her word. If so, blame them; or whichever of them you think is to blame.
Or again, it is barely possible that you may think, as I do, that the
whole loathsome load has been laid upon us by the monarchy which I have
not named; still less wasted time in abusing. But if there be in Europe
a military State which has not the religion of Russia, yet has helped
Russia to tyrannise over the Poles, that State cares not for religion,
but for tyranny. If there be a State in Europe which has not the
religion of the Austrians, but has helped Austria to bully the Servians,
that State cares not for belief, but for bullying. If there be in
Europe any people or principality which respects neither republics nor
religions, to which the political ideal of Paris is as much a myth as
the mystical ideal of Moscow, then blame that: and do more than blame.
In the healthy and highly theological words of Robert Blatchford, drive
it back to the Hell from which it came.


Crying Over Spilt Blood

But whatever you do, do not blame everybody for what was certainly done
by somebody. It may be it is no good crying over spilt blood, any
more than over spilt milk. But we do not find the culprit any more by
spilling the milk over everybody; or by daubing everybody with blood.
Still less do we improve matters by watering the milk with our tears,
nor the blood either. To say that everybody is responsible means that
nobody is responsible. If in the future we see Russia annexing Rutland
(as part of the old Kingdom of Muscovy), if we see Bavaria taking a
sudden fancy to the Bank of England, or the King of the Cannibal Islands
suddenly demanding a tribute of edible boys and girls from England and
America, we may be quite certain also that the Leader of the Labour
Party will rise, with a slight cough, and say: "It would be a difficult
task to apportion the blame between the various claims which..."




REVIVE THE COURT JESTER

I hope the Government will not think just now about appointing a Poet
Laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The
business just now before the country makes a very good detective story;
but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature
always weakens a nation; but even healthy patriotic literature has
its proper time and occasion. For instance, Mr. Newbolt (who has been
suggested for the post) is a very fine poet; but I think his patriotic
lyrics would just now rather jar upon a patriot. We are rather too much
concerned about our practical seamanship to feel quite confident that
Drake will return and "drum them up the Channel as he drummed them long
ago." On the contrary, we have an uncomfortable feeling that Drake's
ship might suddenly go to the bottom, because the capitalists have made
Lloyd George abolish the Plimsoll Line. One could not, without being
understood ironically, adjure the two party teams to-day to "play up,
play up and play the game," or to "love the game more than the
prize." And there is no national hero at this moment in the soldiering
line--unless, perhaps, it is Major Archer-Shee--of whom anyone would
be likely to say: "Sed miles; sed pro patria." There is, indeed, one
beautiful poem of Mr. Newbolt's which may mingle faintly with one's
thoughts in such times, but that, alas, is to a very different tune. I
mean that one in which he echoes Turner's conception of the old wooden
ship vanishing with all the valiant memories of the English:


There's a far bell ringing At the setting of the sun, And a phantom
voice is singing Of the great days done. There's a far bell ringing, And
a phantom voice is singing Of a fame forever clinging To the great days
done. For the sunset breezes shiver, Temeraire, Temeraire, And she's
fading down the river....


Well, well, neither you nor I know whether she is fading down the river
or not. It is quite enough for us to know, as King Alfred did, that a
great many pirates have landed on both banks of the Thames.


Praise and Prophecy Impossible

At this moment that is the only kind of patriotic poem that could
satisfy the emotions of a patriotic person. But it certainly is not
the sort of poem that is expected from a Poet Laureate, either on
the highest or the lowest theory of his office. He is either a great
minstrel singing the victories of a great king, or he is a common Court
official like the Groom of the Powder Closet. In the first case his
praises should be true; in the second case they will nearly always be
false; but in either case he must praise. And what there is for him to
praise just now it would be precious hard to say. And if there is no
great hope of a real poet, there is still less hope of a real prophet.
What Newman called, I think, "The Prophetical Office," that is, the
institution of an inspired protest even against an inspired religion,
certainly would not do in modern England. The Court is not likely to
keep a tame prophet in order to encourage him to be wild. It is not
likely to pay a man to say that wolves shall howl in Downing-street and
vultures build their nests in Buckingham Palace. So vast has been the
progress of humanity that these two things are quite impossible. We
cannot have a great poet praising kings. We cannot have a great prophet
denouncing kings. So I have to fall back on a third suggestion.


The Field for a Fool

Instead of reviving the Court Poet, why not revive the Court Fool? He is
the only person who could do any good at this moment either to the
Royal or the judicial Courts. The present political situation is utterly
unsuitable for the purposes of a great poet. But it is particularly
suitable for the purposes of a great buffoon. The old jester was under
certain privileges: you could not resent the jokes of a fool, just
as you cannot resent the sermons of a curate. Now, what the present
Government of England wants is neither serious praise nor serious
denunciation; what it wants is satire. What it wants, in other words,
is realism given with gusto. When King Louis the Eleventh unexpectedly
visited his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, with a small escort, the Duke's
jester said he would give the King his fool's cap, for he was the fool
now. And when the Duke replied with dignity, "And suppose I treat him
with all proper respect?" the fool answered, "Then I will give it to
you." That is the kind of thing that somebody ought to be free to say
now. But if you say it now you will be fined a hundred pounds at the
least.


Carson's Dilemma

For the things that have been happening lately are not merely things
that one could joke about. They are themselves, truly and intrinsically,
jokes. I mean that there is a sort of epigram of unreason in the
situation itself, as there was in the situation where there was jam
yesterday and jam to-morrow but never jam to-day. Take, for instance,
the extraordinary case of Sir Edward Carson. The point is not whether we
regard his attitude in Belfast as the defiance of a sincere and dogmatic
rebel, or as the bluff of a party hack and mountebank. The point is not
whether we regard his defence of the Government at the Old Bailey as a
chivalrous and reluctant duty done as an advocate or a friend, or as
a mere case of a lawyer selling his soul for a fat brief. The point is
that whichever of the two actions we approve, and whichever of the four
explanations we adopt, Sir Edward's position is still raving nonsense.
On any argument, he cannot escape from his dilemma. It may be argued
that laws and customs should be obeyed whatever our private feelings;
and that it is an established custom to accept a brief in such a case.
But then it is a somewhat more established custom to obey an Act
of Parliament and to keep the peace. It may be argued that extreme
misgovernment justifies men in Ulster or elsewhere in refusing to obey
the law. But then it would justify them even more in refusing to
appear professionally in a law court. Etiquette cannot be at once so
unimportant that Carson may shoot at the King's uniform, and yet so
important that he must always be ready to put on his own. The Government
cannot be so disreputable that Carson need not lay down his gun, and yet
so respectable that he is bound to put on his wig. Carson cannot at once
be so fierce that he can kill in what he considers a good cause, and yet
so meek that he must argue in what he considers a bad cause. Obedience
or disobedience, conventional or unconventional, a solicitor's letter
cannot be more sacred than the King's writ; a blue bag cannot be more
rational than the British flag. The thing is rubbish read anyway, and
the only difficulty is to get a joke good enough to express it. It is a
case for the Court Jester. The phantasy of it could only be expressed by
some huge ceremonial hoax. Carson ought to be crowned with the shamrocks
and emeralds and followed by green-clad minstrels of the Clan-na-Gael,
playing "The Wearing of the Green."


Belated Chattiness by Wireless

But all the recent events are like that. They are practical jokes. The
jokes do not need to be made: they only need to be pointed out. You and
I do not talk and act as the Isaacs brothers talked and acted, by their
own most favourable account of themselves; and even their account of
themselves was by no means favourable. You and I do not talk of
meeting our own born brother "at a family function" as if he were some
infinitely distant cousin whom we only met at Christmas. You and I, when
we suddenly feel inclined for a chat with the same brother about his
dinner and the Coal Strike, do not generally select either wireless
telegraphy or the Atlantic Cable as the most obvious and economical
channel for that outburst of belated chattiness. You and I do not talk,
if it is proposed to start a railway between Catsville and Dogtown, as
if the putting up of a station at Dogtown could have no kind of economic
effect on the putting up of a station at Catsville. You and I do not
think it candid to say that when we are at one end of a telephone we
have no sort of connection with the other end. These things have got
into the region of farce; and should be dealt with farcically, not even
ferociously.


A Fool Who Shall Be Free

In the Roman Republic there was a Tribune of the People, whose person
was inviolable like an ambassador's. There was much the same idea
in Becket's attempt to remove the Priest, who was then the popular
champion, from the ordinary courts. We shall have no Tribune; for we
have no republic. We shall have no Priest; for we have no religion. The
best we deserve or can expect is a Fool who shall be free; and who shall
deliver us with laughter.





THE ART OF MISSING THE POINT

Missing the point is a very fine art; and has been carried to something
like perfection by politicians and Pressmen to-day. For the point is
generally a very sharp point; and is, moreover, sharp at both ends.
That is to say that both parties would probably impale themselves in an
uncomfortable manner if they did not manage to avoid it altogether. I
have just been looking at the election address of the official Liberal
candidate for the part of the country in which I live; and though it
is, if anything, rather more logical and free from cant than most other
documents of the sort it is an excellent example of missing the point.
The candidate has to go boring on about Free Trade and Land Reform and
Education; and nobody reading it could possibly imagine that in the town
of Wycombe, where the poll will be declared, the capital of the Wycombe
division of Bucks which the candidate is contesting, centre of the
important and vital trade on which it has thriven, a savage struggle
about justice has been raging for months past between the poor and rich,
as real as the French Revolution. The man offering himself at Wycombe as
representative of the Wycombe division simply says nothing about it at
all. It is as if a man at the crisis of the French Terror had offered
himself as a deputy for the town of Paris, and had said nothing about
the Monarchy, nothing about the Republic, nothing about the massacres,
nothing about the war; but had explained with great clearness his views
on the suppression of the Jansenists, the literary style of Racine,
the suitability of Turenae for the post of commander-in-chief, and the
religious reflections of Madame de Maintenon. For, at their best, the
candidate's topics are not topical. Home Rule is a very good thing, and
modern education is a very bad thing; but neither of them are things
that anybody is talking about in High Wycombe. This is the first and
simplest way of missing the point: deliberately to avoid and ignore it.


The Candid Candidate

It would be an amusing experiment, by the way, to go to the point
instead of avoiding it. What fun it would be to stand as a strict Party
candidate, but issue a perfectly frank and cynical Election Address.
Mr. Mosley's address begins, "Gentlemen,--Sir Alfred Cripps having been
chosen for a high judicial position and a seat in the House of Lords, a
by-election now becomes necessary, and the electors of South Bucks are
charged with the responsible duty of electing, etc., etc." But suppose
there were another candidate whose election address opened in a plain,
manly style, like this: "Gentlemen,--In the sincere hope of being myself
chosen for a high judicial position or a seat in the House of Lords,
or considerably increasing my private fortune by some Government
appointment, or, at least, inside information about the financial
prospects, I have decided that it is worth my while to disburse large
sums of money to you on various pretexts, and, with even more reluctance
to endure the bad speaking and bad ventilation of the Commons' House
of Parliament, so help me God. I have very pronounced convictions on
various political questions; but I will not trouble my fellow-citizens
with them, since I have quite made up my mind to abandon any or all
of them if requested to do so by the upper classes. The electors are
therefore charged with the entirely irresponsible duty of electing a
Member; or, in other words, I ask my neighbours round about this part,
who know I am not a bad chap in many ways, to do me a good turn in my
business, just as I might ask them to change a sovereign. My election
will have no conceivable kind of effect on anything or anybody except
myself; so I ask, as man to man, the Electors of the Southern or Wycombe
Division of the County of Buckingham to accept a ride in one of my
motor-cars; and poll early to please a pal--God Save the King." I do not
know whether you or I would be elected if we presented ourselves with
an election address of that kind; but we should have had our fun and
(comparatively speaking) saved our souls; and I have a strong suspicion
that we should be elected or rejected on a mechanical majority like
anybody else; nobody having dreamed of reading an election address any
more than an advertisement of a hair restorer.


Tyranny and Head-Dress

But there is another and more subtle way in which we may miss the point;
and that is, not by keeping a dead silence about it, but by being just
witty enough to state it wrong. Thus, some of the Liberal official
papers have almost screwed up their courage to the sticking-point about
the bestial coup d'etat in South Africa. They have screwed up their
courage to the sticking-point; and it has stuck. It cannot get any
further; because it has missed the main point. The modern Liberals make
their feeble attempts to attack the introduction of slavery into South
Africa by the Dutch and the Jews, by a very typical evasion of the vital
fact. The vital fact is simply slavery. Most of these Dutchmen have
always felt like slave-owners. Most of these Jews have always felt like
slaves. Now that they are on top, they have a particular and curious
kind of impudence, which is only known among slaves. But the Liberal
journalists will do their best to suggest that the South African
wrong consisted in what they call Martial Law. That is, that there is
something specially wicked about men doing an act of cruelty in khaki
or in vermilion, but not if it is done in dark blue with pewter buttons.
The tyrant who wears a busby or a forage cap is abominable; the tyrant
who wears a horsehair wig is excusable. To be judged by soldiers is
hell; but to be judged by lawyers is paradise.

Now the point must not be missed in this way. What is wrong with the
tyranny in Africa is not that it is run by soldiers. It would be quite
as bad, or worse, if it were run by policemen. What is wrong is that,
for the first time since Pagan times, private men are being forced to
work for a private man. Men are being punished by imprisonment or exile
for refusing to accept a job. The fact that Botha can ride on a horse,
or fire off a gun, makes him better rather than worse than any man like
Sidney Webb or Philip Snowden, who attempt the same slavery by much less
manly methods. The Liberal Party will try to divert the whole discussion
to one about what they call militarism. But the very terms of modern
politics contradict it. For when we talk of real rebels against the
present system we call them Militants. And there will be none in the
Servile State.




THE SERVILE STATE AGAIN

I read the other day, in a quotation from a German newspaper, the highly
characteristic remark that Germany having annexed Belgium would soon
re-establish its commerce and prosperity, and that, in particular,
arrangements were already being made for introducing into the new
province the German laws for the protection of workmen.

I am quite content with that paragraph for the purpose of any
controversy about what is called German atrocity. If men I know had not
told me they had themselves seen the bayoneting of a baby; if the
most respectable refugees did not bring with them stories of burning
cottages--yes, and of burning cottagers as well; if doctors did not
report what they do report of the condition of girls in the hospitals;
if there were no facts; if there were no photographs, that one phrase I
have quoted would be quite sufficient to satisfy me that the Prussians
are tyrants; tyrants in a peculiar and almost insane sense which makes
them pre-eminent among the evil princes of the earth. The first and
most striking feature is a stupidity that rises into a sort of ghastly
innocence. The protection of workmen! Some workmen, perhaps, might have
a fancy for being protected from shrapnel; some might be glad to put up
an umbrella that would ward off things dropping from the gentle
Zeppelin in heaven upon the place beneath. Some of these discontented
proletarians have taken the same view as Vandervelde their leader, and
are now energetically engaged in protecting themselves along the line
of the Yser; I am glad to say not altogether without success. It is
probable that nearly all of the Belgian workers would, on the
whole, prefer to be protected against bombs, sabres, burning cities,
starvation, torture, and the treason of wicked kings. In short, it is
probable--it is at least possible, impious as is the idea--that they
would prefer to be protected against Germans and all they represent.
But if a Belgian workman is told that he is not to be protected against
Germans, but actually to be protected by Germans, I think he may be
excused for staring. His first impulse, I imagine, will be to ask,
"Against whom? Are there any worse people to come along?"

But apart from the hellish irony of this humanitarian idea, the question
it raises is really one of solid importance for people whose politics
are more or less like ours. There is a very urgent point in that
question, "Against whom would the Belgian workmen be protected by
the German laws?" And if we pursue it, we shall be enabled to analyse
something of that poison--very largely a Prussian poison--which has long
been working in our own commonwealth, to the enslavement of the weak
and the secret strengthening of the strong. For the Prussian armies
are, pre-eminently, the advance guard of the Servile State. I say this
scientifically, and quite apart from passion or even from preference.
I have no illusions about either Belgium or England. Both have been
stained with the soot of Capitalism and blinded with the smoke of mere
Colonial ambition; both have been caught at a disadvantage in such
modern dirt and disorder; both have come out much better than I should
have expected countries so modern and so industrial to do. But in
England and Belgium there is Capitalism mixed up with a great many other
things, strong things and things that pursue other aims; Clericalism,
for instance, and militant Socialism in Belgium; Trades Unionism and
sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England. But Prussia is
Capitalism; that is, a gradually solidifying slavery; and that majestic
unity with which she moves, dragging all the dumb Germanies after her,
is due to the fact that her Servile State is complete, while ours is
incomplete. There are not mutinies; there are not even mockeries; the
voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever. For this
people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class:
in its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest
and most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is,
in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that
atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men;
and to insult an officer is death.

If anyone ask how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the
employed to the employers is brought about, we all know the answer.
It is brought about by hunger and hardness of heart, accelerated by a
certain kind of legislation, of which we have had a good deal lately
in England, but which was almost invariably borrowed from Prussia. Mr.
Herbert Samuel's suggestion that the poor should be able to put their
money in little boxes and not be able to get it out again is a sort
of standing symbol of all the rest. I have forgotten how the poor were
going to benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from
dropping sixpence down a drain. Perhaps they were going to get it back
some day; perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the
Daily Citizen; perhaps when they got their hair cut; perhaps when they
consented to be inoculated, or trepanned, or circumcised, or something.
Germany is full of this sort of legislation; and if you asked an
innocent German, who honestly believed in it, what it was, he would
answer that it was for the protection of workmen.

And if you asked again "Their protection from what?" you would have
the whole plan and problem of the Servile State plain in front of you.
Whatever notion there is, there is no notion whatever of protecting the
employed person _from his employer_. Much less is there any idea of his
ever being anywhere except under an employer. Whatever the Capitalist
wants he gets. He may have the sense to want washed and well-fed
labourers rather than dirty and feeble ones, and the restrictions may
happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser or by-laws from the
Krupps. But the Kaiser will not offend the Krupps, and the Krupps
will not offend the Kaiser. Laws of this kind, then, do not attempt to
protect workmen against the injustice of the Capitalist as the English
Trade Unions did. They do not attempt to protect workmen against the
injustice of the State as the mediaeval guilds did. Obviously they
cannot protect workmen against the foreign invader--especially when (as
in the comic case of Belgium) they are imposed by the foreign invader.
What then are such laws designed to protect workmen against? Tigers,
rattlesnakes, hyenas?

Oh, my young friends; oh, my Christian brethren, they are designed to
protect this poor person from something which to those of established
rank is more horrid than many hyenas. They are designed, my friends, to
protect a man from himself--from something that the masters of the earth
fear more than famine or war, and which Prussia especially fears as
everything fears that which would certainly be its end. They are meant
to protect a man against himself--that is, they are meant to protect a
man against his manhood.

And if anyone reminds me that there is a Socialist Party in Germany, I
reply that there isn't.




THE EMPIRE OF THE IGNORANT

That anarchic future which the more timid Tories professed to fear has
already fallen upon us. We are ruled by ignorant people. But the most
ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class,
the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. I do not say
it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are
often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, or their
humanity to animals.

There is still no better company than the young at the two Universities,
or the best of the old in the Army or some of the other services. Also,
of course, there are exceptions in the matter of learning; real scholars
like Professor Gilbert Murray or Professor Phillimore are not ignorant,
though they _are_ gentlemen. But when one looks up at any mass of the
wealthier and more powerful classes, at the Grand Stand at Epsom, at
the windows of Park-lane, at the people at a full-dress debate or a
fashionable wedding, we shall be safe in saying that they are, for the
most part, the most ill-taught, or untaught, creatures in these islands.


Literally Illiterate

It is indeed their feeble boast that they are not literally illiterate.
They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own
names--for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else. The
modern barons, however, can sign their own names--or someone else's for
a change. They can sign their own names; and that is about all they can
do. They cannot face a fact, or follow an argument, or feel a tradition;
but, least of all, can they, upon any persuasion, read through a plain
impartial book, English or foreign, that is not specially written to
soothe their panic or to please their pride. Looking up at these seats
of the mighty I can only say, with something of despair, what Robert
Lowe said of the enfranchised workmen: "We must educate our masters."

I do not mean this as paradoxical, or even as symbolical; it is simply
tame and true. The modern English rich know nothing about things, not
even about the things to which they appeal. Compared with them, the
poor are pretty sure to get some enlightenment, even if they cannot get
liberty; they must at least be technical. An old apprentice learnt
a trade, even if his master came like any Turk and banged him most
severely. The old housewife knew which side her bread was buttered, even
if it were so thin as to be almost imperceptible. The old sailor knew
the ropes; even if he knew the rope's end. Consequently, when any
of these revolted, they were concerned with things they knew, pains,
practical impossibilities, or the personal record.


But They Know

The apprentice cried "Clubs?" and cracked his neighbours' heads with
the precision and fineness of touch which only manual craftsmanship can
give. The housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how
much or how little, cold meat there was in the house. The sailor who
defied discipline by mutinying at the Nore did not defy discipline in
the sense of falling off the rigging or letting the water into the hold.
Similarly the modern proletariat, however little it may know, knows what
it is talking about.

But the curious thing about the educated class is that exactly what it
does not know is what it is talking about. I mean that it is startlingly
ignorant of those special things which it is supposed to invoke and keep
inviolate. The things that workmen invoke may be uglier, more acrid,
more sordid; but they know all about them. They know enough arithmetic
to know that prices have risen; the kind Levantine gentleman is always
there to make them fully understand the meaning of an interest sum; and
the landlord will define Rent as rigidly as Ricardo. The doctors can
always tell them the Latin for an empty stomach; and when the poor man
is treated for the time with some human respect (by the Coronet) it
almost seems a pity he is not alive to hear how legally he died.

Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering
classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for
certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as
history, reverence, the love of the land. Well, it might be no bad thing
to have something, even if it were something narrow, that testified to
the truths of religion or patriotism. But such narrow things in the
past have always at least known their own history; the bigot knew his
catechism; the patriot knew his way home. The astonishing thing about
the modern rich is their real and sincere ignorance--especially of the
things they like.


No!

Take the most topical case you can find in any drawing-room: Belfast.
Ulster is most assuredly a matter of history; and there is a sense in
which Orange resistance is a matter of religion. But go and ask any of
the five hundred fluttering ladies at a garden party (who find Carson so
splendid and Belfast so thrilling) what it is all about, when it began,
where it came from, what it really maintains? What was the history
of Ulster? What is the religion of Belfast? Do any of them know where
Ulstermen were in Grattan's time; do any of them know what was the
"Protestantism" that came from Scotland to that isle; could any of them
tell what part of the old Catholic system it really denied?

It was generally something that the fluttering ladies find in their own
Anglican churches every Sunday. It were vain to ask them to state the
doctrines of the Calvinist creed; they could not state the doctrines
of their own creed. It were vain to tell them to read the history of
Ireland; they have never read the history of England. It would matter as
little that they do not know these things, as that I do not know German;
but then German is not the only thing I am supposed to know. History and
ritual are the only things aristocrats are supposed to know; and they
don't know them.


Smile and Smile

I am not fed on turtle soup and Tokay because of my exquisite intimacy
with the style and idiom of Heine and Richter. The English governing
class is fed on turtle soup and Tokay to represent the past, of which
it is literally ignorant, as I am of German irregular verbs; and to
represent the religious traditions of the State, when it does not know
three words of theology, as I do not know three words of German.

This is the last insult offered by the proud to the humble. They rule
them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret. They smile and smile;
but they have forgotten the secret.




THE SYMBOLISM OF KRUPP

The curious position of the Krupp firm in the awful story developing
around us is not quite sufficiently grasped. There is a kind of academic
clarity of definition which does not see the proportions of things for
which everything falls within a definition, and nothing ever breaks
beyond it. To this type of mind (which is valuable when set to its
special and narrow work) there is no such thing as an exception that
proves the rule. If I vote for confiscating some usurer's millions I am
doing, they say, precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out
of a blind man's hat. They are both denials of the principle of private
property, and are equally right and equally wrong, according to our view
of that principle. I should find a great many distinctions to draw
in such a matter. First, I should say that taking a usurer's money by
proper authority is not robbery, but recovery of stolen goods. Second,
I should say that even if there were no such thing as personal property,
there would still be such a thing as personal dignity, and different
modes of robbery would diminish it in very different ways. Similarly,
there is a truth, but only a half-truth, in the saying that all modern
Powers alike rely on the Capitalist and make war on the lines of
Capitalism. It is true, and it is disgraceful. But it is _not_ equally
true and equally disgraceful. It is not true that Montenegro is as much
ruled by financiers as Prussia, just as it is not true that as many men
in the Kaiserstrasse, in Berlin, wear long knives in their belts as wear
them in the neighbourhood of the Black Mountain. It is not true that
every peasant from one of the old Russian communes is the immediate
servant of a rich man, as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller. It is as
false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write.
There is an element of Capitalism in all modern countries, as there is
an element of illiteracy in all modern countries. There are some who
think that the number of our fellow-citizens who can sign their names
ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything
in the bank to sign it for, but I am not one of these.

In any case, the position of Krupp has certain interesting aspects. When
we talk of Army contractors as among the base but active actualities of
war, we commonly mean that while the contractor benefits by the war,
the war, on the whole, rather suffers by the contractor. We regard this
unsoldierly middleman with disgust, or great anger, or contemptuous
acquiescence, or commercial dread and silence, according to our personal
position and character. But we nowhere think of him as having anything
to do with fighting in the final sense. Those worthy and wealthy persons
who employ women's labour at a few shillings a week do not do it to
obtain the best clothes for the soldiers, but to make a sufficient
profit on the worst. The only argument is whether such clothes are just
good enough for the soldiers, or are too bad for anybody or anything. We
tolerate the contractor, or we do not tolerate him; but no one admires
him especially, and certainly no one gives him any credit for any
success in the war. Confessedly or unconfessedly we knock his profits,
not only off what goes to the taxpayer, but what goes to the soldier. We
know the Army will not fight any better, at least, because the clothes
they wear were stitched by wretched women who could hardly see; or
because their boots were made by harassed helots, who never had time to
think. In war-time it is very widely confessed that Capitalism is not a
good way of ruling a patriotic or self-respecting people, and all sorts
of other things, from strict State organisation to quite casual personal
charity, are hastily substituted for it. It is recognised that the
"great employer," nine times out of ten, is no more than the schoolboy
or the page who pilfers tarts and sweets from the dishes as they go up
and down. How angry one is with him depends on temperament, on the stage
of the dinner--also on the number of tarts.

Now here comes in the real and sinister significance of Krupps. There
are many capitalists in Europe as rich, as vulgar, as selfish, as
rootedly opposed to any fellowship of the fortunate and unfortunate. But
there is no other capitalist who claims, or can pretend to claim, that
he has very appreciably _helped_ the activities of his people in war. I
will suppose that Lipton did not deserve the very severe criticisms
made on his firm by Mr. Justice Darling; but, however blameless he was,
nobody can suppose that British soldiers would charge better with the
bayonet because they had some particular kind of groceries inside them.
But Krupp can make a plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to
which his country owes nearly all of its successes could only have been
produced under the equally infernal conditions of the modern factory
and the urban and proletarian civilisation. That is why the victory of
Germany would be simply the victory of Krupp, and the victory of Krupp
would be simply the victory of Capitalism. There, and there alone,
Capitalism would be able to point to something done successfully for a
whole nation--done (as it would certainly maintain) better than small
free States or natural democracies could have done it. I confess I think
the modern Germans morally second-rate, and I think that even war, when
it is conducted most successfully by machinery, is second-rate war. But
this second-rate war will become not only the first but the only brand,
if the cannon of Krupp should conquer; and, what is very much worse, it
will be the only intelligent answer that any capitalist has yet given
against our case that Capitalism is as wasteful and as weak as it is
certainly wicked. I do not fear any such finality, for I happen to
believe in the kind of men who fight best with bayonets and whose
fathers hammered their own pikes for the French Revolution.




THE TOWER OF BEBEL

Among the cloudy and symbolic stories in the beginning of the Bible
there is one about a tower built with such vertical energy as to take a
hold on heaven, but ruined and resulting only in a confusion of tongues.
The story might be interpreted in many ways--religiously, as meaning
that spiritual insolence starts all human separations; irreligiously,
as meaning that the inhuman heavens grudge man his magnificent dream;
or merely satirically as suggesting that all attempts to reach a higher
agreement always end in more disagreement than there was before. It
might be taken by the partially intelligent Kensitite as a judgment on
Latin Christians for talking Latin. It might be taken by the somewhat
less intelligent Professor Harnack as a final proof that all prehistoric
humanity talked German. But when all was said, the symbol would remain
that a plain tower, as straight as a sword, as simple as a lily, did
nevertheless produce the deepest divisions that have been known among
men. In any case we of the world in revolt--Syndicalists, Socialists,
Guild Socialists, or whatever we call ourselves--have no need to worry
about the scripture or the allegory. We have the reality. For whatever
reason, what is said to have happened to the people of Shinak has
precisely and practically happened to us.

None of us who have known Socialists (or rather, to speak more
truthfully, none of us who have been Socialists) can entertain the
faintest doubt that a fine intellectual sincerity lay behind what
was called "L'Internationale." It was really felt that Socialism was
universal like arithmetic. It was too true for idiom or turn of phrase.
In the formula of Karl Marx men could find that frigid fellowship which
they find when they agree that two and two make four. It was almost as
broadminded as a religious dogma.

Yet this universal language has not succeeded, at a moment of crisis,
in imposing itself on the whole world. Nay, it has not, at the moment
of crisis, succeeded in imposing itself on its own principal champions.
Herve is not talking Economic Esperanto; he is talking French. Bebel is
not talking Economic Esperanto; he is talking German. Blatchford is
not talking Economic Esperanto; he is talking English, and jolly good
English, too. I do not know whether French or Flemish was Vandervelde's
nursery speech, but I am quite certain he will know more of it after
this struggle than he knew before. In short, whether or no there be a
new union of hearts, there has really and truly been a new division of
tongues.

How are we to explain this singular truth, even if we deplore it? I
dismiss with fitting disdain the notion that it is a mere result of
military terrorism or snobbish social pressure. The Socialist leaders
of modern Europe are among the most sincere men in history; and their
Nationalist note in this affair has had the ring of their sincerity. I
will not waste time on the speculation that Vandervelde is bullied by
Belgian priests; or that Blatchford is frightened of the horse-guards
outside Whitehall. These great men support the enthusiasm of their
conventional countrymen because they share it; and they share it because
there is (though perhaps only at certain great moments) such a thing as
pure democracy.

Timour the Tartar, I think, celebrated some victory with a tower built
entirely out of human skulls; perhaps he thought _that_ would reach to
heaven. But there is no cement in such building; the veins and ligaments
that hold humanity together have long fallen away; the skulls will roll
impotently at a touch; and ten thousand more such trophies could only
make the tower taller and crazier. I think the modern official apparatus
of "votes" is very like that tottering monument. I think the Tartar
"counted heads," like an electioneering agent. Sometimes when I have
seen from the platform of some paltry party meeting the rows and rows of
grinning upturned faces, I have felt inclined to say, as the poet does
in the "The Vision of Sin"--"Welcome fellow-citizens, Hollow hearts and
empty heads."


Not that the people were personally hollow or empty, but they had come
on a hollow and empty business: to help the good Mr. Binks to strengthen
the Insurance Act against the wicked Mr. Jinks who would only promise
to fortify the Insurance Act. That night it did not blow the democratic
gale. Yet it can blow on these as on others; and when it does blow men
learn many things. I, for one, am not above learning them.

The Marxian dogma which simplifies all conflicts to the Class War is so
much nobler a thing than the nose-counting of the parliaments that one
must apologise for the comparison. And yet there is a comparison.
When we used to say that there were so many thousands of Socialists
in Germany, we were counting by skulls. When we said that the majority
consisting of Proletarians would be everywhere opposed to the minority,
consisting of Capitalists, we were counting by skulls. Why, yes; if all
men's heads had been cut off from the rest of them, as they were by the
good sense and foresight of Timour the Tartar; if they had no hearts or
bellies to be moved; no hand that flies up to ward off a weapon, no foot
that can feel a familiar soil--if things were so the Marxian calculation
would be not only complete but correct. As we know to-day, the Marxian
calculation is complete, but it is not correct.

Now, this is the answer to the questions of some kind critics, whose
actual words I have not within reach at the moment, about whether my
democracy meant the rule of the majority over the minority. It means the
rule of the rule--the rule of the rule over the exception. When a nation
finds a soul it clothes it with a body, and does verily act like one
living thing. There is nothing to be said about those who are out of it,
except that they are out of it. After talking about it in the abstract
for decades, this is Democracy, and it is marvellous in our eyes. It is
not the difference between ninety-nine persons and a hundred persons; it
is one person--the people. I do not know or care how many or how few of
the Belgians like or dislike the pictures of Wiertz. They could not be
either justified or condemned by a mere majority of Belgians. But I am
very certain that the defiance to Prussia did not come from a majority
of Belgians. It came from Belgium one and indivisible--atheists,
priests, princes of the blood, Frenchified shopkeepers, Flemish boors,
men, women, and children, and the sooner we understand that this sort of
thing can happen the better for us. For it is this spontaneous spiritual
fellowship of communities under certain conditions to which the four or
five most independent minds of Europe willingly bear witness to-day.

But is there no exception: is there no one faithful among the unfaithful
found? Is no great Socialist politician still untouched by the
patriotism of the vulgar? Why, yes; the rugged Ramsay MacDonald, scarred
with a hundred savage fights against the capitalist parties, still lifts
up his horny hand for peace. What further need have we of witnesses?
I, for my part, am quite satisfied, and do not doubt that Mr. MacDonald
will be as industrious in damping down democracy in this form as in
every other.




A REAL DANGER

Heaven forbid that I should once more wade in those swamps of logomachy
and tautology in which the old guard of the Determinists still seem to
be floundering. The question of Fate and Free Will can never attain to
a conclusion, though it may attain to a conviction. The shortest
philosophic summary is that both cause and choice are ultimate ideas
within us, and that if one man denies choice because it seems contrary
to cause, the other man has quite as much right to deny cause because
it seems contrary to choice. The shortest ethical summary is that
Determinism either affects conduct or it does not. If it does not, it is
morally not worth preaching; if it does, it must affect conduct in the
direction of impotence and submission. A writer in the "Clarion" says
that the reformer cannot help trying to reform, nor the Conservative
help his Conservatism. But suppose the reformer tries to reform the
Conservative and turn him into another reformer? Either he can, in which
case Determinism has made no difference at all, or he can't, in which
case it can only have made reformers more hopeless and Conservatives
more obstinate. And the shortest practical and political summary is that
working men, most probably, will soon be much too busy using their Free
Will to stop to prove that they have got it. Nevertheless, I like to
watch the Determinist in the "Clarion" Cockpit every week, as busy as a
squirrel--in a cage. But being myself a squirrel (leaping lightly from
bough to bough) and preferring the form of activity which occasionally
ends in nuts, I should not intervene in the matter even indirectly,
except upon a practical point. And the point I have in mind is practical
to the extent of deadly peril. It is another of the numerous new ways in
which the restless rich, now walking the world with an awful insomnia,
may manage to catch us napping.


Must Be a Mystery

There are two letters in the "Clarion" this week which in various ways
interest me very much. One is concerned to defend Darwin against the
scientific revolt against him that was led by Samuel Butler, and among
other things it calls Bernard Shaw a back number. Well, most certainly
"The Origin of Species" is a back number, in so far as any honest and
interesting book ever can be; but in pure philosophy nothing can be
out of date, since the universe must be a mystery even to the believer.
There is, however, one condition of things in which I do call it
relevant to describe somebody as behind the times. That is when the man
in question, thinking of some state of affairs that has passed away, is
really helping the very things he would like to hinder. The principles
cannot alter, but the problems can. Thus, I should call a man behind the
times who, in the year 1872, pleaded for the peaceful German peasants
against the triumphant militarism of Napoleon. Or I should call a man
out of date who, in the year 1892, wished for a stronger Navy to compete
with the Navy of Holland, because it had once swept the sea and sailed
up the Thames. And I certainly call a man or a movement out of date
that, in the year 1914, when we few are fighting a giant machine,
strengthened with all material wealth and worked with all the material
sciences, thinks that our chief danger is from an excess of moral and
religious responsibility. He reminds me of Mr. Snodgrass, who had the
presence of mind to call out "Fire!" when Mr. Pickwick fell through the
ice.

The other letter consists of the usual wiredrawn argument for fatalism.
Man cannot imagine the universe being created, and therefore is
"compelled by his reason" to think the universe without beginning or
end, which (I may remark) he cannot imagine either. But the letter ends
with something much more ominous than bad metaphysics. Here, in
the middle of the "Clarion," in the centre of a clean and combative
democratic sheet, I meet again my deplorable old acquaintance, the
scientific criminologist. "The so-called evil-doer should not be
punished for his acts, but restrained." In forty-eight hours I could
probably get a petition to that effect signed by millionaires. A short
time ago a Bill was introduced to hold irresponsible and "restrain" a
whole new class of people, who were "incapable of managing their affairs
with prudence." Read the supporters' names on the back of that Bill, and
see what sort of democrats they were.

Now, clearing our heads of what is called popular science (which means
going to sleep to a lullaby of long words), let us use our own brains a
little, and ask ourselves what is the real difference between punishing
a man and restraining him. The material difference may be any or none;
for punishment may be very mild, and restraint may be very ruthless. The
man, of course, must dislike one as much as the other, or it would not
be necessary to restrain him at all. And I assure you he will get no
great glow of comfort out of your calling him irresponsible after you
have made him impotent. A man does not necessarily feel more free and
easy in a straight waistcoat than in a stone cell. The moral difference
is that a man can be punished for a crime because he is born a citizen;
while he can be constrained because he is born a slave. But one
arresting and tremendous difference towers over all these doubtful or
arguable differences. There is one respect, vital to all our liberties
and all our lives, in which the new restraint would be different
from the old punishment. It is of this that the plutocrats will take
advantage.


The Plain Difference

The perfectly plain difference is this. All punishment, even the most
horrible, proceeds upon the assumption that the extent of the evil is
known, and that a certain amount of expiation goes with it. Even if
you hang the man, you cannot hang him twice. Even if you burn him,
you cannot burn him for a month. And in the case of all ordinary
imprisonments, the whole aim of free institutions from the beginning of
the world has been to insist that a man shall be convicted of a definite
crime and confined for a definite period. But the moment you admit this
notion of medical restraint, you must in fairness admit that it may go
on as long as the authorities choose to think (or say) that it ought
to go on. The man's punishment refers to the past, which is supposed
to have been investigated, and which, in some degree at least, has been
investigated. But his restraint refers to the future, which his doctors,
keepers, and wardens have yet to investigate. The simple result will be
that, in the scientific Utopia of the "Clarion," men like Mann or Syme
or Larkin will not be put in prison because of what they have done.
They will be kept in prison because of what they might do. Indeed, the
builders of the new tyranny have already come very near to avowing
this scientific and futurist method. When the lawyers tried to stop the
"Suffragette" from appearing at all, they practically said: "We do not
know your next week's crime, because it isn't committed yet; but we are
scientifically certain you have the criminal type. And by the sublime
and unalterable laws of heredity, all your poor little papers will
inherit it."

This is a purely practical question; and that is why I insist on it,
even in such strenuous times. The writers on the "Clarion" have a
perfect right to think Christianity is the foe of freedom, or even
that the stupidity and tyranny of the present Government is due to the
monkish mysticism of Lord Morley and Mr. John M. Robertson. They have a
right to think the theory of Determinism as true as Calvin thought it.
But I do not like seeing them walk straight into the enormous iron trap
set open by the Capitalists, who find it convenient to make our law even
more lawless than it is. The rich men want a scientist to write them a
_lettre de cachet_ as a doctor writes a prescription. And so they wish
to seal up in a public gaol the scandals of a private asylum. Yes; the
writers on the "Clarion" are indeed claiming irresponsibility for human
beings. But it is the governments that will be irresponsible, not the
governed.

But I will tell them one small secret in conclusion. There is nothing
whatever wrong in the ancient and universal idea of Punishment--except
that we are not punishing the right people.




THE DREGS OF PURITANISM

One peculiarity of the genuine kind of enemy of the people is that his
slightest phrase is clamorous with all his sins. Pride, vain-glory, and
hypocrisy seem present in his very grammar; in his very verbs or adverbs
or prepositions, as well as in what he says, which is generally bad
enough. Thus I see that a Nonconformist pastor in Bromley has been
talking about the pathetic little presents of tobacco sent to the common
soldiers. This is how he talks about it. He is reported as having said,
"By the help of God, they wanted this cigarette business stopped." How
one could write a volume on that sentence, a great thick volume called
"The Decline of the English Middle Class." In taste, in style, in
philosophy, in feeling, in political project, the horrors of it are as
unfathomable as hell.

First, to begin with the trifle, note something slipshod and vague in
the mere verbiage, typical of those who prefer a catchword to a creed.
"This cigarette business" might mean anything. It might mean Messrs.
Salmon and Gluckstein's business. But the pastor at Bromley will not
interfere with that, for the indignation of his school of thought, even
when it is sincere, always instinctively and unconsciously swerves
aside from anything that is rich and powerful like the partners in a big
business, and strikes instead something that is poor and nameless like
the soldiers in a trench. Nor does the expression make clear who "they"
are--whether the inhabitants of Britain or the inhabitants of Bromley,
or the inhabitants of this one crazy tabernacle in Bromley; nor is it
evident how it is going to be stopped or who is being asked to stop it.
All these things are trifles compared to the more terrible offences
of the phrase; but they are not without their social and historical
interest. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the wealthy
Puritan class, generally the class of the employers of labour, took a
line of argument which was narrow, but not nonsensical. They saw the
relation of rich and poor quite coldly as a contract, but they saw that
a contract holds both ways. The Puritans of the middle class, in short,
did in some sense start talking and thinking for themselves. They are
still talking. They have long ago left off thinking. They talk about the
loyalty of workmen to their employers, and God knows what rubbish; and
the first small certainty about the reverend gentleman whose sentence
I have quoted is that his brain stopped working as a clock stops, years
and years ago.

Second, consider the quality of the religious literature! These people
are always telling us that the English translated Bible is sufficient
training for anyone in noble and appropriate diction; and so it is. Why,
then, are they not trained? They are always telling us that Bunyan, the
rude Midland tinker, is as much worth reading as Chaucer or Spenser;
and so he is. Why, then, have they not read him? I cannot believe
that anyone who had seen, even in a nightmare of the nursery, Apollyon
straddling over the whole breadth of the way could really write like
that about a cigarette. By the help of God, they wanted this cigarette
business stopped. Therefore, with angels and archangels and the whole
company of Heaven, with St. Michael, smiter of Satan and Captain of
the Chivalry of God, with all the ardour of the seraphs and the flaming
patience of the saints, we will have this cigarette business stopped.
Where has all the tradition of the great religious literatures gone to
that a man should come on such a bathos with such a bump?

Thirdly, of course, there is the lack of imaginative proportion, which
rises into a sort of towering blasphemy. An enormous number of live
young men are being hurt by shells, hurt by bullets, hurt by fever
and hunger and horror of hope deferred; hurt by lance blades and sword
blades and bayonet blades breaking into the bloody house of life. But
Mr. Price (I think that's his name) is still anxious that they should
not be hurt by cigarettes. That is the sort of maniacal isolation that
can be found in the deserts of Bromley. That cigarettes are bad for
the health is a very tenable opinion to which the minister is quite
entitled. If he happens to think that the youth of Bromley smoke too
many cigarettes, and that he has any influence in urging on them the
unhealthiness of the habit, I should not blame him if he gave sermons
or lectures about it (with magic-lantern slides), so long as it was in
Bromley and about Bromley. Cigarettes may be bad for the health: bombs
and bayonets and even barbed wire are not good for the health. I never
met a doctor who recommended any of them. But the trouble with this sort
of man is that he cannot adjust himself to the scale of things. He would
do very good service if he would go among the rich aristocratic ladies
and tell them not to take drugs in a chronic sense, as people take opium
in China. But he would be doing very bad service if he were to go among
the doctors and nurses on the field and tell them not to give drugs, as
they give morphia in a hospital. But it is the whole hypothesis of war,
it is its very nature and first principle, that the man in the trench
is almost as much a suffering and abnormal person as the man in the
hospital. Hit or unhit, conqueror or conquered, he is, by nature of the
case, having less pleasure than is proper and natural to a man.

Fourth (for I need not dwell here on the mere diabolical idiocy that can
regard beer or tobacco as in some way evil and unseemly in themselves),
there is the most important element in this strange outbreak; at least,
the most dangerous and the most important for us. There is that
main feature in the degradation of the old middle class: the utter
disappearance of its old appetite for liberty. Here there is no question
of whether the men are to smoke cigarettes, or the women choose to
send cigarettes, or even that the officers or doctors choose to allow
cigarettes. The thing is to cease, and we may note one of the most
recurrent ideas of the servile State: it is mentioned in the passive
mood. It must be stopped, and we must not even ask who has stopped it!




THE TYRANNY OF BAD JOURNALISM

The amazing decision of the Government to employ methods quite alien to
England, and rather belonging to the police of the Continent, probably
arises from the appearance of papers which are lucid and fighting, like
the papers of the Continent. The business may be put in many ways. But
one way of putting it is simply to say that a monopoly of bad journalism
is resisting the possibility of good journalism. Journalism is not the
same thing as literature; but there is good and bad journalism, as there
is good and bad literature, as there is good and bad football. For the
last twenty years or so the plutocrats who govern England have allowed
the English nothing but bad journalism. Very bad journalism, simply
considered as journalism.

It always takes a considerable time to see the simple and central fact
about anything. All sorts of things have been said about the modern
Press, especially the Yellow Press; that it is Jingo or Philistine or
sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial; but
none of these have anything really to do with the point.

The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not
the "popular Press." It is not the public Press. It is not an organ
of public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all
sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great
nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and
enemies. The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and
honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on
the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and
a monopoly. He receives all his political information and all
his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of
half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal
of money.

This enormous and essential fact is concealed for us by a number of
legends that have passed into common speech. There is the notion that
the Press is flashy or trivial _because_ it is popular. In other words,
an attempt is made to discredit democracy by representing journalism
as the natural literature of democracy. All this is cold rubbish.
The democracy has no more to do with the papers than it has with the
peerages. The millionaire newspapers are vulgar and silly because the
millionaires are vulgar and silly. It is the proprietor, not the editor,
not the sub-editor, least of all the reader, who is pleased with this
monotonous prairie of printed words. The same slander on democracy can
be noticed in the case of advertisements. There is many a tender old
Tory imagination that vaguely feels that our streets would be hung with
escutcheons and tapestries, if only the profane vulgar had not hung them
with advertisements of Sapolio and Sunlight Soap. But advertisement does
not come from the unlettered many. It comes from the refined few.
Did you ever hear of a mob rising to placard the Town Hall with
proclamations in favour of Sapolio? Did you ever see a poor, ragged
man laboriously drawing and painting a picture on the wall in favour
of Sunlight Soap--simply as a labour of love? It is nonsense; those who
hang our public walls with ugly pictures are the same select few who
hang their private walls with exquisite and expensive pictures. The
vulgarisation of modern life has come from the governing class; from the
highly educated class. Most of the people who have posters in Camberwell
have peerages at Westminster. But the strongest instance of all is that
which has been unbroken until lately, and still largely prevails; the
ghastly monotony of the Press.

Then comes that other legend; the notion that men like the masters of
the Newspaper Trusts "give the people what they want." Why, it is the
whole aim and definition of a Trust that it gives the people what it
chooses. In the old days, when Parliaments were free in England, it
was discovered that one courtier was allowed to sell all the silk, and
another to sell all the sweet wine. A member of the House of Commons
humorously asked who was allowed to sell all the bread. I really tremble
to think what that sarcastic legislator would have said if he had been
put off with the modern nonsense about "gauging the public taste."
Suppose the first courtier had said that, by his shrewd, self-made
sense, he had detected that people had a vague desire for silk; and
even a deep, dim human desire to pay so much a yard for it! Suppose
the second courtier said that he had, by his own rugged intellect,
discovered a general desire for wine: and that people bought his wine
at his price--when they could buy no other! Suppose a third courtier had
jumped up and said that people always bought his bread when they could
get none anywhere else.

Well, that is a perfect parallel. "After bread, the need of the people
is knowledge," said Danton. Knowledge is now a monopoly, and comes
through to the citizens in thin and selected streams, exactly as bread
might come through to a besieged city. Men must wish to know what is
happening, whoever has the privilege of telling them. They must listen
to the messenger, even if he is a liar. They must listen to the liar,
even if he is a bore. The official journalist for some time past has
been both a bore and a liar; but it was impossible until lately to
neglect his sheets of news altogether. Lately the capitalist Press
really has begun to be neglected; because its bad journalism was
overpowering and appalling. Lately we have really begun to find out that
capitalism cannot write, just as it cannot fight, or pray, or marry, or
make a joke, or do any other stricken human thing. But this discovery
has been quite recent. The capitalist newspaper was never actually
unread until it was actually unreadable.

If you retain the servile superstition that the Press, as run by the
capitalists, is popular (in any sense except that in which dirty water
in a desert is popular), consider the case of the solemn articles in
praise of the men who own newspapers--men of the type of Cadbury or
Harmsworth, men of the type of the small club of millionaires. Did you
ever hear a plain man in a tramcar or train talking about Carnegie's
bright genial smile or Rothschild's simple, easy hospitality? Did you
ever hear an ordinary citizen ask what was the opinion of Sir Joseph
Lyons about the hopes and fears of this, our native land? These few
small-minded men publish, papers to praise themselves. You could no more
get an intelligent poor man to praise a millionaire's soul, except for
hire, than you could get him to sell a millionaire's soap, except for
hire. And I repeat that, though there are other aspects of the matter of
the new plutocratic raid, one of the most important is mere journalistic
jealousy. The Yellow Press is bad journalism: and wishes to stop the
appearance of good journalism.

There is no average member of the public who would not prefer to have
Lloyd George discussed as what he is, a Welshman of genius and ideals,
strangely fascinated by bad fashion and bad finance, rather than
discussed as what neither he nor anyone else ever was, a perfect
democrat or an utterly detestable demagogue. There is no reader of a
daily paper who would not feel more concern--and more respect--for Sir
Rufus Isaacs as a man who has been a stockbroker, than as a man who
happens to be Attorney-General. There is no man in the street who is not
more interested in Lloyd George's investments than in his Land Campaign.
There is no man in the street who could not understand (and like)
Rufus Isaacs as a Jew better than he can possibly like him as a British
statesman. There is no sane journalist alive who would say that the
official account of Marconis would be better "copy" than the true
account that such papers as this have dragged out. We have committed one
crime against the newspaper proprietor which he will never forgive. We
point out that his papers are dull. And we propose to print some papers
that are interesting.




THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION

Everyone but a consistent and contented capitalist, who must be
something pretty near to a Satanist, must rejoice at the spirit and
success of the Battle of the Buses. But one thing about it which happens
to please me particularly was that it was fought, in one aspect at
least, on a point such as the plutocratic fool calls unpractical. It
was fought about a symbol, a badge, a thing attended with no kind of
practical results, like the flags for which men allow themselves to fall
down dead, or the shrines for which men will walk some hundreds of miles
from their homes. When a man has an eye for business, all that goes on
on this earth in that style is simply invisible to him. But let us be
charitable to the eye for business; the eye has been pretty well blacked
this time.

But I wish to insist here that it is exactly what is called the
unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief
difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists;
though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable
truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can
go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of
the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes
he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely
elephantine ones. And, though we speak in a general way of an elephant
trumpeting, it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to
play the drum. But man, savage or civilised, simple or complex
always desires to see his own soul outside himself; in some material
embodiment. He always wishes to point to a table in a temple, or a cloth
on a stick, or a word on a scroll, or a badge on a coat, and say: "This
is the best part of me. If need be, it shall be the rest of me that
shall perish." This is the method which seems so unbusinesslike to the
men with an eye to business. This is also the method by which battles
are won.


The Symbolism of the Badge

The badge on a Trade Unionist's coat is a piece of poetry in the
genuine, lucid, and logical sense in which Milton defined poetry (and
he ought to know) when he said that it was simple, sensuous, and
passionate. It is simple, because many understand the word "badge,"
who might not even understand the word "recognition." It is sensuous,
because it is visible and tangible; it is incarnate, as all the good
Gods have been; and it is passionate in this perfectly practical sense,
which the man with an eye to business may some day learn more thoroughly
than he likes, that there are men who will allow you to cross a word
out in a theoretical document, but who will not allow you to pull a big
button off their bodily clothing, merely because you have more money
than they have. Now I think it is this sensuousness, this passion, and,
above all, this simplicity that are most wanted in this promising revolt
of our time. For this simplicity is perhaps the only thing in which the
best type of recent revolutionists have failed. It has been our
sorrow lately to salute the sunset of one of the very few clean and
incorruptible careers in the most corruptible phase of Christendom. The
death of Quelch naturally turns one's thoughts to those extreme Marxian
theorists, who, whatever we may hold about their philosophy, have
certainly held their honour like iron. And yet, even in this instant
of instinctive reverence, I cannot feel that they were poetical enough,
that is childish enough, to make a revolution. They had all the audacity
needed for speaking to the despot; but not the simplicity needed for
speaking to the democracy. They were always accused of being too bitter
against the capitalist. But it always seemed to me that they were (quite
unconsciously, of course) much too kind to him. They had a fatal habit
of using long words, even on occasions when he might with propriety have
been described in very short words. They called him a Capitalist when
almost anybody in Christendom would have called him a cad. And "cad"
is a word from the poetic vocabulary indicating rather a general and
powerful reaction of the emotions than a status that could be defined
in a work of economics. The capitalist, asleep in the sun, let such long
words crawl all over him, like so many long, soft, furry caterpillars.
Caterpillars cannot sting like wasps. And, in repeating that the old
Marxians have been, perhaps, the best and bravest men of our time, I say
also that they would have been better and braver still if they had never
used a scientific word, and never read anything but fairy tales.


The Beastly Individualist

Suppose I go on to a ship, and the ship sinks almost immediately; but
I (like the people in the Bab Ballads), by reason of my clinging to a
mast, upon a desert island am eventually cast. Or rather, suppose I am
not cast on it, but am kept bobbing about in the water, because the only
man on the island is what some call an Individualist, and will not throw
me a rope; though coils of rope of the most annoying elaboration and
neatness are conspicuous beside him as he stands upon the shore. Now,
it seems to me, that if, in my efforts to shout at this fellow-creature
across the crashing breakers, I call his position the "insularistic
position," and my position "the semi-amphibian position," much valuable
time may be lost. I am not an amphibian. I am a drowning man. He is
not an insularist, or an individualist. He is a beast. Or rather, he
is worse than any beast can be. And if, instead of letting me drown, he
makes me promise, while I am drowning, that if I come on shore it shall
be as his bodily slave, having no human claims henceforward forever,
then, by the whole theory and practice of capitalism, he becomes a
capitalist, he also becomes a cad.

Now, the language of poetry is simpler than that of prose; as anyone
can see who has read what the old-fashioned protestant used to call
confidently "his" Bible. And, being simpler, it is also truer; and,
being truer, it is also fiercer. And, for most of the infamies of our
time, there is really nothing plain enough, except the plain language of
poetry. Take, let us say, the ease of the recent railway disaster,
and the acquittal of the capitalists' interest. It is not a scientific
problem for us to investigate. It is a crime committed before our eyes;
committed, perhaps, by blind men or maniacs, or men hypnotised, or men
in some other ways unconscious; but committed in broad daylight, so that
the corpse is bleeding on our door-step. Good lives were lost, because
good lives do not pay; and bad coals do pay. It seems simply impossible
to get any other meaning out of the matter except that. And, if in human
history there be anything simple and anything horrible, it seems to have
been present in this matter. If, even after some study and understanding
of the old religious passions which were the resurrection of Europe,
we cannot endure the extreme infamy of witches and heretics literally
burned alive--well, the people in this affair were quite as literally
burned alive. If, when we have really tried to extend our charity beyond
the borders of personal sympathy, to all the complexities of class
and creed, we still feel something insolent about the triumphant and
acquitted man who is in the wrong, here the men who are in the wrong are
triumphant and acquitted. It is no subject for science. It is a subject
for poetry. But for poetry of a terrible sort.






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Project Gutenberg's The Wisdom of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Wisdom of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #223]
Release Date: February, 1995
[Last Updated: December 5, 2014]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN ***




Produced by Martin Ward





THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN

By G. K. Chesterton



To

LUCIAN OLDERSHAW



CONTENTS


     1.  The Absence of Mr Glass
     2.  The Paradise of Thieves
     3.  The Duel of Dr Hirsch
     4.  The Man in the Passage
     5.  The Mistake of the Machine
     6.  The Head of Caesar
     7.  The Purple Wig
     8.  The Perishing of the Pendragons
     9.  The God of the Gongs
     10. The Salad of Colonel Cray
     11. The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
     12. The Fairy Tale of Father Brown





ONE -- The Absence of Mr Glass


THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and
specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at
Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green
marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a
blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a
terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must
not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even
poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they
were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood
upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they
were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the
wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three
kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table
of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and
rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the
left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of
English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign
physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that
rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth.
One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but
there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the
Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as
if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility
steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables
laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more
of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the
specialist's library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and
even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.

Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded--as the
boys' geographies say--on the east by the North Sea and on the west by
the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was
clad in an artist's velvet, but with none of an artist's negligence; his
hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face
was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room
indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern
sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.

Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into
those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most
startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but
civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room
a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella
as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and
prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat,
clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of
all that is homely and helpless.

The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not
unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless
sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor
with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a
corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an
omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily
disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped
between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked
after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke
simultaneously as follows:

"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that business of the
MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray
excuse me if I am wrong."

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd
little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with a cold intensity
of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my
work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have
sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty
and importance, but--"

"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man called
Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged." And he leaned back
in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them
were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement.
"And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."

"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the clerical hat.
"Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be
more important than that?"

The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him of many
things--some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not
wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the
ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw
himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting
physician.

"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor's
Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of
yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called
Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will
give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French
Republic and the King of England--no, better: fourteen years better. I
have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story."

The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable
warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as
if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in
passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking
the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a
four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks,
the little man began his recital:

"I told you my name was Brown; well, that's the fact, and I'm the
priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you've seen beyond those
straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and
straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall
there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a
widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and
between her and the daughter, and between her and the lodgers--well, I
dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides. At present she
has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given
more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of
the house."

"And the young woman of the house," asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent
amusement, "what does she want?"

"Why, she wants to marry him," cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly.
"That is just the awful complication."

"It is indeed a hideous enigma," said Dr Hood.

"This young James Todhunter," continued the cleric, "is a very decent
man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright,
brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor,
and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of
money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being
of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and
probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and
noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several
hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He declares
his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before
the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab
will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know
how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that.
There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when
the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of
a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists
and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields
and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking
to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a
quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in
the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the
family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab
prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is)
crawls out every night from the big box in the corner, which is kept
locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter's
is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the
'Thousand and One Nights'. And yet there is the little fellow in his
respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock.
He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is
tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused
for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself
equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church
with him tomorrow."

A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish
for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having
condescended to the priest's simplicity, condescended expansively. He
settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the
tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:

"Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main
tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early
winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be
wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye
all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or
migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds
in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces
religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger
case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we
commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens.
Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept
easily the superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they
still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious
explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is
not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind them
and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put
fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your
small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab,
terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of
the sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it
were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its
ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands
of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of
morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees--"

Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more
impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was
marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young
girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had
sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her
cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief
as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, sir," she said, "but I had to follow Father
Brown at once; it's nothing less than life or death."

Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. "Why, what has
happened, Maggie?" he said.

"James has been murdered, for all I can make out," answered the girl,
still breathing hard from her rush. "That man Glass has been with him
again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate
voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high
and quavery."

"That man Glass?" repeated the priest in some perplexity.

"I know his name is Glass," answered the girl, in great impatience.
"I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling--about money, I
think--for I heard James say again and again, 'That's right, Mr Glass,'
or 'No, Mr Glass,' and then, 'Two or three, Mr Glass.' But we're talking
too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet."

"But time for what?" asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young
lady with marked interest. "What is there about Mr Glass and his money
troubles that should impel such urgency?"

"I tried to break down the door and couldn't," answered the girl
shortly, "Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the
window-sill that looks into the room. It was all dim, and seemed to be
empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he
were drugged or strangled."

"This is very serious," said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and
umbrella and standing up; "in point of fact I was just putting your case
before this gentleman, and his view--"

"Has been largely altered," said the scientist gravely. "I do not think
this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else
to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you."

In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the
MacNabs' street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the
mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was
not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an
energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge
of the town was not entirely without justification for the doctor's
hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses stood
farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the
afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the
sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy
back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black,
barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up in astonishment,
and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean hands
similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a
demon herself. The doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill
reiterations of her daughter's story, with more disturbing details
of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr Glass for
murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or against
the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not
having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the
front of the house until they came to the lodger's door at the back,
and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder
sharply to the panel and burst in the door.

It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a
flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling
collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay
littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had
been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table,
but a third lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet
from it lay what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but
with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a
grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees
against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of
the room was rolled a gentleman's silk top hat, as if it had just been
knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see
it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of
potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter,
with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his
elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.

Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the
whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the
carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head
of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it
almost slipped down on to his shoulders.

"Mr Glass's hat," said the doctor, returning with it and peering into
the inside with a pocket lens. "How to explain the absence of Mr Glass
and the presence of Mr Glass's hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man
with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically
brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should
think."

"But, good heavens!" called out Miss MacNab, "aren't you going to untie
the man first?"

"I say 'old' with intention, though not with certainty" continued the
expositor; "my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair
of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always
falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a
hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is
bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous
voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear lady,
patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common
in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years.
Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly
tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous
appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I
have more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over
the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the
mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel
had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr
Todhunter."

"By the way," said Father Brown, "might it not be as well to untie Mr
Todhunter?"

"Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here," proceeded the
specialist. "I may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass
was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter,
as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an
abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit;
they have been produced for a particular companion. But, as it
happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this
wine-service, but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine.
What, then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once suggest
some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the
pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the man, or
at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed,
certainly fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of
them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on the fringes of society."

"Look here," cried the young woman, "if you don't let me pass to untie
him I'll run outside and scream for the police."

"I should not advise you, Miss MacNab," said Dr Hood gravely, "to be
in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to
compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen
something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief
facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is
economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret.
Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the
kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that
the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr
Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him.
We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one
hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end
vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today
and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon."

"Are you going to take those ropes off?" asked the girl stubbornly.

Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went
across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a little
and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:

"No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police
bring the handcuffs."

Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round
face and said: "What do you mean?"

The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the
carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:

"Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up," he said, "you all jump to the
conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped.
There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so
dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his
own free will? Second," he continued, moving towards the window, "this
is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade
here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr
Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add
to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the
blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the
blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There,
I think, we have a pretty complete story."

"But the ropes?" inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with
a rather vacant admiration.

"Ah, the ropes," said the expert with a singular intonation. "Miss
MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from
his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter
can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses."

"What?" cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.

"I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter," reiterated Hood
quietly. "I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a
branch of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself
and could loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an
enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the
ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim of the struggle
instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in the garden
or stuffed up the chimney."

There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the
sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than
ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could
almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing
polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy,
even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall
hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air was dense with
the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things,
because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker
wound.

The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent
and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It
was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that
creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea.
"Say it again, please," he said in a simple, bothered manner; "do you
mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all
alone?"

"That is what I mean," said the doctor.

"Jerusalem!" ejaculated Brown suddenly, "I wonder if it could possibly
be that!"

He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite
a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then
he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. "Yes, that's it!"
he cried in a certain excitement. "Can't you see it in the man's face?
Why, look at his eyes!"

Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance.
And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of
Todhunter's visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and
intense about the upper part of it.

"His eyes do look queer," cried the young woman, strongly moved. "You
brutes; I believe it's hurting him!"

"Not that, I think," said Dr Hood; "the eyes have certainly a singular
expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as
expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality--"

"Oh, bosh!" cried Father Brown: "can't you see he's laughing?"

"Laughing!" repeated the doctor, with a start; "but what on earth can he
be laughing at?"

"Well," replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, "not to put too fine
a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I'm a little
inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it."

"Now you know about what?" asked Hood, in some exasperation.

"Now I know," replied the priest, "the profession of Mr Todhunter."

He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with
what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an
equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to
watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously
over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him
into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming
specialist.

"Dr Hood," he cried enthusiastically, "you are a great poet! You have
called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is
than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts
are rather commonplace and comic by comparison."

"I have no notion what you are talking about," said Dr Hood rather
haughtily; "my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete.
A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer
the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be
ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass--"

"That's it, that's it," said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly,
"that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so
extremely absent. I suppose," he added reflectively, "that there was
never anybody so absent as Mr Glass."

"Do you mean he is absent from the town?" demanded the doctor.

"I mean he is absent from everywhere," answered Father Brown; "he is
absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak."

"Do you seriously mean," said the specialist with a smile, "that there
is no such person?"

The priest made a sign of assent. "It does seem a pity," he said.

Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. "Well," he said, "before
we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first
proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room.
If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?"

"It is Mr Todhunter's," replied Father Brown.

"But it doesn't fit him," cried Hood impatiently. "He couldn't possibly
wear it!"

Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. "I never said he
could wear it," he answered. "I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist
on a shade of difference, a hat that is his."

"And what is the shade of difference?" asked the criminologist with a
slight sneer.

"My good sir," cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin
to impatience, "if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter's
shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between
a man's hat and the hats that are his."

"But a hatter," protested Hood, "can get money out of his stock of new
hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?"

"Rabbits," replied Father Brown promptly.

"What?" cried Dr Hood.

"Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper," said
the reverend gentleman with rapidity. "Didn't you see it all when
you found out the faked ropes? It's just the same with the sword.
Mr Todhunter hasn't got a scratch on him, as you say; but he's got a
scratch in him, if you follow me."

"Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes?" inquired Mrs MacNab
sternly.

"I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter's clothes," said Father Brown. "I
mean inside Mr Todhunter."

"Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?"

"Mr Todhunter," explained Father Brown placidly, "is learning to be a
professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in
the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces
of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but
because it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the
three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and
catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed
one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword,
which it was Mr Todhunter's professional pride and duty to swallow.
But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the
inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him,
which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious
one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the
Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all
burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they
are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of
those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his
trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other
conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once
looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great
indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and
make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre
of Mr Glass."

"But what about the two voices?" asked Maggie, staring.

"Have you never heard a ventriloquist?" asked Father Brown. "Don't you
know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves
in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?"

There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who
had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. "You are certainly a very
ingenious person," he said; "it could not have been done better in a
book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in
explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him
so addressed by Mr Todhunter."

The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. "Well, that,"
he said, "that's the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our
juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted
them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to
catch them. What he really said was: 'One, two and three--missed a glass
one, two--missed a glass.' And so on."

There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with
one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner
complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish.
Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced
from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that
ZALADIN, the World's Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and
Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks
at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o'clock
precisely.





TWO. -- The Paradise of Thieves


THE great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets,
walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the
Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and
orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white
tables the insignia of an early and elegant lunch; and this seemed to
increase a satisfaction that already touched the top of swagger. Muscari
had an eagle nose like Dante; his hair and neckerchief were dark and
flowing; he carried a black cloak, and might almost have carried a black
mask, so much did he bear with him a sort of Venetian melodrama. He
acted as if a troubadour had still a definite social office, like a
bishop. He went as near as his century permitted to walking the world
literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.

For he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had
fought many brilliant duels, or without a corresponding case for his
mandolin, with which he had actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the
highly conventional daughter of a Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he
was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked
a certain thing and was it. His poetry was as straightforward as anyone
else's prose. He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with
a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy
compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger
or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

The banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel
attached to Muscari's restaurant; that was why it was his favourite
restaurant. A glance flashed around the room told him at once, however,
that the English party had not descended. The restaurant was glittering,
but still comparatively empty. Two priests were talking at a table in
a corner, but Muscari (an ardent Catholic) took no more notice of them
than of a couple of crows. But from a yet farther seat, partly concealed
behind a dwarf tree golden with oranges, there rose and advanced towards
the poet a person whose costume was the most aggressively opposite to
his own.

This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a
sharp collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the
true tradition of 'Arry at Margate, to look at once startling and
commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari was
astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different from the
body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that
rose abruptly out of the standing collar like cardboard and the comic
pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized it, above all
the dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old but
forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college,
and European fame was promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when
he appeared in the world he failed, first publicly as a dramatist and a
demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an actor, a traveller,
a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind
the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that
profession, and it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed
him up.

"Ezza!" cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant
astonishment. "Well, I've seen you in many costumes in the green room;
but I never expected to see you dressed up as an Englishman."

"This," answered Ezza gravely, "is not the costume of an Englishman, but
of the Italian of the future."

"In that case," remarked Muscari, "I confess I prefer the Italian of the
past."

"That is your old mistake, Muscari," said the man in tweeds, shaking
his head; "and the mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans
made the morning: we had the newest steel, the newest carving, the
newest chemistry. Why should we not now have the newest factories, the
newest motors, the newest finance--the newest clothes?"

"Because they are not worth having," answered Muscari. "You cannot make
Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the
short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads."

"Well, to me Marconi, or D'Annunzio, is the star of Italy" said the
other. "That is why I have become a Futurist--and a courier."

"A courier!" cried Muscari, laughing. "Is that the last of your list of
trades? And whom are you conducting?"

"Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe."

"Not the banker in this hotel?" inquired the poet, with some eagerness.

"That's the man," answered the courier.

"Does it pay well?" asked the troubadour innocently.

"It will pay me," said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. "But I am a
rather curious sort of courier." Then, as if changing the subject, he
said abruptly: "He has a daughter--and a son."

"The daughter is divine," affirmed Muscari, "the father and son are, I
suppose, human. But granted his harmless qualities doesn't that banker
strike you as a splendid instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions
in his safes, and I have--the hole in my pocket. But you daren't
say--you can't say--that he's cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even
more energetic. He's not clever, he's got eyes like blue buttons; he's
not energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic. He's a
conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he's got money simply because
he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You're too strong-minded
for business, Ezza. You won't get on. To be clever enough to get all
that money, one must be stupid enough to want it."

"I'm stupid enough for that," said Ezza gloomily. "But I should suggest
a suspension of your critique of the banker, for here he comes."

Mr Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody
looked at him. He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue eye and
faded grey-sandy moustaches; but for his heavy stoop he might have been
a colonel. He carried several unopened letters in his hand. His son
Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous; but
nobody looked at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for
the moment at least, upon Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and
colour of the dawn seemed set purposely above that sapphire sea, like
a goddess's. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath as if he were drinking
something, as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which his
fathers made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally intense and far more
baffling.

Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this
occasion; and her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit,
allowing the stranger Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their
table and their talk. In Ethel Harrogate conventionality crowned itself
with a perfection and splendour of its own. Proud of her father's
prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond daughter but an arrant
flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden good-nature that
made her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a fresh and
hearty thing.

They were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the
mountain path they were to attempt that week. The danger was not from
rock and avalanche, but from something yet more romantic. Ethel had
been earnestly assured that brigands, the true cut-throats of the modern
legend, still haunted that ridge and held that pass of the Apennines.

"They say," she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, "that
all that country isn't ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of
Thieves. Who is the King of Thieves?"

"A great man," replied Muscari, "worthy to rank with your own Robin
Hood, signorina. Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the
mountains some ten years ago, when people said brigands were extinct.
But his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.
Men found his fierce proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his
sentinels, gun in hand, in every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian
Government tried to dislodge him, and was defeated in six pitched
battles as if by Napoleon."

"Now that sort of thing," observed the banker weightily, "would never
be allowed in England; perhaps, after all, we had better choose another
route. But the courier thought it perfectly safe."

"It is perfectly safe," said the courier contemptuously. "I have been
over it twenty times. There may have been some old jailbird called a
King in the time of our grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not
to fable. Brigandage is utterly stamped out."

"It can never be utterly stamped out," Muscari answered; "because armed
revolt is a recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are like
their mountains, rich in grace and green gaiety, but with the fires
beneath. There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take
to drink--and our own poor take to daggers."

"A poet is privileged," replied Ezza, with a sneer. "If Signor Muscari
were English he would still be looking for highwaymen in Wandsworth.
Believe me, there is no more danger of being captured in Italy than of
being scalped in Boston."

"Then you propose to attempt it?" asked Mr Harrogate, frowning.

"Oh, it sounds rather dreadful," cried the girl, turning her glorious
eyes on Muscari. "Do you really think the pass is dangerous?"

Muscari threw back his black mane. "I know it is dangerous:" he said. "I
am crossing it tomorrow."

The young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of
white wine and lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the
banker, the courier and the poet, distributing peals of silvery satire.
At about the same instant the two priests in the corner rose; the
taller, a white-haired Italian, taking his leave. The shorter priest
turned and walked towards the banker's son, and the latter was
astonished to realize that though a Roman priest the man was an
Englishman. He vaguely remembered meeting him at the social crushes
of some of his Catholic friends. But the man spoke before his memories
could collect themselves.

"Mr Frank Harrogate, I think," he said. "I have had an introduction, but
I do not mean to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come
far better from a stranger. Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take
care of your sister in her great sorrow."

Even for Frank's truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision
of his sister still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her
laughter still from the garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre
adviser in puzzledom.

"Do you mean the brigands?" he asked; and then, remembering a vague fear
of his own, "or can you be thinking of Muscari?"

"One is never thinking of the real sorrow," said the strange priest.
"One can only be kind when it comes."

And he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other almost with his
mouth open.

A day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really
crawling and staggering up the spurs of the menacing mountain range.
Between Ezza's cheery denial of the danger and Muscari's boisterous
defiance of it, the financial family were firm in their original
purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide with theirs. A
more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town station of
the little priest of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business
led him also to cross the mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate
could not but connect his presence with the mystical fears and warnings
of yesterday.

The coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the modernist
talent of the courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific
activity and breezy wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished
from thought and speech; though so far conceded in formal act that some
slight protection was employed. The courier and the young banker carried
loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with much boyish gratification) buckled
on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.

He had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely
Englishwoman; on the other side of her sat the priest, whose name was
Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual; the courier and the
father and son were on the banc behind. Muscari was in towering spirits,
seriously believing in the peril, and his talk to Ethel might well have
made her think him a maniac. But there was something in the crazy and
gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like orchards,
that dragged her spirit up alone with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat;
it spanned sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off
headlands like a lasso.

And yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the
rose. The fields were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of
kingfisher and parrot and humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering
flowers. There are no lovelier meadows and woodlands than the English,
no nobler crests or chasms than those of Snowdon and Glencoe. But
Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the
splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits
of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in
Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a
mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown
to the stars with dynamite.

"It's like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head," said Ethel.

"It is our secret," answered he, "the secret of the volcano; that is
also the secret of the revolution--that a thing can be violent and yet
fruitful."

"You are rather violent yourself," and she smiled at him.

"And yet rather fruitless," he admitted; "if I die tonight I die
unmarried and a fool."

"It is not my fault if you have come," she said after a difficult
silence.

"It is never your fault," answered Muscari; "it was not your fault that
Troy fell."

As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost
like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow
on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to
the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse
reared up to his full height--the titanic and terrifying height of
a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the
equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through
the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel,
who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he
lived.

At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet's
head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially
even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in
the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could
take him there. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in
the second it was as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had
evidently more promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had
given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land which might
have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As
it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less
dignified in their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn
of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a
sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments of
the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage,
save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets
were scattered in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung
above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses plunged painfully
down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched
his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to
himself: "Now why on earth have we fallen just here?"

He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy
umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance
at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of
him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel's sunshade, and just beyond it lay a
curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it
up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his
heavy face turned the colour of clay.

"Heaven deliver us!" he muttered; "it can't be hers! Has her sorrow come
on her already?" He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. "I think
I'm justified," he said, "till I know a little more."

He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the
flowers by Muscari, who was saying: "We have fallen into heaven; it is
a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and
goddesses who can fall upwards."

And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy
a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. "After
all," he thought, "perhaps the poison isn't hers; perhaps it's one of
Muscari's melodramatic tricks."

Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly
theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut
reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood
in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing
occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt,
came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses' heads. He had a
queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there
was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent
appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.

Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow,
Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a
short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below,
leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the
road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the
muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright
but quite motionless eyes.

"The brigands!" cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. "This
was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first,
we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them."

"The coachman," said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his
pockets, "happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate's."

"Then shoot him all the more," cried the poet impatiently; "he was
bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will
break the line up there--with a rush."

And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the
four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate,
he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld
the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy
ring, his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face
seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening light.

"You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows," he
said, "and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more
than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics
while you have been writing them."

"Come on, I tell you!" thundered Muscari from above. "Will you stand
there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three
strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?"

"I call myself Montano," cried the strange courier in a voice equally
loud and full. "I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my
summer palace."

And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of
the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a
large paper in his hand.

"This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking," went on the
courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, "is, together
with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of
Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have
doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and
from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is
unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if
the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that
'reserves his defence,' but the better kind that reserves his last
bullet."

All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown,
who heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his
pocket. "Thank God!" he muttered; "that's much more probable. The poison
belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may
never be captured, like Cato."

The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same
kind of dangerous politeness. "It only remains for me," he said,
"to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the
pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual
of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only
applies to a part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the
celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort
to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity
of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to
get anything out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our
admiration for classic literature and our reverence for Holy Church."

He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly
at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The
brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and,
glancing over it, continued: "My other intentions are clearly set forth
in this public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which
after that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and
every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism,
since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is
this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the
colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have
found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he
has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce
such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it
should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior
should now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket."

The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but
seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used
up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son
and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand
trap. And now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his
breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the
brigand.

"Excellent!" cried that outlaw gaily; "so far we are all cosy. I resume
the points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy.
The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the
Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure
is almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their
importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for another day's
association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal from you
that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant
things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies
and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably off here
for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a
sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves."

All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with
carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such
preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his
sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl
had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural
affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat
snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a
lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it.
He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself
somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within
a yard or two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an
instantaneous irritation.

"Well," said the poet tartly, "do people still think me too romantic?
Are there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?"

"There may be," said Father Brown agnostically.

"What do you mean?" asked the other sharply.

"I mean I am puzzled," replied the priest. "I am puzzled about Ezza or
Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable
as a brigand even than he was as a courier."

"But in what way?" persisted his companion. "Santa Maria! I should have
thought the brigand was plain enough."

"I find three curious difficulties," said the priest in a quiet voice.
"I should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell
you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you
left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing;
the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low.
But I could not help hearing Ezza say these words--'Well, let her have
a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any minute.' Mr Harrogate
answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On the
impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril;
I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant
this capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the
brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole
purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have
meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and
banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate's head?"

"Disaster to Miss Harrogate!" ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some
ferocity. "Explain yourself; go on."

"All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief," resumed the
priest reflectively. "And here is the second of them. Why did he put
so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two
thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency
to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate's friends
would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves
were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized
and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so
specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he
levied the blackmail?"

"I cannot imagine," said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once
with an unaffected gesture. "You may think you enlighten me, but you are
leading me deeper in the dark. What may be the third objection to the
King of the Thieves?" "The third objection," said Father Brown, still
in meditation, "is this bank we are sitting on. Why does our
brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the Paradise of
Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to look
at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It
never could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the
world. For it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road
across the mountains--the very place where the police would most
probably pass. Why, five shabby short guns held us helpless here about
half an hour ago. The quarter of a company of any kind of soldiers could
have blown us over the precipice. Whatever is the meaning of this odd
little nook of grass and flowers, it is not an entrenched position. It
is something else; it has some other strange sort of importance; some
value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental theatre or
a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy; it
is like...."

As the little priest's words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull
and dreamy sincerity, Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and
impatient, heard a new noise in the mountains. Even for him the sound
was as yet very small and faint; but he could have sworn the evening
breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of horses' hoofs and a
distant hallooing.

At the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the
less-experienced English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above
them and stood in the broken hedge, steadying himself against a tree and
peering down the road. He was a strange figure as he stood there, for he
had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and swinging baldric and cutlass in
his capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic tweed of the courier
showed through in patches all over him.

The next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement
with his hand. The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion,
but in what was evidently a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of
occupying the road along the ridge, they sprinkled themselves along the
side of it behind the trees and the hedge, as if watching unseen for an
enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning to shake the mountain
road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out orders. The
brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the evening
air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then
the noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches
broke, horses neighed, men cried out.

"A rescue!" cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat;
"the gendarmes are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to
be rebels against robbers! Come, don't let us leave everything to
the police; that is so dreadfully modern. Fall on the rear of these
ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us; come, friends, let us rescue
the gendarmes!"

And throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and
began to escalade the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up
and ran across to help him, revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear
himself imperatively recalled by the raucous voice of his father, who
seemed to be in great agitation.

"I won't have it," said the banker in a choking voice; "I command you
not to interfere."

"But, father," said Frank very warmly, "an Italian gentleman has led the
way. You wouldn't have it said that the English hung back."

"It is useless," said the older man, who was trembling violently, "it is
useless. We must submit to our lot."

Father Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as
if on his heart, but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great
light came into his face like the light of the revelation of death.

Muscari meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank
up to the road, and struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder,
causing him to stagger and swing round. Montano also had his cutlass
unsheathed, and Muscari, without further speech, sent a slash at his
head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But even as the two
short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately
dropped his point and laughed.

"What's the good, old man?" he said in spirited Italian slang; "this
damned farce will soon be over."

"What do you mean, you shuffler?" panted the fire-eating poet. "Is your
courage a sham as well as your honesty?"

"Everything about me is a sham," responded the ex-courier in complete
good humour. "I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I
have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine
courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can't fight a duel
with that." And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old
straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.

Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to
discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were
pushing their horses' muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands,
who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill
them. It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police
than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of doomed and
outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in bewilderment
he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest standing
there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of a
word or two.

"Signor Muscari," said the cleric, "in this queer crisis personalities
may be pardoned. I may tell you without offence of a way in which you
will do more good than by helping the gendarmes, who are bound to break
through in any case. You will permit me the impertinent intimacy, but do
you care about that girl? Care enough to marry her and make her a good
husband, I mean?"

"Yes," said the poet quite simply.

"Does she care about you?"

"I think so," was the equally grave reply.

"Then go over there and offer yourself," said the priest: "offer her
everything you can; offer her heaven and earth if you've got them. The
time is short."

"Why?" asked the astonished man of letters.

"Because," said Father Brown, "her Doom is coming up the road."

"Nothing is coming up the road," argued Muscari, "except the rescue."

"Well, you go over there," said his adviser, "and be ready to rescue her
from the rescue."

Almost as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush
of the escaping brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass
like defeated men pursued; and the great cocked hats of the mounted
gendarmerie were seen passing along above the broken hedge. Another
order was given; there was a noise of dismounting, and a tall officer
with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand appeared
in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who
cried out in a hoarse and strangled voice: "Robbed! I've been robbed!"

"Why, that was hours ago," cried his son in astonishment: "when you were
robbed of two thousand pounds."

"Not of two thousand pounds," said the financier, with an abrupt and
terrible composure, "only of a small bottle."

The policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green
hollow. Encountering the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him
on the shoulder with something between a caress and a buffet and gave
him a push that sent him staggering away. "You'll get into trouble,
too," he said, "if you play these tricks."

Again to Muscari's artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of
a great outlaw at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the
Harrogate group and said: "Samuel Harrogate, I arrest you in the name
of the law for embezzlement of the funds of the Hull and Huddersfield
Bank."

The great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to
reflect a moment, and before they could interpose took a half turn and
a step that brought him to the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then,
flinging up his hands, he leapt exactly as he leapt out of the coach.
But this time he did not fall into a little meadow just beneath; he fell
a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of bones in the valley.

The anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father
Brown, was largely mixed with admiration. "It was like him to escape us
at last," he said. "He was a great brigand if you like. This last
trick of his I believe to be absolutely unprecedented. He fled with
the company's money to Italy, and actually got himself captured by sham
brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the disappearance of
the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for ransom was
really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he's been
doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a
serious loss to his family."

Muscari was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as
she did for many a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could
not help having a smile and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the
indefensible Ezza Montano. "And where are you going next?" he asked him
over his shoulder.

"Birmingham," answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. "Didn't I tell
you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe
in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago--in
short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!"

"In short," said Muscari, "to the real Paradise of Thieves."





THREE -- The Duel of Dr Hirsch


M. MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs
Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both short,
brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong
to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair
look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently
affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two
beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They
were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the
great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.

M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common expression
"Adieu" should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight
fine imposed for its use in private life. "Then," he said, "the very
name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time in the ear
of man." M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance to militarism,
and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from "Aux armes,
citoyens" to "Aux greves, citoyens". But his antimilitarism was of a
peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker,
who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole
planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac's proposal that (by way of
beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.

And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from
their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France
and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was
temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his
sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short,
more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him,
something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout
Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and
daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if
somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin
doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist
nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and
evolutionary--the Republican Government put considerable confidence in
him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered
a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully
guarding.

His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee--a street which in
that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself;
a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place
where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this
were the white and green blinds of the great scientist's house, an iron
balcony, also painted green, running along in front of the first-floor
windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind of court, gay with
shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated talk.

The door was opened to them by the doctor's old servant, Simon, who
might very well have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit
of black, spectacles, grey hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he
was a far more presentable man of science than his master, Dr Hirsch,
who was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to
make his body insignificant. With all the gravity of a great physician
handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M. Armagnac. That
gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read the
following:

I cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I
refuse to meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the
stairs. He has been kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms;
I have locked myself in my study, opposite that cafe. If you love me,
go over to the cafe and wait at one of the tables outside. I will try
to send him over to you. I want you to answer him and deal with him. I
cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.

There is going to be another Dreyfus case.

P. HIRSCH



M. Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and
looked at M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the
little tables under the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall
glasses of horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in
any weather and at any time. Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except
for one soldier drinking coffee at one table, and at another a large man
drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.

Maurice Brun cleared his throat and said: "Of course we must help the
master in every way, but--"

There was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: "He may have excellent
reasons for not meeting the man himself, but--"

Before either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader
had been expelled from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway
swayed and burst apart, as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them
like a cannon-ball.

He was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a
figure that had indeed something generally Tyrolean about it. The man's
shoulders were big and broad, but his legs were neat and active in
knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His face was brown like a nut; he
had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark hair was brushed
back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a square and
powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of a
bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but
this was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man's ears
and falling in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat.
It was a scarf of strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple,
probably of Oriental fabrication. Altogether the man had something a
shade barbaric about him; more like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary
French officer. His French, however, was obviously that of a native;
and his French patriotism was so impulsive as to be slightly absurd.
His first act when he burst out of the archway was to call in a clarion
voice down the street: "Are there any Frenchmen here?" as if he were
calling for Christians in Mecca.

Armagnac and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men
were already running from the street corners; there was a small but
ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt French instinct for the politics
of the street, the man with the black moustache had already run across
to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables, and seizing a
branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins once
shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.

"Frenchmen!" he volleyed; "I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I
am speaking! The fellows in their filthy parliaments who learn to
speak also learn to be silent--silent as that spy cowering in the house
opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his bedroom door! Silent as he
is now, though he hears my voice across this street and shakes where he
sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently--the politicians! But the time
has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to the
Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the
Vosges yesterday, and a paper was found on him--a paper I hold in my
hand. Oh, they tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who
wrote it--the man in that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with
his initials. It is a direction for finding the secret of this new
Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch wrote this note about it.
This note is in German, and was found in a German's pocket. 'Tell the
man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first drawer to the
left of Secretary's desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be careful.
P.H.'"

He rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly
the sort of man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd
was Nationalist, and already in threatening uproar; and a minority of
equally angry Intellectuals, led by Armagnac and Brun, only made the
majority more militant.

"If this is a military secret," shouted Brun, "why do you yell about it
in the street?"

"I will tell you why I do!" roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. "I
went to this man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation
it could have been given in complete confidence. He refuses to explain.
He refers me to two strangers in a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has
thrown me out of the house, but I am going back into it, with the people
of Paris behind me!"

A shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew,
one breaking a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged
once more under the archway and was heard crying and thundering inside.
Every instant the human sea grew wider and wider; it surged up against
the rails and steps of the traitor's house; it was already certain that
the place would be burst into like the Bastille, when the broken french
window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the balcony. For an instant
the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd figure in such
a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape of a
champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His
coat hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long
and weedy; his cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those
irritating beards that begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and
he wore blue spectacles.

Livid as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob
fell silent in the middle of his third sentence.

"...only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the
second to my friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M.
Dubosc, though he is storming outside this very room. It is true I have
asked two other men to confront him for me. And I will tell you why!
Because I will not and must not see him--because it would be against all
rules of dignity and honour to see him. Before I am triumphantly cleared
before a court, there is another arbitration this gentleman owes me as a
gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am strictly--"

Armagnac and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor's
enemies roared applause at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few
sentences were inaudible, but they could hear him say: "To my friends--I
myself should always prefer weapons purely intellectual, and to these
an evolved humanity will certainly confine itself. But our own most
precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and heredity. My books
are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in politics
from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their
pistols. The French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a
sportsman. Well, I give my proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and
then go back to reason for the rest of my life."

Two men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services
to Colonel Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common
soldier with the coffee, who said simply: "I will act for you, sir. I
am the Duc de Valognes." The other was the big man, whom his friend the
priest sought at first to dissuade; and then walked away alone.

In the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe
Charlemagne. Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests
were nearly all under a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the
ornamental trees stood so thick around and among the tables as to give
something of the dimness and the dazzle of a small orchard. At one of
the central tables a very stumpy little priest sat in complete solitude,
and applied himself to a pile of whitebait with the gravest sort of
enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a peculiar taste
for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure. He did
not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown
bread and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell
across the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down opposite. Flambeau
was gloomy.

"I'm afraid I must chuck this business," said he heavily. "I'm all on
the side of the French soldiers like Dubosc, and I'm all against the
French atheists like Hirsch; but it seems to me in this case we've made
a mistake. The Duke and I thought it as well to investigate the charge,
and I must say I'm glad we did."

"Is the paper a forgery, then?" asked the priest

"That's just the odd thing," replied Flambeau. "It's exactly like
Hirsch's writing, and nobody can point out any mistake in it. But it
wasn't written by Hirsch. If he's a French patriot he didn't write it,
because it gives information to Germany. And if he's a German spy he
didn't write it, well--because it doesn't give information to Germany."

"You mean the information is wrong?" asked Father Brown.

"Wrong," replied the other, "and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would
have been right--about the hiding-place of his own secret formula in his
own official department. By favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the
Duke and I have actually been allowed to inspect the secret drawer at
the War Office where the Hirsch formula is kept. We are the only people
who have ever known it, except the inventor himself and the Minister for
War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch from fighting. After
that we really can't support Dubosc if his revelation is a mare's nest."

"And it is?" asked Father Brown.

"It is," said his friend gloomily. "It is a clumsy forgery by somebody
who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the
cupboard on the right of the Secretary's desk. As a fact the cupboard
with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says
the grey envelope contains a long document written in red ink. It isn't
written in red ink, but in ordinary black ink. It's manifestly absurd to
say that Hirsch can have made a mistake about a paper that nobody knew
of but himself; or can have tried to help a foreign thief by telling him
to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think we must chuck it up and apologize
to old Carrots."

Father Brown seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his
fork. "You are sure the grey envelope was in the left cupboard?" he
asked.

"Positive," replied Flambeau. "The grey envelope--it was a white
envelope really--was--"

Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared
across at his companion. "What?" he asked, in an altered voice.

"Well, what?" repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.

"It was not grey," said the priest. "Flambeau, you frighten me."

"What the deuce are you frightened of?"

"I'm frightened of a white envelope," said the other seriously, "If it
had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey.
But if it was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has been
dabbling in some of the old brimstone after all."

"But I tell you he couldn't have written such a note!" cried Flambeau.
"The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr
Hirsch knew all about the facts."

"The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts," said his
clerical companion soberly. "He could never have got 'em so wrong
without knowing about 'em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on
every subject--like the devil."

"Do you mean--?"

"I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,"
said his friend firmly. "Suppose someone sent you to find a house with
a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden,
with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You
would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say
no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind
green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats
were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and
coffee forbidden--then you would know you had found the house. The man
must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate."

"But what could it mean?" demanded the diner opposite.

"I can't conceive," said Brown; "I don't understand this Hirsch affair
at all. As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and
red ink instead of black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a
forger, as you say. But three is a mystical number; it finishes things.
It finishes this. That the direction about the drawer, the colour of
ink, the colour of envelope, should none of them be right by accident,
that can't be a coincidence. It wasn't."

"What was it, then? Treason?" asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.

"I don't know that either," answered Brown, with a face of blank
bewilderment. "The only thing I can think of.... Well, I never
understood that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier
than the other sorts. I go by a man's eyes and voice, don't you know,
and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses--and
avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible
things imputed both ways; I know (though it's not modern to say so) that
human nature in the highest places is still capable of being Cenci or
Borgia. No--, what puzzled me was the sincerity of both parties. I don't
mean the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly
honest, and often duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the
conspirators, if they were conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a
traitor. I mean the men who must have known the truth. Now Dreyfus
went on like a man who knew he was a wronged man. And yet the French
statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he wasn't a wronged man
but simply a wrong 'un. I don't mean they behaved well; I mean they
behaved as if they were sure. I can't describe these things; I know what
I mean."

"I wish I did," said his friend. "And what has it to do with old
Hirsch?"

"Suppose a person in a position of trust," went on the priest, "began to
give the enemy information because it was false information. Suppose
he even thought he was saving his country by misleading the foreigner.
Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little loans were made
to him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his
contradictory position in a confused way by never telling the foreign
spies the truth, but letting it more and more be guessed. The better
part of him (what was left of it) would still say: 'I have not helped
the enemy; I said it was the left drawer.' The meaner part of him would
already be saying: 'But they may have the sense to see that means the
right.' I think it is psychologically possible--in an enlightened age,
you know."

"It may be psychologically possible," answered Flambeau, "and it
certainly would explain Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his
judges being sure he was guilty. But it won't wash historically, because
Dreyfus's document (if it was his document) was literally correct."

"I wasn't thinking of Dreyfus," said Father Brown.

Silence had sunk around them with the emptying of the tables; it was
already late, though the sunlight still clung to everything, as if
accidentally entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted
his seat sharply--making an isolated and echoing noise--and threw his
elbow over the angle of it. "Well," he said, rather harshly, "if Hirsch
is not better than a timid treason-monger..."

"You mustn't be too hard on them," said Father Brown gently. "It's not
entirely their fault; but they have no instincts. I mean those things
that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an
investment. They've been taught that it's all a matter of degree."

"Anyhow," cried Flambeau impatiently, "he's not a patch on my principal;
and I shall go through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he's a
sort of patriot after all."

Father Brown continued to consume whitebait.

Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau's fierce black
eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. "What's the matter with you?"
Flambeau demanded. "Dubosc's all right in that way. You don't doubt
him?"

"My friend," said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a
kind of cold despair, "I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has
happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before
my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There
is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police
mystery where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or
less telling the truth. Here both men.... Well! I've told you the only
theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn't satisfy
me."

"Nor me either," replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on
eating fish with an air of entire resignation. "If all you can suggest
is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly
clever, but...well, what would you call it?"

"I should call it thin," said the priest promptly. "I should call it
uncommonly thin. But that's the queer thing about the whole business.
The lie is like a schoolboy's. There are only three versions, Dubosc's
and Hirsch's and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by
a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the
French official to help German officers; or it was written by the French
official to mislead German officers. Very well. You'd expect a secret
paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look
quite different from that. You'd expect, probably a cipher, certainly
abbreviations; most certainly scientific and strictly professional
terms. But this thing's elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: 'In
the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.' It looks as if... as
if it were meant to be seen through at once."

Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform
had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of
thump.

"I have extraordinary news," said the Duc de Valognes. "I have just come
from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he
asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain."

"What?" cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite
frightful--"apologize?"

"Yes," said the Duke gruffly; "then and there--before everybody--when
the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving
the country."

"But what can this mean?" cried Flambeau. "He can't be afraid of that
little Hirsch! Confound it!" he cried, in a kind of rational rage;
"nobody could be afraid of Hirsch!"

"I believe it's some plot!" snapped Valognes--"some plot of the Jews and
Freemasons. It's meant to work up glory for Hirsch..."

The face of Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it
could shine with ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was
always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted
itself in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that his
friend had suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his
plate of fish.

"Where did you last see our precious Colonel?" asked Flambeau,
irritably.

"He's round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with
him. He's packing up, I tell you."

"Will he be there still, do you think?" asked Flambeau, frowning at the
table.

"I don't think he can get away yet," replied the Duke; "he's packing to
go a long journey..."

"No," said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, "for a
very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still
be in time to catch him if we go there in a motor-cab."

Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the
corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the
party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once,
when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or
not, he answered rather absently: "No; only of ambition--like Caesar."
Then he somewhat inconsequently added: "He lives a very lonely life; he
has had to do everything for himself."

"Well, if he's ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now," said Flambeau
rather bitterly. "All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has
turned tail."

"Don't talk so loud," said Father Brown, lowering his voice, "your
cursed Colonel is just in front."

The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the
wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be
seen shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He
looked much the same as when they first saw him, except that he had
changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair
of trousers. It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.

The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to
be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage
scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it,
interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut
fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing
gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens, showed
at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and
purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall
Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as
inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the
lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.

Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. "Do you know," he
said, "there is something about this place that--"

"Hullo!" called out the Duke sharply; "that fellow's disappeared.
Vanished, like a blasted fairy!"

"He has a key," explained their clerical friend. "He's only gone into
one of these garden doors," and as he spoke they heard one of the dull
wooden doors close again with a click in front of them.

Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood
in front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of
curiosity. Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like
a monkey and stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark
against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.

The Duke looked at the priest. "Dubosc's escape is more elaborate than
we thought," he said; "but I suppose he is escaping from France."

"He is escaping from everywhere," answered Father Brown.

Valognes's eyes brightened, but his voice sank. "Do you mean suicide?"
he asked.

"You will not find his body," replied the other.

A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. "My God," he
exclaimed in French, "I know what this place is now! Why, it's the back
of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the
back of a house as well as the back of a man."

"And Dubosc's gone in there!" cried the Duke, smiting his hip. "Why,
they'll meet after all!" And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on
the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with
excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall,
with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully
across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.

The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and
desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau,
who had the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung
himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he
could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of
the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light,
but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his
neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau
could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and
luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the
words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.

"Yes, they will meet now after all!"

"They will never meet," said Father Brown. "Hirsch was right when he
said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you
read a queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so
perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to
feel quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is
something of the kind, but more curious."

"There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,"
said Valognes vindictively. "They will jolly well have to meet if we
capture them and force them to fight."

"They will not meet on the Day of Judgement," said the priest. "If God
Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet
for the swords to cross--even then, if one of them stood ready, the
other would not come."

"Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?" cried the Duc de Valognes,
impatiently; "why on earth shouldn't they meet like other people?"

"They are the opposite of each other," said Father Brown, with a queer
kind of smile. "They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to
speak."

He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes
turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That
investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel,
after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau's first
thought was that this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped
the thought for another. The solidity and squareness of Dubosc's chest
and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came off with his
coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman,
who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious
purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his
dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong
light fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black
moustache had gone; he--was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained
of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall
Father Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself.

"It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites
won't do. They don't work. They don't fight. If it's white instead of
black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line--then
there's something wrong, Monsieur, there's something wrong. One of these
men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong
and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so you can't see
his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can't see his
chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck;
the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It's
all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there's something wrong. Things
made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one
sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a
key..."

Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet.
The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front
of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort
of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and
clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the mocking mouth
uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the face of
Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were
covered with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat,
the figure vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later
a roar of popular applause from the street beyond announced that Dr
Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.





FOUR -- The Man in the Passage


TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage
running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening
daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty.
The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the
other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each
man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of
striking appearance and they hated each other.

The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the
Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured
river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it
supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The
other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither
was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special
and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this
case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of
the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits
and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.

The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who
evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each
approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence.
Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man
from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret
stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with
civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who
seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.

In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could
be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and
popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But
everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a
diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man
whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed
with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty
unintelligent committees--on every sort of subject, from the reform of
the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain.
In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody
could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up
Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could
not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been
ruled by him all your life.

His appearance was "distinguished" in exactly the same sense; it was at
once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his
high silk hat--, yet it was unlike anyone else's hat--a little higher,
perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender
figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair
was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the
common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not
look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and
militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez
with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a
shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of
such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the
restaurants.

The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short,
but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and
cropped close to a strong, massive head--the sort of head you break a
door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller's. His military moustache and
the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair
of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in
sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders
were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school
of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a
proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.

For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success.
You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain
Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You
could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait
was on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other
illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or
on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary,
was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man's.
In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like
Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson
Seymour.

The door was opened to them by an aged servant or "dresser", whose
broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers
contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress's
dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every
angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one
huge diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of
luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage
costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the
Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the
shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against
the wall.

They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and
asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the
other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of
both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great
actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that
does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half
a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always
did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar
of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange
garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue
and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,
hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to
all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with
her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was
producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of
Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given
to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in
dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the
green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive
individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what
was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman's face.

She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so
many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted
some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his
victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered
later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against
his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional
unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked
up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient
Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in
the time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the
Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still.
He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as
perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could
come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would--

The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of
a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly
six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore
Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon,
looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which
across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small
and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff--and as
menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed
face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of
high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American
conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.

"Aurora," he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had
moved so many audiences, "will you--"

He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented
itself just inside the doorway--a figure so incongruous in the scene as
to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of
the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as
Bruno's and Aurora's) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He
did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull
civility: "I believe Miss Rome sent for me."

A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature
rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a
professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood
round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming
in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The
presence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome's
sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat
dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt
child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will
rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration
with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject
Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her
about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.

A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a
black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with
a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great
Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other
sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and
be left alone with the man who did not--did not admire her in that
sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the
firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was,
perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was
one half of humanity--the other half. The little priest watched, like a
Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all
while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it
was easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the
British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about
behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather than
ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to
be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to
move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him
into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome
as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.

She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner:
"I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite
flowers. But they won't be complete, you know, without my favourite
flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some
lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely."

The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at
once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like
a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of
the cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival
there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the
slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then,
dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But
meanwhile Miss Rome's experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not
succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly
and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of
command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about
the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses
that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and
that like a bewildered bulldog.

"I must show this stupid man where to go," said Aurora in a whisper to
Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.

Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his
posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some
last instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing
down the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the
Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour's brow darkened again. A man
in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other
end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno's private
room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father
Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster
Cathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the
upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left
alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous
conversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling out
looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat and
trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame
of a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd
glass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like
angels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to
everybody like very rude persons.

Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but
followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself
and his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned
himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him--calculating
the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at
which each must fit into the wall...when he heard a strong but strangled
cry.

He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant
Sir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. "Who's that
man in the passage?" he cried. "Where's that dagger of mine?"

Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging
about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly
find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the
pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the
same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of
lilies-of-the-valley. "What's this?" he cried. "What's that creature
down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?"

"My tricks!" hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.

In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped
out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked
briskly towards what he saw.

At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him,
Cutler calling out: "What are you doing? Who are you?"

"My name is Brown," said the priest sadly, as he bent over something
and straightened himself again. "Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as
quickly as I could. I have come too late."

The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in
that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of
gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of
green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn
away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound
from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger
lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.

There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could
hear far off a flower-girl's laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone
whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand.
Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been
passion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.

Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. "You need
not kill me," he said in a voice quite cold; "I shall do that on my own
account."

The Captain's hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the
same icy candour: "If I find I haven't the nerve to do it with that
dagger I can do it in a month with drink."

"Drink isn't good enough for me," replied Cutler, "but I'll have blood
for this before I die. Not yours--but I think I know whose."

And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the
dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst
it open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he
did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door
and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily
towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakily
back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of
the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him,
taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room
already rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger.
Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police
at the end of the passage.

When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost
ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore
Bruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious
opponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested
a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police,
who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with
a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight
slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and
table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him
just below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was
removed from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running
blood with a steady smile.

"Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don't he?" said the constable
confidentially to Cutler.

Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: "We must attend
to the...the death..." and his voice escaped from articulation.

"The two deaths," came in the voice of the priest from the farther side
of the room. "This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him." And
he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the
gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to
the woman who had died.

The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a
rough tenderness. "I wish I was him," he said huskily. "I remember he
used to watch her wherever she walked more than--anybody. She was his
air, and he's dried up. He's just dead."

"We are all dead," said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the
road.

They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some
random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their
faces were tragic, but also cryptic.

The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild
thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white
tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of
their grief, but not so certain of their innocence.

"We had better all be going," said Seymour heavily; "we have done all we
can to help."

"Will you understand my motives," asked Father Brown quietly, "if I say
you have done all you can to hurt?"

They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: "To hurt
whom?"

"To hurt yourselves," answered the priest. "I would not add to your
troubles if it weren't common justice to warn you. You've done nearly
everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be
acquitted. They'll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that
after the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state
and began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go,
you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and
then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger."

"Hurt myself!" exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. "A silly little
scratch."

"Which drew blood," replied the priest, nodding. "We know there's blood
on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on
it before."

There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien
to his daily accent: "But I saw a man in the passage."

"I know you did," answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, "so did
Captain Cutler. That's what seems so improbable."

Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father
Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with
his stumpy old umbrella.

As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important
news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century
more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent
reason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly
explain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of "The
Bruno Case," or "The Passage Mystery," in the Press of London and the
provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the
Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and
cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least
reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons.
The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and
the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular
soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances
the Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this
somewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports of
Bruno's trial.

The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those
who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more
serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living
impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really
filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief
actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced;
the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but
weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and
trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was
defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur
by those who misunderstood the Irish character--and those who had not
been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions,
the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the
eminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been
stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; some
instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was just
over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw
her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when
Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.

Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the
presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of
this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem
to fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow.
When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of
the important witnesses was called.

Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did
at all--not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of
a public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of
self-effacement before the King's justice; and though everyone looked at
him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury,
they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a
private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly
lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at
the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for
a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own
dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who
asked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had
then gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in
order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to
buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room,
exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the
deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing
and run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner's
dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of his
friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and
looked down it towards the prisoner's door. Did he see anything in the
passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.

Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the
witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more
than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which
seemed at once sympathetic and creepy: "Did you see it distinctly?"

Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full
working-order. "Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite
indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the
outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it
appears quite black against the light at the other end." The witness
lowered his steady eyes once more and added: "I had noticed the fact
before, when Captain Cutler first entered it." There was another
silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.

"Well," said Sir Walter patiently, "what was the outline like? Was it,
for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?"

"Not in the least," answered Seymour quietly.

"What did it look like to you?"

"It looked to me," replied the witness, "like a tall man."

Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his
umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be
looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner
by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it
as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and
taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.

Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his
black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the
witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many
other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped
him.

"I shall only detain you a moment," said Mr Butler, who was a
rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial
slumber. "Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?"

A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour's features. "I'm
afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers," he said. "When I saw daylight
between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all."

Butler's sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. "After
all!" he repeated slowly. "So you did think at first it was a woman?"

Seymour looked troubled for the first time. "It is hardly a point of
fact," he said, "but if his lordship would like me to answer for my
impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing
that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the
curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair."

"Thank you," said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had
got what he wanted.

Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir
Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same.
He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching
of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the
upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion
of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little
artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen.
Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic--with a somewhat
too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said
it looked more like a beast--with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner.
But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and
Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already
fairly clear.

The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a
long time about it. "You used a rather remarkable expression," he said,
looking at Cutler sleepily. "What do you mean by saying that it looked
more like a beast than a man or a woman?"

Cutler seemed seriously agitated. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have said
that," he said; "but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a
chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--"

Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. "Never mind
whether its hair was like a pig's," he said, "was it like a woman's?"

"A woman's!" cried the soldier. "Great Scott, no!"

"The last witness said it was," commented the counsel, with unscrupulous
swiftness. "And did the figure have any of those serpentine and
semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No
feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and
square than otherwise?"

"He may have been bending forward," said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather
faint voice.

"Or again, he may not," said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the
second time.

The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic
clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed
hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a
child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head
(mostly by some ramifications of his family's religion) that Father
Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked
and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up
sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told
him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry.
When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the
man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his
theories.

"A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black
shape. Well, what shape was it?"

Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal
nature of obedience. "The shape," he said, "was short and thick, but had
two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or
top, rather like horns, and--"

"Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt," ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down
in triumphant jocularity. "It was the devil come to eat Protestants."

"No," said the priest dispassionately; "I know who it was."

Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of
some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought
only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage,
described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was
a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and
the other a devil....

The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes.
"You are a most extraordinary witness," he said; "but there is something
about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well,
who was the man you saw in the passage?"

"He was myself," said Father Brown.

Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said
quite calmly: "Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?" And then,
without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question:
"You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime
was committed with a short blade?"

"A short blade," assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, "but a
very long hilt."

Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had
really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt
(which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried
on to explain.

"I mean daggers aren't the only things with short blades. Spears
have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like
daggers, if they're that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like
the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she'd sent
for me to settle their family troubles--and I came just too late, God
forgive me! But he died penitent--he just died of being penitent. He
couldn't bear what he'd done."

The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was
gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still
looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel
for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.

"If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear," said Butler, "he
must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of
struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?" He had slipped into
treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.

"The poor lady's dress was torn," said the witness, "because it was
caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free
herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner's room and
lunged with the spear."

"A panel?" repeated the barrister in a curious voice.

"It was a looking-glass on the other side," explained Father Brown.
"When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could
probably be slid out into the passage."

There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the
judge who spoke. "So you really mean that when you looked down that
passage, the man you saw was yourself--in a mirror?"

"Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say," said Brown, "but they
asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and
so I--"

The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said
in specially distinct tones: "Do you really mean to say that when Sir
Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman's
hair and a man's trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?"

"Yes, my lord," said Father Brown.

"And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with
humped shoulders and hog's bristles, he simply saw himself?"

"Yes, my lord."

The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was
hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. "And can you tell us
why," he asked, "you should know your own figure in a looking-glass,
when two such distinguished men don't?"

Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered:
"Really, my lord, I don't know unless it's because I don't look at it so
often."





FIVE -- The Mistake of the Machine


FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens
about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence
had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem
of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and
mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third
Degree in America.

"I've been reading," said Flambeau, "of this new psychometric method
they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean;
they put a pulsometer on a man's wrist and judge by how his heart goes
at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?"

"I think it very interesting," replied Father Brown; "it reminds me
of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a
corpse if the murderer touched it."

"Do you really mean," demanded his friend, "that you think the two
methods equally valuable?"

"I think them equally valueless," replied Brown. "Blood flows, fast or
slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we
can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have
to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to
shed it."

"The method," remarked the other, "has been guaranteed by some of the
greatest American men of science."

"What sentimentalists men of science are!" exclaimed Father Brown, "and
how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a
Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must
be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she
blushes. That's a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by
the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too."

"But surely," insisted Flambeau, "it might point pretty straight at
something or other."

"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight," answered the
other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the
opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right
end. I saw the thing done once and I've never believed in it since." And
he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.

It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his
co-religionists in a prison in Chicago--where the Irish population
displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him
tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor was an
ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee
philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd
apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way;
and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked his theories.
His theories were extremely complicated and were held with extreme
simplicity.

One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom,
took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and
waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper
cutting, which he handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It
appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society
papers, and ran as follows:

"Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All
our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in
which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so
many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years.
Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social
outlook was Last-Trick's show the year previous, the popular Cannibal
Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically
moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than
one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner.
The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd's
pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our
city's gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the
simple manners and customs at the other end of Society's scale. This
would be all the more telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in
Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh
from England's oak-groves. Lord Falconroy's travels began before his
ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the Republic in his
youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd
is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of
nearly twelve hundred million dollars."

"Well," asked Usher, "does that interest you?"

"Why, words rather fail me," answered Father Brown. "I cannot think at
this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And,
unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute
journalists for writing like that, I don't quite see why it should
interest you either."

"Ah!" said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of
newspaper. "Well, does that interest you?"

The paragraph was headed "Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,"
and ran: "Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard
in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities,
hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder who
patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest and most
difficult exit, for which one man has always been found sufficient. The
unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his
brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further
inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied
by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only
temporarily detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he
gave everyone the impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous
future. Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of
murder, it was found that he had written on the wall above the body a
fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood: 'This
was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man
but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim's Pond--O.R.' A man must
have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily
daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man."

"Well, the literary style is somewhat improved," admitted the priest
cheerfully, "but still I don't see what I can do for you. I should cut
a poor figure, with my short legs, running about this State after an
athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt whether anybody could find him.
The convict settlement at Sequah is thirty miles from here; the country
between is wild and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where he
will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man's land tumbling
away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any tree."

"He isn't in any hole," said the governor; "he isn't up any tree."

"Why, how do you know?" asked Father Brown, blinking.

"Would you like to speak to him?" inquired Usher.

Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. "He is here?" he exclaimed.
"Why, how did your men get hold of him?"

"I got hold of him myself," drawled the American, rising and lazily
stretching his lanky legs before the fire. "I got hold of him with the
crooked end of a walking-stick. Don't look so surprised. I really did.
You know I sometimes take a turn in the country lanes outside this
dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening up a steep lane
with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both sides; and a
young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw a man
running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent
and at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when
he came to the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made
of spiders' webs;--or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking
and snapping like bayonets) as if he himself were made of stone. In the
instant in which he appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I
slung my hooked cane at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down.
Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came running up to
secure him."

"It would have been rather awkward," remarked Brown, "if you had found
he was a popular athlete practising a mile race."

"He was not," said Usher grimly. "We soon found out who he was; but I
had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him."

"You thought it was the runaway convict," observed the priest simply,
"because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a
convict had run away."

"I had somewhat better grounds," replied the governor coolly. "I pass
over the first as too simple to be emphasized--I mean that fashionable
athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out
in bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog.
There were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man
was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more
than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite
grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise,
the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a
hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It
at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict
clothes for some confederate's clothes which did not fit him. Second,
there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I
must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not
been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields
he was crossing lay Pilgrim's Pond, for which (you will remember) the
convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-stick flying."

"A brilliant piece of rapid deduction," said Father Brown; "but had he
got a gun?"

As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically:
"I've been told a bullet is not half so useful without it."

"He had no gun," said the other gravely; "but that was doubtless due to
some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy
that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to
repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim."

"Well, that is possible enough," answered the priest.

"And it's hardly worth speculating on," said Usher, turning to some
other papers, "for we know it's the man by this time."

His clerical friend asked faintly: "But how?" And Greywood Usher threw
down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.

"Well, since you are so obstinate," he said, "let's begin at the
beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings have only one thing
in common, which is the mention of Pilgrim's Pond, the estate, as
you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a
remarkable character; one of those that rose on stepping-stones--"

"Of our dead selves to higher things," assented his companion. "Yes; I
know that. Petroleum, I think."

"Anyhow," said Usher, "Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this
rum affair."

He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in
his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.

"To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It
is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his
gun to Pilgrim's Pond. Our people aren't like the English, who will
forgive a man for being rich if he throws away money on hospitals or
horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big by his own considerable
abilities; and there's no doubt that many of those on whom he has shown
his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd
might easily get dropped by some man he'd never even heard of; some
labourer he'd locked out, or some clerk in a business he'd busted.
Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments and a high public character;
but in this country the relations of employers and employed are
considerably strained.

"That's how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim's
Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me, till another little discovery
woke up what I have of the detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe,
I picked up my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns of
country road that brought me to one of the side entrances of Todd's
grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which the place
is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the
moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks
of it lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid
shores in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until
they sank. I'd forgotten the exact tale; but you know the place I mean;
it lies north of Todd's house towards the wilderness, and has two queer
wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more like huge fungoids than
decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool, I fancied I saw
the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it, but it was
all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact, and still
less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply arrested by
something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not more
than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was
fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a
cautious eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a
figure appeared black against the illuminated interior--a muffled figure
bending forward, evidently peering out into the night. It closed the
door behind it, and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch
of imperfect light on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to
be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and evidently
disguised to avoid notice; there was something very strange both about
the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined
with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which brought her
within half a hundred yards of me--, then she stood up for an instant on
the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her
flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to
and fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of
its light fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She
was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian
shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd, the millionaire's daughter.

"She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her
again. I was about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that
the detective fever that had lured me into the adventure was rather
undignified; and that in a more authoritative capacity I already held
all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when a new noise broke
on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but
just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and a
voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden
to know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in
the house. There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a
political platform or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself.
Some of the others seemed to have gone to the lower windows or on to the
steps, and were calling up to him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll
down to the Pilgrim's Pond an hour before, and could not be traced
since. Then Todd cried 'Mighty Murder!' and shut down the window
violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs inside.
Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of the
way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later
than eight o'clock.

"I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to
you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping
the shot for Todd, as he evidently wasn't, it is most likely that he was
keeping it for Lord Falconroy; and it looks as if he had delivered the
goods. No more handy place to shoot a man than in the curious geological
surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown down would sink through
thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that
our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd.
But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America
might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America
should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the
one reason mentioned in the pink paper--that the lord is paying his
attentions to the millionaire's daughter. Our crop-haired friend,
despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.

"I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that's
because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of
Canterbury's daughter will be married in St George's, Hanover Square,
to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don't do justice to the
climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a
good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority
about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had
a father. You are in error. You do not realize that a comparatively few
years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail.
You don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our
most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen
comparatively late in life. Todd's daughter was fully eighteen when her
father first made his pile; so there isn't really anything impossible in
her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as
I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the
hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that
held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise."

"Well," said the priest patiently, "and what did you do next?"

"I reckon you'll be shocked," replied Greywood Usher, "as I know you
don't cotton to the march of science in these matters. I am given a good
deal of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more than I'm given;
and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to test that Psychometric
Machine I told you about. Now, in my opinion, that machine can't lie."

"No machine can lie," said Father Brown; "nor can it tell the truth."

"It did in this case, as I'll show you," went on Usher positively.
"I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and
simply wrote words on a blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the
variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is
to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime in a list of
words connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it
occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote 'heron' and 'eagle' and 'owl', and
when I wrote 'falcon' he was tremendously agitated; and when I began to
make an 'r' at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else
in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived
Englishman like Falconroy except the man who's shot him? Isn't that
better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses--if the evidence of
a reliable machine?"

"You always forget," observed his companion, "that the reliable machine
always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked the detective.

"I mean Man," said Father Brown, "the most unreliable machine I know of.
I don't want to be rude; and I don't think you will consider Man to be
an offensive or inaccurate description of yourself. You say you observed
his manner; but how do you know you observed it right? You say the
words have to come in a natural way; but how do you know that you did it
naturally? How do you know, if you come to that, that he did not observe
your manner? Who is to prove that you were not tremendously agitated?
There was no machine tied on to your pulse."

"I tell you," cried the American in the utmost excitement, "I was as
cool as a cucumber."

"Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers," said Brown with a smile.
"And almost as cool as you."

"Well, this one wasn't," said Usher, throwing the papers about. "Oh, you
make me tired!"

"I'm sorry," said the other. "I only point out what seems a reasonable
possibility. If you could tell by his manner when the word that might
hang him had come, why shouldn't he tell from your manner that the word
that might hang him was coming? I should ask for more than words myself
before I hanged anybody."

Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.

"And that," he cried, "is just what I'm going to give you. I tried the
machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards
and the machine, sir, is right."

He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. "I rather want
to insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on
except the scientific experiment. There was really nothing against the
man at all. His clothes were ill-fitting, as I've said, but they were
rather better, if anything, than those of the submerged class to which
he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging
through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges, the man was
comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he had only just
broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of
the comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to
confess, quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as
they are; he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do.
He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and
showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible that might
come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He asked me more than
once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time
ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would expect an
innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world except
that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his pulse.

"Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right.
By the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule
where all sorts of other people were awaiting examination, I think
he had already more or less made up his mind to clear things up by
something like a confession. He turned to me and began to say in a low
voice: 'Oh, I can't stick this any more. If you must know all about
me--'

"At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench
stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have
never in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean
finger seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the
word was a mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke
on the clock.

"'Drugger Davis!' she shouted. 'They've got Drugger Davis!'

"Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty
faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the
words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features that
the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I'm not quite so
ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the
most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police. It is
certain he had done murder more than once long before his last exploit
with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously
enough because he did it in the same manner as those milder--or
meaner--crimes for which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome,
well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to some extent; and he used
mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them out of their
money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther; and they were
found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and their whole property
missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead; but
deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical
still, the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having
reappeared somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money
instead of borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might
personally fascinate, but still with the same bad result for them. Well,
there is your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even,
since then, four criminals and three warders have identified him and
confirmed the story. Now what have you got to say to my poor little
machine after that? Hasn't the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to
say that the woman and I have done for him?"

"As to what you've done for him," replied Father Brown, rising and
shaking himself in a floppy way, "you've saved him from the electrical
chair. I don't think they can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story
of the poison; and as for the convict who killed the warder, I suppose
it's obvious that you haven't got him. Mr Davis is innocent of that
crime, at any rate."

"What do you mean?" demanded the other. "Why should he be innocent of
that crime?"

"Why, bless us all!" cried the small man in one of his rare moments of
animation, "why, because he's guilty of the other crimes! I don't know
what you people are made of. You seem to think that all sins are kept
together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday were always a
spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here spent weeks
and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money; that he
used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst; that he turned up
afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted--let us
admit, for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I
will tell you what he didn't do. He didn't storm a spiked wall against a
man with a loaded gun. He didn't write on the wall with his own hand, to
say he had done it. He didn't stop to state that his justification was
self-defence. He didn't explain that he had no quarrel with the poor
warder. He didn't name the house of the rich man to which he was going
with the gun. He didn't write his own, initials in a man's blood. Saints
alive! Can't you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don't seem to be like I am a bit. One would think you'd never
had any vices of your own."

The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the
door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an
unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.

The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to
the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after
he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his
private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still
askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his
eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's. The rest of his face
was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers
through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in
a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having
seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had
never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all,
he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like
that speak to him first.

"See here, old man Usher," shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
"I'm getting tired. Don't you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I
don't get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I'll let up on the
fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you'll feel
pretty mean. I reckon I'm not a man with no pull."

The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement
which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had
rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand
of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of
Father Brown fell soft but distinct.

"I have a suggestion to make," he said, "but it seems a little
confusing. I don't know this gentleman--but--but I think I know
him. Now, you know him--you know him quite well--but you don't know
him--naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know."

"I reckon the Cosmos is cracked," said Usher, and fell asprawl in his
round office chair.

"Now, see here," vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but
speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was
comparatively mild and rational though still resounding. "I won't let
you in. I want--"

"Who in hell are you?" yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.

"I think the gentleman's name is Todd," said the priest.

Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.

"I fear you don't read the Society papers properly," he said, and began
to read out in a monotonous voice, "'Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of
our city's gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the
manners and customs of the other end of Society's scale.' There's been
a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim's Pond tonight; and a man, one of the
guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him
here, without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress."

"What man do you mean?"

"I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running
across the ploughed field. Hadn't you better go and investigate him? He
will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran
away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight."

"Do you seriously mean--" began the official.

"Why, look here, Mr Usher," said Father Brown quietly, "you said the
machine couldn't make a mistake; and in one sense it didn't. But the
other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the
man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord
Falconroy's murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he
is Lord Falconroy."

"Then why the blazes didn't he say so?" demanded the staring Usher.

"He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician," replied
the priest, "so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was
just going to tell it you, when"--and Father Brown looked down at his
boots--"when a woman found another name for him."

"But you can't be so mad as to say," said Greywood Usher, very white,
"that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis."

The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and
undecipherable face.

"I am not saying anything about it," he said. "I leave all the rest to
you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him;
but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in
youth; but the whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are
both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would
not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think," he went on
softly and reflectively, "I think you Americans are too modest. I think
you idealize the English aristocracy--even in assuming it to be so
aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you
know he's in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You
don't allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most
influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but--"

"Oh, stop it!" cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in
impatience against a shade of irony in the other's face.

"Don't stay talking to this lunatic!" cried Todd brutally. "Take me to
my friend."

Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression,
carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.

"I'm afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather," he said, "but
this cutting may interest you."

Usher read the headlines, "Last-Trick's Strayed Revellers: Mirthful
Incident near Pilgrim's Pond." The paragraph went on: "A laughable
occurrence took place outside Wilkinson's Motor Garage last night.
A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man
in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the
steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a
girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young
woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd's
daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond,
where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the
gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the customary
joy-ride."

Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed,
"Astounding Escape of Millionaire's Daughter with Convict. She had
Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in--"

Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.





SIX -- The Head of Caesar


THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of
tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs.
The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of
pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be
opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade
is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking
down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but
there is one exception--a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim
almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall
mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with
the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or
eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to
stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess,
and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of
those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.

Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost
fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which
(along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the
street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin's. It
was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown,
formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His
friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite
him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the
neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the
window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He
waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the
curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the
large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to
the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a
young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend
put away the pocket-book), he said softly:

"If you've got ten minutes, I wish you'd follow that man with the false
nose."

Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also
looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She
was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff;
but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly
haughty one. "The man with the false nose!" repeated Flambeau. "Who's
he?"

"I haven't a notion," answered Father Brown. "I want you to find out;
I ask it as a favour. He went down there"--and he jerked his thumb over
his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures--"and can't have
passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction."

Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between
perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his
huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into
the twilight.

Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read
steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired
lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she
leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: "Why do you say that? How
do you know it's false?"

He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable
embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering
on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman's eyes followed
his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.

"No," said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. "It doesn't say 'Sela',
like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was
wool-gathering just now; it says 'Ales.'"

"Well?" inquired the staring young lady. "What does it matter what it
says?"

His ruminating eye roved to the girl's light canvas sleeve, round the
wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough
to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it
more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find
much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant.
"You see, madam," he said, "from outside the place looks--well, it is a
perfectly decent place--but ladies like you don't--don't generally think
so. They never go into such places from choice, except--"

"Well?" she repeated.

"Except an unfortunate few who don't go in to drink milk."

"You are a most singular person," said the young lady. "What is your
object in all this?"

"Not to trouble you about it," he replied, very gently. "Only to arm
myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my
help."

"But why should I need help?"

He continued his dreamy monologue. "You couldn't have come in to see
protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you'd have gone
through into the parlour... and you couldn't have come in because
you were ill, or you'd have spoken to the woman of the place, who's
obviously respectable... besides, you don't look ill in that way, but
only unhappy.... This street is the only original long lane that has
no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up.... I could only
suppose that you'd seen somebody coming whom you didn't want to meet;
and found the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness
of stone.... I don't think I went beyond the licence of a stranger
in glancing at the only man who passed immediately after.... And as I
thought he looked like the wrong sort... and you looked like the right
sort.... I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all.
As for my friend, he'll be back soon; and he certainly can't find out
anything by stumping down a road like this.... I didn't think he could."

"Then why did you send him out?" she cried, leaning forward with yet
warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with
reddish colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.

He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: "Because I hoped
you would speak to me."

She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there
hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke
out of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost
grimly: "Well, if you're so keen on my conversation, perhaps you'll
answer my question." After a pause she added: "I had the honour to ask
you why you thought the man's nose was false."

"The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather," answered
Father Brown with entire simplicity.

"But it's such a crooked nose," remonstrated the red-haired girl.

The priest smiled in his turn. "I don't say it's the sort of nose one
would wear out of mere foppery," he admitted. "This man, I think, wears
it because his real nose is so much nicer."

"But why?" she insisted.

"What is the nursery-rhyme?" observed Brown absent-mindedly. "There was
a crooked man and he went a crooked mile.... That man, I fancy, has gone
a very crooked road--by following his nose."

"Why, what's he done?" she demanded, rather shakily.

"I don't want to force your confidence by a hair," said Father Brown,
very quietly. "But I think you could tell me more about that than I can
tell you."

The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched
hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly,
and she sat down again. "You are more of a mystery than all the others,"
she said desperately, "but I feel there might be a heart in your
mystery."

"What we all dread most," said the priest in a low voice, "is a maze
with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare." "I will tell
you everything," said the red-haired girl doggedly, "except why I am
telling you; and that I don't know."

She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: "You look as if you
knew what isn't snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours
is a good old family, you'll understand it is a necessary part of the
story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother's high-and-dry notions,
noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and
my father was that Colonel Carstairs you've probably heard of, who made
the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe
my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman
coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as
metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection than of
his coat-of-arms--nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary
character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter.
He quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia
on a small allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs
Collection, actually with a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur.
He meant it as a reward, as the highest honour he could offer, in
acknowledgement of Arthur's loyalty and rectitude and the distinctions
he had already gained in mathematics and economics at Cambridge. He left
me practically all his pretty large fortune; and I am sure he meant it
in contempt.

"Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my
father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in
early youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became
like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman
halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff,
idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money
must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent
nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not
trouble to dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the
corded brown-paper parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in
an old brown dressing-gown. With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin,
refined face, it made him look like an old ascetic monk. Every now
and then, though, he would appear dressed like a decidedly fashionable
gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the London sales or
shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.

"Now, if you've known any young people, you won't be shocked if I say
that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of
mind in which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very
well in their way. I'm not like my brother Arthur; I can't help enjoying
enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair,
from the other side of the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think
the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for him; though he really
did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn't behave any worse than
I did; as you shall hear.

"I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as
you can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony
for an unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so
rattled with more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling;
and don't know whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a
broken heart. We lived then at a little seaside watering-place in South
Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few doors off had a son about
five years older than myself, who had been a friend of Giles before he
went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but I tell you
it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used to
go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each
other; at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was.
If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face,
bronzed by the sea also, it's not for his sake, I assure you, but for
the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.

"One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along
the sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front
drawing-room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just
purchased and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark
study and museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard
the heavy door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net
and tam-o'-shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my
brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench
by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the
exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the
long, wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise
portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling
Philip of a coin that was like him, and Philip wishing he had it.
Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts with which my head went
round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies. It seemed to me
that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a
wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I
felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like
the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the
unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur
would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs
treasure! I believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such
a thing, But then, the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened
my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for
the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong
sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the
garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living
and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world--and
then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother's
growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the Carstairs
Collection had come to grips at last.

"Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the
streets to the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the
Roman Empire on my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not
only the old lion argent that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles
of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet
my heart rose higher and higher like a child's kite, until I came over
the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where Philip stood
already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some hundred
yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of
low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake
of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and
waded to where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I
turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water
and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.

"At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on
the sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately
after that it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was
only a dark dot in the distance, and I could only just see that he was
standing quite still and gazing, with his head a little on one side.
There was no earthly logical evidence that he was looking at me; he
might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the sea-gulls,
or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the shore
between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic;
for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us
across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that
he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark
spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old
black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite
of these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation,
and came on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.

"I can't tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he
thus silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he
had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air.
It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man's head had
fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon
disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the
water's edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so
much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away
with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till
he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to
his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing
articulation: 'Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin
with a somewhat different superscription?'

"With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His
tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough,
nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark
beard was not really long or wild--, but he looked rather hairy, because
the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones.
His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather
clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which
somehow (I don't know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity
one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape,
was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft,
it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly
a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to
me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some
hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don't
know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I
think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he
had just that moment moved it.

"'Any little assistance,' he continued with the same queer, priggish
accent, 'that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the
family.'

"Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of
the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were
swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he
have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was
certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I
slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance,
been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not 'X-ray' the
coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more
have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man
in the fairy-tale.

"'Philip,' I cried helplessly, 'ask this man what he wants.'

"When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked
rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the
exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had
another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He
merely said gruffly to the man: 'You clear out of this.' And, motioning
me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention
to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the
roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my
persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed
me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate,
detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when
we had crested the sand-hills, Philip's patience (which was by no means
so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly,
saying, 'Go back. I can't talk to you now.' And as the man hovered and
opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying
from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling
out below, covered with sand.

"This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my
peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess.
Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before
I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate,
with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things
considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that
he himself would keep it 'for the present'. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly: 'You know Giles is back from Australia?'"

The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the
investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him
to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning
his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing,
the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau,
as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown
accepted it with some surprise and read on it: "Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379,
Mafeking Avenue, Putney." The girl was going on with her story.

"I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it
had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a
milk-can--and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the
servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his
brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell.
Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose
help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the
horrid thing's hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I
had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected--perhaps he had been shaken by his fall--and I watched the
star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid
vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.

"Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out.
I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still
glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and
dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any
concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I'd seen it
so slowly.

"The man or monster I'd sent away was standing quite still in the middle
of the garden. Oh, we've all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the
dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever
be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in
warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen
bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber's dummy. He stood quite
still, with his face towards me; and I can't tell you how horrid
he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we'd stuck up a waxwork
instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.

"Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran
out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had
undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different
from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt
vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur
more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet
dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was
rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to
Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly,
but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed
to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane.
But when I stared harder, it was more like a man's thumb pressed on the
pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage
re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a
strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.

"For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip
of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with
the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first
invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters
together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even
as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on
it that was like a snail.

"It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling
close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even
than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but
he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes'
curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to
see the last and worst sight.

"My brother's chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man
with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat
still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother's
books under my brother's lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but
his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his
face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant's
proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and
watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more
frightful still.

"I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn't matter. What I did
next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal
in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch.
He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words;
and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that
very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London,
as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having
nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the
family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to
confess the abstraction of the lesser gem--, but he bore down all other
topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still
misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up
with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the
curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe
almost in the dead of night--but from Philip also.... My brother was
often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of
secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools.
I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of
desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is
as this gentleman has said.

"I've got only one thing to say. I don't deserve to be helped; and I
don't question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to
have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can
have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip
and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?"

"It is an extraordinary problem," admitted Flambeau.

"Not so extraordinary as the answer," remarked Father Brown rather
gloomily. "Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham
place in an hour and a half hence?"

The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. "Yes," she
said, "I'll be there"; and almost instantly left the place.

That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter
as they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a
temporary residence of the Carstairs family.

"Of course the superficial, on reflection," said Flambeau, "would think
first of this Australian brother who's been in trouble before,
who's come back so suddenly and who's just the man to have shabby
confederates. But I can't see how he can come into the thing by any
process of thought, unless..."

"Well?" asked his companion patiently.

Flambeau lowered his voice. "Unless the girl's lover comes in, too,
and he would be the blacker villain. The Australian chap did know that
Hawker wanted the coin. But I can't see how on earth he could know that
Hawker had got it, unless Hawker signalled to him or his representative
across the shore."

"That is true," assented the priest, with respect.

"Have you noted another thing?" went on Flambeau eagerly, "this Hawker
hears his love insulted, but doesn't strike till he's got to the soft
sand-hills, where he can be victor in a mere sham-fight. If he'd struck
amid rocks and sea, he might have hurt his ally."

"That is true again," said Father Brown, nodding.

"And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at
least three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but
at least three people for blackmail"

"Why?" asked the priest softly.

"Well, obviously," cried his friend, "there must be one to be exposed;
one to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify."

After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: "You miss a logical step.
Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents."

"What can you mean?" asked the other.

"Why shouldn't a blackmailer," asked Brown, in a low voice, "threaten
his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in
order to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and
then wrote him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to
tell his wife! Why shouldn't it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to
gamble and then, following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy
with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose--but, here we are, my
friend."

"My God!" cried Flambeau; "you don't mean--"

An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the
golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin.
"Miss Carstairs," said Hawker without ceremony, "wouldn't go in till you
came."

"Well," observed Brown confidently, "don't you think it's the best
thing she can do to stop outside--with you to look after her? You see, I
rather guess you have guessed it all yourself."

"Yes," said the young man, in an undertone, "I guessed on the sands and
now I know; that was why I let him fall soft."

Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let
himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer
parlour. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father
Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if
at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was
wearing a brown dressing-gown.

"We have come," said Father Brown politely, "to give back this coin to
its owner." And he handed it to the man with the nose.

Flambeau's eyes rolled. "Is this man a coin-collector?" he asked.

"This man is Mr Arthur Carstairs," said the priest positively, "and he
is a coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind."

The man changed colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on
his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a
sort of despairing dignity. "You shall see, then," he said, "that I have
not lost all the family qualities." And he turned suddenly and strode
into an inner room, slamming the door.

"Stop him!" shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a
chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it
was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for
doctor and police.

An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body
of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping
brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very
modern English coins.

The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. "This," he said, "was all
that was left of the Carstairs Collection."

After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: "It was
a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a
little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real
money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank
bit by bit to the basest ways of making money--even to blackmailing his
own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for
his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga
in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have
noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess
when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however
distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up
face quite close."

There was another silence. "Well," growled the detective, "and so this
great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser."

"Is there so great a difference?" asked Father Brown, in the same
strange, indulgent tone. "What is there wrong about a miser that is not
often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except... thou shalt
not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them
nor serve them, for I...but we must go and see how the poor young people
are getting on."

"I think," said Flambeau, "that in spite of everything, they are
probably getting on very well."





SEVEN -- The Purple Wig


MR EDWARD NUTT, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at
his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a
typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.

He was a stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were
resolute, his mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather
babyish blue eyes had a bewildered and even wistful look that rather
contradicted all this. Nor indeed was the expression altogether
misleading. It might truly be said of him, as for many journalists in
authority, that his most familiar emotion was one of continuous fear;
fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of misprints,
fear of the sack.

His life was a series of distracted compromises between the proprietor
of the paper (and of him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three
ineradicable mistakes in his mind, and the very able staff he had
collected to run the paper; some of whom were brilliant and experienced
men and (what was even worse) sincere enthusiasts for the political
policy of the paper.

A letter from one of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and
resolute as he was, he seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He
took up a strip of proof instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a
blue pencil, altered the word "adultery" to the word "impropriety,"
and the word "Jew" to the word "Alien," rang a bell and sent it flying
upstairs.

Then, with a more thoughtful eye, he ripped open the letter from his
more distinguished contributor, which bore a postmark of Devonshire, and
read as follows:

DEAR NUTT,--As I see you're working Spooks and Dooks at the same time,
what about an article on that rum business of the Eyres of Exmoor; or
as the old women call it down here, the Devil's Ear of Eyre? The head of
the family, you know, is the Duke of Exmoor; he is one of the few really
stiff old Tory aristocrats left, a sound old crusted tyrant it is quite
in our line to make trouble about. And I think I'm on the track of a
story that will make trouble.

Of course I don't believe in the old legend about James I; and as for
you, you don't believe in anything, not even in journalism. The legend,
you'll probably remember, was about the blackest business in English
history--the poisoning of Overbury by that witch's cat Frances Howard,
and the quite mysterious terror which forced the King to pardon the
murderers. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it; and
the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the
truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which
he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret.
And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor
of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you
don't believe in black magic; and if you did, you couldn't use it for
copy. If a miracle happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up,
now so many bishops are agnostics. But that is not the point. The point
is that there really is something queer about Exmoor and his family;
something quite natural, I dare say, but quite abnormal. And the Ear
is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol or a delusion or disease
or something. Another tradition says that Cavaliers just after James I
began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the first Lord
Exmoor. This also is no doubt fanciful.

The reason I point it out to you is this: It seems to me that we make
a mistake in attacking aristocracy entirely for its champagne and
diamonds. Most men rather admire the nobs for having a good time, but I
think we surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy has made even
the aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of articles pointing out how
dreary, how inhuman, how downright diabolist, is the very smell and
atmosphere of some of these great houses. There are plenty of instances;
but you couldn't begin with a better one than the Ear of the Eyres. By
the end of the week I think I can get you the truth about it.--Yours
ever, FRANCIS FINN.

Mr Nutt reflected a moment, staring at his left boot; then he called out
in a strong, loud and entirely lifeless voice, in which every syllable
sounded alike: "Miss Barlow, take down a letter to Mr Finn, please."

DEAR FINN,--I think it would do; copy should reach us second post
Saturday.--Yours, E. NUTT.

This elaborate epistle he articulated as if it were all one word; and
Miss Barlow rattled it down as if it were all one word. Then he took
up another strip of proof and a blue pencil, and altered the word
"supernatural" to the word "marvellous", and the expression "shoot down"
to the expression "repress".

In such happy, healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until
the ensuing Saturday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same
typist, and using the same blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr
Finn's revelations. The opening was a sound piece of slashing invective
about the evil secrets of princes, and despair in the high places of the
earth. Though written violently, it was in excellent English; but the
editor, as usual, had given to somebody else the task of breaking it
up into sub-headings, which were of a spicier sort, as "Peeress and
Poisons", and "The Eerie Ear", "The Eyres in their Eyrie", and so on
through a hundred happy changes. Then followed the legend of the Ear,
amplified from Finn's first letter, and then the substance of his later
discoveries, as follows:


I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story
at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely
consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord
Jones was alive. Your present correspondent thinks that this, like
many other journalistic customs, is bad journalism; and that the Daily
Reformer has to set a better example in such things. He proposes to tell
his story as it occurred, step by step. He will use the real names of
the parties, who in most cases are ready to confirm his testimony. As
for the headlines, the sensational proclamations--they will come at the
end.

I was walking along a public path that threads through a private
Devonshire orchard and seems to point towards Devonshire cider, when
I came suddenly upon just such a place as the path suggested. It was a
long, low inn, consisting really of a cottage and two barns; thatched
all over with the thatch that looks like brown and grey hair grown
before history. But outside the door was a sign which called it the Blue
Dragon; and under the sign was one of those long rustic tables that used
to stand outside most of the free English inns, before teetotallers
and brewers between them destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three
gentlemen, who might have lived a hundred years ago.

Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about
disentangling the impressions; but just then they looked like three very
solid ghosts. The dominant figure, both because he was bigger in all
three dimensions, and because he sat centrally in the length of the
table, facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed completely in black,
with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage, but a rather bald and rather
bothered brow. Looking at him again, more strictly, I could not exactly
say what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity, except the antique
cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred wrinkles across his
brow.

It was even less easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at
the right end of the table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a
person as could be seen anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a
round snub nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It
was only when I saw his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him
that I realized why I connected him with anything ancient. He was a
Roman Catholic priest.

Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more
to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical
presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad,
I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons;
he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more
saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and
neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought
to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in
conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The
unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair
was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But,
after all analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first
old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned
wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also,
perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.

Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did
not need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long
table and order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned,
especially about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he
talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on
very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight
pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the
subject of the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.

I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it
broke the spell of the third man's silence most successfully. Speaking
with restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and
puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell
me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life:
how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged his own father; and
another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the village; and
another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.

Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print--, such as the
story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog,
or the thing that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of
impieties came from his thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise,
as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.

I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything,
to stop him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable
respect, and could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little
priest at the other end of the-table, though free from any such air of
embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the
recital with great pain--as well as he might.

"You don't seem," I said to the narrator, "to be very fond of the Exmoor
pedigree."

He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and
tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the
table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the
framing temper of a fiend.

"These gentlemen," he said, "will tell you whether I have cause to like
it. The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and
many have suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered
from it as I have." And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen
glass under his heel, and strode away among the green twilight of the
twinkling apple-trees.

"That is an extraordinary old gentleman," I said to the other two; "do
you happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?"

The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled
bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last,
"Don't you know who he is?"

I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the
little priest said, still looking at the table, "That is the Duke of
Exmoor."

Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally
quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: "My friend here is
Doctor Mull, the Duke's librarian. My name is Brown."

"But," I stammered, "if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old
dukes like that?"

"He seems really to believe," answered the priest called Brown, "that
they have left a curse on him." Then he added, with some irrelevance,
"That's why he wears a wig."

It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. "You don't mean
that fable about the fantastic ear?" I demanded. "I've heard of it, of
course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something
much simpler. I've sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of
those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals' ears in the
sixteenth century."

"I hardly think it was that," answered the little man thoughtfully, "but
it is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have
some deformity frequently reappearing--such as one ear bigger than the
other."

The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands,
like a man trying to think out his duty. "No," he groaned. "You do the
man a wrong after all. Understand, I've no reason to defend him, or even
keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else.
Don't fancy because you see him sitting here that he isn't a great lord
in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a man a mile to ring a
bell a yard off--if it would summon another man three miles to fetch
a matchbox three yards off. He must have a footman to carry his
walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses--"

"But not a valet to brush his clothes," cut in the priest, with a
curious dryness, "for the valet would want to brush his wig, too."

The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was
strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. "I don't know
how you know it, Father Brown," he said, "but you are right. He lets the
whole world do everything for him--except dress him. And that he insists
on doing in a literal solitude like a desert. Anybody is kicked out
of the house without a character who is so much as found near his
dressing-room door.

"He seems a pleasant old party," I remarked.

"No," replied Dr Mull quite simply; "and yet that is just what I mean by
saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really
feel the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does,
with sincere shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he
thinks it would blast the sons of man to see. I know it is so; and I
know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation,
or a hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than
that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man could
invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret,
and was scared away from it."

I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking
out of the cavern of his hands. "I don't mind telling you, Father,
because it's really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away.
Didn't you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the
estates?"

The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale
as he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been
his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up
to a certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great
family's fortunes--the tale of a family lawyer. His lawyer, however, had
the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead
of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke's
carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it might be
necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.

The lawyer's name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him
Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald,
though certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but
from very dirty beginnings; being first a "nark" or informer, and then a
money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say,
to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow.
The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never
forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little
lawyer, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they
should halve the estates between them. The sequel certainly could not
be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the
man's bald head as suddenly as I had seen him smash the glass that day
in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar on the scalp, and the
lawyer's eyes altered, but not his smile.

He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. "I
am glad of that," he said, "for now I can take the whole estate. The law
will give it to me."

Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. "The
law will give it you," he said; "but you will not take it.... Why not?
Why? because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it
I shall take off my wig.... Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can
see your bare head. But no man shall see mine and live."

Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But Mull
swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted
fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never
reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared
more for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.

Now Dr Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and
with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the
possibility that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and
gossip. But before I end this half of my discoveries, I think it due to
Dr Mull to record that my two first inquiries have confirmed his story.
I learned from an old apothecary in the village that there was a bald
man in evening dress, giving the name of Green, who came to him one
night to have a three-cornered cut on his forehead plastered. And
I learnt from the legal records and old newspapers that there was a
lawsuit threatened, and at least begun, by one Green against the Duke of
Exmoor.


Mr Nutt, of the Daily Reformer, wrote some highly incongruous words
across the top of the copy, made some highly mysterious marks down
the side of it, and called to Miss Barlow in the same loud, monotonous
voice: "Take down a letter to Mr Finn."

DEAR FINN,--Your copy will do, but I have had to headline it a bit; and
our public would never stand a Romanist priest in the story--you
must keep your eye on the suburbs. I've altered him to Mr Brown, a
Spiritualist.

Yours,

E. NUTT.


A day or two afterward found the active and judicious editor examining,
with blue eyes that seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second
instalment of Mr Finn's tale of mysteries in high life. It began with
the words:


I have made an astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite
different from anything I expected to discover, and will give a much
more practical shock to the public. I venture to say, without any
vanity, that the words I now write will be read all over Europe, and
certainly all over America and the Colonies. And yet I heard all I have
to tell before I left this same little wooden table in this same little
wood of apple-trees.

I owe it all to the small priest Brown; he is an extraordinary man. The
big librarian had left the table, perhaps ashamed of his long tongue,
perhaps anxious about the storm in which his mysterious master had
vanished: anyway, he betook himself heavily in the Duke's tracks through
the trees. Father Brown had picked up one of the lemons and was eyeing
it with an odd pleasure.

"What a lovely colour a lemon is!" he said. "There's one thing I don't
like about the Duke's wig--the colour."

"I don't think I understand," I answered.

"I dare say he's got good reason to cover his ears, like King Midas,"
went on the priest, with a cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed
rather flippant under the circumstances. "I can quite understand that
it's nicer to cover them with hair than with brass plates or leather
flaps. But if he wants to use hair, why doesn't he make it look like
hair? There never was hair of that colour in this world. It looks more
like a sunset-cloud coming through the wood. Why doesn't he conceal the
family curse better, if he's really so ashamed of it? Shall I tell you?
It's because he isn't ashamed of it. He's proud of it"

"It's an ugly wig to be proud of--and an ugly story," I said.

"Consider," replied this curious little man, "how you yourself really
feel about such things. I don't suggest you're either more snobbish or
more morbid than the rest of us: but don't you feel in a vague way that
a genuine old family curse is rather a fine thing to have? Would you
be ashamed, wouldn't you be a little proud, if the heir of the Glamis
horror called you his friend? or if Byron's family had confided, to
you only, the evil adventures of their race? Don't be too hard on the
aristocrats themselves if their heads are as weak as ours would be, and
they are snobs about their own sorrows."

"By Jove!" I cried; "and that's true enough. My own mother's family had
a banshee; and, now I come to think of it, it has comforted me in many a
cold hour."

"And think," he went on, "of that stream of blood and poison that
spurted from his thin lips the instant you so much as mentioned his
ancestors. Why should he show every stranger over such a Chamber of
Horrors unless he is proud of it? He doesn't conceal his wig, he doesn't
conceal his blood, he doesn't conceal his family curse, he doesn't
conceal the family crimes--but--"

The little man's voice changed so suddenly, he shut his hand so sharply,
and his eyes so rapidly grew rounder and brighter like a waking owl's,
that it had all the abruptness of a small explosion on the table.

"But," he ended, "he does really conceal his toilet."

It somehow completed the thrill of my fanciful nerves that at that
instant the Duke appeared again silently among the glimmering trees,
with his soft foot and sunset-hued hair, coming round the corner of
the house in company with his librarian. Before he came within earshot,
Father Brown had added quite composedly, "Why does he really hide the
secret of what he does with the purple wig? Because it isn't the sort of
secret we suppose."

The Duke came round the corner and resumed his seat at the head of the
table with all his native dignity. The embarrassment of the librarian
left him hovering on his hind legs, like a huge bear. The Duke addressed
the priest with great seriousness. "Father Brown," he said, "Doctor
Mull informs me that you have come here to make a request. I no longer
profess an observance of the religion of my fathers; but for their
sakes, and for the sake of the days when we met before, I am very
willing to hear you. But I presume you would rather be heard in
private."

Whatever I retain of the gentleman made me stand up. Whatever I have
attained of the journalist made me stand still. Before this paralysis
could pass, the priest had made a momentarily detaining motion. "If,"
he said, "your Grace will permit me my real petition, or if I retain any
right to advise you, I would urge that as many people as possible should
be present. All over this country I have found hundreds, even of my own
faith and flock, whose imaginations are poisoned by the spell which I
implore you to break. I wish we could have all Devonshire here to see
you do it."

"To see me do what?" asked the Duke, arching his eyebrows.

"To see you take off your wig," said Father Brown.

The Duke's face did not move; but he looked at his petitioner with a
glassy stare which was the most awful expression I have ever seen on a
human face. I could see the librarian's great legs wavering under him
like the shadows of stems in a pool; and I could not banish from my own
brain the fancy that the trees all around us were filling softly in the
silence with devils instead of birds.

"I spare you," said the Duke in a voice of inhuman pity. "I refuse. If
I gave you the faintest hint of the load of horror I have to bear alone,
you would lie shrieking at these feet of mine and begging to know no
more. I will spare you the hint. You shall not spell the first letter of
what is written on the altar of the Unknown God."

"I know the Unknown God," said the little priest, with an unconscious
grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. "I know his
name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And
I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the
mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to
look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear
it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. I entreat your Grace to
end this nightmare now and here at this table."

"If I did," said the Duke in a low voice, "you and all you believe, and
all by which alone you live, would be the first to shrivel and perish.
You would have an instant to know the great Nothing before you died."

"The Cross of Christ be between me and harm," said Father Brown. "Take
off your wig."

I was leaning over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening
to this extraordinary duel half a thought had come into my head. "Your
Grace," I cried, "I call your bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock
it off."

I suppose I can be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it.
When he said, in the same voice of stone, "I refuse," I simply sprang
on him. For three long instants he strained against me as if he had all
hell to help him; but I forced his head until the hairy cap fell off it.
I admit that, whilst wrestling, I shut my eyes as it fell.

I was awakened by a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the
Duke's side. His head and mine were both bending over the bald head
of the wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian
exclaiming: "What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His
ears are just like everybody else's."

"Yes," said Father Brown, "that is what he had to hide."

The priest walked straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even
glance at his ears. He stared with an almost comical seriousness at his
bald forehead, and pointed to a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed,
but still discernible. "Mr Green, I think." he said politely, "and he
did get the whole estate after all."

And now let me tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the
most remarkable thing in the whole affair. This transformation scene,
which will seem to you as wild and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has
been (except for my technical assault) strictly legal and constitutional
from its first beginnings. This man with the odd scar and the ordinary
ears is not an impostor. Though (in one sense) he wears another man's
wig and claims another man's ear, he has not stolen another man's
coronet. He really is the one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was
this. The old Duke really had a slight malformation of the ear, which
really was more or less hereditary. He really was morbid about it; and
it is likely enough that he did invoke it as a kind of curse in the
violent scene (which undoubtedly happened) in which he struck Green with
the decanter. But the contest ended very differently. Green pressed his
claim and got the estates; the dispossessed nobleman shot himself
and died without issue. After a decent interval the beautiful English
Government revived the "extinct" peerage of Exmoor, and bestowed it,
as is usual, on the most important person, the person who had got the
property.

This man used the old feudal fables--properly, in his snobbish soul,
really envied and admired them. So that thousands of poor English people
trembled before a mysterious chieftain with an ancient destiny and
a diadem of evil stars--when they are really trembling before a
guttersnipe who was a pettifogger and a pawnbroker not twelve years ago.
I think it very typical of the real case against our aristocracy as it
is, and as it will be till God sends us braver men.


Mr Nutt put down the manuscript and called out with unusual sharpness:
"Miss Barlow, please take down a letter to Mr Finn."

DEAR FINN,--You must be mad; we can't touch this. I wanted vampires and
the bad old days and aristocracy hand-in-hand with superstition. They
like that but you must know the Exmoors would never forgive this. And
what would our people say then, I should like to know! Why, Sir Simon
is one of Exmoor's greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the
Eyres that's standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was
sick enough at not getting his peerage last year; he'd sack me by wire
if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He's
doing us some rattling articles on "The Heel of the Norman." And how
can he write about Normans if the man's only a solicitor? Do be
reasonable.--Yours, E. NUTT.

As Miss Barlow rattled away cheerfully, he crumpled up the copy
and tossed it into the waste-paper basket; but not before he had,
automatically and by force of habit, altered the word "God" to the word
"circumstances."





EIGHT -- The Perishing of the Pendragons


FATHER BROWN was in no mood for adventures. He had lately fallen ill
with over-work, and when he began to recover, his friend Flambeau had
taken him on a cruise in a small yacht with Sir Cecil Fanshaw, a young
Cornish squire and an enthusiast for Cornish coast scenery. But Brown
was still rather weak; he was no very happy sailor; and though he was
never of the sort that either grumbles or breaks down, his spirits did
not rise above patience and civility. When the other two men praised the
ragged violet sunset or the ragged volcanic crags, he agreed with them.
When Flambeau pointed out a rock shaped like a dragon, he looked at it
and thought it very like a dragon. When Fanshaw more excitedly indicated
a rock that was like Merlin, he looked at it, and signified assent. When
Flambeau asked whether this rocky gate of the twisted river was not the
gate of Fairyland, he said "Yes." He heard the most important things and
the most trivial with the same tasteless absorption. He heard that the
coast was death to all but careful seamen; he also heard that the ship's
cat was asleep. He heard that Fanshaw couldn't find his cigar-holder
anywhere; he also heard the pilot deliver the oracle "Both eyes bright,
she's all right; one eye winks, down she sinks." He heard Flambeau say
to Fanshaw that no doubt this meant the pilot must keep both eyes open
and be spry. And he heard Fanshaw say to Flambeau that, oddly enough, it
didn't mean this: it meant that while they saw two of the coast lights,
one near and the other distant, exactly side by side, they were in the
right river-channel; but that if one light was hidden behind the other,
they were going on the rocks. He heard Fanshaw add that his country was
full of such quaint fables and idioms; it was the very home of romance;
he even pitted this part of Cornwall against Devonshire, as a claimant
to the laurels of Elizabethan seamanship. According to him there had
been captains among these coves and islets compared with whom Drake was
practically a landsman. He heard Flambeau laugh, and ask if, perhaps,
the adventurous title of "Westward Ho!" only meant that all Devonshire
men wished they were living in Cornwall. He heard Fanshaw say there was
no need to be silly; that not only had Cornish captains been heroes, but
that they were heroes still: that near that very spot there was an
old admiral, now retired, who was scarred by thrilling voyages full
of adventures; and who had in his youth found the last group of eight
Pacific Islands that was added to the chart of the world. This Cecil
Fanshaw was, in person, of the kind that commonly urges such crude but
pleasing enthusiasms; a very young man, light-haired, high-coloured,
with an eager profile; with a boyish bravado of spirits, but an almost
girlish delicacy of tint and type. The big shoulders, black brows and
black mousquetaire swagger of Flambeau were a great contrast.

All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired
man hears a tune in the railway wheels, or saw them as a sick man sees
the pattern of his wall-paper. No one can calculate the turns of mood in
convalescence: but Father Brown's depression must have had a great deal
to do with his mere unfamiliarity with the sea. For as the river mouth
narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and the water grew calmer and the
air warmer and more earthly, he seemed to wake up and take notice like
a baby. They had reached that phase just after sunset when air and water
both look bright, but earth and all its growing things look almost
black by comparison. About this particular evening, however, there was
something exceptional. It was one of those rare atmospheres in which
a smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and
Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than
bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks
and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber,
and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue
with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some
vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity in the colours
was further forced on Brown's slowly reviving senses by something
romantic and even secret in the very form of the landscape.

The river was still well wide and deep enough for a pleasure boat so
small as theirs; but the curves of the country-side suggested that it
was closing in on either hand; the woods seemed to be making broken and
flying attempts at bridge-building--as if the boat were passing from
the romance of a valley to the romance of a hollow and so to the supreme
romance of a tunnel. Beyond this mere look of things there was little
for Brown's freshening fancy to feed on; he saw no human beings, except
some gipsies trailing along the river bank, with faggots and osiers
cut in the forest; and one sight no longer unconventional, but in
such remote parts still uncommon: a dark-haired lady, bare-headed, and
paddling her own canoe. If Father Brown ever attached any importance to
either of these, he certainly forgot them at the next turn of the river
which brought in sight a singular object.

The water seemed to widen and split, being cloven by the dark wedge of
a fish-shaped and wooded islet. With the rate at which they went, the
islet seemed to swim towards them like a ship; a ship with a very high
prow--or, to speak more strictly, a very high funnel. For at the extreme
point nearest them stood up an odd-looking building, unlike anything
they could remember or connect with any purpose. It was not specially
high, but it was too high for its breadth to be called anything but a
tower. Yet it appeared to be built entirely of wood, and that in a most
unequal and eccentric way. Some of the planks and beams were of good,
seasoned oak; some of such wood cut raw and recent; some again of white
pinewood, and a great deal more of the same sort of wood painted black
with tar. These black beams were set crooked or crisscross at all kinds
of angles, giving the whole a most patchy and puzzling appearance. There
were one or two windows, which appeared to be coloured and leaded in an
old-fashioned but more elaborate style. The travellers looked at it with
that paradoxical feeling we have when something reminds us of something,
and yet we are certain it is something very different.

Father Brown, even when he was mystified, was clever in analysing his
own mystification. And he found himself reflecting that the oddity
seemed to consist in a particular shape cut out in an incongruous
material; as if one saw a top-hat made of tin, or a frock-coat cut out
of tartan. He was sure he had seen timbers of different tints arranged
like that somewhere, but never in such architectural proportions. The
next moment a glimpse through the dark trees told him all he wanted to
know and he laughed. Through a gap in the foliage there appeared for a
moment one of those old wooden houses, faced with black beams, which are
still to be found here and there in England, but which most of us see
imitated in some show called "Old London" or "Shakespeare's England'.
It was in view only long enough for the priest to see that, however
old-fashioned, it was a comfortable and well-kept country-house, with
flower-beds in front of it. It had none of the piebald and crazy look of
the tower that seemed made out of its refuse.

"What on earth's this?" said Flambeau, who was still staring at the
tower.

Fanshaw's eyes were shining, and he spoke triumphantly. "Aha! you've not
seen a place quite like this before, I fancy; that's why I've brought
you here, my friend. Now you shall see whether I exaggerate about the
mariners of Cornwall. This place belongs to Old Pendragon, whom we call
the Admiral; though he retired before getting the rank. The spirit of
Raleigh and Hawkins is a memory with the Devon folk; it's a modern fact
with the Pendragons. If Queen Elizabeth were to rise from the grave
and come up this river in a gilded barge, she would be received by
the Admiral in a house exactly such as she was accustomed to, in every
corner and casement, in every panel on the wall or plate on the table.
And she would find an English Captain still talking fiercely of fresh
lands to be found in little ships, as much as if she had dined with
Drake."

"She'd find a rum sort of thing in the garden," said Father Brown,
"which would not please her Renaissance eye. That Elizabethan domestic
architecture is charming in its way; but it's against the very nature of
it to break out into turrets."

"And yet," answered Fanshaw, "that's the most romantic and Elizabethan
part of the business. It was built by the Pendragons in the very days
of the Spanish wars; and though it's needed patching and even rebuilding
for another reason, it's always been rebuilt in the old way. The story
goes that the lady of Sir Peter Pendragon built it in this place and
to this height, because from the top you can just see the corner where
vessels turn into the river mouth; and she wished to be the first to see
her husband's ship, as he sailed home from the Spanish Main."

"For what other reason," asked Father Brown, "do you mean that it has
been rebuilt?"

"Oh, there's a strange story about that, too," said the young squire
with relish. "You are really in a land of strange stories. King Arthur
was here and Merlin and the fairies before him. The story goes that Sir
Peter Pendragon, who (I fear) had some of the faults of the pirates
as well as the virtues of the sailor, was bringing home three Spanish
gentlemen in honourable captivity, intending to escort them to
Elizabeth's court. But he was a man of flaming and tigerish temper, and
coming to high words with one of them, he caught him by the throat and
flung him by accident or design, into the sea. A second Spaniard, who
was the brother of the first, instantly drew his sword and flew at
Pendragon, and after a short but furious combat in which both got three
wounds in as many minutes, Pendragon drove his blade through the other's
body and the second Spaniard was accounted for. As it happened the ship
had already turned into the river mouth and was close to comparatively
shallow water. The third Spaniard sprang over the side of the ship,
struck out for the shore, and was soon near enough to it to stand up to
his waist in water. And turning again to face the ship, and holding
up both arms to Heaven--like a prophet calling plagues upon a wicked
city--he called out to Pendragon in a piercing and terrible voice, that
he at least was yet living, that he would go on living, that he would
live for ever; and that generation after generation the house of
Pendragon should never see him or his, but should know by very certain
signs that he and his vengeance were alive. With that he dived under the
wave, and was either drowned or swam so long under water that no hair of
his head was seen afterwards."

"There's that girl in the canoe again," said Flambeau irrelevantly,
for good-looking young women would call him off any topic. "She seems
bothered by the queer tower just as we were."

Indeed, the black-haired young lady was letting her canoe float slowly
and silently past the strange islet; and was looking intently up at the
strange tower, with a strong glow of curiosity on her oval and olive
face.

"Never mind girls," said Fanshaw impatiently, "there are plenty of them
in the world, but not many things like the Pendragon Tower. As you may
easily suppose, plenty of superstitions and scandals have followed in
the track of the Spaniard's curse; and no doubt, as you would put it,
any accident happening to this Cornish family would be connected with
it by rural credulity. But it is perfectly true that this tower has been
burnt down two or three times; and the family can't be called lucky,
for more than two, I think, of the Admiral's near kin have perished by
shipwreck; and one at least, to my own knowledge, on practically the
same spot where Sir Peter threw the Spaniard overboard."

"What a pity!" exclaimed Flambeau. "She's going."

"When did your friend the Admiral tell you this family history?" asked
Father Brown, as the girl in the canoe paddled off, without showing the
least intention of extending her interest from the tower to the yacht,
which Fanshaw had already caused to lie alongside the island.

"Many years ago," replied Fanshaw; "he hasn't been to sea for some time
now, though he is as keen on it as ever. I believe there's a family
compact or something. Well, here's the landing stage; let's come ashore
and see the old boy."

They followed him on to the island, just under the tower, and Father
Brown, whether from the mere touch of dry land, or the interest of
something on the other bank of the river (which he stared at very hard
for some seconds), seemed singularly improved in briskness. They entered
a wooded avenue between two fences of thin greyish wood, such as often
enclose parks or gardens, and over the top of which the dark trees
tossed to and fro like black and purple plumes upon the hearse of a
giant. The tower, as they left it behind, looked all the quainter,
because such entrances are usually flanked by two towers; and this one
looked lopsided. But for this, the avenue had the usual appearance of
the entrance to a gentleman's grounds; and, being so curved that the
house was now out of sight, somehow looked a much larger park than any
plantation on such an island could really be. Father Brown was, perhaps,
a little fanciful in his fatigue, but he almost thought the whole place
must be growing larger, as things do in a nightmare. Anyhow, a mystical
monotony was the only character of their march, until Fanshaw suddenly
stopped, and pointed to something sticking out through the grey
fence--something that looked at first rather like the imprisoned horn
of some beast. Closer observation showed that it was a slightly curved
blade of metal that shone faintly in the fading light.

Flambeau, who like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and
said in a startled voice: "Why, it's a sabre! I believe I know the sort,
heavy and curved, but shorter than the cavalry; they used to have them
in artillery and the--"

As he spoke the blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and
came down again with a more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous
fence to the bottom with a rending noise. Then it was pulled out again,
flashed above the fence some feet further along, and again split it
halfway down with the first stroke; and after waggling a little to
extricate itself (accompanied with curses in the darkness) split it down
to the ground with a second. Then a kick of devilish energy sent the
whole loosened square of thin wood flying into the pathway, and a great
gap of dark coppice gaped in the paling.

Fanshaw peered into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of
astonishment. "My dear Admiral!" he exclaimed, "do you--er--do you
generally cut out a new front door whenever you want to go for a walk?"

The voice in the gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh.
"No," it said; "I've really got to cut down this fence somehow; it's
spoiling all the plants, and no one else here can do it. But I'll only
carve another bit off the front door, and then come out and welcome
you."

And sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice,
brought down another and similar strip of fence, making the opening
about fourteen feet wide in all. Then through this larger forest gateway
he came out into the evening light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to
his sword-blade.

He momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw's fable of an old piratical
Admiral; though the details seemed afterwards to decompose into
accidents. For instance, he wore a broad-brimmed hat as protection
against the sun; but the front flap of it was turned up straight to the
sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the ears, so that it
stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked hat worn by
Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special about
the buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow
had a sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of
swagger, which was not a sailor's roll, and yet somehow suggested it;
and he held in his hand a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but
about twice as big. Under the bridge of the hat his eagle face looked
eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven, but without
eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his face from
his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were prominent
and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly
tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while
it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no
way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the
Hesperides--Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so
expressive of all the romances about the countries of the Sun.

When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again
into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and
his apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as
a piece of necessary but annoying garden work; but at length the ring of
real energy came back into his laughter, and he cried with a mixture of
impatience and good humour:

"Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure
in smashing anything. So would you if your only pleasure was in cruising
about to find some new Cannibal Islands, and you had to stick on this
muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic pond. When I remember how I've
cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous jungle with an old cutlass
half as sharp as this; and then remember I must stop here and chop this
matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled in a family
Bible, why, I--"

He swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of
wood from top to bottom at one stroke.

"I feel like that," he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword
some yards down the path, "and now let's go up to the house; you must
have some dinner."

The semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by three
circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and
the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors
did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather
sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The
corners of the expiring sunset which seemed to cling about the corners
of the house gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter
flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of the house opening
upon the river stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass
telescope. Just outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted
green garden table, as if someone had just had tea there. The entrance
was flanked with two of those half-featured lumps of stone with holes
for eyes that are said to be South Sea idols; and on the brown oak beam
across the doorway were some confused carvings that looked almost as
barbaric.

As they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the
table, and standing on it peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at
the mouldings in the oak. Admiral Pendragon looked very much astonished,
though not particularly annoyed; while Fanshaw was so amused with what
looked like a performing pigmy on his little stand, that he could not
control his laughter. But Father Brown was not likely to notice either
the laughter or the astonishment.

He was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn and
obscure, seemed still to convey some sense to him. The first seemed to
be the outline of some tower or other building, crowned with what looked
like curly-pointed ribbons. The second was clearer: an old Elizabethan
galley with decorative waves beneath it, but interrupted in the middle
by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault in the wood or
some conventional representation of the water coming in. The third
represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped
line like the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms
were held very stiffly up in the air.

"Well," muttered Father Brown, blinking, "here is the legend of the
Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the
sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of
Pendragon Tower."

Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. "And how
many other things might it not be?" he said. "Don't you know that that
sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag, is quite common
in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship be one of those
parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it? And though the
third thing isn't so very heraldic, it would be more heraldic to suppose
it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks just as like
it."

"But it seems rather odd," said Flambeau, "that it should exactly
confirm the old legend."

"Ah," replied the sceptical traveller, "but you don't know how much of
the old legend may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it
isn't the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things,
will tell you there are other versions of the tale, and much more
horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate ancestor with having
had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty picture also.
Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a tower
full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that
way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a
conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined,
would show what a very little way these unhappy coincidences really go."

"Why, how do you mean?" asked Fanshaw.

"It so happens," replied his host coolly, "that there was no thunder
and lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our
family."

"Oh!" said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.

There was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of
the river; then Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed
tone: "Then you don't think there is anything in the tales of the tower
in flames?"

"There are the tales, of course," said the Admiral, shrugging his
shoulders; "and some of them, I don't deny, on evidence as decent as
one ever gets for such things. Someone saw a blaze hereabout, don't you
know, as he walked home through a wood; someone keeping sheep on the
uplands inland thought he saw a flame hovering over Pendragon Tower.
Well, a damp dab of mud like this confounded island seems the last place
where one would think of fires."

"What is that fire over there?" asked Father Brown with a gentle
suddenness, pointing to the woods on the left river-bank. They were all
thrown a little off their balance, and the more fanciful Fanshaw had
even some difficulty in recovering his, as they saw a long, thin stream
of blue smoke ascending silently into the end of the evening light.

Then Pendragon broke into a scornful laugh again. "Gipsies!" he said;
"they've been camping about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want
your dinner," and he turned as if to enter the house.

But the antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he
said hastily: "But, Admiral, what's that hissing noise quite near the
island? It's very like fire."

"It's more like what it is," said the Admiral, laughing as he led the
way; "it's only some canoe going by."

Almost as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black
hair and a very long, yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him
that dinner was served.

The dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note
was rather that of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were,
indeed, three antiquated cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and
one brown sixteenth-century map with Tritons and little ships dotted
about a curly sea. But such things were less prominent on the white
panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South American birds, very
scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific, and several
instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used
them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour
culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral's only
servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of
yellow. The priest's instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions
told him that the colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds
had suggested the word "Canary," and so by a mere pun connected them
with southward travel. Towards the end of the dinner they took their
yellow clothes and black faces out of the room, leaving only the black
clothes and yellow face of the butler.

"I'm rather sorry you take this so lightly," said Fanshaw to the host;
"for the truth is, I've brought these friends of mine with the idea of
their helping you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don't you
really believe in the family story at all?"

"I don't believe in anything," answered Pendragon very briskly, with a
bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. "I'm a man of science."

Rather to Flambeau's surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have
entirely woken up, took up the digression and talked natural history
with his host with a flow of words and much unexpected information,
until the dessert and decanters were set down and the last of the
servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his tone.

"Please don't think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don't ask for
curiosity, but really for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made
a bad shot if I guess you don't want these old things talked of before
your butler?"

The Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed:
"Well, I don't know where you got it, but the truth is I can't stand the
fellow, though I've no excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw,
with his fairy tales, would say my blood moved against men with that
black, Spanish-looking hair."

Flambeau struck the table with his heavy fist. "By Jove!" he cried; "and
so had that girl!"

"I hope it'll all end tonight," continued the Admiral, "when my
nephew comes back safe from his ship. You looked surprised. You won't
understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the story. You see, my father
had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder brother married, and
had a son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and will inherit
the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow
combined Fanshaw's superstition with a good deal of my scepticism--they
were always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a
notion which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse
was truth or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he
thought there would be too much chance of natural catastrophes to
prove anything. But if we went to sea one at a time in strict order
of succession to the property, he thought it might show whether any
connected fate followed the family as a family. It was a silly notion,
I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily; for I was an
ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my
own nephew."

"And your father and brother," said the priest, very gently, "died at
sea, I fear."

"Yes," groaned the Admiral; "by one of those brutal accidents on
which are built all the lying mythologies of mankind, they were both
shipwrecked. My father, coming up this coast out of the Atlantic, was
washed up on these Cornish rocks. My brother's ship was sunk, no one
knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania. His body was never found.
I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other people
besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are discussed in
a normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of
superstition on fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That's
why I say it will be all right when Walter returns. The girl he's
engaged to was coming today; but I was so afraid of some chance delay
frightening her that I wired her not to come till she heard from me. But
he's practically sure to be here some time tonight, and then it'll all
end in smoke--tobacco smoke. We'll crack that old lie when we crack a
bottle of this wine."

"Very good wine," said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, "but, as
you see, a very bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon": for
he had spilt a small spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put
down the glass with a composed face; but his hand had started at the
exact moment when he became conscious of a face looking in through the
garden window just behind the Admiral--the face of a woman, swarthy,
with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of tragedy.

After a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. "Admiral," he
said, "will you do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like,
stop in that tower of yours just for tonight? Do you know that in my
business you're an exorcist almost before anything else?"

Pendragon sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the
window, from which the face had instantly vanished. "I tell you there is
nothing in it," he cried, with ringing violence. "There is one thing I
know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist."
Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful
concentration. "This business is perfectly natural. There is no curse in
it at all."

Father Brown smiled. "In that case," he said, "there can't be any
objection to my sleeping in your delightful summer-house."

"The idea is utterly ridiculous," replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo
on the back of his chair.

"Please forgive me for everything," said Brown in his most sympathetic
tone, "including spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite
so easy about the flaming tower as you try to be."

Admiral Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat
quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. "You do
it at your own peril," he said; "but wouldn't you be an atheist to keep
sane in all this devilry?"

Some three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still
dawdling about the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other
two that Father Brown had no intention of going to bed either in the
tower or the house.

"I think the lawn wants weeding," said he dreamily. "If I could find a
spud or something I'd do it myself."

They followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with
the utmost solemnity, explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon,
that one can always find some small occupation that is helpful to
others. He did not find a spud; but he found an old broom made of twigs,
with which he began energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the
grass.

"Always some little thing to be done," he said with idiotic
cheerfulness; "as George Herbert says: 'Who sweeps an Admiral's garden
in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that and the action fine.' And now,"
he added, suddenly slinging the broom away, "Let's go and water the
flowers."

With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable
lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful
discrimination: "The red tulips before the yellow, I think. Look a bit
dry, don't you think?"

He turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out
straight and solid as a long rod of steel.

"Look out, Samson," cried Flambeau; "why, you've cut off the tulip's
head."

Father Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.

"Mine does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering," he
admitted, scratching his head. "I suppose it's a pity I didn't find the
spud. You should have seen me with the spud! Talking of tools, you've
got that swordstick, Flambeau, you always carry? That's right; and Sir
Cecil could have that sword the Admiral threw away by the fence here.
How grey everything looks!"

"The mist's rising from the river," said the staring Flambeau.

Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on
a higher ridge of the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a
brandished rake and a horribly bellowing voice. "Put down that hose," he
shouted; "put down that hose and go to your--"

"I am fearfully clumsy," replied the reverend gentleman weakly; "do
you know, I upset some wine at dinner." He made a wavering half-turn of
apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand.
The gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like
the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with
his boots in the air.

"How very dreadful!" said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of
wonder. "Why, I've hit a man!"

He stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening;
and then set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose
behind him. The tower was quite close, but its outline was curiously
dim.

"Your river mist," he said, "has a rum smell."

"By the Lord it has," cried Fanshaw, who was very white. "But you can't
mean--"

"I mean," said Father Brown, "that one of the Admiral's scientific
predictions is coming true tonight. This story is going to end in
smoke."

As he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom
like a gigantic rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling
noise that was like the laughter of devils.

"My God! what is this?" cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.

"The sign of the flaming tower," said Father Brown, and sent the driving
water from his hose into the heart of the red patch.

"Lucky we hadn't gone to bed!" ejaculated Fanshaw. "I suppose it can't
spread to the house."

"You may remember," said the priest quietly, "that the wooden fence that
might have carried it was cut away."

Flambeau turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said
rather absently: "Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow."

"This is rather a curious kind of tower," observed Father Brown, "when
it takes to killing people, it always kills people who are somewhere
else."

At the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the
streaming beard stood again on the green ridge against the sky, waving
others to come on; but now waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him
came the two negroes, also with the old crooked cutlasses out of the
trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their black faces and yellow
figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In
the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out brief
directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over
his countenance.

But he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame
which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it
hissed under the torch of the long silver spear of water. He kept his
finger along the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and attended to
no other business, knowing only by the noise and that semi-conscious
corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to tumble
themselves about the island garden. He gave two brief directions to his
friends. One was: "Knock these fellows down somehow and tie them up,
whoever they are; there's rope down by those faggots. They want to take
away my nice hose." The other was: "As soon as you get a chance, call
out to that canoeing girl; she's over on the bank with the gipsies. Ask
her if they could get some buckets across and fill them from the river."
Then he closed his mouth and continued to water the new red flower as
ruthlessly as he had watered the red tulip.

He never turned his head to look at the strange fight that followed
between the foes and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the
island shake when Flambeau collided with the huge gardener; he merely
imagined how it would whirl round them as they wrestled. He heard the
crashing fall; and his friend's gasp of triumph as he dashed on to the
first negro; and the cries of both the blacks as Flambeau and Fanshaw
bound them. Flambeau's enormous strength more than redressed the odds
in the fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered near the house,
only a shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by the paddles
of a canoe; the girl's voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies
answering and coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty
buckets plunged into a full stream; and finally the sound of many feet
around the fire. But all this was less to him than the fact that the
red rent, which had lately once more increased, had once more slightly
diminished.

Then came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and
Fanshaw, now reinforced by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the
mysterious man by the house; and he heard from the other end of the
garden the Frenchman's cry of horror and astonishment. It was echoed by
a howl not to be called human, as the being broke from their hold and
ran along the garden. Three times at least it raced round the whole
island, in a way that was as horrible as the chase of a lunatic, both in
the cries of the pursued and the ropes carried by the pursuers; but was
more horrible still, because it somehow suggested one of the chasing
games of children in a garden. Then, finding them closing in on
every side, the figure sprang upon one of the higher river banks and
disappeared with a splash into the dark and driving river.

"You can do no more, I fear," said Brown in a voice cold with pain.
"He has been washed down to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many
others. He knew the use of a family legend."

"Oh, don't talk in these parables," cried Flambeau impatiently. "Can't
you put it simply in words of one syllable?"

"Yes," answered Brown, with his eye on the hose. "'Both eyes bright,
she's all right; one eye blinks, down she sinks.'"

The fire hissed and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as
it grew narrower and narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets,
but Father Brown still kept his eye on it as he went on speaking:

"I thought of asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look
through that telescope at the river mouth and the river. She might
have seen something to interest her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter
Pendragon coming home, and perhaps even the sign of the half-man, for
though he is certainly safe by now, he may very well have waded ashore.
He has been within a shave of another shipwreck; and would never
have escaped it, if the lady hadn't had the sense to suspect the old
Admiral's telegram and come down to watch him. Don't let's talk about
the old Admiral. Don't let's talk about anything. It's enough to say
that whenever this tower, with its pitch and resin-wood, really caught
fire, the spark on the horizon always looked like the twin light to the
coast light-house."

"And that," said Flambeau, "is how the father and brother died. The
wicked uncle of the legends very nearly got his estate after all."

Father Brown did not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for
civilities, till they were all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of
the yacht. He saw that the frustrated fire was extinguished; and then
refused to linger, though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by
an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the river bank; and might (had
he been moved by romantic curiosities) have received the combined thanks
of the man from the ship and the girl from the canoe. But his fatigue
had fallen on him once more, and he only started once, when Flambeau
abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.

"That's no cigar-ash," he said rather wearily. "That's from the fire,
but you don't think so because you're all smoking cigars. That's just
the way I got my first faint suspicion about the chart."

"Do you mean Pendragon's chart of his Pacific Islands?" asked Fanshaw.

"You thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands," answered Brown.
"Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think
it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial
flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same
feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and
most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among
tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It
was the map of this river."

"But how do you know?" asked Fanshaw.

"I saw the rock you thought was like a dragon, and the one like Merlin,
and--"

"You seem to have noticed a lot as we came in," cried Fanshaw. "We
thought you were rather abstracted."

"I was sea-sick," said Father Brown simply. "I felt simply horrible.
But feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things." And he
closed his eyes.

"Do you think most men would have seen that?" asked Flambeau. He
received no answer: Father Brown was asleep.





NINE -- The God of the Gongs


IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when
the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver.
If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms,
it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the
monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals
by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that
looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow had half-melted
into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when it had
been fixed again by the seal of frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a
ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to
parallel the pale ribbon of the foam.

The line of the sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its
violet-blue, like the vein of a frozen finger. For miles and miles,
forward and back, there was no breathing soul, save two pedestrians,
walking at a brisk pace, though one had much longer legs and took much
longer strides than the other.

It did not seem a very appropriate place or time for a holiday, but
Father Brown had few holidays, and had to take them when he could, and
he always preferred, if possible, to take them in company with his old
friend Flambeau, ex-criminal and ex-detective. The priest had had
a fancy for visiting his old parish at Cobhole, and was going
north-eastward along the coast.

After walking a mile or two farther, they found that the shore was
beginning to be formally embanked, so as to form something like a
parade; the ugly lamp-posts became less few and far between and more
ornamental, though quite equally ugly. Half a mile farther on Father
Brown was puzzled first by little labyrinths of flowerless flower-pots,
covered with the low, flat, quiet-coloured plants that look less like
a garden than a tessellated pavement, between weak curly paths studded
with seats with curly backs. He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a
certain sort of seaside town that he did not specially care about, and,
looking ahead along the parade by the sea, he saw something that put
the matter beyond a doubt. In the grey distance the big bandstand of a
watering-place stood up like a giant mushroom with six legs.

"I suppose," said Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing
a woollen scarf rather closer round his neck, "that we are approaching a
pleasure resort."

"I fear," answered Flambeau, "a pleasure resort to which few people just
now have the pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in
the winter, but it never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones.
This must be Seawood, I think--Lord Pooley's experiment; he had the
Sicilian Singers down at Christmas, and there's talk about holding one
of the great glove-fights here. But they'll have to chuck the rotten
place into the sea; it's as dreary as a lost railway-carriage."

They had come under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at
it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his head
a little on one side, like a bird's. It was the conventional, rather
tawdry kind of erection for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy,
gilt here and there, and lifted on six slender pillars of painted wood,
the whole being raised about five feet above the parade on a round
wooden platform like a drum. But there was something fantastic about
the snow combined with something artificial about the gold that haunted
Flambeau as well as his friend with some association he could not
capture, but which he knew was at once artistic and alien.

"I've got it," he said at last. "It's Japanese. It's like those fanciful
Japanese prints, where the snow on the mountain looks like sugar, and
the gilt on the pagodas is like gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like
a little pagan temple."

"Yes," said Father Brown. "Let's have a look at the god." And with an
agility hardly to be expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised
platform.

"Oh, very well," said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own
towering figure was visible on that quaint elevation.

Slight as was the difference of height, it gave in those level wastes a
sense of seeing yet farther and farther across land and sea. Inland the
little wintry gardens faded into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in
the distance, were long low barns of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that
nothing but the long East Anglian plains. Seawards there was no sail
or sign of life save a few seagulls: and even they looked like the last
snowflakes, and seemed to float rather than fly.

Flambeau turned abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to come
from lower down than might have been expected, and to be addressed to
his heels rather than his head. He instantly held out his hand, but he
could hardly help laughing at what he saw. For some reason or other the
platform had given way under Father Brown, and the unfortunate little
man had dropped through to the level of the parade. He was just tall
enough, or short enough, for his head alone to stick out of the hole in
the broken wood, looking like St John the Baptist's head on a charger.
The face wore a disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps, that of St
John the Baptist.

In a moment he began to laugh a little. "This wood must be rotten," said
Flambeau. "Though it seems odd it should bear me, and you go through the
weak place. Let me help you out."

But the little priest was looking rather curiously at the corners and
edges of the wood alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble
on his brow.

"Come along," cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand
extended. "Don't you want to get out?"

The priest was holding a splinter of the broken wood between his finger
and thumb, and did not immediately reply. At last he said thoughtfully:
"Want to get out? Why, no. I rather think I want to get in." And he
dived into the darkness under the wooden floor so abruptly as to knock
off his big curved clerical hat and leave it lying on the boards above,
without any clerical head in it.

Flambeau looked once more inland and out to sea, and once more could see
nothing but seas as wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea.

There came a scurrying noise behind him, and the little priest came
scrambling out of the hole faster than he had fallen in. His face was no
longer disconcerted, but rather resolute, and, perhaps only through the
reflections of the snow, a trifle paler than usual.


"Well?" asked his tall friend. "Have you found the god of the temple?"

"No," answered Father Brown. "I have found what was sometimes more
important. The Sacrifice."

"What the devil do you mean?" cried Flambeau, quite alarmed.

Father Brown did not answer. He was staring, with a knot in his
forehead, at the landscape; and he suddenly pointed at it. "What's that
house over there?" he asked.

Following his finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the corners of a
building nearer than the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with
a fringe of trees. It was not a large building, and stood well back from
the shore--, but a glint of ornament on it suggested that it was part
of the same watering-place scheme of decoration as the bandstand, the
little gardens and the curly-backed iron seats.

Father Brown jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they
walked in the direction indicated the trees fell away to right and
left, and they saw a small, rather flashy hotel, such as is common in
resorts--the hotel of the Saloon Bar rather than the Bar Parlour. Almost
the whole frontage was of gilt plaster and figured glass, and between
that grey seascape and the grey, witch-like trees, its gimcrack quality
had something spectral in its melancholy. They both felt vaguely that
if any food or drink were offered at such a hostelry, it would be the
paste-board ham and empty mug of the pantomime.

In this, however, they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew
nearer and nearer to the place they saw in front of the buffet, which
was apparently closed, one of the iron garden-seats with curly backs
that had adorned the gardens, but much longer, running almost the whole
length of the frontage. Presumably, it was placed so that visitors might
sit there and look at the sea, but one hardly expected to find anyone
doing it in such weather.

Nevertheless, just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood
a small round restaurant table, and on this stood a small bottle of
Chablis and a plate of almonds and raisins. Behind the table and on the
seat sat a dark-haired young man, bareheaded, and gazing at the sea in a
state of almost astonishing immobility.

But though he might have been a waxwork when they were within four yards
of him, he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three,
and said in a deferential, though not undignified, manner: "Will you
step inside, gentlemen? I have no staff at present, but I can get you
anything simple myself."

"Much obliged," said Flambeau. "So you are the proprietor?"

"Yes," said the dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless
manner. "My waiters are all Italians, you see, and I thought it only
fair they should see their countryman beat the black, if he really can
do it. You know the great fight between Malvoli and Nigger Ned is coming
off after all?"

"I'm afraid we can't wait to trouble your hospitality seriously," said
Father Brown. "But my friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I'm
sure, to keep out the cold and drink success to the Latin champion."

Flambeau did not understand the sherry, but he did not object to it in
the least. He could only say amiably: "Oh, thank you very much."

"Sherry, sir--certainly," said their host, turning to his hostel.
"Excuse me if I detain you a few minutes. As I told you, I have no
staff--" And he went towards the black windows of his shuttered and
unlighted inn.

"Oh, it doesn't really matter," began Flambeau, but the man turned to
reassure him.

"I have the keys," he said. "I could find my way in the dark."

"I didn't mean--" began Father Brown.

He was interrupted by a bellowing human voice that came out of the
bowels of the uninhabited hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly
but inaudibly, and the hotel proprietor moved more sharply towards it
than he had done for Flambeau's sherry. As instant evidence proved, the
proprietor had told, then and after, nothing but the literal truth. But
both Flambeau and Father Brown have often confessed that, in all their
(often outrageous) adventures, nothing had so chilled their blood as
that voice of an ogre, sounding suddenly out of a silent and empty inn.

"My cook!" cried the proprietor hastily. "I had forgotten my cook. He
will be starting presently. Sherry, sir?"

And, sure enough, there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with
white cap and white apron, as befits a cook, but with the needless
emphasis of a black face. Flambeau had often heard that negroes made
good cooks. But somehow something in the contrast of colour and caste
increased his surprise that the hotel proprietor should answer the
call of the cook, and not the cook the call of the proprietor. But he
reflected that head cooks are proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the
host had come back with the sherry, and that was the great thing.

"I rather wonder," said Father Brown, "that there are so few people
about the beach, when this big fight is coming on after all. We only met
one man for miles."

The hotel proprietor shrugged his shoulders. "They come from the other
end of the town, you see--from the station, three miles from here. They
are only interested in the sport, and will stop in hotels for the night
only. After all, it is hardly weather for basking on the shore."

"Or on the seat," said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.

"I have to keep a look-out," said the man with the motionless face. He
was a quiet, well-featured fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had
nothing distinctive about them, except that his black necktie was worn
rather high, like a stock, and secured by a gold pin with some grotesque
head to it. Nor was there anything notable in the face, except something
that was probably a mere nervous trick--a habit of opening one eye
more narrowly than the other, giving the impression that the other was
larger, or was, perhaps, artificial.

The silence that ensued was broken by their host saying quietly:
"Whereabouts did you meet the one man on your march?"

"Curiously enough," answered the priest, "close by here--just by that
bandstand."

Flambeau, who had sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry, put it
down and rose to his feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened
his mouth to speak, and then shut it again.

"Curious," said the dark-haired man thoughtfully. "What was he like?"

"It was rather dark when I saw him," began Father Brown, "but he was--"

As has been said, the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the
precise truth. His phrase that the cook was starting presently was
fulfilled to the letter, for the cook came out, pulling his gloves on,
even as they spoke.

But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and
black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned
and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion.
A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head--a hat of the sort
that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black
man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin
flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say
that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red
flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly
grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his
cigar in the other there was a certain attitude--an attitude we must
always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent
and insolent--the cake walk.

"Sometimes," said Flambeau, looking after him, "I'm not surprised that
they lynch them."

"I am never surprised," said Father Brown, "at any work of hell. But as
I was saying," he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on
his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place,
a queer music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene--"as I was
saying, I couldn't describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish
and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the
pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple
scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the
throat rather in the way that nurses fix children's comforters with a
safety-pin. Only this," added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea,
"was not a safety-pin."

The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to
sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that
one of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well
opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.

"It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or
some such thing," continued the cleric; "and it was fixed in a rather
odd way--he wore pince-nez and a broad black--"

The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his
head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement
of blinding swiftness.

Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen
dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were
resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered
their shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like
a headsman's axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held
it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men
to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening
light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the
shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the
stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat
and shining dagger he had dropped exactly where it had fallen.

"We must get away from here instantly," cried Flambeau, flinging the
huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught the
little priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren
back garden, at the end of which there was a closed back garden door.
Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: "The
door is locked."

As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell,
brushing the brim of his hat. It startled him more than the small and
distant detonation that had come just before. Then came another distant
detonation, and the door he was trying to open shook under the bullet
buried in it. Flambeau's shoulders again filled out and altered
suddenly. Three hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went
out into the empty path behind, carrying the great garden door with him,
as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.

Then he flung the garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot
picked up a spurt of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he
snatched up the little priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and
went racing towards Seawood as fast as his long legs could carry him.
It was not until nearly two miles farther on that he set his small
companion down. It had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the
classic model of Anchises, but Father Brown's face only wore a broad
grin.

"Well," said Flambeau, after an impatient silence, as they resumed their
more conventional tramp through the streets on the edge of the town,
where no outrage need be feared, "I don't know what all this means, but
I take it I may trust my own eyes that you never met the man you have so
accurately described."

"I did meet him in a way," Brown said, biting his finger rather
nervously--"I did really. And it was too dark to see him properly,
because it was under that bandstand affair. But I'm afraid I didn't
describe him so very accurately after all, for his pince-nez was broken
under him, and the long gold pin wasn't stuck through his purple scarf
but through his heart."

"And I suppose," said the other in a lower voice, "that glass-eyed guy
had something to do with it."

"I had hoped he had only a little," answered Brown in a rather troubled
voice, "and I may have been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But
I fear this business has deep roots and dark."

They walked on through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were
beginning to be lit in the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently
approaching the more central parts of the town. Highly coloured bills
announcing the glove-fight between Nigger Ned and Malvoli were slapped
about the walls.

"Well," said Flambeau, "I never murdered anyone, even in my criminal
days, but I can almost sympathize with anyone doing it in such a
dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most
heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be
festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill
his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once
taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but
gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over
me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge
as a Roman amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed
in heaven over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no
one would ever be happy there again."

"It's odd you should mention Epsom," said the priest. "Do you remember
what was called the Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men--ice-cream
men, I think--happened to live at Sutton? They were eventually released.
A man was found strangled, it was said, on the Downs round that part. As
a fact, I know (from an Irish policeman who is a friend of mine) that he
was found close up to the Epsom Grand Stand--in fact, only hidden by one
of the lower doors being pushed back."

"That is queer," assented Flambeau. "But it rather confirms my view
that such pleasure places look awfully lonely out of season, or the man
wouldn't have been murdered there."

"I'm not so sure he--" began Brown, and stopped.

"Not so sure he was murdered?" queried his companion.

"Not so sure he was murdered out of the season," answered the little
priest, with simplicity. "Don't you think there's something rather
tricky about this solitude, Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer
would always want the spot to be lonely? It's very, very seldom a man is
quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the more certain
he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other--Why, here we are
at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it."

They had emerged on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the
principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked
with two giant photographs of Malvoli and Nigger Ned.

"Hallo!" cried Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend
stumped straight up the broad steps. "I didn't know pugilism was your
latest hobby. Are you going to see the fight?"

"I don't think there will be any fight," replied Father Brown.

They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed
through the hall of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with
innumerable seats and boxes, and still the cleric did not look round
or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door marked
"Committee". There he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley.

The attendant observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight
was coming on soon, but Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of
reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared. In a
few moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of
a man who was still shouting directions to another man going out of the
room. "Be careful, you know, about the ropes after the fourth--Well, and
what do you want, I wonder!"

Lord Pooley was a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our
race, was worried--especially about money. He was half grey and half
flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged, frost-bitten
nose.

"Only a word," said Father Brown. "I have come to prevent a man being
killed."

Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it.
"I'm damned if I'll stand any more of this!" he cried. "You and your
committees and parsons and petitions! Weren't there parsons in the old
days, when they fought without gloves? Now they're fighting with the
regulation gloves, and there's not the rag of a possibility of either of
the boxers being killed."

"I didn't mean either of the boxers," said the little priest.

"Well, well, well!" said the nobleman, with a touch of frosty humour.
"Who's going to be killed? The referee?"

"I don't know who's going to be killed," replied Father Brown, with a
reflective stare. "If I did I shouldn't have to spoil your pleasure. I
could simply get him to escape. I never could see anything wrong about
prize-fights. As it is, I must ask you to announce that the fight is off
for the present."

"Anything else?" jeered the gentleman with feverish eyes. "And what do
you say to the two thousand people who have come to see it?"

"I say there will be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them
left alive when they have seen it," said Father Brown.

Lord Pooley looked at Flambeau. "Is your friend mad?" he asked.

"Far from it," was the reply.

"And look here," resumed Pooley in his restless way, "it's worse than
that. A whole pack of Italians have turned up to back Malvoli--swarthy,
savage fellows of some country, anyhow. You know what these
Mediterranean races are like. If I send out word that it's off we shall
have Malvoli storming in here at the head of a whole Corsican clan."

"My lord, it is a matter of life and death," said the priest. "Ring your
bell. Give your message. And see whether it is Malvoli who answers."

The nobleman struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new
curiosity. He said to the clerk who appeared almost instantly in the
doorway: "I have a serious announcement to make to the audience shortly.
Meanwhile, would you kindly tell the two champions that the fight will
have to be put off."

The clerk stared for some seconds as if at a demon and vanished.

"What authority have you for what you say?" asked Lord Pooley abruptly.
"Whom did you consult?"

"I consulted a bandstand," said Father Brown, scratching his head. "But,
no, I'm wrong; I consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in
London--very cheap, too."

He had taken out of his pocket a small, stout, leather-bound volume, and
Flambeau, looking over his shoulder, could see that it was some book of
old travels, and had a leaf turned down for reference.

"'The only form in which Voodoo--'" began Father Brown, reading aloud.

"In which what?" inquired his lordship.

"'In which Voodoo,'" repeated the reader, almost with relish, "'is
widely organized outside Jamaica itself is in the form known as the
Monkey, or the God of the Gongs, which is powerful in many parts of the
two American continents, especially among half-breeds, many of whom
look exactly like white men. It differs from most other forms of
devil-worship and human sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed
formally on the altar, but by a sort of assassination among the crowd.
The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors of the shrine open and
the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet ecstatic
eyes on him. But after--'"

The door of the room was flung open, and the fashionable negro stood
framed in it, his eyeballs rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted
on his head. "Huh!" he cried, showing his apish teeth. "What this? Huh!
Huh! You steal a coloured gentleman's prize--prize his already--yo'
think yo' jes' save that white 'Talian trash--"

"The matter is only deferred," said the nobleman quietly. "I will be
with you to explain in a minute or two."

"Who you to--" shouted Nigger Ned, beginning to storm.

"My name is Pooley," replied the other, with a creditable coolness.
"I am the organizing secretary, and I advise you just now to leave the
room."

"Who this fellow?" demanded the dark champion, pointing to the priest
disdainfully.

"My name is Brown," was the reply. "And I advise you just now to leave
the country."

The prize-fighter stood glaring for a few seconds, and then, rather to
the surprise of Flambeau and the others, strode out, sending the door to
with a crash behind him.

"Well," asked Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair up, "what do you think
of Leonardo da Vinci? A beautiful Italian head."

"Look here," said Lord Pooley, "I've taken a considerable
responsibility, on your bare word. I think you ought to tell me more
about this."

"You are quite right, my lord," answered Brown. "And it won't take long
to tell." He put the little leather book in his overcoat pocket. "I
think we know all that this can tell us, but you shall look at it to see
if I'm right. That negro who has just swaggered out is one of the most
dangerous men on earth, for he has the brains of a European, with the
instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean, common-sense
butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and scientific
secret society of assassins. He doesn't know I know it, nor, for the
matter of that, that I can't prove it."

There was a silence, and the little man went on.

"But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to
make sure I'm alone with him?"

Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the
little clergyman. He only said: "If you want to murder somebody, I
should advise it."

Father Brown shook his head, like a murderer of much riper experience.
"So Flambeau said," he replied, with a sigh. "But consider. The more a
man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty
spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious. Have you
never seen one ploughman from the heights, or one shepherd from the
valleys? Have you never walked along a cliff, and seen one man walking
along the sands? Didn't you know when he's killed a crab, and wouldn't
you have known if it had been a creditor? No! No! No! For an intelligent
murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make
sure that nobody is looking at you."

"But what other plan is there?"

"There is only one," said the priest. "To make sure that everybody is
looking at something else. A man is throttled close by the big stand at
Epsom. Anybody might have seen it done while the stand stood empty--any
tramp under the hedges or motorist among the hills. But nobody would
have seen it when the stand was crowded and the whole ring roaring,
when the favourite was coming in first--or wasn't. The twisting of a
neck-cloth, the thrusting of a body behind a door could be done in an
instant--so long as it was that instant. It was the same, of course,"
he continued turning to Flambeau, "with that poor fellow under the
bandstand. He was dropped through the hole (it wasn't an accidental
hole) just at some very dramatic moment of the entertainment, when the
bow of some great violinist or the voice of some great singer opened
or came to its climax. And here, of course, when the knock-out blow
came--it would not be the only one. That is the little trick Nigger Ned
has adopted from his old God of Gongs."

"By the way, Malvoli--" Pooley began.

"Malvoli," said the priest, "has nothing to do with it. I dare say he
has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians.
They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear
we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are
dark and dirty. Also," he added, with a smile, "I fear the English
decline to draw any fine distinction between the moral character
produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo."

The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its
foreshore with famines and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and
nigger minstrels, before the two friends saw it again, and long before
the storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had died away.
Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them.
The man of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much
seaweed; his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was
wide open, and glistened like glass in the moon. Nigger Ned had been
overtaken a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen with his
closed left hand. The remaining officer was surprised--nay, pained--and
the negro got away. But this was enough to set all the English papers in
a flame, and for a month or two the main purpose of the British Empire
was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so in both senses) escaping by
any English port. Persons of a figure remotely reconcilable with his
were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made to scrub their
faces before going on board ship, as if each white complexion were made
up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in England was put under
special regulations and made to report himself; the outgoing ships would
no more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For people had found out
how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret
society, and by the time Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the
parade parapet in April, the Black Man meant in England almost what he
once meant in Scotland.

"He must be still in England," observed Flambeau, "and horridly well
hidden, too. They must have found him at the ports if he had only
whitened his face."

"You see, he is really a clever man," said Father Brown apologetically.
"And I'm sure he wouldn't whiten his face."

"Well, but what would he do?"

"I think," said Father Brown, "he would blacken his face."

Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: "My dear
fellow!"

Father Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger
for an instant into the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on
the sands.





TEN -- The Salad of Colonel Cray


FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when
the mists were slowly lifting--one of those mornings when the very
element of light appears as something mysterious and new. The scattered
trees outlined themselves more and more out of the vapour, as if they
were first drawn in grey chalk and then in charcoal. At yet more distant
intervals appeared the houses upon the broken fringe of the suburb;
their outlines became clearer and clearer until he recognized many in
which he had chance acquaintances, and many more the names of whose
owners he knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed; none of the
people were of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less
on such an errand. But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome
villa with verandas and wide ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made
him almost involuntarily stop. It was the unmistakable noise of a pistol
or carbine or some light firearm discharged; but it was not this that
puzzled him most. The first full noise was immediately followed by a
series of fainter noises--as he counted them, about six. He supposed
it must be the echo; but the odd thing was that the echo was not in the
least like the original sound. It was not like anything else that he
could think of; the three things nearest to it seemed to be the noise
made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many noises made by an animal,
and the noise made by a person attempting to conceal laughter. None of
which seemed to make much sense.

Father Brown was made of two men. There was a man of action, who was
as modest as a primrose and as punctual as a clock; who went his small
round of duties and never dreamed of altering it. There was also a man
of reflection, who was much simpler but much stronger, who could not
easily be stopped; whose thought was always (in the only intelligent
sense of the words) free thought. He could not help, even unconsciously,
asking himself all the questions that there were to be asked, and
answering as many of them as he could; all that went on like his
breathing or circulation. But he never consciously carried his actions
outside the sphere of his own duty; and in this case the two attitudes
were aptly tested. He was just about to resume his trudge in the
twilight, telling himself it was no affair of his, but instinctively
twisting and untwisting twenty theories about what the odd noises
might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in
the broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which
belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had
a native cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began to
remember that pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied
with consequences with which he was legitimately concerned. He turned
back and went in at the garden gate, making for the front door.

Half-way down one side of the house stood out a projection like a very
low shed; it was, as he afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round
the corner of this came a figure, at first a mere shadow in the haze,
apparently bending and peering about. Then, coming nearer, it solidified
into a figure that was, indeed, rather unusually solid. Major Putnam was
a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those
rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to
combine the oriental climate with the occidental luxuries. But the face
was a good-humoured one, and even now, though evidently puzzled and
inquisitive, wore a kind of innocent grin. He had a large palm-leaf
hat on the back of his head (suggesting a halo that was by no means
appropriate to the face), but otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid
suit of striped scarlet and yellow pyjamas; which, though glowing enough
to behold, must have been, on a fresh morning, pretty chilly to wear. He
had evidently come out of his house in a hurry, and the priest was not
surprised when he called out without further ceremony: "Did you hear
that noise?"

"Yes," answered Father Brown; "I thought I had better look in, in case
anything was the matter."

The Major looked at him rather queerly with his good-humoured gooseberry
eyes. "What do you think the noise was?" he asked.

"It sounded like a gun or something," replied the other, with some
hesitation; "but it seemed to have a singular sort of echo."

The Major was still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes,
when the front door was flung open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the
face of the fading mist; and another figure in pyjamas sprang or tumbled
out into the garden. The figure was much longer, leaner, and more
athletic; the pyjamas, though equally tropical, were comparatively
tasteful, being of white with a light lemon-yellow stripe. The man was
haggard, but handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an aquiline
profile and rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising
from the combination of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache.
All this Father Brown absorbed in detail more at leisure. For the moment
he only saw one thing about the man; which was the revolver in his hand.

"Cray!" exclaimed the Major, staring at him; "did you fire that shot?"

"Yes, I did," retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; "and so would
you in my place. If you were chased everywhere by devils and nearly--"

The Major seemed to intervene rather hurriedly. "This is my friend
Father Brown," he said. And then to Brown: "I don't know whether you've
met Colonel Cray of the Royal Artillery."

"I have heard of him, of course," said the priest innocently. "Did
you--did you hit anything?"

"I thought so," answered Cray with gravity.

"Did he--" asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, "did he fall or cry
out, or anything?"

Colonel Cray was regarding his host with a strange and steady stare.
"I'll tell you exactly what he did," he said. "He sneezed."

Father Brown's hand went half-way to his head, with the gesture of a man
remembering somebody's name. He knew now what it was that was neither
soda-water nor the snorting of a dog.

"Well," ejaculated the staring Major, "I never heard before that a
service revolver was a thing to be sneezed at."

"Nor I," said Father Brown faintly. "It's lucky you didn't turn your
artillery on him or you might have given him quite a bad cold." Then,
after a bewildered pause, he said: "Was it a burglar?"

"Let us go inside," said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way
into his house.

The interior exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning
hours: that the rooms seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after
the Major had turned out the one gaslight in the front hall. Father
Brown was surprised to see the whole dining-table set out as for a
festive meal, with napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of some six
unnecessary shapes set beside every plate. It was common enough, at that
time of the morning, to find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to
find it freshly spread so early was unusual.

While he stood wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and
sent a raging eye over the whole oblong of the tablecloth. At last he
spoke, spluttering: "All the silver gone!" he gasped. "Fish-knives and
forks gone. Old cruet-stand gone. Even the old silver cream-jug gone.
And now, Father Brown, I am ready to answer your question of whether it
was a burglar."

"They're simply a blind," said Cray stubbornly. "I know better than you
why people persecute this house; I know better than you why--"

The Major patted him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar to
the soothing of a sick child, and said: "It was a burglar. Obviously it
was a burglar."

"A burglar with a bad cold," observed Father Brown, "that might assist
you to trace him in the neighbourhood."

The Major shook his head in a sombre manner. "He must be far beyond
trace now, I fear," he said.

Then, as the restless man with the revolver turned again towards the
door in the garden, he added in a husky, confidential voice: "I doubt
whether I should send for the police, for fear my friend here has been a
little too free with his bullets, and got on the wrong side of the law.
He's lived in very wild places; and, to be frank with you, I think he
sometimes fancies things."

"I think you once told me," said Brown, "that he believes some Indian
secret society is pursuing him."

Major Putnam nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders. "I
suppose we'd better follow him outside," he said. "I don't want any
more--shall we say, sneezing?"

They passed out into the morning light, which was now even tinged
with sunshine, and saw Colonel Cray's tall figure bent almost double,
minutely examining the condition of gravel and grass. While the Major
strolled unobtrusively towards him, the priest took an equally indolent
turn, which took him round the next corner of the house to within a yard
or two of the projecting dustbin.

He stood regarding this dismal object for some minute and a half--, then
he stepped towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside. Dust and
other discolouring matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father
Brown never observed his own appearance, whatever else he observed. He
remained thus for a measurable period, as if engaged in some mysterious
prayers. Then he came out again, with some ashes on his hair, and walked
unconcernedly away.

By the time he came round to the garden door again he found a group
there which seemed to roll away morbidities as the sunlight had already
rolled away the mists. It was in no way rationally reassuring; it was
simply broadly comic, like a cluster of Dickens's characters. Major
Putnam had managed to slip inside and plunge into a proper shirt and
trousers, with a crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket over
all; thus normally set off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a
commonplace cordiality. He was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking
to his cook--the swarthy son of Malta, whose lean, yellow and rather
careworn face contrasted quaintly with his snow-white cap and costume.
The cook might well be careworn, for cookery was the Major's hobby. He
was one of those amateurs who always know more than the professional.
The only other person he even admitted to be a judge of an omelette was
his friend Cray--and as Brown remembered this, he turned to look for the
other officer. In the new presence of daylight and people clothed and
in their right mind, the sight of him was rather a shock. The taller and
more elegant man was still in his night-garb, with tousled black hair,
and now crawling about the garden on his hands and knees, still looking
for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all appearance,
striking the ground with his hand in anger at not finding him. Seeing
him thus quadrupedal in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows rather
sadly; and for the first time guessed that "fancies things" might be an
euphemism.

The third item in the group of the cook and the epicure was also known
to Father Brown; it was Audrey Watson, the Major's ward and housekeeper;
and at this moment, to judge by her apron, tucked-up sleeves and
resolute manner, much more the housekeeper than the ward.

"It serves you right," she was saying: "I always told you not to have
that old-fashioned cruet-stand."

"I prefer it," said Putnam, placably. "I'm old-fashioned myself; and the
things keep together."

"And vanish together, as you see," she retorted. "Well, if you are not
going to bother about the burglar, I shouldn't bother about the lunch.
It's Sunday, and we can't send for vinegar and all that in the town; and
you Indian gentlemen can't enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot
of hot things. I wish to goodness now you hadn't asked Cousin Oliver to
take me to the musical service. It isn't over till half-past twelve,
and the Colonel has to leave by then. I don't believe you men can manage
alone."

"Oh yes, we can, my dear," said the Major, looking at her very amiably.
"Marco has all the sauces, and we've often done ourselves well in very
rough places, as you might know by now. And it's time you had a treat,
Audrey; you mustn't be a housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know
you want to hear the music."

"I want to go to church," she said, with rather severe eyes.

She was one of those handsome women who will always be handsome, because
the beauty is not in an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the
head and features. But though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn
hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour, there was a
look in her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows
wasted her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple. For
indeed the little domestic difficulty of which she was now speaking so
decisively was rather comic than tragic. Father Brown gathered, from the
course of the conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave
before the usual lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done
out of a final feast with an old crony, had arranged for a special
dejeuner to be set out and consumed in the course of the morning, while
Audrey and other graver persons were at morning service. She was going
there under the escort of a relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver
Oman, who, though a scientific man of a somewhat bitter type, was
enthusiastic for music, and would go even to church to get it. There was
nothing in all this that could conceivably concern the tragedy in Miss
Watson's face; and by a half conscious instinct, Father Brown turned
again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the grass.

When he strolled across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted
abruptly, as if in some surprise at his continued presence. And indeed,
Father Brown, for reasons best known to himself, had lingered much
longer than politeness required; or even, in the ordinary sense,
permitted.

"Well!" cried Cray, with wild eyes. "I suppose you think I'm mad, like
the rest?"

"I have considered the thesis," answered the little man, composedly.
"And I incline to think you are not."

"What do you mean?" snapped Cray quite savagely.

"Real madmen," explained Father Brown, "always encourage their own
morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find
traces of the burglar; even when there aren't any. You are struggling
against it. You want what no madman ever wants."

"And what is that?"

"You want to be proved wrong," said Brown.

During the last words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was
regarding the cleric with agitated eyes. "By hell, but that is a true
word!" he cried. "They are all at me here that the fellow was only after
the silver--as if I shouldn't be only too pleased to think so! She's
been at me," and he tossed his tousled black head towards Audrey, but
the other had no need of the direction, "she's been at me today about
how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker, and how I have
the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a good-natured
man once--as good-natured as Putnam."

After a pause he said: "Look here, I've never seen you before; but you
shall judge of the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the
same mess; but, owing to some accidents on the Afghan border, I got my
command much sooner than most men; only we were both invalided home
for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there; and we all travelled back
together. But on the journey back things happened. Curious things. The
result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and even Audrey
keeps it hanging on--and I know what they mean. I know what they think I
am. So do you.

"Well, these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I
asked Putnam if I could get some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to
a little place opposite his lodgings. I have since found he was quite
right; but 'opposite' is a dangerous word when one decent house stands
opposite five or six squalid ones; and I must have mistaken the door. It
opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness; but as I turned back,
the door behind me sank back and settled into its place with a noise as
of innumerable bolts. There was nothing to do but to walk forward; which
I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to a flight
of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate
Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I
loosened at last. I came out again upon gloom, which was half turned
into a greenish twilight by a multitude of small but steady lamps
below. They showed merely the feet or fringes of some huge and empty
architecture. Just in front of me was something that looked like a
mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone platform on which
I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And worst of all, an idol
with its back to me.

"It was hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head,
and still more by a thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and
pointing, like a loathsome large finger, at some symbol graven in the
centre of the vast stone back. I had begun, in the dim light, to guess
at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when a more horrible thing
happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall behind me and a man
came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a carved smile on
his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most hateful
thing about him was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I
think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that
the devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to be.

"'If you had only seen the Monkey's Feet,' he said, smiling steadily,
and without other preface, 'we should have been very gentle--you would
only be tortured and die. If you had seen the Monkey's Face, still we
should be very moderate, very tolerant--you would only be tortured and
live. But as you have seen the Monkey's Tail, we must pronounce the
worst sentence, which is--Go Free.'

"When he said the words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I
had struggled, automatically unlock itself: and then, far down the dark
passages I had passed, I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own
bolts backwards.

"'It is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,' said the smiling man.
'Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite
you like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and
you shall die many times.' And with that he was swallowed once more in
the wall behind; and I went out into the street."

Cray paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and
began to pick daisies.

Then the soldier continued: "Putnam, of course, with his jolly common
sense, pooh-poohed all my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of
my mental balance. Well, I'll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the
three things that have happened since; and you shall judge which of us
is right.

"The first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle,
but hundreds of miles from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and
customs where the curse had been put on me. I woke in black midnight,
and lay thinking of nothing in particular, when I felt a faint tickling
thing, like a thread or a hair, trailed across my throat. I shrank back
out of its way, and could not help thinking of the words in the temple.
But when I got up and sought lights and a mirror, the line across my
neck was a line of blood.

"The second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey
home together. It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though
there was nothing there remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it
is, of course, possible that some of its images or talismans were in
such a place. Its curse was there, anyhow. I woke again in the dark with
a sensation that could not be put in colder or more literal words than
that a breath bit like an adder. Existence was an agony of extinction;
I dashed my head against walls until I dashed it against a window; and
fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Putnam, poor fellow, who
had called the other thing a chance scratch, was bound to take seriously
the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But I fear
it was my mental state he took seriously; and not my story.

"The third happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it
happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to
our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea.
I woke up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked
to the window; I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or
a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of stick or branch
circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my
window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was
one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had
come from no human hand."

Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a
wistful look. "Has Major Putnam," he asked, "got any Eastern curios,
idols, weapons and so on, from which one might get a hint?"

"Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear," replied Cray; "but by
all means come into his study."

As they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church,
and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on
cookery to the cook. In the Major's study and den of curios they came
suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street,
who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table--a book which he
dropped rather guiltily, and turned.

Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such
disfavour in his very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether
Audrey knew it or not, were rivals. Nor was the priest wholly
unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very well-dressed
gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an
Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be
in charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small
gloved hands, and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.

Cray seemed to find something specially irritating in the small
prayer-book in Oman's dark-gloved hand. "I didn't know that was in your
line," he said rather rudely.

Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. "This is more so, I know," he
said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, "a dictionary of
drugs and such things. But it's rather too large to take to church."
Then he closed the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest
touch of hurry and embarrassment.

"I suppose," said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject,
"all these spears and things are from India?"

"From everywhere," answered the doctor. "Putnam is an old soldier, and
has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I
know."

"I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands," said Brown, "that he learnt
the art of cookery." And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other
strange utensils on the wall.

At this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his
laughing, lobsterish face into the room. "Come along, Cray," he cried.
"Your lunch is just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who
want to go to church."

Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook
themselves solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers;
but Father Brown noticed that the doctor twice looked back and
scrutinized the house; and even came back to the corner of the street to
look at it again.

The priest looked puzzled. "He can't have been at the dustbin," he
muttered. "Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?"

Father Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer;
but today he seemed about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social
law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch
of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position with
torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more
puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another
of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries, accompanied with
their appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he only
repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread
and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk,
however, was exuberant.

"I'll tell you what I'll do for you," he cried--, "I'll mix you a salad!
I can't eat it, but I'll mix it like an angel! You've got a lettuce
there."

"Unfortunately it's the only thing we have got," answered the
good-humoured Major. "You must remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and
so on vanished with the cruet and the burglar."

"I know," replied Brown, rather vaguely. "That's what I've always been
afraid would happen. That's why I always carry a cruet-stand about with
me. I'm so fond of salads."

And to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his
waistcoat pocket and put it on the table.

"I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too," he went on, taking a
mustard-pot from another pocket. "A mustard plaster, I suppose. And
vinegar"--and producing that condiment--"haven't I heard something about
vinegar and brown paper? As for oil, which I think I put in my left--"

His garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what
no one else saw--the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit
lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover
himself Cray had cloven in.

"You're an astounding card," he said, staring. "I shall come and hear
your sermons, if they're as amusing as your manners." His voice changed
a little, and he leaned back in his chair.

"Oh, there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too," said Father Brown, quite
gravely. "Have you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or
charity that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers
forget that solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened--"

Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.

Father Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the
mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood up and said in a
new, loud and sudden voice--"Drink that!"

At the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and
bursting open a window cried: "Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?"

"Pretty near," said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic
had very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as
for life, but alive.

Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. "A crime!" he cried
hoarsely. "I will go for the police!"

The priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg
and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But
he only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:

"I shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to
know. There is no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a
coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick was the trick of a white
man. There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that mere
feathery touch: a razor held by a white man. There is one way of making
a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the
gas--the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that
can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the
window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You'll see some of them in
the Major's study."

With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The
moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on
her knees beside Cray's chair. He could not hear what they said to each
other; but their faces moved with amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor
and the priest walked slowly towards the garden gate.

"I suppose the Major was in love with her, too," he said with a sigh;
and when the other nodded, observed: "You were very generous, doctor.
You did a fine thing. But what made you suspect?"

"A very small thing," said Oman; "but it kept me restless in church till
I came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work
on poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that
a certain Indian poison, though deadly and difficult to trace, was
particularly easily reversible by the use of the commonest emetics. I
suppose he read that at the last moment--"

"And remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand," said Father
Brown. "Exactly. He threw the cruet in the dustbin--where I found it,
along with other silver--for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you
look at that pepper-pot I put on the table, you'll see a small hole.
That's where Cray's bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the
criminal sneeze."

There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: "The Major is a long time
looking for the police."

"Or the police in looking for the Major?" said the priest. "Well,
good-bye."





ELEVEN -- The Strange Crime of John Boulnois


MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face
dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black
butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American
daily called the Western Sun--also humorously described as the "Rising
Sunset". This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration
(attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that "he guessed the sun would rise
in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling." Those,
however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it.
For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity
long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the
most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or
rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated
in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as
"Weary Willie," and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long
procession of its portraits.

Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a
very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series
of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered
no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois's theory (which was
that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by
convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford,
and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism". But many American papers
seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow
of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox
already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were
presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac,
headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the
Shocks"--or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun
Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and
lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker
Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.

That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to
receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening.
The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills;
the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about
his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country
inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.

In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time
for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with
close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very
bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was
the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought
with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical
negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something
in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his
alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother
journalist.

"Could you do me the favour," asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his
nation, "of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives,
as I understand?"

"It's a few yards down the road," said the red-haired man, removing his
cigar; "I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I'm going on to
Pendragon Park to try and see the fun."

"What is Pendragon Park?" asked Calhoun Kidd.

"Sir Claude Champion's place--haven't you come down for that, too?"
asked the other pressman, looking up. "You're a journalist, aren't you?"

"I have come to see Mr Boulnois," said Kidd.

"I've come to see Mrs Boulnois," replied the other. "But I shan't catch
her at home." And he laughed rather unpleasantly.

"Are you interested in Catastrophism?" asked the wondering Yankee.

"I'm interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,"
replied his companion gloomily. "Mine's a filthy trade, and I never
pretend it isn't."

With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant
one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.

The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was
pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be
loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse
and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin
fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James
Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to
a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the
capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.

Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois
on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western
Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal
which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present
hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.

Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well
as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea
of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally
incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended
to know) Sir Claude Champion, as "one of the brightest and wealthiest of
England's Upper Ten"; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the
world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as
the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory
Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and,
above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other
than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about
his omnivorous culture and restless publicity--, he was not only a great
amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian
frivolity that we convey by the word "dilettante".

That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had
been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun,
gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire,
or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude--a
great deal more, in fact, than there was to know--it would never have
crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the
newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude
Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according
to Dalroy's account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in
couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had
been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a
millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately,
an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other.
Indeed, Boulnois's cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon
Park.

But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a
dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a
beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his
own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to
Champion's had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving
in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement.
Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he
seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an
intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon
were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and
motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois;
balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the
baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a
tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of
Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air
rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet
it was needless to name.

"I don't think it can go on without a smash," said the young man
with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. "Old Boulnois may be
squared--or he may be square. But if he's square he's thick--what you
might call cubic. But I don't believe it's possible."

"He is a man of grand intellectual powers," said Calhoun Kidd in a deep
voice.

"Yes," answered Dalroy; "but even a man of grand intellectual powers
can't be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall
be following myself in a minute or two."

But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself
smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical
informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded;
the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there
with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise
of a rising moon.

The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of
stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of
the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the
name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that
the hour of the "Thinker's" appointment had just struck, he went in and
knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that
the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious
than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a
porter's lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation
of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was
reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly
man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.

"Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir," he said, "but he has
been obliged to go out suddenly."

"But see here, I had an appointment," said the interviewer, with a
rising voice. "Do you know where he went to?"

"To Pendragon Park, sir," said the servant, rather sombrely, and began
to close the door.

Kidd started a little.

"Did he go with Mrs--with the rest of the party?" he asked rather
vaguely.

"No, sir," said the man shortly; "he stayed behind, and then went out
alone." And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not
done.

The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness,
was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit
and teach them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled,
heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy
old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn't
keep an appointment.

"If that's the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife's purest
devotion," said Mr Calhoun Kidd. "But perhaps he's gone over to make
a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the
spot."

And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up
the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective
towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and
orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was
a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word
"Ravenswood" came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven
colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere
almost described in Scott's great tragedy; the smell of something that
died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken
urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is
none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.

More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic
artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him.
He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and
the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have
fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he
went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of
his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought
hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the
image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as
Pierrot's, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue
sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that
this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house
and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense,
there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy--more--he hesitated
for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter--Catastrophism.

More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by
a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a
dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book.
For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed
to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to
sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of
a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such
a place in a forgotten tale.

Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked
sword--such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an
unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of
him and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and
bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look:
the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But
there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.

He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile
had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine
was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned
it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and
fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having
something more interesting to look at.

Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden,
was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape
gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant
mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and
having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the
finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of
a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw
something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment--the figure of a
man.

Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and
incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson,
with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was.
That white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally
young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those black curls already
grizzled--he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir Claude
Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the
next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American's feet,
faintly moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm
suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson
suit was part of the play. But there was a long red stain down the bank
from which the man had rolled--that was no part of the play. He had been
run through the body.

Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear
phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near
him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth
who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if
Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had
a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn't. The moonlight
discoloured everything, against Dalroy's red hair his wan face looked
not so much white as pale green.

All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd's excuse for having cried
out, brutally and beyond all reason: "Did you do this, you devil?"

James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the
fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards
the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to
speak.

"Boulnois.... Boulnois, I say.... Boulnois did it... jealous of me...he
was jealous, he was, he was..."

Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the
words:

"Boulnois...with my own sword...he threw it..."

Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with
a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the
strange salt of the seriousness of his race.

"See here," he said sharply and with command, "you must fetch a doctor.
This man's dead."

"And a priest, too, I suppose," said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner.
"All these Champions are papists."

The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the
head and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other
journalist reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already
prepared to assert they were too late.

"Were you too late also?" asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking
man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which
darted over Kidd dubiously.

"In one sense," drawled the representative of the Sun. "I was too
late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of
importance. I heard the dead man denounce his assassin."

"And who was the assassin?" asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows
together.

"Boulnois," said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.

The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow--, but he did
not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background,
said mildly: "I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon
Park this evening."

"There again," said the Yankee grimly, "I may be in a position to give
the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay
in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me.
But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly
and all alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago.
His butler told me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a
clue--have you sent for them?"

"Yes," said the doctor, "but we haven't alarmed anyone else yet."

"Does Mrs Boulnois know?" asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was
conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.

"I have not told her," said the doctor gruffly--, "but here come the
police."

The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned
with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical
when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace.
"Just before the police come," he said apologetically, "has anyone got a
light?"

The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the
priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined
with blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he
handed the long weapon to the doctor.

"I fear I'm no use here," he said, with a brief sigh. "I'll say good
night to you, gentlemen." And he walked away up the dark avenue towards
the house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in
cogitation.

The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates,
where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in
consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked
slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead,
on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an
equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that
might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd's demands for a lovely and
aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a
Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and
a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been
chryselephantine--made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of
ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though
low, was confident.

"Father Brown?" she said.

"Mrs Boulnois?" he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and
immediately said: "I see you know about Sir Claude."

"How do you know I know?" she asked steadily.

He did not answer the question, but asked another: "Have you seen your
husband?"

"My husband is at home," she said. "He has nothing to do with this."

Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a
curiously intense expression on her face.

"Shall I tell you something more?" she said, with a rather fearful
smile. "I don't think he did it, and you don't either." Father Brown
returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more
gravely.

"Father Brown," said the lady, "I am going to tell you all I know, but
I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven't
jumped to the conclusion of poor John's guilt, as all the rest have
done? Don't mind what you say: I--I know about the gossip and the
appearances that are against me."

Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across
his forehead. "Two very little things," he said. "At least, one's very
trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don't fit
in with Mr Boulnois being the murderer."

He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued
absentmindedly: "To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of
importance to vague ideas. All those things that 'aren't evidence'
are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all
impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this
crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral
impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so
wicked. Anybody can be wicked--as wicked as he chooses. We can direct
our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes
and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this
murder. He would not snatch Romeo's sword from its romantic scabbard;
or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body
among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois
killed anyone he'd do it quietly and heavily, as he'd do any other
doubtful thing--take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet.
No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It's more like Champion."

"Ah!" she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.

"And the trivial thing was this," said Brown. "There were finger-prints
on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are
made if they're on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were
on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword.
Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody
hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an
advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all
enemies except one."

"Except one," she repeated.

"There is only one enemy," said Father Brown, "whom it is easier to kill
with a dagger than a sword."

"I know," said the woman. "Oneself."

There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly:
"Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?"

"Yes" she said, with a face like marble. "I saw him do it."

"He died," said Father Brown, "for love of you?"

An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different
from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her
voice became suddenly strong and full. "I don't believe," she said, "he
ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband."

"Why?" asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the
lady.

"He hated my husband because...it is so strange I hardly know how to say
it...because..."

"Yes?" said Brown patiently.

"Because my husband wouldn't hate him."

Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed
from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point--he never
pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.

Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of
certainty. "My husband," she said, "is a great man. Sir Claude Champion
was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband
has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that
he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for
thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of
splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion
exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire
a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn't be got
to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be
envied. He went mad and killed himself for that."

"Yes," said Father Brown; "I think I begin to understand."

"Oh, don't you see?" she cried; "the whole picture is made for that--the
place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very
door, like a dependant--to make him feel a failure. He never felt it.
He thinks no more about such things than--than an absent-minded lion.
Champion would burst in on John's shabbiest hours or homeliest meals
with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it
like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse
amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing
or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned
a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac."

"And Haman began to tell them," said Father Brown, "of all the things
wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: 'All these things profit
me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.'"

"The crisis came," Mrs Boulnois continued, "when I persuaded John to let
me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They
began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted
to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day)
heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious
rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he
began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been
the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious
attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by
explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot
do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband.
Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, 'Champion
is stealing your wife,' he would think the joke a little vulgar: that
it could be anything but a joke--that notion could find no crack in his
great skull to get in by. Well, John was to come and see us act this
evening, but just as we were starting he said he wouldn't; he had got an
interesting book and a cigar. I told this to Sir Claude, and it was his
death-blow. The monomaniac suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself,
crying out like a devil that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there
in the garden dead of his own jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is
sitting in the dining-room reading a book."

There was another silence, and then the little priest said: "There is
only one weak point, Mrs Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your
husband is not sitting in the dining-room reading a book. That American
reporter told me he had been to your house, and your butler told him Mr
Boulnois had gone to Pendragon Park after all."

Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed
rather bewilderment than confusion or fear. "Why, what can you
mean?" she cried. "All the servants were out of the house, seeing the
theatricals. And we don't keep a butler, thank goodness!"

Father Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. "What,
what?" he cried seeming galvanized into sudden life. "Look here--I
say--can I make your husband hear if I go to the house?"

"Oh, the servants will be back by now," she said, wondering.

"Right, right!" rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling
up the path towards the Park gates. He turned once to say: "Better get
hold of that Yankee, or 'Crime of John Boulnois' will be all over the
Republic in large letters."

"You don't understand," said Mrs Boulnois. "He wouldn't mind. I don't
think he imagines that America really is a place."

When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy dog,
a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where
Boulnois sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described
him. A decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the
instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on
his cigar.

"He has been here for half an hour at least," thought Father Brown. In
fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was
cleared away.

"Don't get up, Mr Boulnois," said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic
way. "I shan't interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your
scientific studies."

"No," said Boulnois; "I was reading 'The Bloody Thumb.'" He said it with
neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep
and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness.
He laid down a gory yellow "shocker" without even feeling its
incongruity enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big,
slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald,
and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned
evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had
assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife
act Juliet.

"I won't keep you long from 'The Bloody Thumb' or any other catastrophic
affairs," said Father Brown, smiling. "I only came to ask you about the
crime you committed this evening."

Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his
broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the
first time.

"I know it was a strange crime," assented Brown in a low voice.
"Stranger than murder perhaps--to you. The little sins are sometimes
harder to confess than the big ones--but that's why it's so important to
confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six
times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless
atrocity."

"It makes one feel," said the philosopher slowly, "such a damned fool."

"I know," assented the other, "but one often has to choose between
feeling a damned fool and being one."

"I can't analyse myself well," went on Boulnois; "but sitting in that
chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday.
It was security, eternity--I can't convey it... the cigars were within
reach...the matches were within reach... the Thumb had four more
appearances to...it was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that
bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that I couldn't get
out of that chair--literally, physically, muscularly couldn't. Then I
did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants
were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his
mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the
Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle,
and I tell you that murder--"

"I understand," said Father Brown. "I've seen him."

"I didn't commit murder," continued the Catastrophist mildly, "but only
perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in
his face. That is my crime, Father Brown, and I don't know what penance
you would inflict for it."

"I shan't inflict any penance," said the clerical gentleman, collecting
his heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; "quite the
contrary. I came here specially to let you off the little penance which
would otherwise have followed your little offence."

"And what," asked Boulnois, smiling, "is the little penance I have so
luckily been let off?"

"Being hanged," said Father Brown.




TWELVE -- The Fairy Tale of Father Brown


THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy
kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It
had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history--hardly fifty
years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found
themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been
not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon
will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss
that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of
Germany--those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king
seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable
sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut
battlements of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more
like the gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was
as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more
like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts
from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees looked young, for
the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern against the
strong blue looked like innumerable childish figures.

Despite his prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life,
Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his
composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many
children do. Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the
heraldic framework of such a town, he did feel rather as if he had
entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as a younger brother
might, in the formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always flung as he
walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich. Nay,
in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed
and clumsy head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of
the ogre's club in a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything
in the form of fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:

"I wonder," he said, "whether one would have real adventures in a place
like this, if one put oneself in the way? It's a splendid back-scene for
them, but I always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with
pasteboard sabres more than real, horrible swords."

"You are mistaken," said his friend. "In this place they not only fight
with swords, but kill without swords. And there's worse than that."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Father Brown.

"Why," replied the other, "I should say this was the only place in
Europe where a man was ever shot without firearms."

"Do you mean a bow and arrow?" asked Brown in some wonder.

"I mean a bullet in the brain," replied Flambeau. "Don't you know the
story of the late Prince of this place? It was one of the great police
mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course, that this
place was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck's very earliest
schemes of consolidation--forcibly, that is, but not at all easily. The
empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to
rule the place in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in
the gallery there--a handsome old gentleman if he'd had any hair or
eyebrows, and hadn't been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but he had
things to harass him, as I'll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of
distinguished skill and success, but he didn't have altogether an easy
job with this little place. He was defeated in several battles by
the celebrated Arnhold brothers--the three guerrilla patriots to whom
Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:

        Wolves with the hair of the ermine,
          Crows that are crowned and kings--
        These things be many as vermin,
          Yet Three shall abide these things.

Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the
occupation would ever have been successful had not one of the three
brothers, Paul, despicably, but very decisively declined to abide
these things any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets of the
insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to
the post of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one
genuine hero among Mr Swinburne's heroes, was killed, sword in hand,
in the capture of the city; and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a
traitor, had always been tame and even timid compared with his active
brothers, retired into something like a hermitage, became converted to a
Christian quietism which was almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men
except to give nearly all he had to the poor. They tell me that not long
ago he could still be seen about the neighbourhood occasionally, a man
in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very wild, white hair, but a face
of astonishing softness."

"I know," said Father Brown. "I saw him once."

His friend looked at him in some surprise. "I didn't know you'd been
here before," he said. "Perhaps you know as much about it as I do.
Anyhow, that's the story of the Arnholds, and he was the last survivor
of them. Yes, and of all the men who played parts in that drama."

"You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?"

"Died," repeated Flambeau, "and that's about as much as we can say. You
must understand that towards the end of his life he began to have
those tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the
ordinary daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to
be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters
were shot without mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that
was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms,
and even in this he erected another sort of central cabin or cupboard,
lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship. Some say that under the
floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than large
enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave, he was
willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet.
The populace had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression
of the revolt, but Otto now insisted, as governments very seldom
insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It was carried out,
with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized
officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength
and science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto was
absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol
into Heiligwaldenstein."

"Human science can never be quite certain of things like that," said
Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over
his head, "if only because of the difficulty about definition and
connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the
mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with
tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a
revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon--until it was fired
into him, of course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that
it didn't even look like a firearm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or
something. Was the bullet at all peculiar?"

"Not that I ever heard of," answered Flambeau; "but my information is
fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able
detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested
him instead, and we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here
of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but I forgot to ask him anything about
the bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this." He paused a
moment to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and
then resumed:

"On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear
in one of the outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors
whom he really wished to meet. They were geological experts sent to
investigate the old question of the alleged supply of gold from the
rocks round here, upon which (as it was said) the small city-state
had so long maintained its credit and been able to negotiate with
its neighbours even under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies.
Hitherto it had never been found by the most exacting inquiry which
could--"

"Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy pistol," said Father
Brown with a smile. "But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn't he
anything to tell the Prince?"

"He always asseverated that he did not know," replied Flambeau; "that
this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right
to say that it received some support from fragmentary words--spoken by
the great Ludwig in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but
pointed at Paul, and said, 'You have not told him...' and was soon
afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished
geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the
most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like
wearing their decorations so much as the men of science--as anybody
knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a
brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain--you
saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a
meaningless sort of smile underneath--the Chamberlain, I say, discovered
there was everything there except the Prince himself. He searched all
the outer salons; then, remembering the man's mad fits of fear, hurried
to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or
cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did
open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the ground,
which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave--that is his
account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and
tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.

"First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the
horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless
clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word
had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness,
coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the
news as briefly as such news is told.

"Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the
dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his
arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed
from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that
moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow
uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf
had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could
be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle--he who had
always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed
and alone."

"Who found his body?" asked Father Brown.

"Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,"
replied his friend, "who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers."

"Had she picked any?" asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the
veil of the branches above him.

"Yes," replied Flambeau. "I particularly remember that the Chamberlain,
or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up
at her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over
that--that bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help
arrived he was dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to
the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond even that
natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors,
especially the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt and excitement,
as well as many important Prussian officials, and it soon began to be
clear that the scheme for finding the treasure bulked much bigger in
the business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been
promised great prizes or international advantages, and some even said
that the Prince's secret apartments and strong military protection were
due less to fear of the populace than to the pursuit of some private
investigation of--"

"Had the flowers got long stalks?" asked Father Brown.

Flambeau stared at him. "What an odd person you are!" he said. "That's
exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he
thought--uglier than the blood and bullet--was that the flowers were
quite short, plucked close under the head."

"Of course," said the priest, "when a grown up girl is really picking
flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their
heads off, as a child does, it looks as if--" And he hesitated.

"Well?" inquired the other.

"Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an
excuse for being there after--well, after she was there."

"I know what you're driving at," said Flambeau rather gloomily. "But
that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point--the want
of a weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other
things--even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how
he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can't. They had
the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a
little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain,
Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy
with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same,
however romantic you are, you can't imagine a big bullet into a man's
jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol,
though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend."

"How do you know there were two shots?" asked the little priest.

"There was only one in his head," said his companion, "but there was
another bullet-hole in the sash."

Father Brown's smooth brow became suddenly constricted. "Was the other
bullet found?" he demanded.

Flambeau started a little. "I don't think I remember," he said.

"Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!" cried Brown, frowning more and more, with
a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. "Don't think me rude. Let me
think this out for a moment."

"All right," said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight
breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of
white and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured
scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the
casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the
castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as
homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had
lain dead.

"What became of this Hedwig eventually?" asked the priest at last.

"She is married to General Schwartz," said Flambeau. "No doubt you've
heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished
himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he
rose from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the
German..."

Father Brown sat up suddenly.

"Rose from the ranks!" he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle.
"Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man;
but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so
patient--"

"What do you mean?" demanded the other. "In what way did they kill the
man?"

"They killed him with the sash," said Brown carefully; and then, as
Flambeau protested: "Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought
to say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn't sound like having a
disease."

"I suppose," said Flambeau, "that you've got some notion in your head,
but it won't easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he
might easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?"

"He was shot by his own orders," said the priest.

"You mean he committed suicide?"

"I didn't say by his own wish," replied Father Brown. "I said by his own
orders."

"Well, anyhow, what is your theory?"

Father Brown laughed. "I am only on my holiday," he said. "I haven't got
any theories. Only this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you
like, I'll tell you a story."

The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated
up to crown the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink
baby fingers of the budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to
reach them; the blue sky began to take a bright violet of evening, when
Father Brown suddenly spoke again:

"It was on a dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees
and dew already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped
hurriedly out of a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the
wood. One of the innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice
it. He had no wish to be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the
great trees, grey and already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like
a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the least frequented side of his
palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked. But there was
no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit
had been a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left
behind were unimportant. He had realized suddenly that he could do
without them.

"His great passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the
strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left
Grossenmark and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he
had bought the traitor and butchered the hero, for this he had long
questioned and cross-questioned the false Chamberlain, until he had come
to the conclusion that, touching his ignorance, the renegade really
told the truth. For this he had, somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised
money on the chance of gaining the larger amount; and for this he had
stolen out of his palace like a thief in the rain, for he had thought of
another way to get the desire of his eyes, and to get it cheap.

"Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was
making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs
above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced
with thorn, in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden
himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could have no real
reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place for
years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed
had cut him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy,
but he now professed a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his
cause, some appeal to his principles, would probably get the mere
money secret out of him. Otto was no coward, in spite of his network of
military precautions, and, in any case, his avarice was stronger than
his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear. Since he was certain there
were no private arms in the whole principality, he was a hundred times
more certain there were none in the Quaker's little hermitage on the
hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants, and with
no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down
with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the
lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the
rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies.
Rifles ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him
would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact
that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so
far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that
an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the
palace rifles at the west door and the east door, at the north door and
the south, and all along the four facades linking them. He was safe.

"It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found
how naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small
platform of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice.
Behind was the black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was
hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the
cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock
platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a
great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the
eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought,
'Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.' Moonrise had
already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain
had ceased.

"Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old
man in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but
whose white hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind.
He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious
exercises. 'They trust in their horses...'

"'Sir,' said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual
courtesy, 'I should like only one word with you.'

"'...and in their chariots,' went on the old man weakly, 'but we
will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts....' His last words were
inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind,
made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two
servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern and supported him. They
wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver
on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were
peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes.
For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and
diplomatic sense stood firm.

"'I fear we have not met,' he said, 'since that awful cannonade in which
your poor brother died.'

"'All my brothers died,' said the old man, still looking across the
valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate
features, and the wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like
icicles, he added: 'You see, I am dead, too.'

"'I hope you'll understand,' said the Prince, controlling himself almost
to a point of conciliation, 'that I do not come here to haunt you, as a
mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right
or wrong in that, but at least there was one point on which we were
never wrong, because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of
the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines that you were
moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion
that...'

"The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him
with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But
when the word 'gold' was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of
something, and turned away his face to the mountains.

"'He has spoken of gold,' he said. 'He has spoken of things not lawful.
Let him cease to speak.'

"Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to
regard success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself
and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually
being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion
of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and
stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the
mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly
twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds
before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and
that they had done it with his own military scarf.

"The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible,
turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible
about it, till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to
read: 'The tongue is a little member, but--'

"Something in the very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge
down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the
gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf
from his neck and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible;
the men who had knotted that gag knew the difference between what a man
can do with his hands in front of him and what he can do with his hands
behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope on the
mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but
he could not speak. A dumb devil was in him.

"He had come close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had
quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant to mean.
Once more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of
the lamp-lit city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself
repeating the phrases of his former mood with a murderous irony. Far as
the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends, every one of whom would
shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles were so
near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals;
therefore it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were
ranked so far away that an enemy could not slink into the town by
any detour; therefore it was vain to return to the city by any remote
course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But
from him no cry would come.

"The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in
stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines
about the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort--for he had
never noticed such things before--were at once luminous and discoloured
by the moonshine, and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered,
as if crawling about the roots of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been
suddenly unseated by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in
that wood he felt something unfathomably German--the fairy tale. He knew
with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle of an ogre--he
had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother if
bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as
if it were a charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he
expected, and broke with a slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in
his scarf, he heard the halloo, 'Who goes there?' Then he remembered the
scarf was not in its usual place.

"He tried to scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then
a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact.
Otto of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would
do no more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the
moon would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of
his uniform, or the old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his
soul.

"The sentry who had fired, according to the strict orders of the
garrison, naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was
a private named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what
he found was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a
kind of mask made of his own military scarf that nothing but open, dead
eyes could be seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had
gone through the gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole
in the scarf, but only one shot. Naturally, if not correctly, young
Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast it on the grass;
and then he saw whom he had slain.

"We cannot be certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that
there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as
was its occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous
knowledge of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether
she came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that
night, we shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this
Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something
of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry
to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him
with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty
such sentries within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm;
and there was nothing to connect her with the disaster either, since she
had not got, and could not have, any firearms.

"Well," said Father Brown rising cheerfully "I hope they're happy."

"Where are you going?" asked his friend.

"I'm going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the
Arnhold who betrayed his brethren," answered the priest. "I wonder what
part--I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?"

And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man
with black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to
contradict the black warning in his eyes.





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Title: Eugenics and Other Evils

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: May 3, 2008 [EBook #25308]

Language: English


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EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS




Eugenics and
Other Evils


By

G.K. Chesterton


Cassell and Company, Limited
London, New York, Toronto & Melbourne
1922




TO THE READER


I publish these essays at the present time for a particular reason
connected with the present situation; a reason which I should like
briefly to emphasise and make clear.

Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are
conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of
preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before
the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when
eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies)
sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy
of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr.
Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man
like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation,
of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be
found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion
too controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it too
seriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself into
a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism
and strict social organisation.

And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might
well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one,
and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And,
anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style.
Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which had
specialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture of
Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be
hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless.
As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it
grew more and more plain that the scientifically organised State was
not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would
ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I
thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.

I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has
gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling
classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia
is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine
years old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal
older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same
bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors
that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For
that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and
publish these papers.

                                                    G.K.C.




CONTENTS


PART I

The False Theory

CHAPTER                                        PAGE

1. WHAT IS EUGENICS?                                   3

2. THE FIRST OBSTACLES                                12

3. THE ANARCHY FROM ABOVE                             22

4. THE LUNATIC AND THE LAW                            31

5. THE FLYING AUTHORITY                               46

6. THE UNANSWERED CHALLENGE                           61

7. THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF DOUBT                    73

8. A SUMMARY OF A FALSE THEORY                        82


PART II

The Real Aim

1. THE IMPOTENCE OF IMPENITENCE                       91

2. TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP                           101

3. TRUE HISTORY OF A EUGENIST                        114

4. THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLESH                        126

5. THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE                        136

6. THE ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY                            148

7. THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM                   159

8. THE END OF THE HOUSEHOLD GODS                     169

9. A SHORT CHAPTER                                   180




Part I

THE FALSE THEORY




Eugenics and Other Evils




CHAPTER I

WHAT IS EUGENICS?


The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is
no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are
mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but
sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because
men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before
it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the
scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried
while it is in the air.

There exists to-day a scheme of action, a school of thought, as
collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we
can make any outline of history. It is as firm a fact as the Oxford
Movement, or the Puritans of the Long Parliament; or the Jansenists;
or the Jesuits. It is a thing that can be pointed out; it is a thing
that can be discussed; and it is a thing that can still be destroyed.
It is called for convenience "Eugenics"; and that it ought to be
destroyed I propose to prove in the pages that follow. I know that it
means very different things to different people; but that is only
because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised
with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued
rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is
only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The
Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions
are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely
astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil
always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has
in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and
abnormal sin. Of these who are deceived I shall speak of course as we
all do of such instruments; judging them by the good they think they
are doing, and not by the evil which they really do. But Eugenics
itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas
exist; and Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming
quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a
thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no
more to be bargained about than poisoning.

It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of Eugenics: though
some of the Eugenists seem to be rather vague about it. The movement
consists of two parts: a moral basis, which is common to all, and a
scheme of social application which varies a good deal. For the moral
basis, it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his
knowledge of consequences. If I were in charge of a baby (like Dr.
Johnson in that tower of vision), and if the baby was ill through
having eaten the soap, I might possibly send for a doctor. I might be
calling him away from much more serious cases, from the bedsides of
babies whose diet had been far more deadly; but I should be justified.
I could not be expected to know enough about his other patients to be
obliged (or even entitled) to sacrifice to them the baby for whom I
was primarily and directly responsible. Now the Eugenic moral basis is
this; that the baby for whom we are primarily and directly responsible
is the babe unborn. That is, that we know (or may come to know) enough
of certain inevitable tendencies in biology to consider the fruit of
some contemplated union in that direct and clear light of conscience
which we can now only fix on the other partner in that union. The one
duty can conceivably be as definite as or more definite than the
other. The baby that does not exist can be considered even before the
wife who does. Now it is essential to grasp that this is a
comparatively new note in morality. Of course sane people always
thought the aim of marriage was the procreation of children to the
glory of God or according to the plan of Nature; but whether they
counted such children as God's reward for service or Nature's premium
on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to
Nature, as a less definable thing. The only person (and this is the
point) towards whom one could have precise duties was the partner in
the process. Directly considering the partner's claims was the nearest
one could get to indirectly considering the claims of posterity. If
the women of the harem sang praises of the hero as the Moslem mounted
his horse, it was because this was the due of a man; if the Christian
knight helped his wife off her horse, it was because this was the due
of a woman. Definite and detailed dues of this kind they did not
predicate of the babe unborn; regarding him in that agnostic and
opportunist light in which Mr. Browdie regarded the hypothetical child
of Miss Squeers. Thinking these sex relations healthy, they naturally
hoped they would produce healthy children; but that was all. The
Moslem woman doubtless expected Allah to send beautiful sons to an
obedient wife; but she would not have allowed any direct vision of
such sons to alter the obedience itself. She would not have said, "I
will now be a disobedient wife; as the learned leech informs me that
great prophets are often the children of disobedient wives." The
knight doubtless hoped that the saints would help him to strong
children, if he did all the duties of his station, one of which might
be helping his wife off her horse; but he would not have refrained
from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling
off horses often resulted in the birth of a genius. Both Moslem and
Christian would have thought such speculations not only impious but
utterly unpractical. I quite agree with them; but that is not the
point here.

The point here is that a new school believes Eugenics _against_
Ethics. And it is proved by one familiar fact: that the heroisms of
history are actually the crimes of Eugenics. The Eugenists' books and
articles are full of suggestions that non-eugenic unions should and
may come to be regarded as we regard sins; that we should really feel
that marrying an invalid is a kind of cruelty to children. But history
is full of the praises of people who have held sacred such ties to
invalids; of cases like those of Colonel Hutchinson and Sir William
Temple, who remained faithful to betrothals when beauty and health had
been apparently blasted. And though the illnesses of Dorothy Osborne
and Mrs. Hutchinson may not fall under the Eugenic speculations (I do
not know), it is obvious that they might have done so; and certainly
it would not have made any difference to men's moral opinion of the
act. I do not discuss here which morality I favour; but I insist that
they are opposite. The Eugenist really sets up as saints the very men
whom hundreds of families have called sneaks. To be consistent, they
ought to put up statues to the men who deserted their loves because of
bodily misfortune; with inscriptions celebrating the good Eugenist
who, on his fiancée falling off a bicycle, nobly refused to marry her;
or to the young hero who, on hearing of an uncle with erysipelas,
magnanimously broke his word. What is perfectly plain is this: that
mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred,
and the effect of it on the children so incalculable, that they have
always admired the maintenance of honour more than the maintenance of
safety. Doubtless they thought that even the children might be none
the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers; but this
was not the first thought, the first commandment. Briefly, we may say
that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as
severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the
character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other, and
leaving the rest to God. To introduce an ethic which makes that
fidelity or infidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is
that rarest of all things, a revolution that has not happened before.

It is only right to say here, though the matter should only be touched
on, that many Eugenists would contradict this, in so far as to claim
that there was a consciously Eugenic reason for the horror of those
unions which begin with the celebrated denial to man of the privilege
of marrying his grandmother. Dr. S.R. Steinmetz, with that creepy
simplicity of mind with which the Eugenists chill the blood, remarks
that "we do not yet know quite certainly" what were "the motives for
the horror of" that horrible thing which is the agony of Oedipus. With
entirely amiable intention, I ask Dr. S.R. Steinmetz to speak for
himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as
separate from other women; nor have I reached them by any curious
researches. I found them where I found an analogous aversion to eating
a baby for breakfast. I found them in a rooted detestation in the
human soul to liking a thing in one way, when you already like it in
another quite incompatible way. Now it is perfectly true that this
aversion may have acted eugenically; and so had a certain ultimate
confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really
cannot be any Eugenist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a
defence of Eugenics but a direct denial of Eugenics. If something
which has been discovered at last by the lamp of learning is something
which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature, this
(so far as it goes) is plainly not an argument for pestering people,
but an argument for letting them alone. If men did not marry their
grandmothers when it was, for all they knew, a most hygienic habit; if
we know now that they instinctly avoided scientific peril; that, so
far as it goes, is a point in favour of letting people marry anyone
they like. It is simply the statement that sexual selection, or what
Christians call falling in love, is a part of man which in the rough
and in the long run can be trusted. And that is the destruction of the
whole of this science at a blow.

The second part of the definition, the persuasive or coercive methods
to be employed, I shall deal with more fully in the second part of
this book. But some such summary as the following may here be useful.
Far into the unfathomable past of our race we find the assumption
that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man.
Before slavery sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of
Christianity, it may or may not be true that slaves were in some sense
bred like cattle, valued as a promising stock for labour. If it was so
it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the
Eugenists; and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a
fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern. It may be,
however, that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the
Eugenist's care. It is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have
killed the first man that suggested it. I mean suggested it seriously;
for Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in
Greek. Among free men, the law, more often the creed, most commonly of
all the custom, have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this
reason or that. But law and creed and custom have never concentrated
heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had
been made. The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual
adventure outside the frontiers of the State. Our first forgotten
ancestors left this tradition behind them; and our own latest fathers
and mothers a few years ago would have thought us lunatics to be
discussing it. The shortest general definition of Eugenics on its
practical side is that it does, in a more or less degree, propose to
control some families at least as if they were families of pagan
slaves. I shall discuss later the question of the people to whom this
pressure may be applied; and the much more puzzling question of what
people will apply it. But it is to be applied at the very least by
somebody to somebody, and that on certain calculations about breeding
which are affirmed to be demonstrable. So much for the subject itself.
I say that this thing exists. I define it as closely as matters
involving moral evidence can be defined; I call it Eugenics. If after
that anyone chooses to say that Eugenics is not the Greek for this--I
am content to answer that "chivalrous" is not the French for "horsy";
and that such controversial games are more horsy than chivalrous.




CHAPTER II

THE FIRST OBSTACLES


Now before I set about arguing these things, there is a cloud of
skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern sceptics, who ought to be
cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real
doctors of the heresy. If I sum up my statement thus: "Eugenics, as
discussed, evidently means the control of some men over the marriage
and unmarriage of others; and probably means the control of the few
over the marriage and unmarriage of the many," I shall first of all
receive the sort of answers that float like skim on the surface of
teacups and talk. I may very roughly and rapidly divide these
preliminary objectors into five sects; whom I will call the
Euphemists, the Casuists, the Autocrats, the Precedenters, and the
Endeavourers. When we have answered the immediate protestation of all
these good, shouting, short-sighted people, we can begin to do justice
to those intelligences that are really behind the idea.

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle
them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of
translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the
same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of
the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of
longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate
and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they
will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles.
Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet
the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them
"It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once
useful distinction between the anthropoid _homo_ and the other
animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be
modified also even in regard to the important question of the
extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of
murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a
simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is
quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if
anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two
actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke
of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the
crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest
champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this
education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which
most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again,
when I spoke of people "being married forcibly by the police," another
distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty
assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few
days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the
State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be
that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area
can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an
idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in
that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after
weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents.
He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a
helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that
nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near
the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in
stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo
a less of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that
the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of
Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is
certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.

The next sect of superficial objectors is even more irritating. I have
called them, for immediate purposes, the Casuists. Suppose I say "I
dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants."
Somebody is sure to say "Well, after all, Queen Eleanor when she
sucked blood from her husband's arm was a cannibal." What is one to
say to such people? One can only say "Confine yourself to sucking
poisoned blood from people's arms, and I permit you to call yourself
by the glorious title of Cannibal." In this sense people say of
Eugenics, "After all, whenever we discourage a schoolboy from marrying
a mad negress with a hump back, we are really Eugenists." Again one
can only answer, "Confine yourselves strictly to such schoolboys as
are naturally attracted to hump-backed negresses; and you may exult in
the title of Eugenist, all the more proudly because that distinction
will be rare." But surely anyone's common-sense must tell him that if
Eugenics dealt only with such extravagant cases, it would be called
common-sense--and not Eugenics. The human race has excluded such
absurdities for unknown ages; and has never yet called it Eugenics.
You may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back;
you may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire;
but if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among
living men. If nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved,
there would be no such thing as a Eugenic Congress, and certainly no
such thing as this book.

I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the
Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good
they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who
give us generally to understand that every modern reform will "work"
all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and
for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their
looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the
shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not
expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most
certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has
left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen.
If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, "Oh, I
would certainly insist on this"; or "I would never go so far as that";
as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever
done quite successfully--force men to forsake their sins. Of these it
is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any
more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a
dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you
have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not
be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put
into it.

Along with such idealists should go the strange people who seem to
think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by
repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates
had in mind. These people will say "So far from aiming at _slavery_,
the Eugenists are seeking _true_ liberty; liberty from disease and
degeneracy, etc." Or they will say "We can assure Mr. Chesterton that
the Eugenists have _no_ intention of segregating the harmless; justice
and mercy are the very motto of----" etc. To this kind of thing
perhaps the shortest answer is this. Many of those who speak thus are
agnostic or generally unsympathetic to official religion. Suppose one
of them said "The Church of England is full of hypocrisy." What would
he think of me if I answered, "I assure you that hypocrisy is
condemned by every form of Christianity; and is particularly
repudiated in the Prayer Book"? Suppose he said that the Church of
Rome had been guilty of great cruelties. What would he think of me if
I answered, "The Church is expressly bound to meekness and charity;
and therefore cannot be cruel"? This kind of people need not detain us
long. Then there are others whom I may call the Precedenters; who
flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the
solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand
the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the
principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer
"Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to
persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old
law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. He simply alters
the word "lepers" to "long-nosed people," and says blandly that the
principle is the same.

Perhaps the weakest of all are those helpless persons whom I have
called the Endeavourers. The prize specimen of them was another M.P.
who defended the same Bill as "an honest attempt" to deal with a great
evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow
citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent
agnosticism about what would come of it. But with this fatuous notion
that one can deliberately establish the Inquisition or the Terror, and
then faintly trust the larger hope, I shall have to deal more
seriously in a subsequent chapter. It is enough to say here that the
best thing the honest Endeavourer could do would be to make an honest
attempt to know what he is doing. And not to do anything else until he
has found out. Lastly, there is a class of controversialists so
hopeless and futile that I have really failed to find a name for them.
But whenever anyone attempts to argue rationally for or against any
existent and recognisable _thing_, such as the Eugenic class of
legislation, there are always people who begin to chop hay about
Socialism and Individualism; and say "_You_ object to all State
interference; _I_ am in favour of State interference. _You_ are an
Individualist; _I_, on the other hand," etc. To which I can only
answer, with heart-broken patience, that I am not an Individualist,
but a poor fallen but baptised journalist who is trying to write a
book about Eugenists, several of whom he has met; whereas he never met
an Individualist, and is by no means certain he would recognise him if
he did. In short, I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the
State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it
would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be
turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless
botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative
advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the
left.

And for the rest, there is undoubtedly an enormous mass of sensible,
rather thoughtless people, whose rooted sentiment it is that any deep
change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant. They
cannot believe that men in hats and coats like themselves can be
preparing a revolution; all their Victorian philosophy has taught
them that such transformations are always slow. Therefore, when I
speak of Eugenic legislation, or the coming of the Eugenic State,
they think of it as something like _The Time Machine_ or _Looking
Backward_: a thing that, good or bad, will have to fit itself to
their great-great-great-grandchild, who may be very different and may
like it; and who in any case is rather a distant relative. To all
this I have, to begin with, a very short and simple answer. The
Eugenic State has begun. The first of the Eugenic Laws has already
been adopted by the Government of this country; and passed with the
applause of both parties through the dominant House of Parliament.
This first Eugenic Law clears the ground and may be said to proclaim
negative Eugenics; but it cannot be defended, and nobody has
attempted to defend it, except on the Eugenic theory. I will call it
the Feeble-Minded Bill both for brevity and because the description
is strictly accurate. It is, quite simply and literally, a Bill for
incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call
mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them
weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this
term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and
relatives on some occasion or other (unless his friends and relatives
have been lamentably lacking in spirit), it can be clearly seen that
this law, like the early Christian Church (to which, however, it
presents points of dissimilarity), is a net drawing in of all kinds.
It must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition
incorporated in the Bill. Indeed, the first definition of
"feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser and vaguer than the
phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about
"persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable
circumstances" (as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances
were directly unfavourable to his doing so), are nevertheless
"incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence"; which is
exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their
neighbours all over this planet. But as an incapacity for any kind of
thought is now regarded as statesmanship, there is nothing so very
novel about such slovenly drafting. What is novel and what is vital
is this: that the _defence_ of this crazy Coercion Act is a Eugenic
defence. It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged, that the
aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists
do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children.
Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who
is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as
were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that
is the point. England has forgotten the Feudal State; it is in the
last anarchy of the Industrial State; there is much in Mr. Belloc's
theory that it is approaching the Servile State; it cannot at present
get at the Distributive State; it has almost certainly missed the
Socialist State. But we are already under the Eugenist State; and
nothing remains to us but rebellion.




CHAPTER III

THE ANARCHY FROM ABOVE


A silent anarchy is eating out our society. I must pause upon the
expression; because the true nature of anarchy is mostly
misapprehended. It is not in the least necessary that anarchy should
be violent; nor is it necessary that it should come from below. A
government may grow anarchic as much as a people. The more sentimental
sort of Tory uses the word anarchy as a mere term of abuse for
rebellion; but he misses a most important intellectual distinction.
Rebellion may be wrong and disastrous; but even when rebellion is
wrong, it is never anarchy. When it is not self-defence, it is
usurpation. It aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule.
And while it cannot be anarchic in essence (because it has an aim), it
certainly cannot be anarchic in method; for men must be organised when
they fight; and the discipline in a rebel army has to be as good as
the discipline in the royal army. This deep principle of distinction
must be clearly kept in mind. Take for the sake of symbolism those two
great spiritual stories which, whether we count them myths or
mysteries, have so long been the two hinges of all European morals.
The Christian who is inclined to sympathise generally with
constituted authority will think of rebellion under the image of
Satan, the rebel against God. But Satan, though a traitor, was not an
anarchist. He claimed the crown of the cosmos; and had he prevailed,
would have expected his rebel angels to give up rebelling. On the
other hand, the Christian whose sympathies are more generally with
just self-defence among the oppressed will think rather of Christ
Himself defying the High Priests and scourging the rich traders. But
whether or no Christ was (as some say) a Socialist, He most certainly
was not an Anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set
up a new authority against an old authority; but He set it up with
positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all
mediæval people--indeed, all people until a little while ago--would
have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered
to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not
because it was a government. Richard II. would have blamed Bolingbroke
not as a disturber of the peace, but as a usurper. Anarchy, then, in
the useful sense of the word, is a thing utterly distinct from any
rebellion, right or wrong. It is not necessarily angry; it is not, in
its first stages, at least, even necessarily painful. And, as I said
before, it is often entirely silent.

Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop
yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the
normal. It is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar,
extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot
_end_ these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family
sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if
members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It
was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the
slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the
slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the
slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is
historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a
picnic; but it is anarchy to lose all memory of mealtimes. It would, I
think, be anarchy if (as is the disgusting suggestion of some) we all
took what we liked off the sideboard. That is the way swine would eat
if swine had sideboards; they have no immovable feasts; they are
uncommonly progressive, are swine. It is this inability to return
within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the
really dangerous disorder. The modern world is like Niagara. It is
magnificent, but it is not strong. It is as weak as water--like
Niagara. The objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or
dangerous or even destructive; it is that it cannot stop. Now it is
plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a
society as easily as the society so ruled. And in modern England it is
the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it--who are truly
possessed by devils. The phrase, in its sound old psychological sense,
is not too strong. The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is
talking nonsense; and it can't stop.

Now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have, and must
have, the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally
that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all
night on New Year's Eve. The State, like the householder, is sane if
it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies
may not even be right; but such remedies are endurable as long as they
are admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of
food in a besieged city; the official disavowal of an arrested spy;
the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law; the cutting of
communication in a plague; or that deepest degradation of the
commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign
soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these
exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far
as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so
much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the
normal.

We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment;
often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people
propose to reform them by a little more of it. We see it in panic
legislation like that after the White Slave scare, when the torture of
flogging was revived for all sorts of ill defined and vague and
variegated types of men. Our fathers were never so mad, even when they
were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not
stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning
they may have seen witches everywhere--because their minds were fixed
on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because
their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the
stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and
pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what
my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of back-biting," or "Some of these
faggots would do your Cousin James good, and teach him to play with
poor girls' affections."

Now the name of all this is Anarchy. It not only does not know what it
wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies
excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers. When this
new sort of New Englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches
fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the
doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is
monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot
stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are pouring into the
pit.

A final instance, which can be sketched much more briefly, can be
found in this general fact: that the definition of almost every crime
has become more and more indefinite, and spreads like a flattening and
thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes. Cruelty to children,
one would have thought, was a thing about as unmistakable, unusual
and appalling as parricide. In its application it has come to cover
almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only
distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the
poor, who generally can't help them, and not in the rich, who
generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The
point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on
the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being
attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the
Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind
mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children
had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an
illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the
horror and heavy punishment, attached in the simplest tribes to
parricide, could now be used against any son who had done any act that
could colourably be supposed to have worried his father, and so
affected his health. Few of us would be safe.

Another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of
libel. Libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger
against the man who bore false witness against his neighbour than
"cruelty" cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that
hated their own flesh. A libel case has become one of the sports of
the less athletic rich--a variation on _baccarat_, a game of chance. A
music-hall actress got damages for a song that was called "vulgar,"
which is as if I could fine or imprison my neighbour for calling my
handwriting "rococo." A politician got huge damages because he was
said to have spoken to children about Tariff Reform; as if that
seductive topic would corrupt their virtue, like an indecent story.
Sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his
business; in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer
slanders the grocer opposite. All this, I say, is Anarchy; for it is
clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction, or sense of
proportion, by which they can draw the line between calling a woman a
popular singer and calling her a bad lot; or between charging a man
with leading infants to Protection and leading them to sin and shame.
But the vital point to which to return is this. That it is not
necessarily, nor even specially, an anarchy in the populace. It is an
anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates--voices of
the governing class--who cannot distinguish between cruelty and
carelessness. It is the judges (and their very submissive special
juries) who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander. And
it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in
the first Eugenic Law, the Feeble-Minded Bill--thus showing that they
can see no difference between a mad and a sane man.

That, to begin with, is the historic atmosphere in which this thing
was born. It is a peculiar atmosphere, and luckily not likely to last.
Real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing
bears to an hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing. But I have
described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in
which such a thing as the Eugenist legislation could be proposed among
men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical
account, however academic or narrow. The lowest sophist in the Greek
schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to
tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was
curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the
mediæval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot
discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish
Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the
Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other
Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790
would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include
the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father. It is only in
our own London Particular (as Mr. Guppy said of the fog) that small
figures can loom so large in the vapour, and even mingle with quite
different figures, and have the appearance of a mob. But, above all, I
have dwelt on the telescopic quality in these twilight avenues,
because unless the reader realises how elastic and unlimited they are,
he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat.

One of those wise old fairy tales, that come from nowhere and flourish
everywhere, tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a
coffee-mill, which would grind anything he wanted when he said one
word and stop when he said another. After performing marvels (which I
wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding) the
mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officers'
mess on board ship; for salt is the type everywhere of small luxury
and exaggeration, and sailors' tales should be taken with a grain of
it. The man remembered the word that started the salt mill, and then,
touching the word that stopped it, suddenly remembered that he forgot.
The tall ship sank, laden and sparkling to the topmasts with salt like
Arctic snows; but the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom,
where all the men lay drowned. And that (so says this fairy tale) is
why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste. For the
fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don't--that one should not
let loose either the supernatural or the natural.




CHAPTER IV

THE LUNATIC AND THE LAW


The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do
not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be
right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill
a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having
got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste
and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the first man, though the
first man might not think so. Or thus again, if you say an insane man
is irresponsible, you imply that a sane man is responsible. He is
responsible for the insane man. And the attempt of the Eugenists and
other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and
flattest folly in philosophy. The Eugenist has to treat everybody,
including himself, as an exception to a rule that isn't there.

The Eugenists, as a first move, have extended the frontiers of the
lunatic asylum: let us take this as our definite starting point, and
ask ourselves what lunacy is, and what is its fundamental relation to
human society. Now that raw juvenile scepticism that clogs all thought
with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the
minority, the sane only the majority. There is a neat exactitude
about such people's nonsense; they seem to miss the point by magic.
The mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body; and
that is what their madness means. The sane are not a majority; they
are mankind. And mankind (as its name would seem to imply) is a
_kind_, not a degree. In so far as the lunatic differs, he differs
from all minorities and majorities in kind. The madman who thinks he
is a knife cannot go into partnership with the other who thinks he is
a fork. There is no trysting place outside reason; there is no inn on
those wild roads that are beyond the world.

The madman is not he that defies the world. The saint, the criminal,
the martyr, the cynic, the nihilist may all defy the world quite
sanely. And even if such fanatics would destroy the world, the world
owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law. But
the madman is not the man who defies the world; he is the man who
_denies_ it. Suppose we are all standing round a field and looking at
a tree in the middle of it. It is perfectly true that we all see it
(as the decadents say) in infinitely different aspects: that is not
the point; the point is that we all say it is a tree. Suppose, if you
will, that we are all poets, which seems improbable; so that each of
us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree.
Suppose one says it looks like a green cloud and another like a green
fountain, and a third like a green dragon and the fourth like a green
cheese. The fact remains: that they all say it _looks_ like these
things. It is a tree. Nor are any of the poets in the least mad
because of any opinions they may form, however frenzied, about the
functions or future of the tree. A conservative poet may wish to clip
the tree; a revolutionary poet may wish to burn it. An optimist poet
may want to make it a Christmas tree and hang candles on it. A
pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it. None of these are mad,
because they are all talking about the same thing. But there is
another man who is talking horribly about something else. There is a
monstrous exception to mankind. Why he is so we know not; a new theory
says it is heredity; an older theory says it is devils. But in any
case, the spirit of it is the spirit that denies, the spirit that
really denies realities. This is the man who looks at the tree and
does not say it looks like a lion, but says that it _is_ a lamp-post.

I do not mean that all mad delusions are as concrete as this, though
some are more concrete. Believing your own body is glass is a more
daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the
top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable
assertion--that what is not is. The difference between us and the
maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but
about what they self-evidently are. The lunatic does not say that he
ought to be King; Perkin Warbeck might say that. He says he is King.
The lunatic does not say he is as wise as Shakespeare; Bernard Shaw
might say that. The lunatic says he _is_ Shakespeare. The lunatic
does not say he is divine in the same sense as Christ; Mr. R.J.
Campbell would say that. The lunatic says he _is_ Christ. In all cases
the difference is a difference about what is there; not a difference
touching what should be done about it.

For this reason, and for this alone, the lunatic is outside public
law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The
criminal admits the facts, and therefore permits us to appeal to the
facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really
understand that agreement is in his own interests. We can say to him,
"Do not steal apples from this tree, or we will hang you on that
tree." But if the man really thinks one tree is a lamp-post and the
other tree a Trafalgar Square fountain, we simply cannot treat with
him at all. It is obviously useless to say, "Do not steal apples from
this lamp-post, or I will hang you on that fountain." If a man denies
the facts, there is no answer but to lock him up. He cannot speak our
language: not that varying verbal language which often misses fire
even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green
grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can
signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald,
described in one of his weird stories two systems of space
co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a
drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden.
Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with
the madman. He cannot have a vote, because he is the citizen of
another country. He is a foreigner. Nay, he is an invader and an
enemy; for the city he lives in has been super-imposed on ours.

Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case. First,
that we can only condemn him to a _general_ doom, because we only know
his _general_ nature. All criminals, who do particular things for
particular reasons (things and reasons which, however criminal, are
always comprehensible), have been more and more tried for such
separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since Europe
began to become a civilisation--and until the rare and recent
re-incursions of barbarism in such things as the Indeterminate
Sentence. Of that I shall speak later; it is enough for this argument
to point out the plain facts. It is the plain fact that every savage,
every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand-chief has always
used this instrument of the Indeterminate Sentence, which has been
recently offered us as something highly scientific and humane. All
these people, in short, being barbarians, have always kept their
captives captive until they (the barbarians) chose to think the
captives were in a fit frame of mind to come out. It is also the plain
fact that all that has been called civilisation or progress, justice
or liberty, for nearly three thousand years, has had the general
direction of treating even the captive as a free man, in so far as
some clear case of some defined crime had to be shown against him.
All law has meant allowing the criminal, within some limits or other,
to argue with the law: as Job was allowed, or rather challenged, to
argue with God. But the criminal is, among civilised men, tried by one
law for one crime for a perfectly simple reason: that the motive of
the crime, like the meaning of the law, is conceivable to the common
intelligence. A man is punished specially as a burglar, and not
generally as a bad man, because a man may be a burglar and in many
other respects not be a bad man. The act of burglary is punishable
because it is intelligible. But when acts are unintelligible, we can
only refer them to a general untrustworthiness, and guard against them
by a general restraint. If a man breaks into a house to get a piece of
bread, we can appeal to his reason in various ways. We can hang him
for housebreaking; or again (as has occurred to some daring thinkers)
we can give him a piece of bread. But if he breaks in, let us say, to
steal the parings of other people's finger nails, then we are in a
difficulty: we cannot imagine what he is going to do with them, and
therefore cannot easily imagine what we are going to do with him. If a
villain comes in, in cloak and mask, and puts a little arsenic in the
soup, we can collar him and say to him distinctly, "You are guilty of
Murder; and I will now consult the code of tribal law, under which we
live, to see if this practice is not forbidden." But if a man in the
same cloak and mask is found at midnight putting a little soda-water
in the soup, what can we say? Our charge necessarily becomes a more
general one. We can only observe, with a moderation almost amounting
to weakness, "You seem to be the sort of person who will do this sort
of thing." And then we can lock him up. The principle of the
indeterminate sentence is the creation of the indeterminate mind. It
does apply to the incomprehensible creature, the lunatic. And it
applies to nobody else.

The second thing to be noted is this: that it is only by the unanimity
of sane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate. If he
says a tree is a lamp-post he is mad; but only because all other men
say it is a tree. If some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it,
and others thought it was a lamp-post wreathed with branches and
vegetation, then it would be a matter of opinion and degree; and he
would not be mad, but merely extreme. Certainly he would not be mad if
nobody but a botanist could see it was a tree. Certainly his enemies
might be madder than he, if nobody but a lamplighter could see it was
not a lamp-post. And similarly a man is not imbecile if only a
Eugenist thinks so. The question then raised would not be his sanity,
but the sanity of one botanist or one lamplighter or one Eugenist.
That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally
clever, which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn
the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish. It is when he begins
to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do, that we
have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule. It is
only because we none of us profess to be anything more than man that
we have authority to treat him as something less.

Now the first principle behind Eugenics becomes plain enough. It is
the proposal that somebody or something should criticise men with the
same superiority with which men criticise madmen. It might exercise
this right with great moderation; but I am not here talking about the
exercise, but about the right. Its _claim_ certainly is to bring all
human life under the Lunacy Laws.

Now this is the first weakness in the case of the Eugenists: that they
cannot define who is to control whom; they cannot say by what
authority they do these things. They cannot see the exception is
different from the rule--even when it is misrule, even when it is an
unruly rule. The sound sense in the old Lunacy Law was this: that you
cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared
to deny that he is a man. Men, and only men, can be the judges of
whether he is a man. But any private club of prigs can be judges of
whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that
tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland
where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the
exception, what we find is the average. And the practical, legal shape
of the quarrel is this: that unless the normal men have the right to
expel the abnormal, what particular sort of abnormal men have the
right to expel the normal men? If sanity is not good enough, what is
there that is saner than sanity?

Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception, the general
idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless. For this
reason: that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity, the
judgment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it
judge not that it be not judged. Eugenists, strange to say, have
fathers and mothers like other people; and our opinion about their
fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about
ours. None of the parents were lunatics, and the rest is mere likes
and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My
lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such
are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a
hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with
characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a
confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love
affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor
marrying a Quaker lady from York." Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said
to Shelley, "From what I see of your temperament, you are running
great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and
eccentric like Godwin." Shelley would be employing the strict
rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers, if he answered,
"From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in
marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and
dilettante like Samuel Rogers." It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody
can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad; and the
general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their
blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do
marry for love or liking. There is no reason to suppose that Dr. Karl
Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of
a bride.

An objection may be anticipated here, but it is very easily answered.
It may be said that we do, in fact, call in medical specialists to
settle whether a man is mad; and that these specialists go by
technical and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of
men. It is obvious that this is true; it is equally obvious that it
does not affect our argument. When we ask the doctor whether our
grandfather is going mad, we still mean mad by our own common human
definition. We mean, is he going to be a certain sort of person whom
all men recognise when once he exists. That certain specialists can
detect the approach of him, before he exists, does not alter the fact
that it is of the practical and popular madman that we are talking,
and of him alone. The doctor merely sees a certain fact potentially in
the future, while we, with less information, can only see it in the
present; but his fact is our fact and everybody's fact, or we should
not bother about it at all. Here is no question of the doctor bringing
an entirely new sort of person under coercion, as in the
Feeble-Minded Bill. The doctor can say, "Tobacco is death to you,"
because the dislike of death can be taken for granted, being a highly
democratic institution; and it is the same with the dislike of the
indubitable exception called madness. The doctor can say, "Jones has
that twitch in the nerves, and he may burn down the house." But it is
not the medical detail we fear, but the moral upshot. We should say,
"Let him twitch, as long as he doesn't burn down the house." The
doctor may say, "He has that look in the eyes, and he may take the
hatchet and brain you all." But we do not object to the look in the
eyes as such; we object to consequences which, once come, we should
all call insane if there were no doctors in the world. We should say,
"Let him look how he likes; as long as he does not look for the
hatchet."

Now, that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical
purpose, of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human
calamities, nobody but a fool would deny. But that does not bring us
one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a
calamity; or to call things calamities which common sense does not
call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death; and,
death being admittedly an evil, he has the right to administer the
queerest and most recondite pill which he may think is a cure for all
such menaces of death. He has not the right to administer death, as
the cure for all human ills. And as he has no moral authority to
enforce a new conception of happiness, so he has no moral authority
to enforce a new conception of sanity. He may know I am going mad; for
madness is an isolated thing like leprosy; and I know nothing about
leprosy. But if he merely thinks my mind is weak, I may happen to
think the same of his. I often do.

In short, unless pilots are to be permitted to ram ships on to the
rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbour; unless judges
are to be allowed to let murderers loose, and explain afterwards that
the murder had done good on the whole; unless soldiers are to be
allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be
found in the valley of humiliation; unless cashiers are to rob a bank
in order to give it an advertisement; or dentists to torture people to
give them a contrast to their comforts; unless we are prepared to let
loose all these private fancies against the public and accepted
meaning of life or safety or prosperity or pleasure--then it is as
plain as Punch's nose that no scientific man must be allowed to meddle
with the public definition of madness. We call him in to tell us where
it is or when it is. We could not do so, if we had not ourselves
settled what it is.

As I wish to confine myself in this chapter to the primary point of
the plain existence of sanity and insanity, I will not be led along
any of the attractive paths that open here. I shall endeavour to deal
with them in the next chapter. Here I confine myself to a sort of
summary. Suppose a man's throat has been cut, quite swiftly and
suddenly, with a table knife, at a small table where we sit. The
whole of civil law rests on the supposition that we are witnesses;
that we saw it; and if we do not know about it, who does? Now suppose
all the witnesses fall into a quarrel about degrees of eyesight.
Suppose one says he had brought his reading-glasses instead of his
usual glasses; and therefore did not see the man fall across the table
and cover it with blood. Suppose another says he could not be certain
it was blood, because a slight colour-blindness was hereditary in his
family. Suppose a third says he cannot swear to the uplifted knife,
because his oculist tells him he is astigmatic, and vertical lines do
not affect him as do horizontal lines. Suppose another says that dots
have often danced before his eyes in very fantastic combinations, many
of which were very like one gentleman cutting another gentleman's
throat at dinner. All these things refer to real experiences. There is
such a thing as myopia; there is such a thing as colour-blindness;
there is such a thing as astigmatism; there is such a thing as
shifting shapes swimming before the eyes. But what should we think of
a whole dinner party that could give nothing except these highly
scientific explanations when found in company with a corpse? I imagine
there are only two things we could think: either that they were all
drunk, or they were all murderers.

And yet there is an exception. If there were one man at table who was
admittedly _blind_, should we not give him the benefit of the doubt?
Should we not honestly feel that he was the exception that proved the
rule? The very fact that he could not have seen would remind us that
the other men must have seen. The very fact that he had no eyes must
remind us of eyes. A man can be blind; a man can be dead; a man can be
mad. But the comparison is necessarily weak, after all. For it is the
essence of madness to be unlike anything else in the world: which is
perhaps why so many men wiser than we have traced it to another.

Lastly, the literal maniac is different from all other persons in
dispute in this vital respect: that he is the only person whom we can,
with a final lucidity, declare that we do not want. He is almost
always miserable himself, and he always makes others miserable. But
this is not so with the mere invalid. The Eugenists would probably
answer all my examples by taking the case of marrying into a family
with consumption (or some such disease which they are fairly sure is
hereditary) and asking whether such cases at least are not clear cases
for a Eugenic intervention. Permit me to point out to them that they
once more make a confusion of thought. The sickness or soundness of a
consumptive may be a clear and calculable matter. The happiness or
unhappiness of a consumptive is quite another matter, and is not
calculable at all. What is the good of telling people that if they
marry for love, they may be punished by being the parents of Keats or
the parents of Stevenson? Keats died young; but he had more pleasure
in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had
lung-trouble; and it may, for all I know, have been perceptible to the
Eugenic eye even a generation before. But who would perform that
illegal operation: the stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter
bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and
prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this
is a faint approximation for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of
Stevenson. This, however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson
it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he
got. If he had died without writing a line, he would have had more
red-hot joy than is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I
owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that
the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among
the days of the year, because it shut not up the doors of his mother's
womb? I respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my
mouth.




CHAPTER V

THE FLYING AUTHORITY


It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together
on a doorstep; and the atheist said, "It is raining." To which the man
replied, "What is raining?": which question was the beginning of a
violent quarrel and a lasting friendship. I will not touch upon any
heads of the dispute, which doubtless included Jupiter Pluvius, the
Neuter Gender, Pantheism, Noah's Ark, Mackintoshes, and the Passive
Mood; but I will record the one point upon which the two persons
emerged in some agreement. It was that there is such a thing as an
atheistic literary style; that materialism may appear in the mere
diction of a man, though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything
quite remote from theology. The mark of the atheistic style is that it
instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead
things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging
war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as
if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Thus those
Socialists that are atheist will not call their international
sympathy, sympathy; they will call it "solidarity," as if the poor men
of France and Germany were physically stuck together like dates in a
grocer's shop. The same Marxian Socialists are accused of cursing the
Capitalists inordinately; but the truth is that they let the
Capitalists off much too easily. For instead of saying that employers
pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral
responsibility, they insist on talking about the "rise and fall" of
wages; as if a vast silver sea of sixpences and shillings was always
going up and down automatically like the real sea at Margate. Thus
they will not speak of reform, but of development; and they spoil
their one honest and virile phrase, "the class war," by talking of it
as no one in his wits can talk of a war, predicting its finish and
final result as one calculates the coming of Christmas Day or the
taxes. Thus, lastly (as we shall see touching our special
subject-matter here) the atheist style in letters always avoids
talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or
concubinage "the relations of the sexes"; as if a man and a woman were
two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each
other, like a table and a chair.

Now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase, "_il
pleut_," clings round the phrase, "_il faut_." In English it is
generally represented by the passive mood in grammar, and the
Eugenists and their like deal especially in it; they are as passive in
their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their
sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals
without heads. It is never "the doctor should cut off this leg" or
"the policeman should collar that man." It is always "Such limbs
should be amputated," or "Such men should be under restraint." Hamlet
said, "I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's
offal." The Eugenist would say, "The region kites should, if possible,
be fattened; and the offal of this slave is available for the dietetic
experiment." Lady Macbeth said, "Give me the daggers; I'll let his
bowels out." The Eugenist would say, "In such cases the bowels should,
etc." Do not blame me for the repulsiveness of the comparisons. I have
searched English literature for the most decent parallels to Eugenist
language.

The formless god that broods over the East is called "Om." The
formless god who has begun to brood over the West is called "On." But
here we must make a distinction. The impersonal word _on_ is French,
and the French have a right to use it, because they are a democracy.
And when a Frenchman says "one" he does not mean himself, but the
normal citizen. He does not mean merely "one," but one and all. "_On
n'a que sa parole_" does not mean "_Noblesse oblige_," or "I am the
Duke of Billingsgate and must keep my word." It means: "One has a
sense of honour as one has a backbone: every man, rich or poor, should
feel honourable"; and this, whether possible or no, is the purest
ambition of the republic. But when the Eugenists say, "Conditions
must be altered" or "Ancestry should be investigated," or what not, it
seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it,
whatever else they may mean. They do not mean that any man not
evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and re-arrangements, as
the French democratic system trusts such a man with a vote or a farm
or the control of a family. That would mean that Jones and Brown,
being both ordinary men, would set about arranging each other's
marriages. And this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate,
and it might occur even to the Eugenic mind that if Jones and Brown
are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages, it is just
possible that they might be capable of arranging their own.

This dilemma, which applies in so simple a case, applies equally to
any wide and sweeping system of Eugenist voting; for though it is true
that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge
in his own case, this particular question of the choice of a wife is
so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case, that it is
surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing
out of the sphere of voting, as they would any proposal of police
interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names.
I should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular
instance of Eugenics to be voted on by the French people. Democracy
dismissed, it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models.
Modern scientists will not say that George III., in his lucid
intervals, should settle who is mad; or that the aristocracy that
introduced gout shall supervise diet.

I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the business,
that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men
should settle each other's marriages between them; the question
remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say
that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent
authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? Who is the man who
is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist's verb? In a large
number of cases I think we can simply say that the individual Eugenist
means himself, and nobody else. Indeed one Eugenist, Mr. A.H. Huth,
actually had a sense of humour, and admitted this. He thinks a great
deal of good could be done with a surgical knife, if we would only
turn him loose with one. And this may be true. A great deal of good
could be done with a loaded revolver, in the hands of a judicious
student of human nature. But it is imperative that the Eugenist should
perceive that on that principle we can never get beyond a perfect
balance of different sympathies and antipathies. I mean that I should
differ from Dr. Saleeby or Dr. Karl Pearson not only in a vast
majority of individual cases, but in a vast majority of cases in which
they would be bound to admit that such a difference was natural and
reasonable. The chief victim of these famous doctors would be a yet
more famous doctor: that eminent though unpopular practitioner, Dr.
Fell.

To show that such rational and serious differences do exist, I will
take one instance from that Bill which proposed to protect families
and the public generally from the burden of feeble-minded persons.
Now, even if I could share the Eugenic contempt for human rights, even
if I could start gaily on the Eugenic campaign, I should not begin by
removing feeble-minded persons. I have known as many families in as
many classes as most men; and I cannot remember meeting any very
monstrous human suffering arising out of the presence of such
insufficient and negative types. There seem to be comparatively few of
them; and those few by no means the worst burdens upon domestic
happiness. I do not hear of them often; I do not hear of them doing
much more harm than good; and in the few cases I know well they are
not only regarded with human affection, but can be put to certain
limited forms of human use. Even if I were a Eugenist, then I should
not personally elect to waste my time locking up the feeble-minded.
The people I should lock up would be the strong-minded. I have known
hardly any cases of mere mental weakness making a family a failure; I
have known eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated force of
character making a family a hell. If the strong-minded could be
segregated it would quite certainly be better for their friends and
families. And if there is really anything in heredity, it would be
better for posterity too. For the kind of egoist I mean is a madman
in a much more plausible sense than the mere harmless "deficient"; and
to hand on the horrors of his anarchic and insatiable temperament is a
much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of
childishness. I would not arrest such tyrants, because I think that
even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny
turning the state into a madhouse. I would not segregate them, because
I respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be
tried by his peers. But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no
more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists
no more than by house-breakers, and since the Habeas Corpus is about
as sacred to Eugenists as it would be to King John, why do not _they_
bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac
from each of them? Why do not the promoters of the Feeble-Minded Bill
call at the many grand houses in town or country where such nightmares
notoriously are? Why do they not knock at the door and take the bad
squire away? Why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac
prize-fighter? I do not know; and there is only one reason I can think
of, which must remain a matter of speculation. When I was at school,
the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that
stood up to bullies.

That, however it may be, does not concern my argument. I mention the
case of the strong-minded variety of the monstrous merely to give one
out of the hundred cases of the instant divergence of individual
opinions the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit to
propagate. If Dr. Saleeby and I were setting out on a segregating trip
together, we should separate at the very door; and if he had a
thousand doctors with him, they would all go different ways. Everyone
who has known as many kind and capable doctors as I have, knows that
the ablest and sanest of them have a tendency to possess some little
hobby or half-discovery of their own, as that oranges are bad for
children, or that trees are dangerous in gardens, or that many more
people ought to wear spectacles. It is asking too much of human nature
to expect them not to cherish such scraps of originality in a hard,
dull, and often heroic trade. But the inevitable result of it, as
exercised by the individual Saleebys, would be that each man would
have his favourite kind of idiot. Each doctor would be mad on his own
madman. One would have his eye on devotional curates; another would
wander about collecting obstreperous majors; a third would be the
terror of animal-loving spinsters, who would flee with all their cats
and dogs before him. Short of sheer literal anarchy, therefore, it
seems plain that the Eugenist must find some authority other than his
own implied personality. He must, once and for all, learn the lesson
which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race--the fact
that he is only himself.

We now pass from mere individual men who obviously cannot be trusted,
even if they are individual medical men, with such despotism over
their neighbours; and we come to consider whether the Eugenists have
at all clearly traced any more imaginable public authority, any
apparatus of great experts or great examinations to which such risks
of tyranny could be trusted. They are not very precise about this
either; indeed, the great difficulty I have throughout in considering
what are the Eugenist's proposals is that they do not seem to know
themselves. Some philosophic attitude which I cannot myself connect
with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of
their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans. The Eugenic
optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and
confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be
all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none
of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies
and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of
offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid
and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have
discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a
sympathetic softening of the head. Nevertheless, there is one large,
though vague, idea of the Eugenists, which is an idea, and which we
reach when we reach this problem of a more general supervision.

It was best presented perhaps by the distinguished doctor who wrote
the article on these matters in that composite book which Mr. Wells
edited, and called "The Great State." He said the doctor should no
longer be a mere plasterer of paltry maladies, but should be, in his
own words, "the health adviser of the community." The same can be
expressed with even more point and simplicity in the proverb that
prevention is better than cure. Commenting on this, I said that it
amounted to treating all people who are well as if they were ill. This
the writer admitted to be true, only adding that everyone is ill. To
which I rejoin that if everyone is ill the health adviser is ill too,
and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness. This is
the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine.
Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man's head is not
better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to
cure it. And it is the same if a man is in revolt, even a morbid
revolt. Taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than
leaving the heart in him, even if you leave it a broken heart.
Prevention is not only not better than cure; prevention is even worse
than disease. Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the
extra exasperation of being quite well. I will ask God, but certainly
not man, to prevent me in all my doings. But the decisive and
discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about the
health adviser of society. I am sure that those who speak thus have
something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other
two propositions we have considered. They do not mean that all
citizens should decide, which would mean merely the present vague and
dubious balance. They do not mean that all medical men should decide,
which would mean a much more unbalanced balance. They mean that a few
men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy
nation, as Napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army. It
is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's
marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and
segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few
great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens, as
nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it is tyranny;
but tyranny is a workable thing. When we ask by what process such men
could be certainly chosen, we are back again on the old dilemma of
despotism, which means a man, or democracy which means men, or
aristocracy which means favouritism. But as a vision the thing is
plausible and even rational. It is rational, and it is wrong.

It is wrong, quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health
cannot be chosen. It is wrong because an expert on health cannot
exist. An expert on disease can exist, for the very reason we have
already considered in the case of madness, because experts can only
arise out of exceptional things. A parallel with any of the other
learned professions will make the point plain. If I am prosecuted for
trespass, I will ask my solicitor which of the local lanes I am
forbidden to walk in. But if my solicitor, having gained my case, were
so elated that he insisted on settling what lanes I should walk in; if
he asked me to let him map out all my country walks, because he was
the perambulatory adviser of the community--then that solicitor would
solicit in vain. If he will insist on walking behind me through
woodland ways, pointing out with his walking-stick likely avenues and
attractive short-cuts, I shall turn on him with passion, saying: "Sir,
I pay you to know one particular puzzle in Latin and Norman-French,
which they call the law of England; and you do know the law of
England. I have never had any earthly reason to suppose that you know
England. If you did, you would leave a man alone when he was looking
at it." As are the limits of the lawyer's special knowledge about
walking, so are the limits of the doctor's. If I fall over the stump
of a tree and break my leg, as is likely enough, I shall say to the
lawyer, "Please go and fetch the doctor." I shall do it because the
doctor really has a larger knowledge of a narrower area. There are
only a certain number of ways in which a leg can be broken; I know
none of them, and he knows all of them. There is such a thing as being
a specialist in broken legs. There is no such thing as being a
specialist in legs. When unbroken, legs are a matter of taste. If the
doctor has really mended my leg, he may merit a colossal equestrian
statue on the top of an eternal tower of brass. But if the doctor has
really mended my leg he has no more rights over it. He must not come
and teach me how to walk; because he and I learnt that in the same
school, the nursery. And there is no more abstract likelihood of the
doctor walking more elegantly than I do than there is of the barber or
the bishop or the burglar walking more elegantly than I do. There
cannot be a general specialist; the specialist can have no kind of
authority, unless he has avowedly limited his range. There cannot be
such a thing as the health adviser of the community, because there
cannot be such a thing as one who specialises in the universe.

Thus when Dr. Saleeby says that a young man about to be married should
be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book, the
expression is neat; but it does not convey the real respects in which
the two things agree, and in which they differ. To begin with, of
course, there is a great deal too much of the bank-book for the sanity
of our commonwealth; and it is highly probable that the health-book,
as conducted in modern conditions, would rapidly become as timid, as
snobbish, and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become. In
the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would
probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health-books as
they do when we fight with bank-books. But that is a more general
matter; the real point is in the difference between the two. The
difference is in this vital fact: that a monied man generally thinks
about money, whereas a healthy man does not think about health. If
the strong young man cannot produce his health-book, it is for the
perfectly simple reason that he has not got one. He can mention some
extraordinary malady he has; but every man of honour is expected to do
that now, whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge.

Health is simply Nature, and no naturalist ought to have the impudence
to understand it. Health, one may say, is God; and no agnostic has any
right to claim His acquaintance. For God must mean, among other
things, that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things, by
which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure; and any
scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate
sanity, I will call the lowest of religious fanatics. I will allow him
to understand the madman, for the madman is an exception. But if he
says he understands the sane man, then he says he has the secret of
the Creator. For whenever you and I feel fully sane, we are quite
incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious
simplicity. We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can
conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by
which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like
precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.

We conclude, therefore, that unless Eugenic activity be restricted to
monstrous things like mania, there is no constituted or constitutable
authority that can really over-rule men in a matter in which they are
so largely on a level. In the matter of fundamental human rights,
nothing can be above Man, except God. An institution claiming to come
from God might have such authority; but this is the last claim the
Eugenists are likely to make. One caste or one profession seeking to
rule men in such matters is like a man's right eye claiming to rule
him, or his left leg to run away with him. It is madness. We now pass
on to consider whether there is really anything in the way of Eugenics
to be done, with such cheerfulness as we may possess after discovering
that there is nobody to do it.




CHAPTER VI

THE UNANSWERED CHALLENGE


Dr. Saleeby did me the honour of referring to me in one of his
addresses on this subject, and said that even I cannot produce any but
a feeble-minded child from a feeble-minded ancestry. To which I reply,
first of all, that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child. The whole
point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and
outside opinion. There is such a thing as mania, which has always been
segregated; there is such a thing as idiotcy, which has always been
segregated; but feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you
might segregate anybody. It is essential that this fundamental fallacy
in the use of statistics should be got somehow into the modern mind.
Such people must be made to see the point, which is surely plain
enough, that it is useless to have exact figures if they are exact
figures about an inexact phrase. If I say, "There are five fools in
Acton," it is surely quite clear that, though no mathematician can
make five the same as four or six, that will not stop you or anyone
else from finding a few more fools in Acton. Now weak-mindedness, like
folly, is a term divided from madness in this vital manner--that in
one sense it applies to all men, in another to most men, in another
to very many men, and so on. It is as if Dr. Saleeby were to say,
"Vanity, I find, is undoubtedly hereditary. Here is Mrs. Jones, who
was very sensitive about her sonnets being criticised, and I found her
little daughter in a new frock looking in the glass. The experiment is
conclusive, the demonstration is complete; there in the first
generation is the artistic temperament--that is vanity; and there in
the second generation is dress--and that is vanity." We should answer,
"My friend, all is vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit--especially
when one has to listen to logic of your favourite kind. Obviously all
human beings must value themselves; and obviously there is in all such
valuation an element of weakness, since it is not the valuation of
eternal justice. What is the use of your finding by experiment in some
people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them?"

Here it will be as well to pause a moment and avert one possible
misunderstanding. I do not mean that you and I cannot and do not
practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or
intermediate type, for which the word "feeble-minded" might be a very
convenient word, and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable
fact of experience. In the same way we might speak, and do speak, of
such and such a person being "mad with vanity" without wanting two
keepers to walk in and take the person off. But I ask the reader to
remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in
talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in
warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction
between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is
that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark; it
is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be
recognised; that he should, in a literary sense, hang the right man.
But it is by no means always to the interests of governments or
officials to hang the right man. The fact that they often do stretch
words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any
fixed laws or free institutions at all. My point is not that I have
never met anyone whom I should call feeble-minded, rather than mad or
imbecile. My point is that if I want to dispossess a nephew, oust a
rival, silence a blackmailer, or get rid of an importunate widow,
there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded
too. And the vaguer the charge is the less they will be able to
disprove it.

One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist
such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world
in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be
such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such
a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in
mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits;
believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to
suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere
rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and
terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies
there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits
there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should
certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly
simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The
reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches, and quite
another to believe in witch-smellers. I have more respect for the old
witch-finders than for the Eugenists, who go about persecuting the
fool of the family; because the witch-finders, according to their own
conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the
strong-minded--the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a
raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a
righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of
sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and
despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a
war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.

When I said above that I believed in witches, but not in
witch-smellers, I stated my full position about that conception of
heredity, that half-formed philosophy of fears and omens; of curses
and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood, which, as
preached to humanity to-day, is often more inhuman than witchcraft
itself. I do not deny that this dark element exists; I only affirm
that it is dark; or, in other words, that its most strenuous students
are evidently in the dark about it. I would no more trust Dr. Karl
Pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt. I am perfectly ready
to give my reasons for thinking this; and I believe any well-balanced
person, if he reflects on them, will think as I do. There are two
senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject. I
know the subject of arithmetic, for instance; that is, I am not good
at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use
to see the absurdity of anyone who says, "So vulgar a fraction cannot
be mentioned before ladies," or "This unit is Unionist, I hope."
Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that
I know next to nothing about my subject: but I know my subject. I know
it in the street. There is the other kind of man, like Dr. Karl
Pearson, who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject; who
undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and
inheritance. But it is not, by any means, the same thing to have
searched the forests and to have recognised the frontiers. Indeed, the
two things generally belong to two very different types of mind. I
gravely doubt whether the Astronomer-Royal would write the best essay
on the relations between astronomy and astrology. I doubt whether the
President of the Geographical Society could give the best definition
and history of the words "geography" and "geology."

Now the students of heredity, especially, understand all of their
subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in
that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the
end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of
what they are studying. Now I do not propose to rely merely on myself
to tell them what they are studying. I propose, as will be seen in a
moment, to call the testimony of a great man who has himself studied
it. But to begin with, the domain of heredity (for those who see its
frontiers) is a sort of triangle, enclosed on its three sides by three
facts. The first is that heredity undoubtedly exists, or there would
be no such thing as a family likeness, and every marriage might
suddenly produce a small negro. The second is that even simple
heredity can never be simple; its complexity must be literally
unfathomable, for in that field fight unthinkable millions. But yet
again it never is simple heredity: for the instant anyone is, he
experiences. The third is that these innumerable ancient influences,
these instant inundations of experiences, come together according to a
combination that is unlike anything else on this earth. It is a
combination that does combine. It cannot be sorted out again, even on
the Day of Judgment. Two totally different people have become in the
sense most sacred, frightful, and unanswerable, one flesh. If a
golden-haired Scandinavian girl has married a very swarthy Jew, the
Scandinavian side of the family may say till they are blue in the face
that the baby has his mother's nose or his mother's eyes. They can
never be certain the black-haired Bedouin is not present in every
feature, in every inch. In the person of the baby he may have gently
pulled his wife's nose. In the person of the baby he may have partly
blacked his wife's eyes.

Those are the three first facts of heredity. That it exists; that it
is subtle and made of a million elements; that it is simple, and
cannot be unmade into those elements. To summarise: you know there is
wine in the soup. You do not know how many wines there are in the
soup, because you do not know how many wines there are in the world.
And you never will know, because all chemists, all cooks, and all
common-sense people tell you that the soup is of such a sort that it
can never be chemically analysed. That is a perfectly fair parallel to
the hereditary element in the human soul. There are many ways in which
one can feel that there is wine in the soup, as in suddenly tasting a
wine specially favoured; that corresponds to seeing suddenly flash on
a young face the image of some ancestor you have known. But even then
the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting one familiar wine among
many unfamiliar ones--or seeing one known ancestor among a million
unknown ancestors. Another way is to get drunk on the soup, which
corresponds to the case of those who say they are driven to sin and
death by hereditary doom. But even then the drunkard cannot be certain
it was the soup, any more than the traditional drunkard who is certain
it was the salmon.

Those are the facts about heredity which anyone can see. The upshot of
them is not only that a miss is as good as a mile, but a miss is as
good as a win. If the child has his parents' nose (or noses) that may
be heredity. But if he has not, that may be heredity too. And as we
need not take heredity lightly because two generations differ--so we
need not take heredity a scrap more seriously because two generations
are similar. The thing is there, in what cases we know not, in what
proportion we know not, and we cannot know.

Now it is just here that the decent difference of function between Dr.
Saleeby's trade and mine comes in. It is his business to study human
health and sickness as a whole, in a spirit of more or less
enlightened guesswork; and it is perfectly natural that he should
allow for heredity here, there, and everywhere, as a man climbing a
mountain or sailing a boat will allow for weather without even
explaining it to himself. An utterly different attitude is incumbent
on any conscientious man writing about what laws should be enforced or
about how commonwealths should be governed. And when we consider how
plain a fact is murder, and yet how hesitant and even hazy we all grow
about the guilt of a murderer, when we consider how simple an act is
stealing, and yet how hard it is to convict and punish those rich
commercial pirates who steal the most, when we consider how cruel and
clumsy the law can be even about things as old and plain as the Ten
Commandments--I simply cannot conceive any responsible person
proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless
ignorance of heredity.

But though I have to consider this dull matter in its due logical
order, it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled,
and settled in a most masterly way, by somebody who has infinitely
more right to speak on it than I have. Our press seems to have a
perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit; and
affixing the wrong terms of eulogy and even the wrong terms of abuse.
And just as people will talk of Bernard Shaw as a naughty winking
Pierrot, when he is the last great Puritan and really believes in
respectability; just as (_si parva licet_ etc.) they will talk of my
own paradoxes, when I pass my life in preaching that the truisms are
true; so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed
firmly in their heads that Mr. H.G. Wells is a harsh and horrible
Eugenist in great goblin spectacles, who wants to put us all into
metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools. As a matter
of fact, of course, Mr. Wells, so far from being too definite, is
generally not definite enough. He is an absolute wizard in the
appreciation of atmospheres and the opening of vistas; but his answers
are more agnostic than his questions. His books will do everything
except shut. And so far from being the sort of man who would stop a
man from propagating, he cannot even stop a full stop. He is not
Eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from
breeding a line of little dots.

But this is not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real
blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of
medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds
of public economy, to giving Mr. Wells only one medal _ob cives
servatos_, I would give him a medal as the Eugenist who destroyed
Eugenics. For everyone spoke of him, rightly or wrongly, as a
Eugenist; and he certainly had, as I have not, the training and type
of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and
not in a generally moral sense. The result was that in that fine book,
"Mankind in the Making," where he inevitably came to grips with the
problem, he threw down to the Eugenists an intellectual challenge
which seems to me unanswerable, but which, at any rate, is unanswered.
I do not mean that no remote Eugenist wrote upon the subject; for it
is impossible to read all writings, especially Eugenist writings. I do
mean that the leading Eugenists write as if this challenge had never
been offered. The gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground.

Having given honour for the idea where it is due, I may be permitted
to summarise it myself for the sake of brevity. Mr. Wells' point was
this. That we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health,
because health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in
the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance. You have
a tall, strong man; but his very strength depends on his not being too
tall for his strength. You catch a healthy, full-blooded fellow; but
his very health depends on his being not too full of blood. A heart
that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant; a nervous system
that would kill a man with a trace of a certain illness will sustain
him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness. Nay, the same
nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other
comparatively healthy thing. Seeing, therefore, that there are
apparently healthy people of all types, it is obvious that if you mate
two of them, you may even then produce a discord out of two
inconsistent harmonies. It is obvious that you can no more be certain
of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play
two fine airs at once on the same piano. You can be even less certain
of it in the more delicate case of beauty, of which the Eugenists talk
a great deal. Marry two handsome people whose noses tend to the
aquiline, and their baby (for all you know) may be a goblin with a
nose like an enormous parrot's. Indeed, I actually know a case of this
kind. The Eugenist has to settle, not the result of fixing one steady
thing to a second steady thing; but what will happen when one toppling
and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another.

This is the interesting conclusion. It is on this degree of knowledge
that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind. When
we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he
loves, when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom
he does not love in the least, even then we have no logical evidence
that the result may not be as horrid and dangerous as if he had
behaved like a man of honour.




CHAPTER VII

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF DOUBT


Let us now finally consider what the honest Eugenists do mean, since
it has become increasingly evident that they cannot mean what they
say. Unfortunately, the obstacles to any explanation of this are such
as to insist on a circuitous approach. The tendency of all that is
printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true
sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it
is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article,
and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may
even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he
thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the
nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of
classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to
write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where
he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his
stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his
thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can
be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth
delivering at all. The poor panting critic falls farther and farther
behind the motor-car of modern fact. Fifty years ago he was barely
fifteen years behind the times. Fifteen years ago he was not more than
fifty years behind the times. Just now he is rather more than a
hundred years behind the times: and the proof of it is that the things
he says, though manifest nonsense about our society to-day, really
were true about our society some hundred and thirty years ago. The
best instance of his belated state is his perpetual assertion that the
supernatural is less and less believed. It is a perfectly true and
realistic account--of the eighteenth century. It is the worst possible
account of this age of psychics and spirit-healers and fakirs and
fashionable fortune-tellers. In fact, I generally reply in eighteenth
century language to this eighteenth century illusion. If somebody says
to me, "The creeds are crumbling," I reply, "And the King of Prussia,
who is himself a Freethinker, is certainly capturing Silesia from the
Catholic Empress." If somebody says, "Miracles must be reconsidered in
the light of rational experience," I answer affably, "But I hope that
our enlightened leader, Hébert, will not insist on guillotining that
poor French queen." If somebody says, "We must watch for the rise of
some new religion which can commend itself to reason," I reply, "But
how much more necessary is it to watch for the rise of some military
adventurer who may destroy the Republic: and, to my mind, that young
Major Bonaparte has rather a restless air." It is only in such
language from the Age of Reason that we can answer such things. The
age we live in is something more than an age of superstition--it is an
age of innumerable superstitions. But it is only with one example of
this that I am concerned here.

I mean the error that still sends men marching about disestablishing
churches and talking of the tyranny of compulsory church teaching or
compulsory church tithes. I do not wish for an irrelevant
misunderstanding here; I would myself certainly disestablish any
church that had a numerical minority, like the Irish or the Welsh; and
I think it would do a great deal of good to genuine churches that have
a partly conventional majority, like the English, or even the Russian.
But I should only do this if I had nothing else to do; and just now
there is very much else to do. For religion, orthodox or unorthodox,
is not just now relying on the weapon of State establishment at all.
The Pope practically made no attempt to preserve the Concordat; but
seemed rather relieved at the independence his Church gained by the
destruction of it: and it is common talk among the French clericalists
that the Church has gained by the change. In Russia the one real
charge brought by religious people (especially Roman Catholics)
against the Orthodox Church is not its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, but
its abject dependence on the State. In England we can almost measure
an Anglican's fervour for his Church by his comparative coolness about
its establishment--that is, its control by a Parliament of Scotch
Presbyterians like Balfour, or Welsh Congregationalists like Lloyd
George. In Scotland the powerful combination of the two great sects
outside the establishment have left it in a position in which it feels
no disposition to boast of being called by mere lawyers the Church of
Scotland. I am not here arguing that Churches should not depend on the
State; nor that they do not depend upon much worse things. It may be
reasonably maintained that the strength of Romanism, though it be not
in any national police, is in a moral police more rigid and vigilant.
It may be reasonably maintained that the strength of Anglicanism,
though it be not in establishment, is in aristocracy, and its shadow,
which is called snobbishness. All I assert here is that the Churches
are not now leaning heavily on their political establishment; they are
not using heavily the secular arm. Almost everywhere their legal
tithes have been modified, their legal boards of control have been
mixed. They may still employ tyranny, and worse tyranny: I am not
considering that. They are not specially using that special tyranny
which consists in using the government.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is
Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science.
And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the
creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that
really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by
pilgrims but by policemen--that creed is the great but disputed
system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in
Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the
Government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination,
in its hundred years of experiment, has been disputed almost as much
as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural
to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them
madness to enforce baptism.

I am not frightened of the word "persecution" when it is attributed to
the churches; nor is it in the least as a term of reproach that I
attribute it to the men of science. It is as a term of legal fact. If
it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory,
incapable of final proof--then our priests are not now persecuting,
but our doctors are. The imposition of such dogmas constitutes a State
Church--in an older and stronger sense than any that can be applied to
any supernatural Church to-day. There are still places where the
religious minority is forbidden to assemble or to teach in this way or
that; and yet more where it is excluded from this or that public post.
But I cannot now recall any place where it is compelled by the
criminal law to go through the rite of the official religion. Even the
Young Turks did not insist on all Macedonians being circumcised.

Now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact. When, in
the past, opinions so arguable have been enforced by State violence,
it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them for fixed
and flaming certainties. If truths could not be evaded by their
enemies, neither could they be altered even by their friends. But what
are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to
enforce? Why, they are that very mass of bottomless questions and
bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last
chapters--questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and
mysterious; answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and
new. The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith; and
therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science
actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis; and yet he
persecutes for the hypothesis. The Inquisitor violently enforced his
creed, because it was unchangeable. The _savant_ enforces it violently
because he may change it the next day.

Now this is a new sort of persecution; and one may be permitted to ask
if it is an improvement on the old. The difference, so far as one can
see at first, seems rather favourable to the old. If we are to be at
the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be racked for a
creed that existed intensely in somebody's head, rather than
vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head,
and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with a
thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a
vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that
is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If
I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to
profess. But even if I yelled out _a credo_ when the Eugenists had me
on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an
extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed
quite a week ago.

Now let no light-minded person say that I am here taking extravagant
parallels; for the parallel is not only perfect, but plain. For this
reason: that the difference between torture and vivisection is not in
any way affected by the fierceness or mildness of either. Whether they
gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred, they were, by hypothesis,
dealing with a truth which they knew to be there. Whether they
vivisect painfully or painlessly, they are trying to find out whether
the truth is there or not. The old Inquisitors tortured to put their
own opinions into somebody. But the new Inquisitors torture to get
their own opinions out of him. They do not know what their own
opinions are, until the victim of vivisection tells them. The division
of thought is a complete chasm for anyone who cares about thinking.
The old persecutor was trying to _teach_ the citizen, with fire and
sword. The new persecutor is trying to _learn_ from the citizen, with
scalpel and germ-injector. The master was meeker than the pupil will
be.

I could prove by many practical instances that even my illustrations
are not exaggerated, by many placid proposals I have heard for the
vivisection of criminals, or by the filthy incident of Dr. Neisser.
But I prefer here to stick to a strictly logical line of distinction,
and insist that whereas in all previous persecutions the violence was
used to end _our_ indecision, the whole point here is that the
violence is used to end the indecision of the persecutors. This is
what the honest Eugenists really mean, so far as they mean anything.
They mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for
conversion, but simply as a _pabulum_ for experiment. That is the
real, rude, barbaric sense behind this Eugenic legislation. The
Eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any
logical inquiry about what they want. They do not know what they want,
except that they want your soul and body and mine in order to find
out. They are quite seriously, as they themselves might say, the first
religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other
established Churches have been based on somebody having found the
truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having
found it.

There is in them a perfectly sincere hope and enthusiasm; but it is
not for us, but for what they might learn from us, if they could rule
us as they can rabbits. They cannot tell us anything about heredity,
because they do not know anything about it. But they do quite honestly
believe that they would know something about it, when they had married
and mismarried us for a few hundred years. They cannot tell us who is
fit to wield such authority, for they know that nobody is; but they do
quite honestly believe that when that authority has been abused for a
very long time, somebody somehow will be evolved who is fit for the
job. I am no Puritan, and no one who knows my opinions will consider
it a mere criminal charge if I say that they are simply gambling. The
reckless gambler has no money in his pockets; he has only the ideas in
his head. These gamblers have no ideas in their heads; they have only
the money in their pockets. But they think that if they could use the
money to buy a big society to experiment on, something like an idea
might come to them at last. That is Eugenics.

I confine myself here to remarking that I do not like it. I may be
very stingy, but I am willing to pay the scientist for what he does
know; I draw the line at paying him for everything he doesn't know. I
may be very cowardly, but I am willing to be hurt for what I think or
what he thinks--I am not willing to be hurt, or even inconvenienced,
for whatever he might happen to think after he had hurt me. The
ordinary citizen may easily be more magnanimous than I, and take the
whole thing on trust; in which case his career may be happier in the
next world, but (I think) sadder in this. At least, I wish to point
out to him that he will not be giving his glorious body as soldiers
give it, to the glory of a fixed flag, or martyrs to the glory of a
deathless God. He will be, in the strict sense of the Latin phrase,
giving his vile body for an experiment--an experiment of which even
the experimentalist knows neither the significance nor the end.




CHAPTER VIII

A SUMMARY OF A FALSE THEORY


I have up to this point treated the Eugenists, I hope, as seriously as
they treat themselves. I have attempted an analysis of their theory as
if it were an utterly abstract and disinterested theory; and so
considered, there seems to be very little left of it. But before I go
on, in the second part of this book, to talk of the ugly things that
really are left, I wish to recapitulate the essential points in their
essential order, lest any personal irrelevance or over-emphasis (to
which I know myself to be prone) should have confused the course of
what I believe to be a perfectly fair and consistent argument. To make
it yet clearer, I will summarise the thing under chapters, and in
quite short paragraphs.

In the first chapter I attempted to define the essential point in
which Eugenics can claim, and does claim, to be a new morality. That
point is that it is possible to consider the baby in considering the
bride. I do not adopt the ideal irresponsibility of the man who said,
"What has posterity done for us?" But I do say, to start with, "What
can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?"
Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his
child whom he has not seen?

In the second chapter I point out that this division in the conscience
cannot be met by mere mental confusions, which would make any woman
refusing any man a Eugenist. There will always be something in the
world which tends to keep outrageous unions exceptional; that
influence is not Eugenics, but laughter.

In the third chapter I seek to describe the quite extraordinary
atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that
atmosphere anarchy; but insist that it is an anarchy in the centres
where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable;
that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that
is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our
time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government. In
this atmosphere it is natural enough that medical experts, being
authorities, should go mad, and attempt so crude and random and
immature a dream as this of petting and patting (and rather spoiling)
the babe unborn.

In chapter four I point out how this impatience has burst through the
narrow channel of the Lunacy Laws, and has obliterated them by
extending them. The whole point of the madman is that he is the
exception that proves the rule. But Eugenics seeks to treat the whole
rule as a series of exceptions--to make all men mad. And on that
ground there is hope for nobody; for all opinions have an author, and
all authors have a heredity. The mentality of the Eugenist makes him
believe in Eugenics as much as the mentality of the reckless lover
makes him violate Eugenics; and both mentalities are, on the
materialist hypothesis, equally the irresponsible product of more or
less unknown physical causes. The real security of man against any
logical Eugenics is like the false security of Macbeth. The only
Eugenist that could rationally attack him must be a man of no woman
born.

In the chapter following this, which is called "The Flying Authority,"
I try in vain to locate and fix any authority that could rationally
rule men in so rooted and universal a matter; little would be gained
by ordinary men doing it to each other; and if ordinary practitioners
did it they would very soon show, by a thousand whims and quarrels,
that they were ordinary men. I then discussed the enlightened
despotism of a few general professors of hygiene, and found it
unworkable, for an essential reason: that while we can always get men
intelligent enough to know more than the rest of us about this or that
accident or pain or pest, we cannot count on the appearance of great
cosmic philosophers; and only such men can be even supposed to know
more than we do about normal conduct and common sanity. Every sort of
man, in short, would shirk such a responsibility, except the worst
sort of man, who would accept it.

I pass on, in the next chapter, to consider whether we know enough
about heredity to act decisively, even if we were certain who ought to
act. Here I refer the Eugenists to the reply of Mr. Wells, which they
have never dealt with to my knowledge or satisfaction--the important
and primary objection that health is not a quality but a proportion of
qualities; so that even health married to health might produce the
exaggeration called disease. It should be noted here, of course, that
an individual biologist may quite honestly believe that he has found a
fixed principle with the help of Weissmann or Mendel. But we are not
discussing whether he knows enough to be justified in thinking (as is
somewhat the habit of the anthropoid _Homo_) that he is right. We are
discussing whether _we_ know enough, as responsible citizens, to put
such powers into the hands of men who may be deceived or who may be
deceivers. I conclude that we do not.

In the last chapter of the first half of the book I give what is, I
believe, the real secret of this confusion, the secret of what the
Eugenists really want. They want to be allowed to find out what they
want. Not content with the endowment of research, they desire the
establishment of research; that is the making of it a thing official
and compulsory, like education or state insurance; but still it is
only research and not discovery. In short, they want a new kind of
State Church, which shall be an Established Church of Doubt--instead
of Faith. They have no Science of Eugenics at all, but they do really
mean that if we will give ourselves up to be vivisected they may very
probably have one some day. I point out, in more dignified diction,
that this is a bit thick.

And now, in the second half of this book, we will proceed to the
consideration of things that really exist. It is, I deeply regret to
say, necessary to return to realities, as they are in your daily life
and mine. Our happy holiday in the land of nonsense is over; we shall
see no more its beautiful city, with the almost Biblical name of Bosh,
nor the forests full of mares' nests, nor the fields of tares that are
ripened only by moonshine. We shall meet no longer those delicious
monsters that might have talked in the same wild club with the Snark
and the Jabberwock or the Pobble or the Dong with the Luminous Nose;
the father who can't make head or tail of the mother, but thoroughly
understands the child she will some day bear; the lawyer who has to
run after his own laws almost as fast as the criminals run away from
them; the two mad doctors who might discuss for a million years which
of them has the right to lock up the other; the grammarian who clings
convulsively to the Passive Mood, and says it is the duty of something
to get itself done without any human assistance; the man who would
marry giants to giants until the back breaks, as children pile brick
upon brick for the pleasure of seeing the staggering tower tumble
down; and, above all, the superb man of science who wants you to pay
him and crown him because he has so far found out nothing. These
fairy-tale comrades must leave us. They exist, but they have no
influence in what is really going on. They are honest dupes and tools,
as you and I were very nearly being honest dupes and tools. If we
come to think coolly of the world we live in, if we consider how very
practical is the practical politician, at least where cash is
concerned, how very dull and earthy are most of the men who own the
millions and manage the newspaper trusts, how very cautious and averse
from idealist upheaval are those that control this capitalist
society--when we consider all this, it is frankly incredible that
Eugenics should be a front bench fashionable topic and almost an Act
of Parliament, if it were in practice only the unfinished fantasy
which it is, as I have shown, in pure reason. Even if it were a just
revolution, it would be much too revolutionary a revolution for modern
statesmen, if there were not something else behind. Even if it were a
true ideal, it would be much too idealistic an ideal for our
"practical men," if there were not something real as well. Well, there
is something real as well. There is no reason in Eugenics, but there
is plenty of motive. Its supporters are highly vague about its theory,
but they will be painfully practical about its practice. And while I
reiterate that many of its more eloquent agents are probably quite
innocent instruments, there _are_ some, even among Eugenists, who by
this time know what they are doing. To them we shall not say, "What is
Eugenics?" or "Where on earth are you going?" but only "Woe unto you,
hypocrites, that devour widows' houses and for a pretence use long
words."




Part II

THE REAL AIM




CHAPTER I

THE IMPOTENCE OF IMPENITENCE


The root formula of an epoch is always an unwritten law, just as the
law that is the first of all laws, that which protects life from the
murderer, is written nowhere in the Statute Book. Nevertheless there
is all the difference between having and not having a notion of this
basic assumption in an epoch. For instance, the Middle Ages will
simply puzzle us with their charities and cruelties, their asceticism
and bright colours, unless we catch their general eagerness for
building and planning, dividing this from that by walls and
fences--the spirit that made architecture their most successful art.
Thus even a slave seemed sacred; the divinity that did hedge a king,
did also, in one sense, hedge a serf, for he could not be driven out
from behind his hedges. Thus even liberty became a positive thing like
a privilege; and even, when most men had it, it was not opened like
the freedom of a wilderness, but bestowed, like the freedom of a city.
Or again, the seventeenth century may seem a chaos of contradictions,
with its almost priggish praise of parliaments and its quite barbaric
massacre of prisoners, until we realise that, if the Middle Ages was a
house half built, the seventeenth century was a house on fire. Panic
was the note of it, and that fierce fastidiousness and exclusiveness
that comes from fear. Calvinism was its characteristic religion, even
in the Catholic Church, the insistence on the narrowness of the way
and the fewness of the chosen. Suspicion was the note of its
politics--"put not your trust in princes." It tried to thrash
everything out by learned, virulent, and ceaseless controversy; and it
weeded its population by witch-burning. Or yet again: the eighteenth
century will present pictures that seem utterly opposite, and yet seem
singularly typical of the time: the sack of Versailles and the "Vicar
of Wakefield"; the pastorals of Watteau and the dynamite speeches of
Danton. But we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight
of the idea of _tidying up_ which ran through the whole period, the
quietest people being prouder of their tidiness, civilisation, and
sound taste than of any of their virtues; and the wildest people
having (and this is the most important point) no love of wildness for
its own sake, like Nietzsche or the anarchic poets, but only a
readiness to employ it to get rid of unreason or disorder. With these
epochs it is not altogether impossible to say that some such form of
words is a key. The epoch for which it is almost impossible to find a
form of words is our own.

Nevertheless, I think that with us the keyword is "inevitability," or,
as I should be inclined to call it, "impenitence." We are
subconsciously dominated in all departments by the notion that there
is no turning back, and it is rooted in materialism and the denial of
free-will. Take any handful of modern facts and compare them with the
corresponding facts a few hundred years ago. Compare the modern Party
System with the political factions of the seventeenth century. The
difference is that in the older time the party leaders not only really
cut off each other's heads, but (what is much more alarming) really
repealed each other's laws. With us it has become traditional for one
party to inherit and leave untouched the acts of the other when made,
however bitterly they were attacked in the making. James II. and his
nephew William were neither of them very gay specimens; but they would
both have laughed at the idea of "a continuous foreign policy." The
Tories were not Conservatives; they were, in the literal sense,
reactionaries. They did not merely want to keep the Stuarts; they
wanted to bring them back.

Or again, consider how obstinately the English mediæval monarchy
returned again and again to its vision of French possessions, trying
to reverse the decision of fate; how Edward III. returned to the
charge after the defeats of John and Henry III., and Henry V. after
the failure of Edward III.; and how even Mary had that written on her
heart which was neither her husband nor her religion. And then
consider this: that we have comparatively lately known a universal
orgy of the thing called Imperialism, the unity of the Empire the only
topic, colonies counted like crown jewels, and the Union Jack waved
across the world. And yet no one so much as dreamed, I will not say of
recovering, the American colonies for the Imperial unity (which would
have been too dangerous a task for modern empire-builders), but even
of re-telling the story from an Imperial standpoint. Henry V.
justified the claims of Edward III. Joseph Chamberlain would not have
dreamed of justifying the claims of George III. Nay, Shakespeare
justifies the French War, and sticks to Talbot and defies the legend
of Joan of Arc. Mr. Kipling would not dare to justify the American
War, stick to Burgoyne, and defy the legend of Washington. Yet there
really was much more to be said for George III. than there ever was
for Henry V. It was not said, much less acted upon, by the modern
Imperialists; because of this basic modern sense, that as the future
is inevitable, so is the past irrevocable. Any fact so complete as the
American exodus from the Empire must be considered as final for æons,
though it hardly happened more than a hundred years ago. Merely
because it has managed to occur it must be called first, a necessary
evil, and then an indispensable good. I need not add that I do not
want to reconquer America; but then I am not an Imperialist.

Then there is another way of testing it: ask yourself how many people
you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who
attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the
British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate?
How few have we met who realised that British education can be
altered, but British weather cannot? How few there were that knew that
the clouds were more immortal and more solid than the schools? For a
thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or
the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? Indeed,
the very word proves my case by its unpromising and unfamiliar sound.
At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform
and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; but nobody talks about
repeal. Our fathers did not talk of Free Trade, but of the Repeal of
the Corn Laws. They did not talk of Home Rule, but of the Repeal of
the Union. In those days people talked of a "Repealer" as the most
practical of all politicians, the kind of politician that carries a
club. Now the Repealer is flung far into the province of an impossible
idealism: and the leader of one of our great parties, having said, in
a heat of temporary sincerity, that he would repeal an Act, actually
had to write to all the papers to assure them that he would only amend
it. I need not multiply instances, though they might be multiplied
almost to a million. The note of the age is to suggest that the past
may just as well be praised, since it cannot be mended. Men actually
in that past have toiled like ants and died like locusts to undo some
previous settlement that seemed secure; but we cannot do so much as
repeal an Act of Parliament. We entertain the weak-minded notion that
what is done can't be undone. Our view was well summarised in a
typical Victorian song with the refrain: "The mill will never grind
again the water that is past." There are many answers to this. One
(which would involve a disquisition on the phenomena of Evaporation
and Dew) we will here avoid. Another is, that to the minds of simple
country folk, the object of a mill is not to grind water, but to grind
corn, and that (strange as it may seem) there really have been
societies sufficiently vigilant and valiant to prevent their corn
perpetually flowing away from them, to the tune of a sentimental song.

Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an
intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our
mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also
our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake. It was
mere vanity in Mr. Brummell when he sent away trays full of
imperfectly knotted neck-cloths, lightly remarking, "These are our
failures." It is a good instance of the nearness of vanity to
humility, for at least he had to admit that they were failures. But it
would have been spiritual pride in Mr. Brummell if he had tied on all
the cravats, one on top of the other, lest his valet should discover
that he had ever tied one badly. For in spiritual pride there is
always an element of secrecy and solitude. Mr. Brummell would be
satanic; also (which I fear would affect him more) he would be badly
dressed. But he would be a perfect presentation of the modern
publicist, who cannot do anything right, because he must not admit
that he ever did anything wrong.

This strange, weak obstinacy, this persistence in the wrong path of
progress, grows weaker and worse, as do all such weak things. And by
the time in which I write its moral attitude has taken on something of
the sinister and even the horrible. Our mistakes have become our
secrets. Editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air all that
reminds them of the party promises unfulfilled, or the party ideals
reproaching them. It is true of our statesmen (much more than of our
bishops, of whom Mr. Wells said it), that socially in evidence they
are intellectually in hiding. The society is heavy with unconfessed
sins; its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects; it has a
constipation of conscience. There are many things it has done and
allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about; it
calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a
false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a
quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and
though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the
rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian
is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard.

It may be said, in some surprise, that surely we hear to-day on every
side the same story of the destitute proletariat and the social
problem, of the sweating in the unskilled trades or the overcrowding
in the slums. It is granted; but I said the true story. Untrue
stories there are in plenty, on all sides of the discussion. There is
the interesting story of the Class Conscious Proletarian of All Lands,
the chap who has "solidarity," and is always just going to abolish
war. The Marxian Socialists will tell you all about him; only he isn't
there. A common English workman is just as incapable of thinking of a
German as anything but a German as he is of thinking of himself as
anything but an Englishman. Then there is the opposite story; the
story of the horrid man who is an atheist and wants to destroy the
home, but who, for some private reason, prefers to call this
Socialism. He isn't there either. The prosperous Socialists have homes
exactly like yours and mine; and the poor Socialists are not allowed
by the Individualists to have any at all. There is the story of the
Two Workmen, which is a very nice and exciting story, about how one
passed all the public houses in Cheapside and was made Lord Mayor on
arriving at the Guildhall, while the other went into all the public
houses and emerged quite ineligible for such a dignity. Alas! for this
also is vanity. A thief might become Lord Mayor, but an honest workman
certainly couldn't. Then there is the story of "The Relentless Doom,"
by which rich men were, by economic laws, forced to go on taking away
money from poor men, although they simply longed to leave off: this is
an unendurable thought to a free and Christian man, and the reader
will be relieved to hear that it never happened. The rich could have
left off stealing whenever they wanted to leave off, only this never
happened either. Then there is the story of the cunning Fabian who sat
on six committees at once and so coaxed the rich man to become quite
poor. By simply repeating, in a whisper, that there are "wheels within
wheels," this talented man managed to take away the millionaire's
motor car, one wheel at a time, till the millionaire had quite
forgotten that he ever had one. It was very clever of him to do this,
only he has not done it. There is not a screw loose in the
millionaire's motor, which is capable of running over the Fabian and
leaving him a flat corpse in the road at a moment's notice. All these
stories are very fascinating stories to be told by the Individualist
and Socialist in turn to the great Sultan of Capitalism, because if
they left off amusing him for an instant he would cut off their heads.
But if they once began to tell the true story of the Sultan to the
Sultan, he would boil them in oil; and this they wish to avoid.

The true story of the sin of the Sultan he is always trying, by
listening to these stories, to forget. As we have said before in this
chapter, he would prefer not to remember, because he has made up his
mind not to repent. It is a curious story, and I shall try to tell it
truly in the two chapters that follow. In all ages the tyrant is hard
because he is soft. If his car crashes over bleeding and accusing
crowds, it is because he has chosen the path of least resistance. It
is because it is much easier to ride down a human race than ride up a
moderately steep hill. The fight of the oppressor is always a
pillow-fight; commonly a war with cushions--always a war for cushions.
Saladin, the great Sultan, if I remember rightly, accounted it the
greatest feat of swordsmanship to cut a cushion. And so indeed it is,
as all of us can attest who have been for years past trying to cut
into the swollen and windy corpulence of the modern compromise, that
is at once cosy and cruel. For there is really in our world to-day the
colour and silence of the cushioned divan; and that sense of palace
within palace and garden within garden which makes the rich
irresponsibility of the East. Have we not already the wordless dance,
the wineless banquet, and all that strange unchristian conception of
luxury without laughter? Are we not already in an evil Arabian Nights,
and walking the nightmare cities of an invisible despot? Does not our
hangman strangle secretly, the bearer of the bow string? Are we not
already eugenists--that is, eunuch-makers? Do we not see the bright
eyes, the motionless faces, and all that presence of something that is
dead and yet sleepless? It is the presence of the sin that is sealed
with pride and impenitence; the story of how the Sultan got his
throne. But it is not the story he is listening to just now, but
another story which has been invented to cover it--the story called
"Eugenius: or the Adventures of One Not Born," a most varied and
entrancing tale, which never fails to send him to sleep.




CHAPTER II

TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP


He awoke in the Dark Ages and smelt dawn in the dark, and knew he was
not wholly a slave. It was as if, in some tale of Hans Andersen, a
stick or a stool had been left in the garden all night and had grown
alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the
old legal fiction of the servile countries, that the slave is a
"chattel," that is a piece of furniture like a stick or a stool. In
the spiritual sense, I am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy
as the spawn of Nietzsche suppose to-day. No human being, pagan or
Christian, I am certain, ever thought of another human being as a
chair or a table. The mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet
is a cabbage; nor can it on the idea that a man is a stool. No man was
ever unconscious of another's presence--or even indifferent to
another's opinion. The lady who is said to have boasted her
indifference to being naked before male slaves was showing off--or she
meant something different. The lord who fed fishes by killing a slave
was indulging in what most cannibals indulge in--a satanist
affectation. The lady was consciously shameless and the lord was
consciously cruel. But it simply is not in the human reason to carve
men like wood or examine women like ivory, just as it is not in the
human reason to think that two and two make five.

But there was this truth in the legal simile of furniture: that the
slave, though certainly a man, was in one sense a dead man; in the
sense that he was _moveable_. His locomotion was not his own: his
master moved his arms and legs for him as if he were a marionette. Now
it is important in the first degree to realise here what would be
involved in such a fable as I have imagined, of a stool rooting itself
like a shrub. For the general modern notion certainly is that life and
liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty and not standing
still. But it is just because the stool is lifeless that it moves
about. It is just because the tree is alive that it does stand still.
That was the main difference between the pagan slave and the Christian
serf. The serf still belonged to the lord, as the stick that struck
root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the
garden; but it would have become a _live_ possession. Therefore the
owner is forced, by the laws of nature, to treat it with _some_
respect; something becomes due from him. He cannot pull it up without
killing it; it has gained a _place_ in the garden--or the society. But
the moderns are quite wrong in supposing that mere change and holiday
and variety have necessarily any element of this life that is the only
seed of liberty. You may say if you like that an employer, taking all
his workpeople to a new factory in a Garden City, is giving them the
greater freedom of forest landscapes and smokeless skies. If it comes
to that, you can say that the slave-traders took negroes from their
narrow and brutish African hamlets, and gave them the polish of
foreign travel and medicinal breezes of a sea-voyage. But the tiny
seed of citizenship and independence there already was in the serfdom
of the Dark Ages, had nothing to do with what nice things the lord
might do to the serf. It lay in the fact that there were some nasty
things he could not do to the serf--there were not many, but there
were some, and one of them was eviction. He could not make the serf
utterly landless and desperate, utterly without access to the means of
production, though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the
serf, than the serf that owned the field. But even if you call the
serf a beast of the field, he was not what we have tried to make the
town workman--a beast with no field. Foulon said of the French
peasants, "Let them eat grass." If he had said it of the modern London
proletariat, they might well reply, "You have not left us even grass
to eat."

There was, therefore, both in theory and practice, _some_ security for
the serf, because he had come to life and rooted. The seigneur could
not wait in the field in all weathers with a battle-axe to prevent the
serf scratching any living out of the ground, any more than the man in
my fairy-tale could sit out in the garden all night with an umbrella
to prevent the shrub getting any rain. The relation of lord and serf,
therefore, involves a combination of two things: inequality and
security. I know there are people who will at once point wildly to all
sorts of examples, true and false, of insecurity of life in the Middle
Ages; but these are people who do not grasp what we mean by the
characteristic institutions of a society. For the matter of that,
there are plenty of examples of equality in the Middle Ages, as the
craftsmen in their guild or the monks electing their abbot. But just
as modern England is not a feudal country, though there is a quaint
survival called Heralds' College--or Ireland is not a commercial
country, though there is a quaint survival called Belfast--it is true
of the bulk and shape of that society that came out of the Dark Ages
and ended at the Reformation, that it did not care about giving
everybody an equal position, but did care about giving everybody a
position. So that by the very beginning of that time even the slave
had become a slave one could not get rid of, like the Scotch servant
who stubbornly asserted that if his master didn't know a good servant
he knew a good master. The free peasant, in ancient or modern times,
is free to go or stay. The slave, in ancient times, was free neither
to go nor stay. The serf was not free to go; but he was free to stay.

Now what have we done with this man? It is quite simple. There is no
historical complexity about it in that respect. We have taken away his
freedom to stay. We have turned him out of his field, and whether it
was injustice, like turning a free farmer out of his field, or only
cruelty to animals, like turning a cow out of its field, the fact
remains that he is out in the road. First and last, we have simply
destroyed the security. We have not in the least destroyed the
inequality. All classes, all creatures, kind or cruel, still see this
lowest stratum of society as separate from the upper strata and even
the middle strata; he is as separate as the serf. A monster fallen
from Mars, ignorant of our simplest word, would know the tramp was at
the bottom of the ladder, as well as he would have known it of the
serf. The walls of mud are no longer round his boundaries, but only
round his boots. The coarse, bristling hedge is at the end of his
chin, and not of his garden. But mud and bristles still stand out
round him like a horrific halo, and separate him from his kind. The
Martian would have no difficulty in seeing he was the poorest person
in the nation. It is just as impossible that he should marry an
heiress, or fight a duel with a duke, or contest a seat at
Westminster, or enter a club in Pall Mall, or take a scholarship at
Balliol, or take a seat at an opera, or propose a good law, or protest
against a bad one, as it was impossible to the serf. Where he differs
is in something very different. He has lost what was possible to the
serf. He can no longer scratch the bare earth by day or sleep on the
bare earth by night, without being collared by a policeman.

Now when I say that this man has been oppressed as hardly any other
man on this earth has been oppressed, I am not using rhetoric: I have
a clear meaning which I am confident of explaining to any honest
reader. I do not say he has been treated worse: I say he has been
treated differently from the unfortunate in all ages. And the
difference is this: that all the others were told to do something, and
killed or tortured if they did anything else. This man is not told to
do something: he is merely forbidden to do anything. When he was a
slave, they said to him, "Sleep in this shed; I will beat you if you
sleep anywhere else." When he was a serf, they said to him, "Let me
find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else's
field." But now he is a tramp they say to him, "You shall be jailed if
I find you in anyone else's field: _but I will not give you a field_."
They say, "You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside
your shed: _but there is no shed_." If you say that modern
magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with
entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps
were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open
air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun
of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced
about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but
deliberately didn't. To which the policeman replied that twopence
would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a
bed: and _therefore_ (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to
be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much
struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for
not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain
that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they
would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as
they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame. These things
are being done in every part of England every day. They have their
parallels even in every daily paper; but they have no parallel in any
other earthly people or period; except in that insane command to make
bricks without straw which brought down all the plagues of Egypt. For
the common historical joke about Henry VIII. hanging a man for being
Catholic and burning him for being Protestant is a symbolic joke only.
The sceptic in the Tudor time could do something: he could always
agree with Henry VIII. The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For
you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws
sticking out of his hair and says, "Procure threepence from nowhere
and I will give you leave to do without it."

If it be answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such
an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free
to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free
to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the
gibbet was free to find peace in the grave. Many of the poor greatly
prefer the grave to the workhouse, but that is not at all my argument
here. The point is this: that it could not have been the general
policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps. It could
not have been his standing "Advice to Serfs" to say, "Get hanged." It
cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to
prison. And, precisely as plainly, it cannot be the standing advice of
rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses. For that would mean
the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and
expensive establishment of slaves. Now it may come to this, as Mr.
Belloc maintains, but it is not the theory on which what we call the
workhouse does in fact rest. The very shape (and even the very size)
of a workhouse express the fact that it was founded for certain quite
exceptional human failures--like the lunatic asylum. Say to a man, "Go
to the madhouse," and he will say, "Wherein am I mad?" Say to a tramp
under a hedge, "Go to the house of exceptional failures," and he will
say with equal reason, "I travel because I have no house; I walk
because I have no horse; I sleep out because I have no bed. Wherein
have I failed?" And he may have the intelligence to add, "Indeed, your
worship, if somebody has failed, I think it is not I." I concede, with
all due haste, that he might perhaps say "me."

The speciality then of this man's wrong is that it is the only
historic wrong that has in it the quality of _nonsense_. It could only
happen in a nightmare; not in a clear and rational hell. It is the top
point of that anarchy in the governing mind which, as I said at the
beginning, is the main trait of modernity, especially in England. But
if the first note in our policy is madness, the next note is certainly
meanness. There are two peculiarly mean and unmanly legal mantraps in
which this wretched man is tripped up. The first is that which
prevents him from doing what any ordinary savage or nomad would
do--take his chance of an uneven subsistence on the rude bounty of
nature.

There is something very abject about forbidding this; because it is
precisely this adventurous and vagabond spirit which the educated
classes praise most in their books, poems and speeches. To feel the
drag of the roads, to hunt in nameless hills and fish in secret
streams, to have no address save "Over the Hills and Far Away," to be
ready to breakfast on berries and the daybreak and sup on the sunset
and a sodden crust, to feed on wild things and be a boy again, all
this is the heartiest and sincerest impulse in recent culture, in the
songs and tales of Stevenson, in the cult of George Borrow and in the
delightful little books published by Mr. E.V. Lucas. It is the one
true excuse in the core of Imperialism; and it faintly softens the
squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the Self-Made Man who
"came up to London with twopence in his pocket." But when a poorer but
braver man with less than twopence in his pocket does the very thing
we are always praising, makes the blue heavens his house, we send him
to a house built for infamy and flogging. We take poverty itself and
only permit it with a property qualification; we only allow a man to
be poor if he is rich. And we do this most savagely if he has sought
to snatch his life by that particular thing of which our boyish
adventure stories are fullest--hunting and fishing. The extremely
severe English game laws hit most heavily what the highly reckless
English romances praise most irresponsibly. All our literature is full
of praise of the chase--especially of the wild goose chase. But if a
poor man followed, as Tennyson says, "far as the wild swan wings to
where the world dips down to sea and sands," Tennyson would scarcely
allow him to catch it. If he found the wildest goose in the wildest
fenland in the wildest regions of the sunset, he would very probably
discover that the rich never sleep; and that there are no wild things
in England.

In short, the English ruler is always appealing to a nation of
sportsmen and concentrating all his efforts on preventing them from
having any sport. The Imperialist is always pointing out with
exultation that the common Englishman can live by adventure anywhere
on the globe, but if the common Englishman tries to live by adventure
in England, he is treated as harshly as a thief, and almost as harshly
as an honest journalist. This is hypocrisy: the magistrate who gives
his son "Treasure Island" and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite;
the squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English
schoolboys, but cruel to English poachers, is drawing near that deep
place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that
the baseness is in the idea of _bewildering_ the tramp; of leaving
him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the
days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer
penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich. But in the older case
there were two very important differences, the second of which is our
main subject in this chapter. The first is that in a comparatively
wild society, however fond of hunting, it seems impossible that
enclosing and game-keeping can have been so omnipresent and efficient
as in a society full of maps and policemen. The second difference is
the one already noted: that if the slave or semi-slave was forbidden
to get his food in the greenwood, he was told to get it somewhere
else. The note of unreason was absent.

This is the first meanness; and the second is like unto it. If there
is one thing of which cultivated modern letters is full besides
adventure it is altruism. We are always being told to help others, to
regard our wealth as theirs, to do what good we can, for we shall not
pass this way again. We are everywhere urged by humanitarians to help
lame dogs over stiles--though some humanitarians, it is true, seem to
feel a colder interest in the case of lame men and women. Still, the
chief fact of our literature, among all historic literatures, is human
charity. But what is the chief fact of our legislation? The great
outstanding fact of modern legislation, among all historic
legislations, is the forbidding of human charity. It is this
astonishing paradox, a thing in the teeth of all logic and
conscience, that a man that takes another man's money with his leave
can be punished as if he had taken it without his leave. All through
those dark or dim ages behind us, through times of servile stagnation,
of feudal insolence, of pestilence and civil strife and all else that
can war down the weak, for the weak to ask for charity was counted
lawful, and to give that charity, admirable. In all other centuries,
in short, the casual bad deeds of bad men could be partly patched and
mended by the casual good deeds of good men. But this is now
forbidden; for it would leave the tramp a last chance if he could beg.

Now it will be evident by this time that the interesting scientific
experiment on the tramp entirely depends on leaving him _no_ chance,
and not (like the slave) one chance. Of the economic excuses offered
for the persecution of beggars it will be more natural to speak in the
next chapter. It will suffice here to say that they are mere excuses,
for a policy that has been persistent while probably largely
unconscious, with a selfish and atheistic unconsciousness. That policy
was directed towards something--or it could never have cut so cleanly
and cruelly across the sentimental but sincere modern trends to
adventure and altruism. Its object is soon stated. It was directed
towards making the very poor man work for the capitalist, for any
wages or none. But all this, which I shall also deal with in the next
chapter, is here only important as introducing the last truth touching
the man of despair. The game laws have taken from him his human
command of Nature. The mendicancy laws have taken from him his human
demand on Man. There is one human thing left it is much harder to take
from him. Debased by him and his betters, it is still something
brought out of Eden, where God made him a demigod: it does not depend
on money and but little on time. He can create in his own image. The
terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries. As
Jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring Time, as the Christ Child
could be hidden from Herod--so the child unborn is still hidden from
the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is
left; and they seek his life to take it away.




CHAPTER III

TRUE HISTORY OF A EUGENIST


He does not live in a dark lonely tower by the sea, from which are
heard the screams of vivisected men and women. On the contrary, he
lives in Mayfair. He does not wear great goblin spectacles that
magnify his eyes to moons or diminish his neighbours to beetles. When
he is more dignified he wears a single eyeglass; when more
intelligent, a wink. He is not indeed wholly without interest in
heredity and Eugenical biology; but his studies and experiments in
this science have specialised almost exclusively in _equus celer_, the
rapid or running horse. He is not a doctor; though he employs doctors
to work up a case for Eugenics, just as he employs doctors to correct
the errors of his dinner. He is not a lawyer, though unfortunately
often a magistrate. He is not an author or a journalist; though he not
infrequently owns a newspaper. He is not a soldier, though he may have
a commission in the yeomanry; nor is he generally a gentleman, though
often a nobleman. His wealth now commonly comes from a large staff of
employed persons who scurry about in big buildings while he is playing
golf. But he very often laid the foundations of his fortune in a very
curious and poetical way, the nature of which I have never fully
understood. It consisted in his walking about the street without a hat
and going up to another man and saying, "Suppose I have two hundred
whales out of the North Sea." To which the other man replied, "And let
us imagine that I am in possession of two thousand elephants' tusks."
They then exchange, and the first man goes up to a third man and says,
"Supposing me to have lately come into the possession of two thousand
elephants' tusks, would you, etc.?" If you play this game well, you
become very rich; if you play it badly you have to kill yourself or
try your luck at the Bar. The man I am speaking about must have played
it well, or at any rate successfully.

He was born about 1860; and has been a member of Parliament since
about 1890. For the first half of his life he was a Liberal; for the
second half he has been a Conservative; but his actual policy in
Parliament has remained largely unchanged and consistent. His policy
in Parliament is as follows: he takes a seat in a room downstairs at
Westminster, and takes from his breast pocket an excellent cigar-case,
from which in turn he takes an excellent cigar. This he lights, and
converses with other owners of such cigars on _equus celer_ or such
matters as may afford him entertainment. Two or three times in the
afternoon a bell rings; whereupon he deposits the cigar in an ashtray
with great particularity, taking care not to break the ash, and
proceeds to an upstairs room, flanked with two passages. He then walks
into whichever of the two passages shall be indicated to him by a
young man of the upper classes, holding a slip of paper. Having gone
into this passage he comes out of it again, is counted by the young
man and proceeds downstairs again; where he takes up the cigar once
more, being careful not to break the ash. This process, which is known
as Representative Government, has never called for any great variety
in the manner of his life. Nevertheless, while his Parliamentary
policy is unchanged, his change from one side of the House to the
other did correspond with a certain change in his general policy in
commerce and social life. The change of the party label is by this
time quite a trifling matter; but there was in his case a change of
philosophy or at least a change of project; though it was not so much
becoming a Tory, as becoming rather the wrong kind of Socialist. He is
a man with a history. It is a sad history, for he is certainly a less
good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is
really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has
come to talking of Degeneration.

In his Radical days (to quote from one who corresponded in some ways
to this type) he was a much better man, because he was a much less
enlightened one. The hard impudence of his first Manchester
Individualism was softened by two relatively humane qualities; the
first was a much greater manliness in his pride; the second was a much
greater sincerity in his optimism. For the first point, the modern
capitalist is merely industrial; but this man was also industrious.
He was proud of hard work; nay, he was even proud of low work--if he
could speak of it in the past and not the present. In fact, he
invented a new kind of Victorian snobbishness, an inverted
snobbishness. While the snobs of Thackeray turned Muggins into De
Mogyns, while the snobs of Dickens wrote letters describing themselves
as officers' daughters "accustomed to every luxury--except spelling,"
the Individualist spent his life in hiding his prosperous parents. He
was more like an American plutocrat when he began; but he has since
lost the American simplicity. The Frenchman works until he can play.
The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his
master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the
Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he
never worked at all. He becomes as far as possible another person--a
country gentleman who has never heard of his shop; one whose left hand
holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger. He uses
a peerage as an alias, and a large estate as a sort of alibi. A stern
Scotch minister remarked concerning the game of golf, with a terrible
solemnity of manner, "the man who plays golf--he neglects his
business, he forsakes his wife, he forgets his God." He did not seem
to realise that it is the chief aim of many a modern capitalist's life
to forget all three.

This abandonment of a boyish vanity in work, this substitution of a
senile vanity in indolence, this is the first respect in which the
rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least
a master-workman and not merely a master. And the second important
respect in which he was better at the beginning is this: that he did
then, in some hazy way, half believe that he was enriching other
people as well as himself. The optimism of the early Victorian
Individualists was not wholly hypocritical. Some of the
clearest-headed and blackest-hearted of them, such as Malthus, saw
where things were going, and boldly based their Manchester city on
pessimism instead of optimism. But this was not the general case; most
of the decent rich of the Bright and Cobden sort did have a kind of
confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long
run for everybody. They thought the troubles of the poor were
incurable by State action (they thought that of all troubles), but
they did not cold-bloodedly contemplate the prospect of those troubles
growing worse and worse. By one of those tricks or illusions of the
brain to which the luxurious are subject in all ages, they sometimes
seemed to feel as if the populace had triumphed symbolically in their
own persons. They blasphemously thought about their thrones of gold
what can only be said about a cross--that they, being lifted up, would
draw all men after them. They were so full of the romance that anybody
could be Lord Mayor, that they seemed to have slipped into thinking
that everybody could. It seemed as if a hundred Dick Whittingtons,
accompanied by a hundred cats, could all be accommodated at the
Mansion House. It was all nonsense; but it was not (until later) all
humbug.

Step by step, however, with a horrid and increasing clearness, this
man discovered what he was doing. It is generally one of the worst
discoveries a man can make. At the beginning, the British plutocrat
was probably quite as honest in suggesting that every tramp carried a
magic cat like Dick Whittington, as the Bonapartist patriot was in
saying that every French soldier carried a marshal's _baton_ in his
knapsack. But it is exactly here that the difference and the danger
appears. There is no comparison between a well-managed thing like
Napoleon's army and an unmanageable thing like modern competition.
Logically, doubtless, it was impossible that every soldier should
carry a marshal's _baton_; they could not all be marshals any more
than they could all be mayors. But if the French soldier did not
always have a _baton_ in his knapsack, he always had a knapsack. But
when that Self-Helper who bore the adorable name of Smiles told the
English tramp that he carried a coronet in his bundle, the English
tramp had an unanswerable answer. He pointed out that he had no
bundle. The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack,
any more than they had fitted him with a future--or even a present.
The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had
never been allowed even to be anything. The French soldier's ambition
may have been in practice not only a short, but even a deliberately
shortened ladder, in which the top rungs were knocked out. But for
the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that
they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact
proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to
understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their
impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his
riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could
have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we
shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every
other kind of robber.

I think it is no more than justice to him to say that the knowledge,
where it has come to him, has come to him slowly; and I think it came
(as most things of common sense come) rather vaguely and as in a
vision--that is, by the mere look of things. The old Cobdenite
employer was quite within his rights in arguing that earth is not
heaven, that the best obtainable arrangement might contain many
necessary evils; and that Liverpool and Belfast might be growing more
prosperous as a whole in spite of pathetic things that might be seen
there. But I simply do not believe he has been able to look at
Liverpool and Belfast and continue to think this: that is why he has
turned himself into a sham country gentleman. Earth is not heaven, but
the nearest we can get to heaven ought not to _look_ like hell; and
Liverpool and Belfast look like hell, whether they are or not. Such
cities might be growing prosperous as a whole, though a few citizens
were more miserable. But it was more and more broadly apparent that it
was exactly and precisely _as a whole_ that they were not growing more
prosperous, but only the few citizens who were growing more prosperous
by their increasing misery. You could not say a country was becoming a
white man's country when there were more and more black men in it
every day. You could not say a community was more and more masculine
when it was producing more and more women. Nor can you say that a city
is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are
very poor men. There might be a false agitation founded on the pathos
of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact
is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite
complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of
individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic
sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as
the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared
with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful
friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if
they hung up the harp that once in Lord Furness's factory, there would
be a chance of another string breaking.

Broadly, and as things bulk to the eye, towns like Leeds, if placed
beside towns like Rouen or Florence, or Chartres, or Cologne, do
actually look like beggars walking among burghers. After that
overpowering and unpleasant impression it is really useless to argue
that they are richer because a few of their parasites get rich enough
to live somewhere else. The point may be put another way, thus: that
it is not so much that these more modern cities have this or that
monopoly of good or evil; it is that they have every good in its
fourth-rate form and every evil in its worst form. For instance, that
interesting weekly paper _The Nation_ amiably rebuked Mr. Belloc and
myself for suggesting that revelry and the praise of fermented liquor
were more characteristic of Continental and Catholic communities than
of communities with the religion and civilisation of Belfast. It said
that if we would "cross the border" into Scotland, we should find out
our mistake. Now, not only have I crossed the border, but I have had
considerable difficulty in crossing the road in a Scotch town on a
festive evening. Men were literally lying like piled-up corpses in the
gutters, and from broken bottles whisky was pouring down the drains. I
am not likely, therefore, to attribute a total and arid abstinence to
the whole of industrial Scotland. But I never said that drinking was a
mark rather of the Catholic countries. I said that _moderate_ drinking
was a mark rather of the Catholic countries. In other words, I say of
the common type of Continental citizen, not that he is the only person
who is drinking, but that he is the only person who knows how to
drink. Doubtless gin is as much a feature of Hoxton as beer is a
feature of Munich. But who is the connoisseur who prefers the gin of
Hoxton to the beer of Munich? Doubtless the Protestant Scotch ask for
"Scotch," as the men of Burgundy ask for Burgundy. But do we find them
lying in heaps on each side of the road when we walk through a
Burgundian village? Do we find the French peasant ready to let
Burgundy escape down a drain-pipe? Now this one point, on which I
accept _The Nation's_ challenge, can be exactly paralleled on almost
every point by which we test a civilisation. It does not matter
whether we are for alcohol or against it. On either argument Glasgow
is more objectionable than Rouen. The French abstainer makes less
fuss; the French drinker gives less offence. It is so with property,
with war, with everything. I can understand a teetotaler being
horrified, on his principles, at Italian wine-drinking. I simply
cannot believe he could be _more_ horrified at it than at Hoxton
gin-drinking. I can understand a Pacifist, with his special scruples,
disliking the militarism of Belfort. I flatly deny that he can dislike
it _more_ than the militarism of Berlin. I can understand a good
Socialist hating the petty cares of the distributed peasant property.
I deny that any good Socialist can hate them _more_ than he hates the
large cares of Rockefeller. That is the unique tragedy of the
plutocratic state to-day; it has _no_ successes to hold up against the
failures it alleges to exist in Latin or other methods. You can (if
you are well out of his reach) call the Irish rustic debased and
superstitious. I defy you to contrast his debasement and superstition
with the citizenship and enlightenment of the English rustic.

To-day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an
organ of the State. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for
this reason: that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to
be rich. But he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them
to be poor. Rob Roy in a cavern, hearing a company approaching, will
hope (or if in a pious mood, pray) that they may come laden with gold
or goods. But Mr. Rockefeller, in his factory, knows that if those who
pass are laden with goods they will pass on. He will therefore (if in
a pious mood) pray that they may be destitute, and so be forced to
work his factory for him for a starvation wage. It is said (and also,
I believe, disputed) that Blücher riding through the richer parts of
London exclaimed, "What a city to sack!" But Blücher was a soldier if
he was a bandit. The true sweater feels quite otherwise. It is when he
drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets
paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he
sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted
and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.

I repeat that up to a point the profiteer was innocent because he was
ignorant; he had been lured on by easy and accommodating events. He
was innocent as the new Thane of Glamis was innocent, as the new Thane
of Cawdor was innocent; but the King---- The modern manufacturer, like
Macbeth, decided to march on, under the mute menace of the heavens.
He knew that the spoil of the poor was in his houses; but he could
not, after careful calculation, think of any way in which they could
get it out of his houses without being arrested for housebreaking. He
faced the future with a face flinty with pride and impenitence. This
period can be dated practically by the period when the old and genuine
Protestant religion of England began to fail; and the average business
man began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he
was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to
scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way
out. But in any case, the man who had made a mistake not only refused
to unmake it, but decided to go on making it. But in this he made yet
another most amusing mistake, which was the beginning of all
Eugenics.




CHAPTER IV

THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLESH


By a quaint paradox, we generally miss the meaning of simple stories
because we are not subtle enough to understand their simplicity. As
long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other
romance of things in general, they saw the thing solid and swallowed
it whole, knowing that it could not disagree with them. But the moment
men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it,
they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find,
for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical
nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins; about how
Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by
lightning for going out after dark. Now these moral stories are
immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because
Puritanism is wrong. But they are not quite so wrong, they are not a
quarter so wrong, as many superficial sages have supposed.

The truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a
human meaning; and not one of the fixed fools of history was such a
fool as he looks. And when our great-uncles or great-grandmothers
told a child he might be drowned by breaking the Sabbath, their souls
(though undoubtedly, as Touchstone said, in a parlous state) were not
in quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their god
was a devil who dropped babies into the Thames for a trifle. This form
of religious literature is a morbid form if taken by itself; but it
did correspond to a certain reality in psychology which most people of
any religion, or even of none, have felt a touch of at some time or
other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the
subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as
right with Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the
superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but that
if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why
all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who
is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a
mental sickness, but it is too human or too mortal a sickness to be
called solely a superstition. It is not solely a superstition; it is
not simply superimposed upon human nature by something that has got on
top of it. It flourishes without check among non-Christian systems,
and it flourishes especially in Calvinism, because Calvinism is the
most non-Christian of Christian systems. But like everything else that
inheres in the natural senses and spirit of man, it has something in
it; it is not stark unreason. If it is an ill (and it generally is),
it is one of the ills that flesh is heir to, but he is the lawful
heir. And like many other dubious or dangerous human instincts or
appetites, it is sometimes useful as a warning against worse things.

Now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the
loss of this; the loss of what we may call the natural and heathen
mysticism. When modern critics say that Julius Caesar did not believe
in Jupiter, or that Pope Leo did not believe in Catholicism, they
overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours. Perhaps
Julius did not believe in Jupiter; but he did not disbelieve in
Jupiter. There was nothing in his philosophy, or the philosophy of
that age, that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit
personal and predominant in the world. But the modern materialists are
not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe. Hence, while
the heathen might avail himself of accidental omens, queer
coincidences or casual dreams, without knowing for certain whether
they were really hints from heaven or premonitory movements in his own
brain, the modern Christian turned heathen must not entertain such
notions at all, but must reject the oracle as the altar. The modern
sceptic was drugged against all that was natural in the supernatural.
And this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom, as a tyrant
literally pagan might possibly not have done.

There is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales
(those, for instance, on which Shakespeare is so often based)--an idea
that is profoundly moral even if the tales are immoral. It is what
may be called the flaw in the deed: the idea that, if I take my
advantage to the full, I shall hear of something to my disadvantage.
Thus Midas fell into a fallacy about the currency; and soon had reason
to become something more than a Bimetallist. Thus Macbeth had a
fallacy about forestry; he could not see the trees for the wood. He
forgot that, though a place cannot be moved, the trees that grow on it
can. Thus Shylock had a fallacy of physiology; he forgot that, if you
break into the house of life, you find it a bloody house in the most
emphatic sense. But the modern capitalist did not read fairy-tales,
and never looked for the little omens at the turnings of the road. He
(or the most intelligent section of him) had by now realised his
position, and knew in his heart it was a false position. He thought a
margin of men out of work was good for his business; he could no
longer really think it was good for his country. He could no longer be
the old "hard-headed" man who simply did not understand things; he
could only be the hard-hearted man who faced them. But he still
marched on; he was sure he had made no mistake.

However, he had made a mistake--as definite as a mistake in
multiplication. It may be summarised thus: that the same inequality
and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour, and at
last no labour at all. It was as if a man who wanted something from an
enemy, should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in
the despair of winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen
the bargain; and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorstep.

He had discovered the divine boomerang; his sin had found him out. The
experiment of Individualism--the keeping of the worker half in and
half out of work--was far too ingenious not to contain a flaw. It was
too delicate a balance to work entirely with the strength of the
starved and the vigilance of the benighted. It was too desperate a
course to rely wholly on desperation. And as time went on the terrible
truth slowly declared itself; the degraded class was really
degenerating. It was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool;
but the tool, ceaselessly used, was being used up. It was quite
reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling a man away like a
tool; but when it was flung away in the rain the tool rusted. But the
comparison to a tool was insufficient for an awful reason that had
already begun to dawn upon the master's mind. If you pick up a hammer,
you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling
away a chisel by the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of
little chisels. But the meanest of the tools, Man, had still this
strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake.
Despite all improvements in machinery, the most important part of the
machinery (the fittings technically described in the trade as "hands")
were apparently growing worse. The firm was not only encumbered with
one useless servant, but he immediately turned himself into five
useless servants. "The poor should not be emancipated," the old
reactionaries used to say, "until they are fit for freedom." But if
this downrush went on, it looked as if the poor would not stand high
enough to be fit for slavery.

So at least it seemed, doubtless in a great degree subconsciously, to
the man who had wagered all his wealth on the usefulness of the poor
to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor. The time came
at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to
be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be
something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a
necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact
that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor
could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by
the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal
nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences
began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but
still to a notable extent, in a much looser sense than the Eugenists
assume, but still in some sort of sense, the types that were
inadequate or incalculable or uncontrollable began to increase. Under
the hedges of the country, on the seats of the parks, loafing under
the bridges or leaning over the Embankment, began to appear a new race
of men--men who are certainly not mad, whom we shall gain no
scientific light by calling feeble-minded, but who are, in varying
individual degrees, dazed or drink-sodden, or lazy or tricky or tired
in body and spirit. In a far less degree than the teetotallers tell
us, but still in a large degree, the traffic in gin and bad beer
(itself a capitalist enterprise) fostered the evil, though it had not
begun it. Men who had no human bond with the instructed man, men who
seemed to him monsters and creatures without mind, became an eyesore
in the market-place and a terror on the empty roads. The rich were
afraid.

Moreover, as I have hinted before, the act of keeping the destitute
out of public life, and crushing them under confused laws, had an
effect on their intelligences which paralyses them even as a
proletariat. Modern people talk of "Reason versus Authority"; but
authority itself involves reason, or its orders would not even be
understood. If you say to your valet, "Look after the buttons on my
waistcoat," he may do it, even if you throw a boot at his head. But if
you say to him, "Look after the buttons on my top-hat," he will not do
it, though you empty a boot-shop over him. If you say to a schoolboy,
"Write out that Ode of Horace from memory in the original Latin," he
may do it without a flogging. If you say, "Write out that Ode of
Horace in the original German," he will not do it with a thousand
floggings. If you will not learn logic, he certainly will not learn
Latin. And the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subject (such as
that which punishes the homeless for not going home) have really, I
think, a great deal to do with a certain increase in their
sheepishness and short-wittedness, and, therefore, in their industrial
inefficiency. By one of the monstrosities of the feeble-minded theory,
a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could _then_ be examined by
doctors as to the state of his mind--presumably in order to discover
by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In
other words, when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent of
doing something, they jail him for being too innocent to do anything.
I do not suppose the man is an idiot at all, but I can believe he
feels more like one after the legal process than before. Thus all the
factors--the bodily exhaustion, the harassing fear of hunger, the
reckless refuge in sexuality, and the black botheration of bad
laws--combined to make the employee more unemployable.

Now, it is very important to understand here that there were two
courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted
by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have
reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope
of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to
his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more
money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the community, and
then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings
to produce a generation better born, bred and cared for than these
tortured types that were less and less use to him. It might still not
be too late to rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan
that poverty might fly out of the window, with the reasonable prospect
of love coming in at the door. In short, he might have let the English
poor, the mass of whom were not weak-minded, though more of them were
growing weaker, a reasonable chance, in the form of more money, of
achieving their eugenical resurrection themselves. It has never been
shown, and it cannot be shown, that the method would have failed. But
it can be shown, and it must be closely and clearly noted, that the
method had very strict limitations from the employers' own point of
view. If they made the worker too comfortable, he would not work to
increase another's comforts; if they made him too independent, he
would not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages were so
good that he could save out of them, he might cease to be a
wage-earner. If his house or garden were his own, he might stand an
economic siege in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been built
on his dependence; but now it was getting out of hand, not in the
direction of freedom, but of frank helplessness. One might say that
his dependence had got independent of control.

But there was another way. And towards this the employer's ideas
began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly,
to drift. Giving property, giving leisure, giving status costs money.
But there is one human force that costs nothing. As it does not cost
the beggar a penny to indulge, so it would not cost the employer a
penny to employ. He could not alter or improve the tables or the
chairs on the cheap. But there were two pieces of furniture (labelled
respectively "the husband" and "the wife") whose relations were much
cheaper. He could alter the _marriage_ in the house in such a way as
to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children
he did want, with the smallest possible number of the kind he did
not. He could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds. And he
could harness to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of
the blood of a man in his youth, as he has already harnessed to them
all the wild waste rivers of the world.




CHAPTER V

THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE


Now, if any ask whether it be imaginable that an ordinary man of the
wealthier type should analyse the problem or conceive the plan, the
inhumanly far-seeing plan, as I have set it forth, the answer is:
"Certainly not." Many rich employers are too generous to do such a
thing; many are too stupid to know what they are doing. The eugenical
opportunity I have described is but an ultimate analysis of a whole
drift of thoughts in the type of man who does not analyse his
thoughts. He sees a slouching tramp, with a sick wife and a string of
rickety children, and honestly wonders what he can do with them. But
prosperity does not favour self-examination; and he does not even ask
himself whether he means "How can I help them?" or "How can I use
them?"--what he can still do for them, or what they could still do for
him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than
the former; he laments the breaking of the tools of Mammon much more
than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible
to grope in the limbo of what he does think; but we can assert that
there is one thing he doesn't think. He doesn't think, "This man might
be as jolly as I am, if he need not come to me for work or wages."

That this is so, that at root the Eugenist is the Employer, there are
multitudinous proofs on every side, but they are of necessity
miscellaneous, and in many cases negative. The most enormous is in a
sense the most negative: that no one seems able to imagine capitalist
industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. By a curious
recurrent slip in the mind, as irritating as a catch in a clock,
people miss the main thing and concentrate on the mean thing. "Modern
conditions" are treated as fixed, though the very word "modern"
implies that they are fugitive. "Old ideas" are treated as impossible,
though their very antiquity often proves their permanence. Some years
ago some ladies petitioned that the platforms of our big railway
stations should be raised, as it was more convenient for the hobble
skirt. It never occurred to them to change to a sensible skirt. Still
less did it occur to them that, compared with all the female fashions
that have fluttered about on it, by this time St. Pancras is as
historic as St. Peter's.

I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious
assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of "business" or
industrialism, and not _vice versa_; examples from all the magazines,
novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take
one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open
in front of me--a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of
being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes
to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we
have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper
classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to
sign his letter "Hopeful." Well, there are certainly many methods by
which people in the upper classes prevent procreation; one of them is
what used to be called "platonic friendship," till they found another
name for it at the Old Bailey. I do not suppose the hopeful gentleman
hopes for this; but some of us find the abortion he does hope for
almost as abominable. That, however, is not the curious point. The
curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying, "When
people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high
infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are
stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a
time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if
there were no unwanted children." You will observe that he tacitly
takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately
shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of
human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries,
things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted
children; but unwanted by whom? This man does not really mean that the
parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not
want to pay them properly. Doubtless, if you said to him directly,
"Are you in favour of low wages?" he would say, "No." But I am not, in
this chapter, talking about the effect on such modern minds of a
cross-examination to which they do not subject themselves. I am
talking about the way their minds work, the instinctive trick and turn
of their thoughts, the things they assume before argument, and the way
they faintly feel that the world is going. And, frankly, the turn of
their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted, as the turn of my
mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted. Motherhood, they feel,
and a full childhood, and the beauty of brothers and sisters, are good
things in their way, but not so good as a bad wage. About the
mutilation of womanhood, and the massacre of men unborn, he signs
himself "Hopeful." He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human
annihilation. But about improving the small bad wage he signs himself
"Hopeless."

This is the first evidence of motive: the ubiquitous assumption that
life and love must fit into a fixed framework of employment, even (as
in this case) of bad employment. The second evidence is the tacit and
total neglect of the scientific question in all the departments in
which it is not an employment question; as, for instance, the
marriages of the princely, patrician, or merely plutocratic houses. I
do not mean, of course, that no scientific men have rigidly tackled
these, though I do not recall any cases. But I am not talking of the
merits of individual men of science, but of the push and power behind
this movement, the thing that is able to make it fashionable and
politically important. I say, if this power were an interest in truth,
or even in humanity, the first field in which to study would be in the
weddings of the wealthy. Not only would the records be more lucid,
and the examples more in evidence, but the cases would be more
interesting and more decisive. For the grand marriages have presented
both extremes of the problem of pedigree--first the "breeding in and
in," and later the most incongruous cosmopolitan blends. It would
really be interesting to note which worked the best, or what point of
compromise was safest. For the poor (about whom the newspaper
Eugenists are always talking) cannot offer any test cases so complete.
Waiters never had to marry waitresses, as princes had to marry
princesses. And (for the other extreme) housemaids seldom marry Red
Indians. It may be because there are none to marry. But to the
millionaires the continents are flying railway stations, and the most
remote races can be rapidly linked together. A marriage in London or
Paris may chain Ravenna to Chicago, or Ben Cruachan to Bagdad. Many
European aristocrats marry Americans, notoriously the most mixed stock
in the world; so that the disinterested Eugenist, with a little
trouble, might reveal rich stores of negro or Asiatic blood to his
delighted employer. Instead of which he dulls our ears and distresses
our refinement by tedious denunciations of the monochrome marriages of
the poor.

For there is something really pathetic about the Eugenist's neglect of
the aristocrat and his family affairs. People still talk about the
pride of pedigree; but it strikes me as the one point on which the
aristocrats are almost morbidly modest. We should be learned Eugenists
if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are
of their hairdressing. We see the modern aristocrat in the most human
poses in the illustrated papers, playing with his dog or parrot--nay,
we see him playing with his child, or with his grandchild. But there
is something heartrending in his refusal to play with his grandfather.
There is often something vague and even fantastic about the
antecedents of our most established families, which would afford the
Eugenist admirable scope not only for investigation but for
experiment. Certainly, if he could obtain the necessary powers, the
Eugenist might bring off some startling effects with the mixed
materials of the governing class. Suppose, to take wild and
hypothetical examples, he were to marry a Scotch earl, say, to the
daughter of a Jewish banker, or an English duke to an American parvenu
of semi-Jewish extraction? What would happen? We have here an
unexplored field.

It remains unexplored not merely through snobbery and cowardice, but
because the Eugenist (at least the influential Eugenist)
half-consciously knows it is no part of his job; what he is really
wanted for is to get the grip of the governing classes on to the
unmanageable output of poor people. It would not matter in the least
if all Lord Cowdray's descendants grew up too weak to hold a tool or
turn a wheel. It would matter very much, especially to Lord Cowdray,
if all his employees grew up like that. The oligarch can be
unemployable, because he will not be employed. Thus the practical and
popular exponent of Eugenics has his face always turned towards the
slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of
segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is
thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking
of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the
hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted
creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not
thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer of White. And this not
because he is such a brute as to like people like White or Thaw any
more than we do, but because he knows that _his_ problem is the
degeneration of the useful classes; because he knows that White would
never have been a millionaire if all his workers had spent themselves
on women as White did, that Thaw would never have been a millionaire
if all his servants had been Thaws. The ornaments may be allowed to
decay, but the machinery _must_ be mended. That is the second proof of
the plutocratic impulse behind all Eugenics: that no one thinks of
applying it to the prominent classes. No one thinks of applying it
where it could most easily be applied.

A third proof is the strange new disposition to regard the poor as a
_race_; as if they were a colony of Japs or Chinese coolies. It can be
most clearly seen by comparing it with the old, more individual,
charitable, and (as the Eugenists might say) sentimental view of
poverty. In Goldsmith or Dickens or Hood there is a basic idea that
the particular poor person ought not to be so poor: it is some
accident or some wrong. Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim are fairy princes
waiting for their fairy godmother. They are held as slaves, but rather
as the hero and heroine of a Spanish or Italian romance were held as
slaves by the Moors. The modern poor are getting to be regarded as
slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the negroes in the
plantations. The bondage of the white hero to the black master was
regarded as abnormal; the bondage of the black to the white master as
normal. The Eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence
of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of
Cratchit; but, as a matter of fact, we have here a very good instance
of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism.
The poor are _not_ a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk
about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact,
what Dickens describes: "a dustbin of individual accidents," of
damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very
largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver
Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things,
like most dustbins. But the Eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in
the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost
certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit
them. It seems to affect not only their minds, but their very
eyesight. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Alec Tweedie almost scornfully
asks, "When we go through the slums, do we see beautiful children?"
The answer is, "Yes, very often indeed." I have seen children in the
slums quite pretty enough to be Little Nell or the outcast whom Hood
called "young and so fair." Nor has the beauty anything necessarily to
do with health; there are beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying
children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat
Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type,
of every sort of health and breeding, in a single back street. They
have nothing in common but the wrong we do them.

The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism
in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes
and long-lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make
the poor all of a piece--a sort of black fungoid growth that is
ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor
landladies: that they always say they have seen better days. Nine
times out of ten they say it because it is true. What can be said of
the great mass of Englishmen, by anyone who knows any history, except
that they have seen better days? And the landlady's claim is not
snobbish, but rather spirited; it is her testimony to the truth in the
old tales of which I spoke: that she _ought not_ to be so poor or so
servile in status; that a normal person ought to have more property
and more power in the State than _that_. Such dreams of lost dignity
are perhaps the only things that stand between us and the
cattle-breeding paradise now promised. Nor are such dreams by any
means impotent. I remember Mr. T.P. O'Connor wrote an interesting
article about Madame Humbert, in the course of which he said that
Irish peasants, and probably most peasants, tended to have a
half-fictitious family legend about an estate to which they were
entitled. This was written in the time when Irish peasants were
landless in their land; and the delusion doubtless seemed all the more
entertaining to the landlords who ruled them and the money-lenders who
ruled the landlords. But the dream has conquered the realities. The
phantom farms have materialised. Merely by tenaciously affirming the
kind of pride that comes after a fall, by remembering the old
civilisation and refusing the new, by recurring to an old claim that
seemed to most Englishmen like the lie of a broken-down lodging-house
keeper at Margate--by all this the Irish have got what they want, in
solid mud and turf. That imaginary estate has conquered the Three
Estates of the Realm.

But the homeless Englishman must not even remember a home. So far from
his house being his castle, he must not have even a castle in the air.
He must have no memories; that is why he is taught no history. Why is
he told none of the truth about the mediæval civilisation except a few
cruelties and mistakes in chemistry? Why does a mediæval burgher never
appear till he can appear in a shirt and a halter? Why does a mediæval
monastery never appear till it is "corrupt" enough to shock the
innocence of Henry VIII.? Why do we hear of one charter--that of the
barons--and not a word of the charters of the carpenters, smiths,
shipwrights and all the rest? The reason is that the English peasant
is not only not allowed to have an estate, he is not even allowed to
have lost one. The past has to be painted pitch black, that it may be
worse than the present.

There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about Eugenics, and
that is its meanness. Wealth, and the social science supported by
wealth, had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely
failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate--and they made men
decay. Then, instead of confessing the error, and trying to restore
the wealth, or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to
cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They
put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest of all, they
actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first
blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again. They are
apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad,
merely because the system was maddening. Suppose a captain had
collected volunteers in a hot, waste country by the assurance that he
could lead them to water, and knew where to meet the rest of his
regiment. Suppose he led them wrong, to a place where the regiment
could not be for days, and there was no water. And suppose sunstroke
struck them down on the sand man after man, and they kicked and danced
and raved. And, when at last the regiment came, suppose the captain
successfully concealed his mistake, because all his men had suffered
too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred. What would
you think of the gallant captain? It is pretty much what I think of
this particular captain of industry.

Of course, nobody supposes that all Capitalists, or most Capitalists,
are conscious of any such intellectual trick. Most of them are as much
bewildered as the battered proletariat; but there are some who are
less well-meaning and more mean. And these are leading their more
generous colleagues towards the fulfilment of this ungenerous evasion,
if not towards the comprehension of it. Now a ruler of the Capitalist
civilisation, who has come to consider the idea of ultimately herding
and breeding the workers like cattle, has certain contemporary
problems to review. He has to consider what forces still exist in the
modern world for the frustration of his design. The first question is
how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty. The second
question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian
ideas as may be implied in Socialism. The third is whether there is
any power of resistance in the tradition of the populace itself. These
three questions for the future I shall consider in their order in the
final chapters that follow. It is enough to say here that I think the
progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where
they will fail to prevent the experiment. Briefly, the progress will
have deprived the Capitalist of his old Individualist scruples,
without committing him to his new Collectivist obligations. He is in a
very perilous position; for he has ceased to be a Liberal without
becoming a Socialist, and the bridge by which he was crossing has
broken above an abyss of Anarchy.




CHAPTER VI

THE ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY


If such a thing as the Eugenic sociology had been suggested in the
period from Fox to Gladstone, it would have been far more fiercely
repudiated by the reformers than by the Conservatives. If Tories had
regarded it as an insult to marriage, Radicals would have far more
resolutely regarded it as an insult to citizenship. But in the
interval we have suffered from a process resembling a sort of mystical
parricide, such as is told of so many gods, and is true of so many
great ideas. Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has
destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it
unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they
were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it
undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free
to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize
about this reactionary scepticism is that as it is bound to be
unlimited in theory, so it is bound to be unlimited in practice. In
other words, the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable
it to advance, not only towards Eugenic legislation, but towards any
conceivable or inconceivable extravagances of Eugenics.

Those who reply to any plea for freedom invariably fall into a certain
trap. I have debated with numberless different people on these
matters, and I confess I find it amusing to see them tumbling into it
one after another. I remember discussing it before a club of very
active and intelligent Suffragists, and I cast it here for convenience
in the form which it there assumed. Suppose, for the sake of argument,
that I say that to take away a poor man's pot of beer is to take away
a poor man's personal liberty, it is very vital to note what is the
usual or almost universal reply. People hardly ever do reply, for some
reason or other, by saying that a man's liberty consists of such and
such things, but that beer is an exception that cannot be classed
among them, for such and such reasons. What they almost invariably do
say is something like this: "After all, what is liberty? Man must live
as a member of a society, and must obey those laws which, etc., etc."
In other words, they collapse into a complete confession that they
_are_ attacking all liberty and any liberty; that they _do_ deny the
very existence or the very possibility of liberty. In the very form of
the answer they admit the full scope of the accusation against them.
In trying to rebut the smaller accusation, they plead guilty to the
larger one.

This distinction is very important, as can be seen from any practical
parallel. Suppose we wake up in the middle of the night and find that
a neighbour has entered the house not by the front-door but by the
skylight; we may suspect that he has come after the fine old family
jewellery. We may be reassured if he can refer it to a really
exceptional event; as that he fell on to the roof out of an aeroplane,
or climbed on to the roof to escape from a mad dog. Short of the
incredible, the stranger the story the better the excuse; for an
extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse. But we shall
hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful
fashion and says, "After all, what is property? Why should material
objects be thus artificially attached, etc., etc.?" We shall merely
realise that his attitude allows of his taking the jewellery and
everything else. Or if the neighbour approaches us carrying a large
knife dripping with blood, we may be convinced by his story that he
killed another neighbour in self-defence, that the quiet gentleman
next door was really a homicidal maniac. We shall know that homicidal
mania is exceptional and that we ourselves are so happy as not to
suffer from it; and being free from the disease may be free from the
danger. But it will not soothe us for the man with the gory knife to
say softly and pensively "After all, what is human life? Why should we
cling to it? Brief at the best, sad at the brightest, it is itself but
a disease from which, etc., etc." We shall perceive that the sceptic
is in a mood not only to murder us but to massacre everybody in the
street. Exactly the same effect which would be produced by the
questions of "What is property?" and "What is life?" is produced by
the question of "What is liberty?" It leaves the questioner free to
disregard any liberty, or in other words to take any liberties. The
very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may
choose to do. If he gags a man to prevent him from indulging in
profane swearing, or locks him in the coal cellar to guard against his
going on the spree, he can still be satisfied with saying, "After all,
what is liberty? Man is a member of, etc., etc."

That is the problem, and that is why there is now no protection
against Eugenic or any other experiments. If the men who took away
beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the
lawful pleasures, there might be a different situation. If the men who
had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other
liberties, there might be some defence for them. But it never occurs
to them to admit any liberties at all. It never so much as crosses
their minds. Hence the excuse for the last oppression will always
serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny there can
be no end.

Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret
and sacred places of personal freedom, where no sane man ever dreamed
of seeing it; and especially the sanctuary of sex. It is as easy to
take away a man's wife or baby as to take away his beer when you can
say "What is liberty?"; just as it is as easy to cut off his head as
to cut off his hair if you are free to say "What is life?" There is no
rational philosophy of human rights generally disseminated among the
populace, to which we can appeal in defence even of the most intimate
or individual things that anybody can imagine. For so far as there was
a vague principle in these things, that principle has been wholly
changed. It used to be said that a man could have liberty, so long as
it did not interfere with the liberty of others. This did afford some
rough justification for the ordinary legal view of the man with the
pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of
distinction between beer and tea, on the ground that a man may be
moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head. And it
may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to
throw the tea-pot at anybody's head. But the whole ground of argument
is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to
others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking
the beer. The argument is based on health; and it is said that the
Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment
that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between
beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with
tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the
hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is
to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control
all the habits of all the citizens, and among the rest their habits in
the matter of sex.

But there is more than this. It is not only true that it is the last
liberties of man that are being taken away; and not merely his first
or most superficial liberties. It is also inevitable that the last
liberties should be taken first. It is inevitable that the most
private matters should be most under public coercion. This inverse
variation is very important, though very little realised. If a man's
personal health is a public concern, his most private acts are _more_
public than his most public acts. The official must deal _more_
directly with his cleaning his teeth in the morning than with his
using his tongue in the market-place. The inspector must interfere
_more_ with how he sleeps in the middle of the night than with how he
works in the course of the day. The private citizen must have much
_less_ to say about his bath or his bedroom window than about his vote
or his banking account. The policeman must be in a new sense a private
detective; and shadow him in private affairs rather than in public
affairs. A policeman must shut doors behind him for fear he should
sneeze, or shove pillows under him for fear he should snore. All this
and things far more fantastic follow from the simple formula that the
State must make itself responsible for the health of the citizen. But
the point is that the policeman must deal primarily and promptly with
the citizen in his relation to his home, and only indirectly and more
doubtfully with the citizen in his relation to his city. By the whole
logic of this test, the king must hear what is said in the inner
chamber and hardly notice what is proclaimed from the house-tops. We
have heard of a revolution that turns everything upside down. But
this is almost literally a revolution that turns everything inside
out.

If a wary reactionary of the tradition of Metternich had wished in the
nineteenth century to reverse the democratic tendency, he would
naturally have begun by depriving the democracy of its margin of more
dubious powers over more distant things. He might well begin, for
instance, by removing the control of foreign affairs from popular
assemblies; and there is a case for saying that a people may
understand its own affairs, without knowing anything whatever about
foreign affairs. Then he might centralise great national questions,
leaving a great deal of local government in local questions. This
would proceed so for a long time before it occurred to the blackest
terrorist of the despotic ages to interfere with a man's own habits in
his own house. But the new sociologists and legislators are, by the
nature of their theory, bound to begin where the despots leave off,
even if they leave off where the despots begin. For them, as they
would put it, the first things must be the very fountains of life,
love and birth and babyhood; and these are always covered fountains,
flowing in the quiet courts of the home. For them, as Mr. H.G. Wells
put it, life itself may be regarded merely as a tissue of births. Thus
they are coerced by their own rational principle to begin all coercion
at the other end; at the inside end. What happens to the outside end,
the external and remote powers of the citizen, they do not very much
care; and it is probable that the democratic institutions of recent
centuries will be allowed to decay in undisturbed dignity for a
century or two more. Thus our civilisation will find itself in an
interesting situation, not without humour; in which the citizen is
still supposed to wield imperial powers over the ends of the earth,
but has admittedly no power over his own body and soul at all. He will
still be consulted by politicians about whether opium is good for
China-men, but not about whether ale is good for him. He will be
cross-examined for his opinions about the danger of allowing Kamskatka
to have a war-fleet, but not about allowing his own child to have a
wooden sword. About all, he will be consulted about the delicate
diplomatic crisis created by the proposed marriage of the Emperor of
China, and not allowed to marry as he pleases.

Part of this prophecy or probability has already been accomplished;
the rest of it, in the absence of any protest, is in process of
accomplishment. It would be easy to give an almost endless catalogue
of examples, to show how, in dealing with the poorer classes at least,
coercion has already come near to a direct control of the relations of
the sexes. But I am much more concerned in this chapter to point out
that all these things have been adopted in principle, even where they
have not been adopted in practice. It is much more vital to realise
that the reformers have possessed themselves of a _principle_, which
will cover all such things if it be granted, and which is not
sufficiently comprehended to be contradicted. It is a principle
whereby the deepest things of flesh and spirit must have the most
direct relation with the dictatorship of the State. They must have it,
by the whole reason and rationale upon which the thing depends. It is
a system that might be symbolised by the telephone from headquarters
standing by a man's bed. He must have a relation to Government like
his relation to God. That is, the more he goes into the inner
chambers, and the more he closes the doors, the more he is alone with
the law. The social machinery which makes such a State uniform and
submissive will be worked outwards from the household as from a
handle, or a single mechanical knob or button. In a horrible sense,
loaded with fear and shame and every detail of dishonour, it will be
true to say that charity begins at home.

Charity will begin at home in the sense that all home children will be
like charity children. Philanthropy will begin at home, for all
householders will be like paupers. Police administration will begin at
home, for all citizens will be like convicts. And when health and the
humours of daily life have passed into the domain of this social
discipline, when it is admitted that the community must primarily
control the primary habits, when all law begins, so to speak, next to
the skin or nearest the vitals--then indeed it will appear absurd that
marriage and maternity should not be similarly ordered. Then indeed it
will seem to be illogical, and it will be illogical, that love should
be free when life has lost its freedom.

So passed, to all appearance, from the minds of men the strange dream
and fantasy called freedom. Whatever be the future of these
evolutionary experiments and their effect on civilisation, there is
one land at least that has something to mourn. For us in England
something will have perished which our fathers valued all the more
because they hardly troubled to name it; and whatever be the stars of
a more universal destiny, the great star of our night has set. The
English had missed many other things that men of the same origins had
achieved or retained. Not to them was given, like the French, to
establish eternal communes and clear codes of equality; not to them,
like the South Germans, to keep the popular culture of their songs;
not to them, like the Irish, was it given to die daily for a great
religion. But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced,
with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions, the way of a man who
wished to walk nameless and alone. It was not for nothing that they
forgot all their laws to remember the name of an outlaw, and filled
the green heart of England with the figure of Robin Hood. It was not
for nothing that even their princes of art and letters had about them
something of kings incognito, undiscovered by formal or academic fame;
so that no eye can follow the young Shakespeare as he came up the
green lanes from Stratford, or the young Dickens when he first lost
himself among the lights of London. It is not for nothing that the
very roads are crooked and capricious, so that a man looking down on
a map like a snaky labyrinth, could tell that he was looking on the
home of a wandering people. A spirit at once wild and familiar rested
upon its wood-lands like a wind at rest. If that spirit be indeed
departed, it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions
it had itself permitted, by monsters it had idly let loose.
Industrialism and Capitalism and the rage for physical science were
English experiments in the sense that the English lent themselves to
their encouragement; but there was something else behind them and
within them that was not they--its name was liberty, and it was our
life. It may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last
evaporated. If so, it matters little what becomes of the external
experiments of our nation in later time. That at which we look will be
a dead thing alive with its own parasites. The English will have
destroyed England.




CHAPTER VII

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM


Socialism is one of the simplest ideas in the world. It has always
puzzled me how there came to be so much bewilderment and
misunderstanding and miserable mutual slander about it. At one time I
agreed with Socialism, because it was simple. Now I disagree with
Socialism, because it is too simple. Yet most of its opponents still
seem to treat it, not merely as an iniquity but as a mystery of
iniquity, which seems to mystify them even more than it maddens them.
It may not seem strange that its antagonists should be puzzled about
what it is. It may appear more curious and interesting that its
admirers are equally puzzled. Its foes used to denounce Socialism as
Anarchy, which is its opposite. Its friends seemed to suppose that it
is a sort of optimism, which is almost as much of an opposite. Friends
and foes alike talked as if it involved a sort of faith in ideal human
nature; why I could never imagine. The Socialist system, in a more
special sense than any other, is founded not on optimism but on
original sin. It proposes that the State, as the conscience of the
community, should possess all primary forms of property; and that
obviously on the ground that men cannot be trusted to own or barter
or combine or compete without injury to themselves. Just as a State
might own all the guns lest people should shoot each other, so this
State would own all the gold and land lest they should cheat or
rackrent or exploit each other. It seems extraordinarily simple and
even obvious; and so it is. It is too obvious to be true. But while it
is obvious, it seems almost incredible that anybody ever thought it
optimistic.

I am myself primarily opposed to Socialism, or Collectivism or
Bolshevism or whatever we call it, for a primary reason not
immediately involved here: the ideal of property. I say the ideal and
not merely the idea; and this alone disposes of the moral mistake in
the matter. It disposes of all the dreary doubts of the
Anti-Socialists about men not yet being angels, and all the yet
drearier hopes of the Socialists about men soon being supermen. I do
not admit that private property is a concession to baseness and
selfishness; I think it is a point of honour. I think it is the most
truly popular of all points of honour. But this, though it has
everything to do with my plea for a domestic dignity, has nothing to
do with this passing summary of the situation of Socialism. I only
remark in passing that it is vain for the more vulgar sort of
Capitalist, sneering at ideals, to say to me that in order to have
Socialism "You must alter human nature." I answer "Yes. You must alter
it for the worse."

The clouds were considerably cleared away from the meaning of
Socialism by the Fabians of the 'nineties; by Mr. Bernard Shaw, a
sort of anti-romantic Quixote, who charged chivalry as chivalry
charged windmills, with Sidney Webb for his Sancho Panza. In so far as
these paladins had a castle to defend, we may say that their castle
was the Post Office. The red pillar-box was the immovable post against
which the irresistible force of Capitalist individualism was arrested.
Business men who said that nothing could be managed by the State were
forced to admit that they trusted all their business letters and
business telegrams to the State.

After all, it was not found necessary to have an office competing with
another office, trying to send out pinker postage-stamps or more
picturesque postmen. It was not necessary to efficiency that the
postmistress should buy a penny stamp for a halfpenny and sell it for
twopence; or that she should haggle and beat customers down about the
price of a postal order; or that she should always take tenders for
telegrams. There was obviously nothing actually impossible about the
State management of national needs; and the Post Office was at least
tolerably managed. Though it was not always a model employer, by any
means, it might be made so by similar methods. It was not impossible
that equitable pay, and even equal pay, could be given to the
Postmaster-General and the postman. We had only to extend this rule of
public responsibility, and we should escape from all the terror of
insecurity and torture of compassion, which hag-rides humanity in the
insane extremes of economic inequality and injustice. As Mr. Shaw put
it, "A man must save Society's honour before he can save his own."

That was one side of the argument: that the change would remove
inequality; and there was an answer on the other side. It can be
stated most truly by putting another model institution and edifice
side by side with the Post Office. It is even more of an ideal
republic, or commonwealth without competition or private profit. It
supplies its citizens not only with the stamps but with clothes and
food and lodging, and all they require. It observes considerable level
of equality in these things; notably in the clothes. It not only
supervises the letters but all the other human communications; notably
the sort of evil communications that corrupt good manners. This twin
model to the Post Office is called the Prison. And much of the scheme
for a model State was regarded by its opponents as a scheme for a
model prison; good because it fed men equally, but less acceptable
since it imprisoned them equally.

It is better to be in a bad prison than in a good one. From the
standpoint of the prisoner this is not at all a paradox; if only
because in a bad prison he is more likely to escape. But apart from
that, a man was in many ways better off in the old dirty and corrupt
prison, where he could bribe turnkeys to bring him drink and meet
fellow-prisoners to drink with. Now that is exactly the difference
between the present system and the proposed system. Nobody worth
talking about respects the present system. Capitalism is a corrupt
prison. That is the best that can be said for Capitalism. But it is
something to be said for it; for a man is a little freer in that
corrupt prison than he would be in a complete prison. As a man can
find one jailer more lax than another, so he could find one employer
more kind than another; he has at least a choice of tyrants. In the
other case he finds the same tyrant at every turn. Mr. Shaw and other
rational Socialists have agreed that the State would be in practice
government by a small group. Any independent man who disliked that
group would find his foe waiting for him at the end of every road.

It may be said of Socialism, therefore, very briefly, that its friends
recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as
decreasing liberty. On the one hand it was said that the State could
provide homes and meals for all; on the other it was answered that
this could only be done by State officials who would inspect houses
and regulate meals. The compromise eventually made was one of the most
interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do
everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that
had ever been desired in it. Since it was supposed to gain equality at
the sacrifice of liberty, we proceeded to prove that it was possible
to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality. Indeed, there was not
the faintest attempt to gain equality, least of all economic equality.
But there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate
liberty, by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and
interferences. But it was not the Socialist State regulating those
whom it fed, like children or even like convicts. It was the
Capitalist State raiding those whom it had trampled and deserted in
every sort of den, like outlaws or broken men. It occurred to the
wiser sociologists that, after all, it would be easy to proceed more
promptly to the main business of bullying men, without having gone
through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them. After
all, it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build
it; it was even possible, with luck, to inspect the house in time to
prevent it being built. All that is described in the documents of the
Housing Problem; for the people of this age loved problems and hated
solutions. It was easy to restrict the diet without providing the
dinner. All that can be found in the documents of what is called
Temperance Reform.

In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the
good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the
bad. All that official discipline, about which the Socialists
themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over
bodily by the Capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic
tyrannies of a Socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a
Capitalist State. For the vital point is that it did not in the
smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a Capitalist State. It
simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its
victims. It did not enable any man to build a better house; it only
limited the houses he might live in--or how he might manage to live
there; forbidding him to keep pigs or poultry or to sell beer or
cider. It did not even add anything to a man's wages; it only took
away something from a man's wages and locked it up, whether he liked
it or not, in a sort of money-box which was regarded as a
medicine-chest. It does not send food into the house to feed the
children; it only sends an inspector into the house to punish the
parents for having no food to feed them. It does not see that they
have got a fire; it only punishes them for not having a fireguard. It
does not even occur to it to provide the fireguard.

Now this anomalous situation will probably ultimately evolve into the
Servile State of Mr. Belloc's thesis. The poor will sink into slavery;
it might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery.
That is to say, sooner or later, it is very probable that the rich
will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the
bargain; and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like
outlaws. But for the purpose of my own argument it is not necessary to
carry the process so far as this, or indeed any farther than it has
already gone. The purely negative stage of interference, at which we
have stuck for the present, is in itself quite favourable to all these
eugenical experiments. The capitalist whose half-conscious thought and
course of action I have simplified into a story in the preceding
chapters, finds this insufficient solution quite sufficient for his
purposes. What he has felt for a long time is that he must check or
improve the reckless and random breeding of the submerged race, which
is at once outstripping his requirements and failing to fulfil his
needs. Now the anomalous situation has already accustomed him to
stopping things. The first interferences with sex need only be
negative; and there are already negative interferences without number.
So that the study of this stage of Socialism brings us to the same
conclusion as that of the ideal of liberty as formally professed by
Liberalism. The ideal of liberty is lost, and the ideal of Socialism
is changed, till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor.

The first movements for intervention in the deepest domestic concerns
of the poor all had this note of negative interference. Official
papers were sent round to the mothers in poor streets; papers in which
a total stranger asked these respectable women questions which a man
would be killed for asking, in the class of what were called gentlemen
or in the countries of what were called free men. They were questions
supposed to refer to the conditions of maternity; but the point is
here that the reformers did not begin by building up those economic or
material conditions. They did not attempt to pay money or establish
property to create those conditions. They never give anything--except
orders. Another form of the intervention, and one already mentioned,
is the kidnapping of children upon the most fantastic excuses of sham
psychology. Some people established an apparatus of tests and trick
questions; which might make an amusing game of riddles for the family
fireside, but seems an insufficient reason for mutilating and
dismembering the family. Others became interested in the hopeless
moral condition of children born in the economic condition which they
did not attempt to improve. They were great on the fact that crime was
a disease; and carried on their criminological studies so successfully
as to open the reformatory for little boys who played truant; there
was no reformatory for reformers. I need not pause to explain that
crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

Finally one thing may be added which is at least clear. Whether or no
the organisation of industry will issue positively in a eugenical
reconstruction of the family, it has already issued negatively, as in
the negations already noted, in a partial destruction of it. It took
the form of a propaganda of popular divorce, calculated at least to
accustom the masses to a new notion of the shifting and re-grouping of
families. I do not discuss the question of divorce here, as I have
done elsewhere, in its intrinsic character; I merely note it as one of
these negative reforms which have been substituted for positive
economic equality. It was preached with a weird hilarity, as if the
suicide of love were something not only humane but happy. But it need
not be explained, and certainly it need not be denied, that the
harassed poor of a diseased industrialism were indeed maintaining
marriage under every disadvantage, and often found individual relief
in divorce. Industrialism does produce many unhappy marriages, for the
same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms
were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness.
Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided.
Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of
sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with
the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest
promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and
gathering the tares into the barn. And since the serpent coiled about
the chalice had dropped his poison in the wine of Cana, analysts were
instantly active in the effort to preserve the poison and to pour away
the wine.




CHAPTER VIII

THE END OF THE HOUSEHOLD GODS


The only place where it is possible to find an echo of the mind of the
English masses is either in conversation or in comic songs. The latter
are obviously the more dubious; but they are the only things recorded
and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular
Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing;
but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper
leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the
Press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely
interested; such as horse-racing. Sometimes the Press is about as
popular as the Press Gang. We talk of Labour leaders in Parliament;
but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked like
labourers. The Bolshevists, I believe, profess to promote something
that they call "proletarian art," which only shows that the word
Bolshevism can sometimes be abbreviated into bosh. That sort of
Bolshevist is not a proletarian, but rather the very thing he accuses
everybody else of being. The Bolshevist is above all a bourgeois; a
Jewish intellectual of the town. And the real case against industrial
intellectualism could hardly be put better than in this very
comparison. There has never been such a thing as proletarian art; but
there has emphatically been such a thing as peasant art. And the only
literature which even reminds us of the real tone and talk of the
English working classes is to be found in the comic song of the
English music-hall.

I first heard one of them on my voyage to America, in the midst of the
sea within sight of the New World, with the Statue of Liberty
beginning to loom up on the horizon. From the lips of a young Scotch
engineer, of all people in the world, I heard for the first time these
immortal words from a London music-hall song:--

    "Father's got the sack from the water-works
      For smoking of his old cherry-briar;
    Father's got the sack from the water-works
      'Cos he might set the water-works on fire."

As I told my friends in America, I think it no part of a patriot to
boast; and boasting itself is certainly not a thing to boast of. I
doubt the persuasive power of English as exemplified in Kipling, and
one can easily force it on foreigners too much, even as exemplified in
Dickens. I am no Imperialist, and only on rare and proper occasions a
Jingo. But when I hear those words about Father and the water-works,
when I hear under far-off foreign skies anything so gloriously English
as that, then indeed (I said to them), then indeed:--

    "I thank the goodness and the grace
      That on my birth have smiled,
    And made me, as you see me here,
      A little English child."

But that noble stanza about the water-works has other elements of
nobility besides nationality. It provides a compact and almost perfect
summary of the whole social problem in industrial countries like
England and America. If I wished to set forth systematically the
elements of the ethical and economic problem in Pittsburg or
Sheffield, I could not do better than take these few words as a text,
and divide them up like the heads of a sermon. Let me note the points
in some rough fashion here.

1.--_Father._ This word is still in use among the more ignorant and
ill-paid of the industrial community; and is the badge of an old
convention or unit called the family. A man and woman having vowed to
be faithful to each other, the man makes himself responsible for all
the children of the woman, and is thus generically called "Father." It
must not be supposed that the poet or singer is necessarily one of the
children. It may be the wife, called by the same ritual "Mother." Poor
English wives say "Father" as poor Irish wives say "Himself," meaning
the titular head of the house. The point to seize is that among the
ignorant this convention or custom still exists. Father and the family
are the foundations of thought; the natural authority still comes
natural to the poet; but it is overlaid and thwarted with more
artificial authorities; the official, the schoolmaster, the
policeman, the employer, and so on. What these forces fighting the
family are we shall see, my dear brethren, when we pass to our second
heading; which is:--

2.--_Got the Sack._ This idiom marks a later stage of the history of
the language than the comparatively primitive word "Father." It is
needless to discuss whether the term comes from Turkey or some other
servile society. In America they say that Father has been fired. But
it involves the whole of the unique economic system under which Father
has now to live. Though assumed by family tradition to be a master, he
can now, by industrial tradition, only be a particular kind of
servant; a servant who has not the security of a slave. If he owned
his own shop and tools, he could not get the sack. If his master owned
him, he could not get the sack. The slave and the guildsman know where
they will sleep every night; it was only the proletarian of
individualist industrialism who could get the sack, if not in the
style of the Bosphorus, at least in the sense of the Embankment. We
pass to the third heading.

3.--_From the Water-works._ This detail of Father's life is very
important; for this is the reply to most of the Socialists, as the
last section is to so many of the Capitalists. The water-works which
employed Father is a very large, official and impersonal institution.
Whether it is technically a bureaucratic department or a big business
makes little or no change in the feelings of Father in connection with
it. The water-works might or might not be nationalised; and it would
make no necessary difference to Father being fired, and no difference
at all to his being accused of playing with fire. In fact, if the
Capitalists are more likely to give him the sack, the Socialists are
even more likely to forbid him the smoke. There is no freedom for
Father except in some sort of private ownership of things like water
and fire. If he owned his own well his water could never be cut off,
and while he sits by his own fire his pipe can never be put out. That
is the real meaning of property, and the real argument against
Socialism; probably the only argument against Socialism.

4.--_For Smoking._ Nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of
industrialism more strangely than the fact that, while employers still
claim the right to sack him like a stranger, they are already
beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son. Economically
he can go and starve on the Embankment; but ethically and hygienically
he must be controlled and coddled in the nursery. Government
repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets bread. But it
anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get
beer. It passes an Insurance Act to force him to provide himself with
medicine; but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to
provide himself with meals. Thus while the sack is inconsistent with
the family, the supervision is really inconsistent with the sack. The
whole thing is a tangled chain of contradictions. It is true that in
the special and sacred text of scripture we are here considering, the
smoking is forbidden on a general and public and not on a medicinal
and private ground. But it is none the less relevant to remember that,
as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison, they may
soon prove that nicotine is a poison. And it is most significant of
all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new
democracy of America than in what is called the old oligarchy of
England. When I was in America, people were already "defending"
tobacco. People who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that
daylight is defensible, or that it is not really sinful to sneeze. In
other words, they are quietly going mad.

5.--_Of his old Cherry-briar._ Here we have the intermediate and
anomalous position of the institution of Property. The sentiment still
exists, even among the poor, or perhaps especially among the poor. But
it is attached to toys rather than tools; to the minor products rather
than to the means of production. But something of the sanity of
ownership is still to be observed; for instance, the element of custom
and continuity. It was an _old_ cherry-briar; systematically smoked by
Father in spite of all wiles and temptations to Woodbines and gaspers;
an old companion possibly connected with various romantic or diverting
events in Father's life. It is perhaps a relic as well as a trinket.
But because it is not a true tool, because it gives the man no grip on
the creative energies of society, it is, with all the rest of his
self-respect, at the mercy of the thing called the sack. When he gets
the sack from the water-works, it is only too probable that he will
have to pawn his old cherry-briar.

6.--_'Cos he might set the water-works on fire._ And that single line,
like the lovely single lines of the great poets, is so full, so final,
so perfect a picture of all the laws we pass and all the reasons we
give for them, so exact an analysis of the logic of all our
precautions at the present time, that the pen falls even from the
hands of the commentator; and the masterpiece is left to speak for
itself.

Some such analysis as the above gives a better account than most of
the anomalous attitude and situation of the English proletarian
to-day. It is the more appropriate because it is expressed in the
words he actually uses; which certainly do not include the word
"proletarian." It will be noted that everything that goes to make up
that complexity is in an unfinished state. Property has not quite
vanished; slavery has not quite arrived; marriage exists under
difficulties; social regimentation exists under restraints, or rather
under subterfuges. The question which remains is which force is
gaining on the other, and whether the old forces are capable of
resisting the new. I hope they are; but I recognise that they resist
under more than one heavy handicap. The chief of these is that the
family feeling of the workmen is by this time rather an instinct than
an ideal. The obvious thing to protect an ideal is a religion. The
obvious thing to protect the ideal of marriage is the Christian
religion. And for various reasons, which only a history of England
could explain (though it hardly ever does), the working classes of
this country have been very much cut off from Christianity. I do not
dream of denying, indeed I should take every opportunity of affirming,
that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on
rational apart from religious grounds. But a religion is the practical
protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to
be pugnacious. And our ideal, if it is to survive, will have to be
both.

Those who make merry over the landlady who has seen better days, of
whom something has been said already, commonly speak, in the same
jovial journalese, about her household goods as her household gods.
They would be much startled if they discovered how right they are.
Exactly what is lacking to the modern materialist is something that
can be what the household gods were to the ancient heathen. The
household gods of the heathen were not only wood and stone; at least
there is always more than that in the stone of the hearth-stone and
the wood of the roof-tree. So long as Christianity continued the
tradition of patron saints and portable relics, this idea of a
blessing on the household could continue. If men had not domestic
divinities, at least they had divine domesticities. When Christianity
was chilled with Puritanism and rationalism, this inner warmth or
secret fire in the house faded on the hearth. But some of the embers
still glow or at least glimmer; and there is still a memory among the
poor that their material possessions are something sacred. I know poor
men for whom it is the romance of their lives to refuse big sums of
money for an old copper warming-pan. They do not want it, in any sense
of base utility. They do not use it as a warming-pan; but it warms
them for all that. It is indeed, as Sergeant Buzfuz humorously
observed, a cover for hidden fire. And the fire is that which burned
before the strange and uncouth wooden gods, like giant dolls, in the
huts of ancient Italy. It is a household god. And I can imagine some
such neglected and unlucky English man dying with his eyes on the red
gleam of that piece of copper, as happier men have died with their
eyes on the golden gleam of a chalice or a cross.

It will thus be noted that there has always been some connection
between a mystical belief and the materials of domesticity; that they
generally go together; and that now, in a more mournful sense, they
are gone together. The working classes have no reserves of property
with which to defend their relics of religion. They have no religion
with which to sanctify and dignify their property. Above all, they are
under the enormous disadvantage of being right without knowing it.
They hold their sound principles as if they were sullen prejudices.
They almost secrete their small property as if it were stolen
property. Often a poor woman will tell a magistrate that she sticks to
her husband, with the defiant and desperate air of a wanton resolved
to run away from her husband. Often she will cry as hopelessly, and
as it were helplessly, when deprived of her child as if she were a
child deprived of her doll. Indeed, a child in the street, crying for
her lost doll, would probably receive more sympathy than she does.

Meanwhile the fun goes on; and many such conflicts are recorded, even
in the newspapers, between heart-broken parents and house-breaking
philanthropists; always with one issue, of course. There are any
number of them that never get into the newspapers. And we have to be
flippant about these things as the only alternative to being rather
fierce; and I have no desire to end on a note of universal ferocity. I
know that many who set such machinery in motion do so from motives of
sincere but confused compassion, and many more from a dull but not
dishonourable medical or legal habit. But if I and those who agree
with me tend to some harshness and abruptness of condemnation, these
worthy people need not be altogether impatient with our impatience. It
is surely beneath them, in the scope of their great schemes, to
complain of protests so ineffectual about wrongs so individual. I have
considered in this chapter the chances of general democratic defence
of domestic honour, and have been compelled to the conclusion that
they are not at present hopeful; and it is at least clear that we
cannot be founding on them any personal hopes. If this conclusion
leaves us defeated, we submit that it leaves us disinterested. Ours is
not the sort of protest, at least, that promises anything even to the
demagogue, let alone the sycophant. Those we serve will never rule,
and those we pity will never rise. Parliament will never be surrounded
by a mob of submerged grandmothers brandishing pawn-tickets. There is
no trade union of defective children. It is not very probable that
modern government will be overturned by a few poor dingy devils who
are sent to prison by mistake, or rather by ordinary accident. Surely
it is not for those magnificent Socialists, or those great reformers
and reconstructors of Capitalism, sweeping onward to their scientific
triumphs and caring for none of these things, to murmur at our vain
indignation. At least if it is vain it is the less venal; and in so
far as it is hopeless it is also thankless. They have their great
campaigns and cosmopolitan systems for the regimentation of millions,
and the records of science and progress. They need not be angry with
us, who plead for those who will never read our words or reward our
effort, even with gratitude. They need surely have no worse mood
towards us than mystification, seeing that in recalling these small
things of broken hearts or homes, we are but recording what cannot be
recorded; trivial tragedies that will fade faster and faster in the
flux of time, cries that fail in a furious and infinite wind, wild
words of despair that are written only upon running water; unless,
indeed, as some so stubbornly and strangely say, they are somewhere
cut deep into a rock, in the red granite of the wrath of God.




CHAPTER IX

A SHORT CHAPTER


Round about the year 1913 Eugenics was turned from a fad to a fashion.
Then, if I may so summarise the situation, the joke began in earnest.
The organising mind which we have seen considering the problem of slum
population, the popular material and the possibility of protests, felt
that the time had come to open the campaign. Eugenics began to appear
in big headlines in the daily Press, and big pictures in the
illustrated papers. A foreign gentleman named Bolce, living at
Hampstead, was advertised on a huge scale as having every intention of
being the father of the Superman. It turned out to be a Superwoman,
and was called Eugenette. The parents were described as devoting
themselves to the production of perfect pre-natal conditions. They
"eliminated everything from their lives which did not tend towards
complete happiness." Many might indeed be ready to do this; but in the
voluminous contemporary journalism on the subject I can find no
detailed notes about how it is done. Communications were opened with
Mr. H.G. Wells, with Dr. Saleeby, and apparently with Dr. Karl
Pearson. Every quality desired in the ideal baby was carefully
cultivated in the parents. The problem of a sense of humour was felt
to be a matter of great gravity. The Eugenist couple, naturally
fearing they might be deficient on this side, were so truly scientific
as to have resort to specialists. To cultivate a sense of fun, they
visited Harry Lauder, and then Wilkie Bard, and afterwards George
Robey; but all, it would appear, in vain. To the newspaper reader,
however, it looked as if the names of Metchnikoff and Steinmetz and
Karl Pearson would soon be quite as familiar as those of Robey and
Lauder and Bard. Arguments about these Eugenic authorities, reports of
the controversies at the Eugenic Congress, filled countless columns.
The fact that Mr. Bolce, the creator of perfect pre-natal conditions,
was afterwards sued in a law-court for keeping his own flat in
conditions of filth and neglect, cast but a slight and momentary
shadow upon the splendid dawn of the science. It would be vain to
record any of the thousand testimonies to its triumph. In the nature
of things, this should be the longest chapter in the book, or rather
the beginning of another book. It should record, in numberless
examples, the triumphant popularisation of Eugenics in England. But as
a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last. And this
must be a very short chapter, because the whole of this story was cut
short. A very curious thing happened. England went to war.

This would in itself have been a sufficiently irritating interruption
in the early life of Eugenette, and in the early establishment of
Eugenics. But a far more dreadful and disconcerting fact must be
noted. With whom, alas, did England go to war? England went to war
with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very
land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had
come. She went to war with the whole of Dr. Steinmetz, and presumably
with at least half of Dr. Karl Pearson. She gave battle to the
birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of
the new hope of humanity. In a few weeks the very name of a professor
was a matter for hissing and low plebeian mirth. The very name of
Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to
humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched
with lunacy. A new mood came upon the whole people; a mood of
marching, of spontaneous soldierly vigilance and democratic
discipline, moving to the faint tune of bugles far away. Men began to
talk strangely of old and common things, of the counties of England,
of its quiet landscapes, of motherhood and the half-buried religion of
the race. Death shone on the land like a new daylight, making all
things vivid and visibly dear. And in the presence of this awful
actuality it seemed, somehow or other, as if even Mr. Bolce and the
Eugenic baby were things unaccountably far-away and almost, if one may
say so, funny.

Such a revulsion requires explanation, and it may be briefly given.
There was a province of Europe which had carried nearer to perfection
than any other the type of order and foresight that are the subject
of this book. It had long been the model State of all those more
rational moralists who saw in science the ordered salvation of
society. It was admittedly ahead of all other States in social reform.
All the systematic social reforms were professedly and proudly
borrowed from it. Therefore when this province of Prussia found it
convenient to extend its imperial system to the neighbouring and
neutral State of Belgium, all these scientific enthusiasts had a
privilege not always granted to mere theorists. They had the
gratification of seeing their great Utopia at work, on a grand scale
and very close at hand. They had not to wait, like other evolutionary
idealists, for the slow approach of something nearer to their dreams;
or to leave it merely as a promise to posterity. They had not to wait
for it as for a distant thing like the vision of a future state; but
in the flesh they had seen their Paradise. And they were very silent
for five years.

The thing died at last, and the stench of it stank to the sky. It
might be thought that so terrible a savour would never altogether
leave the memories of men; but men's memories are unstable things. It
may be that gradually these dazed dupes will gather again together,
and attempt again to believe their dreams and disbelieve their eyes.
There may be some whose love of slavery is so ideal and disinterested
that they are loyal to it even in its defeat. Wherever a fragment of
that broken chain is found, they will be found hugging it. But there
are limits set in the everlasting mercy to him who has been once
deceived and a second time deceives himself. They have seen their
paragons of science and organisation playing their part on land and
sea; showing their love of learning at Louvain and their love of
humanity at Lille. For a time at least they have believed the
testimony of their senses. And if they do not believe now, neither
would they believe though one rose from the dead; though all the
millions who died to destroy Prussianism stood up and testified
against it.




INDEX


Abnormal innocence and abnormal sin, alliance between, 4

Abortion, open advocacy of, 138

Affinity as a bar to marriage, 8

Altruism, remarks on, 111

Anarchy, definition of, 22, 23
  the opposite of Socialism, 159

Anglican Church, the, and question of disestablishment, 75

Aristocratic marriages, Eugenists and, 139 _et seq._

Atheistic literary style, the, 46

Authority versus Reason, 132

Autocrats, Eugenists as, 15


Belloc, Mr., and the Servile State, 21, 165
  rebuked by _The Nation_, 122

Blücher, Marshal, an alleged saying of, 124

Bolce, Mr., the super-Eugenist, 180, 181

Bolshevists, and "proletarian art," 169

Brummell, Mr., vanity of, 96

Burglary, punishment for, 36


Calvinism, immorality of, 126, 127
  in the Middle Ages, 92

Calvinists and the doctrine of free-will, 52

Capitalists, and workmen, 133
  Socialists and, 47

Casuists, Eugenists as, 14

Catholic countries, and the drink traffic, 122

Celtic sadness, and the desolation of Belfast, 121

Chesterton, G.K., and Socialism, 159 _et seq._
  on H.G. Wells, 69
  rebuked by _The Nation_, 122

Children, and non-eugenic unions, 7
  cruelty to: punishment for, 26-7

Christian conception of rebellion, the, 22, 23

Christian religion as protector of the ideal of marriage, 175

Christian serf, how he differed from a pagan slave, 102

Christianity, and freedom, 10

Church teaching, compulsory, 75

Church, the, and question of disestablishment, 75

"Class War, the," and Socialists, 47

Coercion, and control of sex-relationship, 155

Comic songs, and a sermon thereon, 169 _et seq._

Compulsion, and sexual selection, 14, 155

Compulsory education, 95
  vaccination, 77

Concordat, the, and the independence of the Roman Church, 75

Criminals, difference between lunatics and, 34, 35
  proposed vivisection of, 79
  punishment of, 25 _et seq._, 35 _et seq._

Criminology as a disease, 167

Cruelty to children, punishment for, 26-7


Delusions, concrete and otherwise, 32 _et seq._

Disestablishment, author's views on, 75

Doctors, as health advisers of the community, 55, 58
  limits to their knowledge, 57


Education, compulsory, 95

Endeavourers, the, 17

English proletarians, anomalous attitude of, 175

Establishment, author's views on, 75 _et seq._

Ethics, as opposed to Eugenics, 7

Eugenic Law, the first, and negative Eugenics, 19, 28

Eugenic State, beginning of the, 19

Eugenics and employment, 141
  author's conception of, 12
  becomes a fashion, 180
  beginning of, 125
  different meanings of, 4
  essence of, 4
  first principle of, 38
  general definition of, 10
  meanness of the motive of, 136 _et seq._, 146
  moral basis of, 5
  the false theory of, 3 _et seq._
  the real aim of, 91 _et seq._
  versus Ethics, 7

Eugenist, true story of a, 114 _et seq._

Eugenists, and their new morality, 82
  as Casuists, 14
  as employers, 133, 137
  as Euphemists, 12
  their plutocratic impulses, 139 _et seq._
  Mr. Wells' challenge to, 70
  secret of what they really want, 73 _et seq._, 85

Euphemists, Eugenists as, 12


Fabians, and Socialism, 160

Feeble-Minded Bill, the, Eugenists and, 17, 18, 19, 20, 28, 51, 52

Feeble-mindedness, Dr. Saleeby on, 61
  hereditary, 62, 63

Flogging, revival of, 25

Foulon, and the French peasants, 103

Freedom, Christianity and, 10

Free-will disbelieved by Eugenists, 52


Game laws, English, result of the, 110, 112

Golf, a Scotch minister's opinion of, 117

Great War, the, outbreak of, and its effect on Eugenics, 181


Health, and what it is, 59
  Mr. Wells' views on inheritance of, 70, 85-6
  not necessarily allied with beauty, 144
  "Health adviser" of society, the, 55, 58

Hereditary diseases, and marriage, 44

Heredity, and feeble-mindedness, 62, 63
  author's conception of, 64
  incontestable proof of, 66
  three first facts of, 66-7
  unsatisfactory plight of students of, 66
  uselessness of attempting to judge, 39

Housebreaking, punishment for, 36

Household gods of the heathen, 176

Housing problem, the, 164

Hutchinson, Colonel and Mrs., the historic instance of, 7

Huth, A.H., an admission by, 50


Idealists (_see_ Autocrats)

Idiotcy, segregation of, 61

Imperialism, and its aims, 93

Imprisonment, the State and, 25

Incest, the crime of, 8, 9

Indeterminate sentence, the, instrument of, 35
  principle of, 37

Individualism, the experiment of, 130

Individualists, early Victorian, 118

Intervention, Socialistic movements of, 166

Irish peasants, T.P. O'Connor on, 144

Irishman in Liverpool, the, 121


Journalism and the Press of to-day, 73


Kindred and affinity, as a bar to marriage, 8


Law, the, and restrictions on sex, 10
  and the indeterminate sentence, 35
  and the lunatic, 31 _et seq._

Libel, definition of, 28
  loose extension of idea of, 27-8

Liberty and scepticism, 148
  the eclipse of, 149 _et seq._
  the Eugenist's view of, 16

Lodge, Sir Oliver, and "the stud farm," 13, 14

Lunacy, and Eugenic legislation, 17-20, 28, 29, 31 _et seq._
  medical specialists as judges of, 40, 41

Lunacy Law, the old, 38

Lunacy Laws, the, extension of principle of, 17

Lunatic, the, and the law, 31 _et seq._

Lunatics, difference between criminals and, 34, 35


Macdonald, George, and space co-incident, 34

Madman, a, definition of, 32

Madness, degrees of, 32
  medical specialists and, 40, 41
  the essence of, 44
  (_See also_ Lunacy)

Malthus, and his doctrine, 118

Mania, segregation of, 61

Marriage, and question of hereditary disease, 44
  the aim of, 5
  the Christian religion and, 175

Marriages, aristocratic, 139 _et seq._

Marxian Socialists, and Capitalists, 47

Materialism, as the established church, 77
  in speech, 46

Materialists, modern, 128

Medical specialists and madness, 40, 41

Mendicancy laws, result of the, 113

Metternich tradition, the, 154

Midas, 129

Middle Ages, the, 91 _et seq._

Midias, segregation of, 29

Monogamy, author's views on, 176

Morality, and restraints on sex, 8


Neisser, Dr., 79

Newspapers, anarchic tendency of modern, 26
  decadence of present-day, 73

Niagara, comparison of modern world with, 24

Nietzsche, 182

Non-eugenic unions, and children, 7


O'Connor, T.P., on the Irish peasants, 144

Oedipus, and his incestuous marriage, 8

Om, the formless god of the East, 48

_On_, meaning and use of the word, 48

Osborne, Dorothy, and Sir William Temple, 7


Pagan slave, the, difference between Christian serf and, 102

Pearson, Dr. Karl, 50, 65, 181

Peasant art, comic songs as an instance of, 170

Persecution, author's views on, 77 _et seq._

"Platonic friendship," 138

Politics in the Middle Ages, 92

Post Office, the State, 161
  twin model of, 162

Precedenters, the, 17

Press, the, criticisms of, 73, 169

Prevention not better than cure, 55

Preventive medicine, fallacy of, 55

Prison system, the, 162

Procreation, prevention of, 138

Profiteering, author on, 124

"Proletarian art," 169

Property, author's views on, 160

Punishment, extension of, 25

Puritanical moral stories, immorality of, 126


Realities, denial of, 33

Reason versus Authority, 132

Rebellion, Christian conception of, 23
  meaning of, 22

Reform and Repeal, 95

"Relations of the sexes," atheists and, 47

Religion in the Middle Ages, 92

Representative Government, the procedure of, 116

Rockefeller, Mr., 124

Russian Orthodox Church, the, and the State, 75


Saladin, Sultan, 100

Saleeby, Dr., 50
  and a "health-book," 58
  and feeble-mindedness, 61
  and heredity, 68

Saturnalia, the Roman, 24

Scepticism, reactionary, 148

Science and tyranny, 76

Scotland, Church of, 76

Scotland, drunkenness in, 122

Segregation of strong-minded people, a suggested, 51

Serf, the, different from pagan slave, 102

Servile State, the, Mr. Belloc's theory of, 21, 165

Sex-relationship, controlled by coercion, 155

Sexes, the, relations of, 47

Sexual selection a destruction of Eugenics, 9

Shaw, Bernard, 162
  and Sidney Webb, 161
  as Puritan, 69

Slaves, breeding of, 10

Slum children, Mrs. Alec Tweedie and, 143

Smiles, Dr. Samuel, and the English tramp, 119

Snobbishness, an inverted, 117

Socialism as oppressor of the poor, 166

Socialism, the transformation of, 159 _et seq._

Socialist system, foundation of the, 159

Socialists, and "solidarity," 46
  their view of the State, 163

Specialists (medical) and madness, 40, 41

Spiritual pride, an example of, 96

Spiritual world, the, author's belief in, 63

State, the, and compulsion, 14
  Socialist view of, 163

Statistics, fundamental fallacy in use of, 61

Steinmetz, Dr. R.S., 8, 181

Stevenson, R.L., and pre-natal conditions, 45


Temperance Reform, 164

Temple, Sir William, and Dorothy Osborne, 7

Tithes, question of, 75

Tory conception of anarchy, the, 22

Tramp, true history of a, 101 _et seq._

Truant schools. Socialists and, 167

Tweedie, Mrs. Alec, and the children of the slums, 143

Tyranny of government by Science, 76


Vaccination, compulsory, 77

Vanity, hereditary--and other, 62

Victorian Individualists, optimism of, 118
  snobbishness, 117


Wages, "rise and fall of," 47

Webb, Sidney, and Bernard Shaw, 161

Wells, H.G., 55, 154
  author's criticism of, 69-70
  his "Mankind in the Making," 70

White Slave traffic, punishment for, 25

Witchcraft, punishment for, 26

Witch-hunting and witch burning, 63, 64




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The Project Gutenberg EBook of What I Saw in America, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: What I Saw in America

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: November 13, 2008 [EBook #27250]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA ***




Produced by Irma Špehar, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)






WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the Edinburgh
University Press




_Contents_

                                    PAGE

WHAT IS AMERICA?                       1

A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL      19

A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY              33

IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS          47

SOME AMERICAN CITIES                  63

IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY               80

THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN             97

PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS              121

PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY        145

FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION              163

THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN           182

THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS          195

IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING?           208

LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES              222

WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE            235

A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT              253

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA                267

THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND                281

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY              295




_What is America?_


I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the
mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and
imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there
is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the
thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders,
embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead
or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what
they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant
for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond
that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather
an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be
inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw
dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the
abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as
those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the
fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar
manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in
fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if
men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand
each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment
when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a
meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers
are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame
them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a
Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are
wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it
their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the
Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising
foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff
and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in
international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too
much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely
consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is
actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the
only excuse of this book.

Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I
went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and when
taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle
is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is
foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong
because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits
of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly
healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity
can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind.
It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior
to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for
having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It
is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in
dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning
two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the
sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of
thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the
explanation of the joke.

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was
capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies
and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they
stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I
have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a
little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last
palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks
and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own
shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The
officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very
polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin
Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in
the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all
appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices.
But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up
in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game
called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an
examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros
in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember,
wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr.
Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an anarchist?' To which
a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'What
the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with some
playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an
[Greek: archê]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of
subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I
should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour
and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid
curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to
this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our
experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that
given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall
I slay my brother Boer?'--the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in
family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the
point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was
the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip
into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting
down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you
all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the
government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long
sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest
opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my
forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as
secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these
answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists
are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and
they are certain to tell no lies.

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign
problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have
I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly
entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it
incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as
incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The
very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking
about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and
that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough
to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit
of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the
ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something
to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of
officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the
year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which
many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and
assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled
by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one
wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether
I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit
the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of
civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not
care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have
minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a
polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in
the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire
into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of
practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to
argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern
despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the
fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the
American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the
traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something
to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the
remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to
unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique
and curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions,
but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable
advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, 'It is not much good thinking of a
thing unless you think it out.' It is not to deny that American
officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it
really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America.
In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America _is_; and the
answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander
and more worthy of our intelligent interest.

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the
American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it
does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a
compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish
Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only
nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth
with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of
Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also
theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all
men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give
them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It
certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn
atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority
from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern
political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,
and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim
is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about
divine, at least about human things.

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the
world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of
all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of
all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to
exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute
something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly
said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain
pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of
the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true
among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow
touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about
nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly
Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish.
Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be
broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was
heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And
we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for
making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in
a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the
same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment
of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a
melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a
certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The
melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of
Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it
becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it
implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so
far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious
because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal,
precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in
something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist,
precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have been theoretical,
though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great Virginian gentleman
declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character of
an English countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. There is
nothing to prevent America being literally invaded by Turks, as she is
invaded by Jews or Bulgars. In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the
_Bab Ballads_, we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben:--


     One morning knocked at half-past eight
     A tall Red Indian at his gate.
     In Turkey, as you 'r' p'raps aware,
     Red Indians are extremely rare.


But the converse need by no means be true. There is nothing in the
nature of things to prevent an emigration of Turks increasing and
multiplying on the plains where the Red Indians wandered; there is
nothing to necessitate the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians,
alas, are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians to Turks,
not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; but the point here is
that America, partly by original theory and partly by historical
accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would
think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any
American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a
rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those
who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never
met Turks except in the _Bab Ballads_. It is not fair simply to compare
America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is
not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at
the American international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied
with saying, 'We don't have any of that nonsense in England.'

We do not have any of that nonsense in England because we have never
attempted to have any of that philosophy in England. And, above all,
because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be
national, because there is nothing else to be. England in these days is
not well governed; England is not well educated; England suffers from
wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. But England is
English; _esto perpetua_. England is English as France is French or
Ireland Irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions
for granted. Now this gives us a totally different and a very much
easier task. We have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a
creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have
got a character. In any of the old nations the national unity is
preserved by the national type. Because we have a type we do not need to
have a test.

Take that innocent question, 'Are you an anarchist?' which is
intrinsically quite as impudent as 'Are you an optimist?' or 'Are you a
philanthropist?' I am not discussing here whether these things are
right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly.
Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go
about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. It is quite
true that the phrase occurs on no British forms that I have seen. But
this is not only because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It
is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. For instance,
it would be easy to make fun of the American formula by noting that the
cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. It might well be
maintained that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practically
certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. But Herbert Spencer was
an extraordinarily typical Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class.
And Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English aristocrat of
the old and genuine aristocracy. Every one knew in his heart that the
squire would not throw a bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would
not throw a bomb at anybody. Every one knew that there was something
subconscious in a man like Auberon Herbert, which would have come out
only in throwing bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in
his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging
bombs from the sky far beyond the German line. Every one knows that
normally, in the last resort, the English gentleman is patriotic. Every
one knows that the English Nonconformist is national even when he denies
that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that
nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who
says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the
International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden.
Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but
nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where
there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any
theories. Even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do
certain things. So the conscientious objector, in the English sense,
may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of England. But the
conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to
throwing bombs.

Now I am very far from intending to imply that these American tests are
good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the
temptation of America. I shall have something to say later on about that
temptation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply consistently this
conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious
and not racial selection. If they did apply that principle consistently,
they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the
democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. What I
say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see
the whole position in a totally different perspective. We say that the
Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or
doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply
wondering what the devil they are doing.

When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan
commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we
see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic.
We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. Any
one can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life
a problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by a
coincidence be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, 'Buffle, my
old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish you'd ask him down for a day
or two. He has the oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating.' It would
not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don's opinions would lead
him to blow up the house; because the Oxford don is an English type.
Suppose somebody said, 'Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down for
the week-end; he's a bit of a crank but quite interesting.' We should
not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and
offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the
daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we know his habits,
we do not care about his opinions. But suppose somebody offered to bring
a person from the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week or
two, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, we
should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it
was. If somebody wished to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at
Christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and
interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. We
should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that
presented to the emigrant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy
Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of Ainu he was.
Would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? And if we did
ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In short, as
in the American formula, is he a polygamist? Merely as a point of
housekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. Is the
Hairy Ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police
insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of the
police? In short, as in the American formula, is he an anarchist?

Of course this generalisation about America, like other historical
things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to
be considered in their place. The negroes are a special problem, because
of what white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are a special
problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to
white men. The Jews are a special problem, because of what they and the
Gentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of
doing to each other. But the point is not that nothing exists in America
except this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere
except in America. This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it
is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to
make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of
making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In
a word, what is unique is not America but what is called
Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing
ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not
trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders.
France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or
German prisoners of war. America is the one place in the world where
this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on.
And the process, as I have pointed out, is _not_ internationalisation.
It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the
internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out
of exiles. This is what at once illuminates and softens the moral
regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. They are
abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is
abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that America was an
asylum. It is only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a
lunatic asylum.

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that I stood with the
official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. It was while I
stood on English soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling
and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at
being asked if I were not an Anarchist, was partly due to the fact that
I was not an American. And in truth I think there are some things a man
ought to know about America before he sees it. What we know of a country
beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally
affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect
what we expect it to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected
America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably
assume it to be. I never thought it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony,
knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different
colonists. During the war I felt that the very worst propaganda for the
Allies was the propaganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out
that in one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. If she is
not nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer
to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head
waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the
grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the
street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to
persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a
rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and
had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some
of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and
which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he does
not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr.
Belloc has called 'Eye-Openers in Travel.' But there are some things
about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is
that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and
abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of
the British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of the
Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from
the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists
have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging,
that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing
called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly
people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought.
And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are
accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional
teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classic
conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen,
and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means
especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to the
virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The
idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not been
primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we
may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his
romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider
in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape
the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is
besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in
the industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by modern
capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of
all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American
ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there
is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got
itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American
ideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an
ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an
Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of
moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see
a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as
much as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than he
admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to
develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He
may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may
possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He
may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men
being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe
but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by
which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity
as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that
equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics
who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in
tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with
unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme
disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of
changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and
distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find
him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay.
It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;
it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when
men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate
experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and
daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it
in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their
flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the
fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose
ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as
well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our
skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever
the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.




_A Meditation in a New York Hotel_


All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went
wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware
that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in
the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American
audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is
rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather
melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not
to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb
and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself
on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a
monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a
speech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed
to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and
perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to
circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the
great elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare
myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a
considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But if
he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo,
it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its
version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that
lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and
country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to
our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in
anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the
elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a
special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the
territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the
spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example
of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all,
I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are
insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my
impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with
which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They
may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they
do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was
there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the
wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if one
may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the
structure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloons
were not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder even
for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a
very different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests or
when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the
American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not
feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking
Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice
to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not
doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a
specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-places
were used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the great
reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as
drinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of
Prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the
saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are the
hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels
covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a
mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not
inns.

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it,
which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from
each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel
rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of Nebraska, or
whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And
before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark
that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the
interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like
another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, or
hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a
green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may
be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and
flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering
habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked
landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they
call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic
multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to
suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once
myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be
prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)
by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like
it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as
altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and
found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my
phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to
some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to
Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Green
of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for the
unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New York
and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences.
Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red
Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently
unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being
quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent
of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the
two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The
original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked
into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted
and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a
certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;
because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of
machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only
talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But
I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the
New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is that
far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying
and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there
is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors
exactly the same.

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and,
as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first
went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was
certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how
many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had
built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such
things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as
public streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression was
that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival
or a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution
and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds
that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway
station. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not
possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to
dine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except
drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with
the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in
Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big
hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe
that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy
in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the
other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the
American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible.
The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and
treated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs another
floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously
and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed on this
floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. As I have been one of
them myself, I trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active
anthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds
or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. Of course there
are modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generally
approximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social life
of the American cities. There is generally something like a ground floor
that is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private,
and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its
innumerable and identical cells.

The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it is
called, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and
hurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do
to linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in
their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discuss
elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say
automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or
sometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me of
another story that never existed, about a man who was accused of having
murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing
machine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. The
Americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles
to the lift. When first I came among them I had a suspicion that they
possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of
the elevator. I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate
worshipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion it were
now vain to collect, as I have regretfully abandoned it, except in so
far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural
plan of the building. Now an American gentleman invariably takes off his
hat in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it
is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a lady in the elevator;
and this marks the difference of atmosphere. The lift is a room, but the
hotel is a street. But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed
that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church.
There is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great
deal of his vague but idealistic religion. Perhaps that flying chapel
will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possibly
with a symbolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service will
be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words
touching the Utmost for the Highest. Possibly he would consent even to
call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. There would be
no difficulty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral
problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the difficulty of imagining
a lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down.

I think I know my American friends and acquaintances too well to
apologise for any levity in these illustrations. Americans make fun of
their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such
fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to
the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an
American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and
sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern
of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern
of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and humane custom to have a
bathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praises
of it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I
think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember there was a
Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very
patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and
doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. I was
interviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have
been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after
answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the
length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a
rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The
editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his
contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as
justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and
the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye
brightened. 'That's the only copy in the whole thing,' he said, 'A
Bath-Tub in Every Home.' So these words appeared in enormous letters
above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things
that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I
had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even
feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional
bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I
discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my
portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial
advertisement, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial
traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was supposed to be
travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption of the portrait, and you
will see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: 'We offer a
Bath-Tub in Every Home.' And this charming error was doubtless clinched
by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer courts of the
temple of the ancient Guild of Lavenders. I never knew how many shared
the impression; I regret to say that I only traced it with certainty in
two individuals. But I understand that it included the idea that I had
come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, and had made an
eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs.

Such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admiration
for American bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, however
inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these
American institutions can really be praised. About everything like
laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but what
does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. Americans are
particular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue
which I very seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate.
But with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less a
mere fashion. It is really related to human dignity rather than to
social superiority. The really glorious thing about the American is that
he does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a
civilised man. His Puritanic particularity on certain points is really
detachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not a
part of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery.
Those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class
especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to any aristocracy
even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards
are secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe
in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter
recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub
of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times
better than efficiency, and that is something like equality.

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is American. In some
respects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it is
symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend
too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a
little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a
nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might
very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with
a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it is
arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and
sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The
whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb
and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman
would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a
list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do not
sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all is
said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should
be gigantic as well as generous.

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the
pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures
running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the
groups where there was no hustle there was often something of
homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;
but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at
their favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the
room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I
could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of
St. George's Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and
read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were
allowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and there
may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels
without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. I
felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where people
liked to have their meals in peace.

The process of the summons is called 'paging,' and consists of sending a
little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the
building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of
course, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a mere
whisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats the
formula of 'Calling Mr. So and So.' I remember a particularly crowded
_parterre_ in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg,
through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I have
never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost
spirit, saying again and again for ever, 'Carling Mr. Anderson.' One
felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been
any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in
an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out
of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with
shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my
philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may
frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful
industrial civilisation.

Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained
by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting
crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of
something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually
tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so
much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations
with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something
unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for
the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the
fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future.

Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing
is really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in
new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been
wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over
the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and my
thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that
stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English
inns. We talk of experimenting in the French café, as of some fresh and
almost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French café, in the
sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only difference
was that French democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiply
its tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth.
Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the
old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint
that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of
something very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to
float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in
one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am
looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn.
This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one
of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in
England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque
comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to
Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in
bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis.
The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard,
and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the
roof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and
the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some
day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude
like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the
Blue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a
tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor,
with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the
lift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as
part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer
be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will
only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern
plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the
structure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after
long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows
inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like
thunder; of D'Artagnan knocking at the door.




_A Meditation in Broadway_


When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my
American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse
them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of
coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks,
advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the
two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I
said to them, in my simplicity, 'What a glorious garden of wonders this
would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.'

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that
there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called
scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on
people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who
read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this
principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little
practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing
vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to
criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out
the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the
sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns
and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the
land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of
its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary
signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher
than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway.
Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity,
worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please
himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic
hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a
comet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons
fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for
'Government of the People, For the People, By the People'; for it must
obviously be that, unless it were 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' His
shrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad
stood for 'Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; Tang Tonic All the
Time.' He will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot
and rebellious, as the saying, 'Give me liberty or give me death.' He
will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, 'Skyoline Has
Gout Beaten to a Frazzle.' Therefore it was that I desired the peasant
to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage,
and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the Fall.
He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple
and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the
Tree of Knowledge.

In other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeed
I fear in any case he would soon discover his error. If he stood wildly
waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney
picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede the
excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of New York. If he fell on
his knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria
under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by
an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. But though the foreign
simplicity might not long survive in New York, it is quite a mistake to
suppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be
excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being
ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of all can he be excluded for
being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. There is
here indeed more than one distinction to be made. New York is a
cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. Most of the
masses in New York have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to
which New York belongs. Those who are Americanised are American, and
very patriotically American. Those who are not thus nationalised are not
in the least internationalised. They simply continue to be themselves;
the Irish are Irish; the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes
carry on the traditions of remote European valleys almost untouched. In
short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and
their new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they
seldom simply occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens; there is no
moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often the exiles bring with
them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths.

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in
crude American garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of New York.
In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian;
and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already
protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry
of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American
friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical
sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might
be expected to say, 'I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian
habits lately,' or 'Don't bother to dress; it's quite a Czecho-Slovakian
affair.' Anyhow my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense;
he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms
of America, which were both favourable and unfavourable. He was a squat
man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like
dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but I do not think he had
ever been deceived by the lights of Broadway.

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant
among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. He was a
much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce
black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a
waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. As he
was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech
with him and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, 'I'm
afraid I don't know as much as I ought to about Bulgaria. I suppose most
of your people are agricultural, aren't they?' He did not stir an inch
from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and
said, 'Yes. From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when
people get away from that they are lost.'

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life
of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. To see him clear away the
clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an
automaton or like nothing on earth except an American waiter (for piling
up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having
uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so
startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture
of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he passed, with his artificial
clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the
hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart
was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words
were carved as on a rock.

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this
raises about the Americanisation of the Bulgar. It has many aspects, of
some of which most Englishmen and even some Americans are rather
unconscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could
not be Americanised in New York; but it is not so certain that he could
not be Americanised in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is
hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impressions go, it is a
secret. It is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square
miles of open prairie. But for most of our countrymen it is something
invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all
those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is
there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently
equalised property, as in a peasantry. On the other hand, there are
those who say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he only
comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford to return to be a
peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide this issue, and indeed I did not
introduce it to this end. I was led to it by a certain line of
reflection that runs along the Great White Way, and I will continue to
follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers
more than New York but more than the whole New World. Any argument
against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of
the Old World, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or Belfast. But
it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see
the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own
fireworks.

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its
sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty
and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the
truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Salvation Army doubtless
had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, I pointed out
that the very contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums and
democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or any other march of the
Church Militant. It was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their
dissenting morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same with
things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me to
mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and
ugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am
strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art's
sake, they seem to me rather artistic. As a form of practical social
work they seem to me stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich enough to
build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden
crescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to his
manufacture of the Paradise Tooth Paste or The Seventh Heaven Cigar, I
do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of
social service. I have never tried the Seventh Heaven Cigar; indeed a
premonition moves me towards the belief that I shall go down to the dust
without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any
particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except
those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in being
useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism.
But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the
profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson
stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden
any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured
lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured
toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to
dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so
much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I
should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion
return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad
daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this
delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all
sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and
their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial,
useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even
when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will
not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and
peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements.
Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of
men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are
a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see
the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form
of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have
seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, 'Ugg says Ugg
makes the best stone hatchets,' he would have perceived a lack of
detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said
to a medieval peasant, 'Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts
of a horn, that he makes good bows,' the peasant would have said, 'Well,
of course he does,' and thought about something more important. It is
only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism
that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have
been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for other reasons I
cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and
a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight
only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and
the fairyland of Broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. For
such people the Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century city,
will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke of it will have vanished.

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking
at the lights of Broadway. It is not true to say in the strict sense
that the peasant has never seen such things before. The truth is that he
has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose.
Peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more
real things. Apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not
read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who
could read, and who could understand. For him also fire is sacred, for
him also colour is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the
little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to
light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used to the colours in church
windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can
only conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to Mr. Bilge.
Now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it is
exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to
criticise. If he were a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a
land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to
arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhaps
the Sacred Emperor's birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually
dawn on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly be born
every night. And when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was a
philosopher, would be a little disappointed ... possibly a little
disdainful.

Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs
and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes Day. That quaint and even queer
national festival has been fading for some time out of English life.
Still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that it
represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular
impulse. People spent money on the display of fireworks; they did not
get money by it. And the people who spent money were often those who had
very little money to spend. It had something of the glorious and
fanatical character of making the poor poorer. It did not, like the
advertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of making
the rich richer. In short, it came from the people and it appealed to
the nation. The historical and religious cause in which it originated is
not mine; and I think it has perished partly through being tied to a
historical theory for which there is no future. I think this is
illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and
destructive. Negation and destruction are very noble things as far as
they go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popular
expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. I
shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether
literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a
bolster and a paper mask, calling out


     Guy Fawkes Guy
     Hit him in the eye.


But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero to
crown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. I admit that
popular Protestantism has become too purely negative for people to
wreathe in flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. I
do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; which still has
statues that can be wreathed in flowers. I wish our national feast of
fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. I wish the
beauty of a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St.
Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman candles were really
Roman candles. But this negative character does not destroy the national
character; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at
least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disinterested at all about
the new commercial fireworks. There is nothing so dignified as a dingy
guy among the lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the very
word guy has another and milder significance. An American friend
congratulated me on the impression I produced on a lady interviewer,
observing, 'She says you're a regular guy.' This puzzled me a little at
the time. 'Her description is no doubt correct,' I said, 'but I confess
that it would never have struck me as specially complimentary.' But it
appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in the
original American. A guy in America is a colourless term for a human
being. All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with certain ...
but I am misled by another association. And a regular guy means, I
presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that
the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated
remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by
the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of
these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new
illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what is
yet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at
all. That is where it differs from the narrowest national Protestantism
of the English institution. Mobs have risen in support of No Popery; no
mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New Puffery. Many a poor crazy
Orangeman has died saying, 'To Hell with the Pope'; it is doubtful
whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic
words, 'Try Hugby's Chewing Gum.' These modern and mercantile legends
are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive
to the suggestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business merely
writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. All men really are
guys, in the sense of dummies. We are only the victims of his
pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye.

This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by
such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is
top-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not
popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America,
while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue
with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on
earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the
industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives
with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are
everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.
France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England and
Germany are industrial; but England and Germany are not really
democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of
great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side
to all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great deal
of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;
just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again be
peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the
reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow
city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering
in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very
heaven of the American spirit.

That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first
chapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is still
the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to
conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern
capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that
might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon
the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new
great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if
it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag,
and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here take
the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on
the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last
illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the
heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content
for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact that
they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a
moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these
vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great
cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should
rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind
murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a
falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words
written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on
Belshazzar's wall.... But what did it write on Belshazzar's wall?... I
am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark
sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far
up in the divine vacuum of the night.

'From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away
from that they are lost.'




_Irish and other Interviewers_


It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he
lands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of his
own country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of grey
and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous
windows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown house
standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among
many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart
of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international
position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most
clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touched
land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already
boarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent
that I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was
at that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to do
something for England.

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw
that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had
made all the obvious jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a
soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a
point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the
French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed
that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation
before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still in
some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp
for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one
persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if
recent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunatic
asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of the
country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great
statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.

It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations
with the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with
the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse
than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most
indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this
matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example
can make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is
some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I
had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double
sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an
imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the
apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves
is worse than the worst that we can do.

There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be
inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in
Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the
persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class
Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little
more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious
fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had
never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen in
Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,
Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very best
Semites. A moneylender in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but a
moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but
fundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that some
things could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as a
whole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an
English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by the
Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as
follows:--

'It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic
rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do.
They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the
simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is
quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say
nothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or the
value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid
head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another.
Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the
progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic
education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of
the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a
mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small
beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of
simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny
bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as
to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts
of the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly
incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jew
has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no
Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.
These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept full
responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.'

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched
and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the
Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to
Anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the
people of the United States when we say, as we do say in substance,
something like this: 'We mean no harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy,
so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to
withdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; they
have no notion of how to rule themselves. There is something charming
about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarse
business of politics. But for their own sakes it is impossible to leave
these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule
themselves. They are like children; but they are our own children, and
we understand them. We accept full responsibility for acting as their
parents and guardians.'

Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is false, but that
it is the particular view that the Americans know to be false. While we
are saying that the Irish could not organise, the Americans are
complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation.
While we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the Americans are
saying, more or less humorously, that the Irishman rules them. A highly
intelligent professor said to me in Boston, 'We have solved the Irish
problem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government.' While
we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of
mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a
very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and
bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very
naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their
patriotism has endured. But there are a great many Americans who do not
pity the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely to pity the
English; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them
despise the English. Thus both the friends of Ireland and the foes of
Ireland tend to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies by
our action, and another by our apology.

It is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; a
misunderstanding that really has a moral. The English excuse would carry
much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. There are
a considerable number of people in the United States who could
sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the Irish.
Those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear.
The argument I have often used in other places comes back with
prodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of American
opinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for
the English is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that the
Unionist, if he must be a Unionist, should use that and no other. When
the Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a
captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say;
all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. He
is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly
to penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence,
not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is
afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. This is
not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and that
is the most that can be said for it. All other talk, about Celtic frenzy
or Catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or to
deceive the world. But the vital point to realise is that it is cant
that cannot possibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the
Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not merely true to
say that he knows better. It is equally true to say that he knows worse.
He knows vices and evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the
hazy vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal slanders are
inconsistent even with the real sins. To us Ireland is a shadowy Isle of
Sunset, like Atlantis, about which we can make up legends. To him it is
a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like
Whitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. And,
as I have said, there are some lies we do not tell even about
Whitechapel. We do not say it is inhabited by Jews too stupid to count
or know the value of a coin.

The first thing for any honest Englishman to send across the sea is
this; that the English have not the shadow of a notion of what they are
up against in America. They have never even heard of the batteries of
almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live wire even
before I landed. People talk about the hypocrisy of England in dealing
with a small nationality. What strikes me is the stupidity of England in
supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is
really dealing with a very large nationality. She is dealing with a
nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the
other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;
they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not
even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combination
with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thought
first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing
back in the shadow of the trees.

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figure
of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic
than the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for the
English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also
considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer.
And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and
are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller
meets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of a
feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is a
slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries,
which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at
that moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect that
nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should
attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the Law
Courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing
for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is
fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview
would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of
the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered
rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to
say stage thunder.

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently
regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other
terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen
concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked
was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York.
Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of
English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it
seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable
incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was only the mood of
the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. And
since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception
of American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy to
be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach.

I have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreign
country, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But if
a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to
destruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Every
nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a
rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of
something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreigner
commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the
feature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. An
Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the French
eccentric in refusing to open a window. But he does not think the
English eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on to
the pavement in Ludgate Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in
little Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote
islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a Chinaman
who should enter all the wayside public-houses in Kent and Sussex and
demand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot
expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He does
not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin
ordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase
'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.' These are the simple and self-evident
cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the
tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own
substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution.
The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side
with the national poison. If it did not, all the natives would be dead.
For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of the
undiluted poison called progress.

It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the American
journalist. The American interviewers really have exceedingly good
manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to
pursue their trade. And even what is called their hustling method can
truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle
in, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem the very
warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that
he soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a
very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in this
respect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for an
Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which
American journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. It
might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask a total stranger on the
spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; but
I really think that if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go
very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. The Englishman
would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path;
but if once he had got to the grave I think he would have much more
disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our own national
temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when
connections had really been established. Possibly that is the reason why
our national temperament does not establish them. I suspect that the
real reason that an Englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off
talking. I suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separate
railway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists as
escaping from a race of talkers.

However this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantage
in the ease with which the American butterfly flits from flower to
flower. He may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not
force himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on
knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. It may be,
to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as
if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on
being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great deal of the
interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism
does not apply; there is nothing which even an Englishman of extreme
sensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involved
are generally entirely public, and treated with not a little public
spirit. But my only reason for saying here what can be said even for the
worst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle;
that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries
with it its own foreign cure. American interviewing is generally very
reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And even those to whom talking
to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth out
may still admit that American interviewing has many of the qualities of
American dentistry.

Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of
the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the
articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that
distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen
in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And the
headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic
locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging
himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can
safely be let loose to wander about the town.

For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists
immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labour
troubles. I told them my general view of Labour in the very largest and
perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great
truth to be taught to the middle classes was that Capitalism was itself
a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was
breaking down as that it had never really stood up. Slaveries could
last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could
hardly even live, and were already dying.

All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly and
most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it
casually and idly spoken. But on the top of this column of political
philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters,
'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike.' This was inaccurate. When I
spoke I not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but I
did not know what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct
idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying
things about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from the
beneficent activities. Any one who did not happen to be a journalist, or
know a little about journalism, American and English, would have
supposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone mad
and written the title. But I know that we have here to deal with two
different types of journalists; and the man who writes the headlines I
will not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in dreams.

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes
translate things into his native language. It would not seem odd that a
French interviewer should translate them into French; and it is certain
that the American interviewer sometimes translates them into American.
Those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent
than any interviewer. To take one out of the twenty examples, some of
which I have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that I
had the reputation of being a nut. I should be flattered but faintly
surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. I should
afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in America a
nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. And as I
have here to translate their American phrase into English, it may be
very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into
American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer
to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer,
obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with
it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break
it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said,
'Prohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This is almost avowed
translation, like a French translation. Nobody can suppose that it would
come natural to an Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a
dollar sign--whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had made me
talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre as 'a cent plain, and two
cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and
dollar-foolish. Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest
American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, but after
mentioning several names, I said that the greatest natural genius and
artistic force was probably Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more
precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be
interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt Whitman was your one
real red-blooded man.' Here again I hardly think the translation can
have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that
I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have
dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking. And even this
trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the
rather monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that America and
England can be far better friends when sharply divided than when
shapelessly amalgamated. These two journalists were false reporters, but
they were true translators. They were not so much interviewers as
interpreters. And the second is that in any such difference it is often
wholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority. For ability to
translate does imply ability to understand; and many of these
journalists really did understand. I think there are many English
journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the
plutocratic foundation of Prohibition. But the American knew at once
that I meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew
very well that it is.

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing
makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy
and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact
that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some
vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be
grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality.
It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent
young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask
for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living
subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for
twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next
morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his
victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from
him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large
black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion
of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next
morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I
saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith
and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting
essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices
than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the American
pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of
highway-robber in print.

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence of
interviewers, because I really think they are made to bear too much of
the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. But I am very
far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very
bad. So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in a real sense
rather magnify it. I would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger
and more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor
journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like
dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. What is wrong
with the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole
disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to
the cinema and then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism is
not in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the lower level of
the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; or
rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even to
belong to it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, as the
trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without involving a vilification of
all the people who grow wheat. It is the American plutocracy and not the
American press. What is the matter with the modern world is not modern
headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What is the matter with
the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from
another.




_Some American Cities_


There is one point, almost to be called a paradox, to be noted about New
York; and that is that in one sense it is really new. The term very
seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New Forest is nearly as old
as the Conquest, and the New Theology is nearly as old as the Creed.
Things have been offered to me as the new thought that might more
properly be called the old thoughtlessness; and the thing we call the
New Poor Law is already old enough to know better. But there is a sense
in which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always being
renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the
citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that
they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope.
At first I had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up a big
building without feeling that it was time to pull it down again; and
that somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody else
was putting on the last tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliant
and bewildering place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid
ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are the
growth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbing
quickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or
in some incredibly accelerated cinema.

There is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much as
a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that they always take the scaffolding
away, and leave us nothing but a mere building. If they would only take
the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in most
cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. If I could analyse what it
is that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a white
and wooden skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charming
about New York; in spite of its suffering from the curse of
cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It is
partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhausted
artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energy
that does not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is here
a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. Indeed there
is about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. It therefore
touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all
theatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise
something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the
climate and colours of Western Europe. We may say that the back-scene
remains the same. The sky remained, and in the depths of winter it
seemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered
myself that clouds were English products like primroses. An American
would probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that at
least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that in
England it is the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have changes
from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different
magic-lantern slides; one view showing the Bay of Naples and the next
the North Pole. I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in
American weather; but as a matter of proportion it is true that the most
unstable part of our scenery is the most stable part of theirs. Indeed
we might almost be pardoned the boast that Britain alone really
possesses the noble thing called weather; most other countries having to
be content with climate. It must be confessed, however, that they often
are content with it. And the beauty of New York, which is considerable,
is very largely due to the clarity that brings out the colours of varied
buildings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely enough I found
myself repeating about this vista of the West two vivid lines in which
Mr. W. B. Yeats has called up a vision of the East:--


     And coloured like the eastern birds
     At evening in their rainless skies.


To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelled
Englishman has probably seen American posters and trade advertisements
of a patchy and gaudy kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-car
are cut out as in cardboard against a sky like blue marble. I used to
think it was only New Art, but I found that it is really New York.

It is not for nothing that the very nature of local character has gained
the nickname of local colour. Colour runs through all our experience;
and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very
paints in the paint-box, or even in their very names. And just as the
very name of 'crimson lake' really suggested to me some sanguine and
mysterious mere, dark yet red as blood, so the very name of 'burnt
sienna' became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the notion of
something traditional and tragic; as if some such golden Italian city
had really been darkened by many conflagrations in the wars of mediaeval
democracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly
contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour might be
called up to a childish fancy by the mere name of 'raw umber'; and such
a city is New York. I used to be puzzled by the name of 'raw umber,'
being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or stewed umber. But
the colours of New York are exactly in that key; and might be adumbrated
by phrases like raw pink or raw yellow. It is really in a sense like
something uncooked; or something which the satiric would call
half-baked. And yet the effect is not only beautiful, it is even
delicate. I had no name for this nuance; until I saw that somebody had
written of 'the pastel-tinted towers of New York'; and I knew that the
name had been found. There are no paints dry enough to describe all that
dry light; and it is not a box of colours but of crayons. If the
Englishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block of
white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can I
imagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to children about a
country where the trees are like sugar-sticks and the lakes like
treacle, but most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairyland
where the trees were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of
coloured chalks.

But here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look of
the continual reconstruction and change. The strong daylight finds
everywhere the broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in
newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And it is in this
respect that the local colour can literally be taken as local character.
For New York considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, and
those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its
restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder
whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubt
is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight,
which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangle
of numerals which at first makes an English head reel. The detail is
merely a symbol; and when he is used to it he can see that it is, like
the most humdrum human customs, both worse and better than his own. '271
West 52nd Street' is the easiest of all addresses to find, but the
hardest of all addresses to remember. He who is, like myself, so
constituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular
reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called
'Pine Crest' or 'Heather Crag' like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham.
But his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of the
vision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His
first feeling that his head is turning round is due to something really
dizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. If
there be in the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in
change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is
still building and unbuilding it. One might fancy that it changes in
everything and that nothing endures but its invisible name; and even its
name, as I have said, seems to make a boast of novelty.

That is something like a sincere first impression of the atmosphere of
New York. Those who think that is the atmosphere of America have never
got any farther than New York. We might almost say that they have never
entered America, any more than if they had been detained like
undesirable aliens at Ellis Island. And indeed there are a good many
undesirable aliens detained in Manhattan Island too. But of that I will
not speak, being myself an alien with no particular pretensions to be
desirable. Anyhow, such is New York; but such is not the New World. The
great American Republic contains very considerable varieties, and of
these varieties I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to
generalise. But from the little I did see, I should venture on the
generalisation that the great part of America is singularly and even
strikingly unlike New York. It goes without saying that New York is very
unlike the vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of the
Middle West, which I did see. It may be conjectured with some confidence
that it is very unlike what is called the Wild and sometimes the Woolly
West, which I did not see. But I am here comparing New York, not with
the newer states of the prairie or the mountains, but with the other
older cities of the Atlantic coast. And New York, as it seems to me, is
quite vitally different from the other historic cities of America. It is
so different that it shows them all for the moment in a false light, as
a long white searchlight will throw a light that is fantastic and
theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages folded in the everlasting
hills. Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore are more like those quiet
villages than they are like New York.

If I were to call this book 'The Antiquities of America,' I should give
rise to misunderstanding and possibly to annoyance. And yet the double
sense in such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We talk of
Plato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for beauty as parts of the
antique, but hardly of the antiquated. When we call them ancient it is
not because they have perished, but rather because they have survived.
In the same way I heard some New Yorkers refer to Philadelphia or
Baltimore as 'dead towns.' They mean by a dead town a town that has had
the impudence not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancient
thing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be increasingly
astonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or the French nation still
alive. And what I mean by Philadelphia and Baltimore being alive is
precisely what these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity;
it is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of the
purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the founders of the
colonies and the fathers of the republic. This tradition is truly to be
called life; for life alone can link the past and the future. It merely
means that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so
what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. In New York it
is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. These
moderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. But I can
truly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of the
States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which
is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have
seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I
saw from afar off, above the vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great
Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned
a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the
turning of a lane, a league from my own door.

For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the talk about
electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the modern vulgarity of
avarice and advertisement sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston; but
so it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know that
there is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester; many
people know that it is rather more interesting; and some people know
that Alfred can still walk in Winchester and that St. Thomas at
Canterbury was killed but did not die. It is at least as possible for a
Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an
Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of Becket. Tradition does not
mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the
dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred
years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel
in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. And these
things did and do matter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on
that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his
treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph
and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a
priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have
illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair to
Penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that
toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides.
Those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannot
forgive him for consenting to bargain with the Stuarts. And the same is
true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant
experiment of the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the first
experiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and his
Catholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers on
what is now called the path of progress. That the first religious
toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics is
one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories
did not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and
found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for I
felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impression
accidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitude
and grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great American
whose name I had known from childhood and whose career was drawing to
its close; for it was but a few days after I left the city that I
learned that Cardinal Gibbons was dead.

On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood the first monument
raised after the Revolution to Washington. Beyond it was a new monument
saluting in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who fell
fighting in France in the Great War. Between them were steps and stone
seats, and I sat down on one of them and talked to two children who were
clambering about the bases of the monument. I felt a profound and
radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my
lecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any
names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness
of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality; of how we find
places and lose them; and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and
it is equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we forget. I
had even stirring in my head the suggestion of some verses that I shall
never finish--


     If I ever go back to Baltimore
     The city of Maryland.


But the poem would have to contain far too much; for I was thinking of a
thousand things at once; and wondering what the children would be like
twenty years after and whether they would travel in white goods or be
interested in oil, and I was not untouched (it may be said) by the fact
that a neighbouring shop had provided the only sample of the substance
called 'tea' ever found on the American continent; and in front of me
soared up into the sky on wings of stone the column of all those high
hopes of humanity a hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted
candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where perhaps
already a Prince of the Church was dying. Only on a later page can I
even attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed the
tangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting there on that stone
seat under that quiet sky, I had some experience of the thronging
thousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds,
that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town.

Two other cities I visited which have this particular type of
traditional character, the one being typical of the North and the other
of the South. At least I may take as convenient anti-types the towns of
Boston and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being a shade more
truly southern than St. Louis. To the extreme South, in the sense of
what is called the Black Belt, I never went at all. Now English
travellers expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they are not
prepared for the aspects of Boston in the North which are even more so.
If we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one
side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other the
names are more prosaic than the places. St. Louis is a fine town, and we
recognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill
overlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who has
christened the city. But the city is not as beautiful as its name; it
could not be. Indeed these titles set up a standard to which the most
splendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the
commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. We should think it
odd if Belfast had borne the name of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly
shocked if the town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ.
But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat challenging
benediction, to be found in the very name of San Francisco.

But on the other hand a place like Boston is much more beautiful than
its name. And, as I have suggested, an Englishman's general information,
or lack of information, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of
beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard so much about
the purely commercial North as against the agricultural and
aristocratic South, and the traditions of Boston and Philadelphia are
rather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But
here also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. The
circle of old families, which still meets with a certain exclusiveness
in Philadelphia, is the sort of thing that we in England should expect
to find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, which
Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality though it
was always a minority and is now a very small minority. An epigram,
invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard, describes it as very small
indeed:--


     Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
     Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak only to God.


But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that the
smaller it is the better. I am bound to say, however, that the
distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present representative of the family, broke
through any taboo that may tie his affections to his Creator and to Miss
Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indiscriminately as to show
kindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an English lecturer. But
if the thing is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and Boston
on this side is very much a place of memories. It would be paying it a
very poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me of
England; for indeed they reminded me of English things that have largely
vanished from England. There are old brown houses in the corners of
squares and streets that are like glimpses of a man's forgotten
childhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocrat
may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, I felt I had
come to the land where old tales come true.

I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of America because it
is very much missed in a mere contrast with England. I need not say that
if I felt it even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more
about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed particularly solid in
the Southern States, precisely because of the comparative quietude and
leisure of the atmosphere of the South. It was never more vivid to me
than when coming in, at a quiet hour of the night, into the
comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and mounting to a
dim and deserted upper floor where I found myself before a faded
picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew
Jackson, watchful like a white eagle.

At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one sense alone. Most
Englishmen know a good deal of American fiction, and nothing whatever of
American history. They know more about the autocrat of the
breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and the people, the
one great democratic despot of modern times; the Napoleon of the New
World. The only notion the English public ever got about American
politics they got from a novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_; and to say the
least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact.
Hundreds of us have heard of Tom Sawyer for one who has heard of Charles
Sumner; and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed
examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln and Lee. But in
the case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense of
individual isolation; for I believe that there are even fewer among
Englishmen than among Americans who realise that the energy of that
great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil
which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a
sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he
must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind
him, because all the politicians were against him. The end of that
struggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the
sceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It
will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and
accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will have
begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles;
and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to give
us their names.

But I have a special reason for ending this chapter on the name of the
great popular dictator who made war on the politicians and the
financiers. This chapter does not profess to touch on one in twenty of
the interesting cities of America, even in this particular aspect of
their relation to the history of America, which is so much neglected in
England. If that were so, there would be a great deal to say even about
the newest of them; Chicago, for instance, is certainly something more
than the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition suggests; and it
has been building a boulevard not unworthy of its splendid position on
its splendid lake. But all these cities are defiled and even diseased
with industrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that they
have deliberately preserved one of their cities from such defilement and
such disease. And that is the presidential city, which stands in the
American mind for the same ideal as the President; the idea of the
Republic that rises above modern money-getting and endures. There has
really been an effort to keep the White House white. No factories are
allowed in that town; no more than the necessary shops are tolerated. It
is a beautiful city; and really retains something of that classical
serenity of the eighteenth century in which the Fathers of the Republic
moved. With all respect to the colonial place of that name, I do not
suppose that Wellington is particularly like Wellington. But Washington
really is like Washington.

In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our criticising
foreigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. In other words,
the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little
more of the old humility. When we complain of American individualism, we
forget that we have fostered it by ourselves having far less of this
impersonal ideal of the Republic or commonwealth as a whole. When we
complain, very justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the
possession of American magnates, we ought to remember that we paved the
way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of
English magnates. It is bad that a public treasure should be in the
possession of a private man in America, but we took the first step in
lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of a man in
England. I know all about the genuine national tradition which treated
the aristocracy as constituting the state; but these very foreign
purchases go to prove that we ought to have had a state independent of
the aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do sometimes covet the
monuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgar
and irrational. They are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings
away with them; and too many of such buildings are private and for sale.
There were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplant
Glastonbury Abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubs
in pots. It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to
separate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man
venerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as a
rubbish-heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order to
idolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to
worship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of American
appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only as
a deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there is
another side to the American tradition, which is really too much lacking
in our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea of preserving
Washington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal
commerce. Nobody could buy the White House or the Washington Monument;
it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glastonbury) that nobody wants
to; but nobody could if he did want to. There is really a certain air of
serenity and security about the place, lacking in every other American
town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of that
half-southern province, from which smoke has been banished. The effect
is not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical and
often beautiful. But whatever else they have built, they have built a
great blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place does
express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people;
and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers,
and set it in a stainless sky.




_In the American Country_


The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he
did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. I mean the
things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have
been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard a
thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard
rhapsodies and disparagements of every description. Modern rationalistic
critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its
accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated
superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the one
impression that had never pierced through their description was the
simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to
the very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turreted
city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes.
One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most
picturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, I had always
lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. We know
that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seem
that it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hid
from the wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple
impression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid the phrase; for it
would really seem that each man discovers it for himself.

Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them, about the tall and
dominant buildings of New York. I agree that they have an instant effect
on the imagination; which I think is increased by the situation in which
they stand, and out of which they arose. They are all the more
impressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, is
horizontally almost narrow. New York is an island, and has all the
intensive romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height
upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon
a lonely rock. But this story of the sky-scrapers, which I had often
heard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest
and most curious characteristic of American architecture. Told only in
terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial
cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold
and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would suggest a modern
Babylon altogether too Babylonian. It would imply that a man of the new
world was a sort of new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a
pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of
mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine
school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all
sky-scrapers--the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less because
there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the very
reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner
passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I
began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. I saw
forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon as
literal forests do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, in
another sense, literally like forests. They were all made of wood. It
was almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had been all made
of cardboard. I had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to
Americans as if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, if
they do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood.

I do not say this in any sense as a criticism. As it happens, I am
particularly fond of wood. Of all the superstitions which our fathers
took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it
is lucky to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less as
superstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If humanity had really
thought Friday unlucky it would have talked about bad Friday instead of
good Friday. And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am
not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the
places of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea that there was something
cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one of
those ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. It
is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing
of the wood of the Cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence.
It is like that other divine coincidence that the Victim was a
carpenter, who might almost have made His own cross. Whether we take the
mystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deep
connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic
mysticism. It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to
the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the same fashion
a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was the
downfall of Troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted,
like his own rocking-horse in the nursery.

It might be said symbolically that Americans have a taste for
rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. A
flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that,
even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still.
Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the
matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may
still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think
there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit
that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is
innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less is
it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls'
houses. It is the true tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has
grown too big to live in a doll's house. These things seem somehow to
escape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are too
temporary even to be merely temporal. These people are not building
tombs; they are not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merely
building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house;
and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation. How far it
promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; I am
only describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages built
of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured like
the clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal.

There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense from
the nursery. We hear much of Americans being educated on English
literature; but I think few Americans realise how much English children
have been educated on American literature. It is true, and it is
inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashioned
American literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly
the limitations of the young American millionaire, and especially the
staleness of his English culture; but there is necessarily another side
to it. If the American talked more of Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we
should probably talk more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this
staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different
question. But, in any case, it is true that the old American books were
often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books
of our nursery. I know few men in England who have not left their
boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _Huckleberry
Finn_. I know few women in England, from the most revolutionary
Suffragette to the most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will
not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the Little Women of
Miss Alcott. _Helen's Babies_ was the first and by far the best book in
the modern scriptures of baby-worship. And about all this old-fashioned
American literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, and
even fed, our growing minds. Perhaps it was the smell of growing things;
but I am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. Now
that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in a
hundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber. There was the
perpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the
woods. There was something crude and clean about everything; something
fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not then
have put a name. Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of
wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. I
will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from Log
Cabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of white
wood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lasts
like iron for things like these.' But I will say that the experience
illuminates some other lines by Holmes himself:--


     Little I ask, my wants are few,
     I only ask a hut of stone.


I should not have known, in England, that he was already asking for a
good deal even in asking for that. In the presence of this wooden world
the very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut
of marble, or a hovel of gold.

It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at all
this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing
shortage at home. I know not by what incongruous movement of the mind
there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of things
ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. The last war
brought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows.
And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London; and a model
of Shakespeare's town.

It is possible indeed that such Elizabethan memories may receive a check
or a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to the
outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is
confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch Us
Grow.' He can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling before
his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer. But he may have
formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside
Shakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criticism here, to any
one who knows history; since the things that grow are not always the
things that remain; and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency
to burst. I was always told that Americans were harsh, hustling, rather
rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical and the future
belonged to them. I confess I felt a fine shade of difference; I liked
the Americans; I thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of
fine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel clear about was
their future. I believe they were happier in their frame-houses than
most people in most houses; having democracy, good education, and a
hobby of work; the one doubt that did float across me was something
like, 'Will all this be here at all in two hundred years?' That was the
first impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like the
waggons of gipsies; it is a serious impression, but there is an answer
to it. It is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as he
goes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about the vast central
prairies. And the answer is agriculture. Wooden houses may or may not
last; but farms will last; and farming will always last.

The houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or common; but they
are not on a heath or common. They are on the most productive and
prosperous land, perhaps, in the modern world. The houses might fall
down like shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tills
those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity.
They are already counting for a great deal, and possibly for too much,
in the affairs of America. The real criticism of the Middle West is
concerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately
appreciated by the educated class in England. The first is that the turn
of the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries with
it. That is the meaning of the resurrection of Ireland; that is the
meaning of the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Russian
peasants. The other is that in most places these peasant societies carry
on what may be called the Catholic tradition. The Middle West is perhaps
the one considerable place where they still carry on the Puritan
tradition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the
town; and the second truth about the Middle West turns largely on its
moral relation to the town. As I shall suggest presently, there is much
in common between this agricultural society of America and the great
agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agricultural society
nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. The agricultural
society tends to the agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an
additional problem, which I can hardly explain without a periphrasis.

There was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the
decay of the country. It is more and more true, I think, to-day that it
is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and
promise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a substitute for
the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart
from the question about fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more
than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen,
and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight;
but he need never move at the movies. Thus in the real village inn are
the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and
unreal metropolitan politics. And those central city politics are not
only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. They corrupt everything
that they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexing
questions.

For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole point about
feminism and the factory. It is very largely the point about feminism
and many other callings, apparently more cultured than the factory, such
as the law court and the political platform. When I see women so wildly
anxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city my
first feeling is not indignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity
with which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leaking ship
under a lowering storm. When I see wives and mothers going in for
business government I not only regard it as a bad business but as a
bankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women,
just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses
or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being made dukes.

It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, had
cried out for powder and patches. By the time they were wearing them
they would be the only people wearing them. For powder and patches soon
went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. In the same
way, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they have
only done it for a deserted factory. It would have been very unwise of
the lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in the
last days of the French monarchy. It would have been very laborious to
learn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all such
things were at once most complicated and most moribund. It would be
tiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of tricks
was coming to an end. A French satirist might have written a fine
apologue about Jacques Bonhomme coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes
and demanding to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity; but I fear the stick in waiting would be
waiting still.

One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in America
was that of a very interesting book called _Main Street_, which involves
many of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternal
feminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the
story, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns
on the great central plains of America; and of a sort of struggle
between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of
her neighbours. There are a number of true and telling suggestions in
the book, but the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of many
readers was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, with
unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic
implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless
request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he
had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a
great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which
she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be
taking a somewhat funereal view of the life of humanity.

For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the life
of humanity, and even the life which all humanitarians have striven to
give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal
but even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establish
this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and revolutionary martyrs have
died, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men
have taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poor
gentleman might have liberty to look for his screw-driver. For there is
here a fact about America that is almost entirely unknown in England.
The English have not in the least realised the real strength of America.
We in England hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about the
economic energy of industrial America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or
the machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while we in England
suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we
have not got what the Americans have got; something at least to balance
it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted
with small freeholders. For the reason I shall mention in a moment, they
are not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. But they
are in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their
comparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injustice
of the towns.

And, even in places like that described as Main Street, that comparative
equality can immediately be felt. The men may be provincials, but they
are certainly citizens; they consult on a common basis. And I repeat
that in this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and
righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village, fairly
prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, is
after all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim; whenever
reformers have used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The march
to Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march to the New
Jerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street. And the
latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to
live there.

All this is true, and I think the lady might be more contented in her
coffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffins
where her fellow creatures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to
this, or at least a modification of it. There is a case for the lady and
a case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. And when we have
noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a
situation like that of modern America, and especially the Middle West.
And with that we come back to the truth with which I started this
speculation; the truth that few have yet realised, but of which I, for
one, am more and more convinced--that industrialism is spreading because
it is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are
choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green
world grey.

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of the Middle West
are far in advance of the English of the twentieth century. It is not
their fault if they are still some centuries behind the English of the
twelfth century. But the defect by which they fall short of being a true
peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the
same sense as their own material food. They do not, like some
peasantries, create other kinds of culture besides the kind called
agriculture. Their culture comes from the great cities; and that is
where all the evil comes from.

If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, or even across
Europe in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showed
its vitality by its variety. We know the adventures of the three
brothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain from
city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wasted
by a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sitting
by fountains of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the real
adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to
another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing
new songs.

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if he found the
people in the city of St. Louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour
in honour of their patron saint. He might even feel some faint surprise
if he found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite
costume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red Indian, in honour
of the noble treaty of William Penn. Yet these are the sort of local and
traditional things that would really be found giving variety to the
valleys of mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine and
generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like
Oklahoma. But you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in
Oberammergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the
cinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to
Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these
people have on the economic side a much closer approach than we have to
economic freedom. It is not for us, who have allowed our land to be
stolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such
colonists as merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really kept
something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dignity of democracy;
and that democracy may yet save their country even from the calamities
of wealth and science.

But, while these farmers do not need to become industrial in order to
become industrious, they do tend to become industrial in so far as they
become intellectual. Their culture, and to some great extent their
creed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres,
and bring with them a blast of death and a reek of rotting things. It is
that influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressing
towards the Middle Ages.

For, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the Middle Ages, may
be found a symbolic pattern of hammers and nails and saws; and there is
no reason why they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers. There
is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to the
author should not have been borne in triumph down Main Street like a
sword of state, in some pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of the
Carpenters or St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry and
piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the
worthy and virile democracy of the West. Nor are Americans of
intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. There is an
admirable society called the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and
address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul
against the environment. With the national heartiness they blazon their
note-paper with heraldry and the hues of Gothic windows; with the
national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one
who should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would find out
his mistake. For many of them do really know a great deal about
mediaevalism; much more than I do, or most other men brought up on an
island that is crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same spirit
may be seen in the beautiful new plans and buildings of Yale,
deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on Gothic
irregularity and surprise. The grace and energy of the mediaeval
architecture resurrected by a man like Mr. R. A. Cram of Boston has
behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; an
enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation.
Even on the huge Puritan plains of the Middle West the influence strays
in the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic
epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that churchyard compared with
which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret
drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village,
almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes is
dedicated to the Catholic priest.

But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main Street is Modern Street
in its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people; and all these
historic things are a thousand miles from them. They have not heard the
ancient noise either of arts or arms; the building of the cathedral or
the marching of the crusade. But at least they have not deliberately
slandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. And if they have not
produced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts.
They can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting things;
nor shall the foundations of their state be moved. And the memory of
those colossal fields, of those fruitful deserts, came back the more
readily into my mind because I finished these reflections in the very
heart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It
was in fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it might
very well be an American one. And it also struck me that we yield rather
too easily to America the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feel
far too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. There
is a story of an American who carefully studied all the sights of London
or Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion that 'it had nothing on
Minneapolis.' It seems to me that Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester.
There were the same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and
metallic appliances; a man felt that he might walk a day without seeing
a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. The
factory chimneys might have been Pittsburg; the sky-signs might have
been New York. One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a
sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance
and judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek
for the only thing that has not been made by men. But even that was
illogical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars,
which might have reminded me of Old Glory; but that was not the sign
that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all the
buildings a forest of brick; I was far in the interior of a labyrinth of
lifeless things. Only, looking up, between two black chimneys and a
telegraph pole, I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it,
the silver pattern of the Plough.




_The American Business Man_


It is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols, and all
differ about the meaning of the symbols. It is obvious that a Russian
republican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and
therefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped to the land of
the free, he might find the same bird on the American coinage figuring
as a bird of freedom. Doubtless, he might find many other things to
surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him
think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. But
I am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equally
obvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of
vengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have some
difficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the red
flag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junction.

But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally much more
subtle than in these simple cases. I have remarked elsewhere that the
first thing which a traveller should write about is the thing which he
has not read about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a
thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see.

I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in America;
we might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. But after he has seen
such things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them; and here a
great deal of complication and controversy is possible. The thing
probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face of
it; but even on the face of it, it might mean many different and even
opposite things.

For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude; a
rude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest; or it might mean a
very recent and rapid solution of the housing problem, conducted cheaply
and therefore on a very large scale. A wooden house might suggest the
very newest thing in America or one of the very oldest things in
England. It might mean a grey ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition at
Earl's Court.

It is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols that
we make most of the international mistakes. Without the smallest error
of detail, I will promise to prove that Oriental women are independent
because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject because they wear
skirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I will take the example of two
very commonplace and trivial objects of modern life--a walking stick and
a fur coat.

As it happened, I travelled about America with two sticks, like a
Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I fear the simile is too stately.
I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highly
ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both
because I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either of
them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey stick from the
woods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it with me to Palestine it
partakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. When I can say that I
have taken the same stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stick
and I may both have a rest. The other, which I value even more, was
given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, and I wish I could think
that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword.

Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met, struck by the fastidious
foppery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom of
elegant English dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know that
it is much less common among Americans than among Englishmen to carry
even one. The point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carried
by Englishmen than by Americans; it is that the sticks which are carried
by Americans stand for something entirely different.

In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about it
something of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conduct
of the clouded cane. It would be an exaggeration to say that when the
citizens of the United States see a man carrying a light stick, they
deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But there is about it
a faint flavour of luxury and lounging, and most of the energetic
citizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct.

Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick may imply lounging,
but it does not imply luxury, and I can say with some firmness that it
does not imply dandyism. In a great many Englishmen it means the very
opposite even of lounging. By one of those fantastic paradoxes which
are the mystery of nationality, a walking stick often actually means
walking. It frequently suggests the very reverse of the beau with his
clouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially a
country type. It rather implies the kind of Englishman who tramps about
in lanes and meadows and knocks the tops off thistles. It suggests the
sort of man who has carried the stick through his native woods, and
perhaps even cut it in his native woods.

There are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no doubt, in the rural
parts of America, but the idea of a walking stick would not especially
suggest them to Americans; it would not call up such figures like a
fairy wand. It would be easy to trace back the difference to many
English origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to the idea of the
old squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, but trained to hold a
useless staff rather than a useful tool. It might be suggested that
American citizens do at least so far love freedom as to like to have
their hands free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that they
keep their hands for the handles of many machines. And that the hand on
a handle is less free than the hand on a stick or even a tool. But these
again are controversial questions and I am only noting a fact.

If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less exactly what the
impression is, and how misleading it is, he could find something like a
parallel in what he himself feels about a fur coat. When I first found
myself among the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my rather
exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place was largely produced
by the number of men in fur coats, and what we should consider rather
ostentatious fur coats, with all the fur outside.

Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric but largely accidental
associations in connection with a fur coat. I will not say that he
thinks a man in a fur coat must be a wealthy and wicked man; but I do
say that in his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked man
would wear a fur coat. Thus I had the sensation of standing in a surging
mob of American millionaires, or even African millionaires; for the
millionaires of Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Table
compared with the millionaires of Johannesburg.

But, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was not even an
American millionaire, but simply an American. It did not signify luxury,
but rather necessity, and even a harsh and almost heroic necessity.
Orson probably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears, but not
the bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally represented as a furry
folk; but they are not necessarily engaged in delicate financial
operations, even in the typical and appropriate occupation called
freezing out. And if the American is not exactly an arctic traveller
rushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from
ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoor
and indoor clothing. He has to live in an icehouse outside and a
hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse
inside that. He turns himself into an icehouse and warms himself against
the cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point is that the
same coat of fur which in England would indicate the sybarite life may
here very well indicate the strenuous life; just as the same walking
stick which would here suggest a lounger would in England suggest a
plodder and almost a pilgrim.

And these two trifles are types which I should like to put, by way of
proviso and apology, at the very beginning of any attempt at a record of
any impressions of a foreign society. They serve merely to illustrate
the most important impression of all, the impression of how false all
impressions may be. I suspect that most of the very false impressions
have come from the careful record of very true facts. They have come
from the fatal power of observing the facts without being able to
observe the truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most vivid
clarity and being blind to all that it symbolises. It is as if a man who
knew no Greek should imagine that he could read a Greek inscription
because he took the Greek R for an English P or the Greek long E for an
English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people's
impressions of America, but as a criticism on my own. I wish it to be
understood that I am well aware that all my views are subject to this
sort of potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the
facts I do not profess to be certain of the deductions.

In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunderstanding of this kind
affects the common impression, not altogether unfounded, that the
Americans talk about dollars. But for the moment I am merely anxious to
avoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk about Americans. About the
dogmas of democracy, about the right of a people to its own symbols,
whether they be coins or customs, I am convinced, and no longer to be
shaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in silver or other
substances, I am always open to correction. That error is the price we
pay for the great glory of nationality. And in this sense I am quite
ready, at the start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions.

The fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact without the truth
is false. I have already noted that this is especially true touching our
observations of a strange country; and it is certainly true touching one
small fact which has swelled into a large fable. I mean the fable about
America commonly summed up in the phrase about the Almighty Dollar. I do
not think the dollar is almighty in America; I fancy many things are
mightier, including many ideals and some rather insane ideals. But I
think it might be maintained that the dollar has another of the
attributes of deity. If it is not omnipotent it is in a sense
omnipresent. Whatever Americans think about dollars, it is, I think,
relatively true that they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanical
record could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones and
stenography, I do not think it probable that the mere word 'dollars'
would occur more often in any given number of American conversations
than the mere word 'pounds' or 'shillings' in a similar number of
English conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all statistics,
would be utterly useless and even fundamentally false. It is as if we
should calculate that the word 'elephant' had been mentioned a certain
number of times in a particular London street, or so many times more
often than the word 'thunderbolt' had been used in Stoke Poges.
Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully collecting those
statistics also; and doubtless there are scientific social reformers
capable of legislating on the basis of them. They would probably argue
from the elephantine imagery of the London street that such and such a
percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and required medical
care and police coercion. And doubtless their calculations, like nearly
all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that
the street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yet
more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant and
Castle. And in the same way the mechanical calculation about the mention
of dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understanding
of why they are mentioned. It certainly does not mean merely a love of
money; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very
different and even contrary things. The love of money is very different
in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great
financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now this
difference in the conversation of American and English business men
arises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American which
are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also arises from much
deeper things in the Englishman, of which the Englishman is even more
ignorant.

To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart from any love of
money, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact size
or weight of things, in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is
as if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet of
walking stick and four inches of cigar. It is so in cases that have no
possible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. An American will
praise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his own
estate for the good of the poor. But he will generally say that the
philanthropist gave them a 200-acre park, where an Englishman would
think it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. There is
something about this precision which seems suitable to the American
atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and the
glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as the
vaguer English version is consonant to our mistier and more
impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more
boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate
particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of
regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It is
a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts.

But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference; and
it can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the difference
itself. When two business men in a train are talking about dollars I am
not so foolish as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of
St. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English business men I should
not expect them to be talking about business. Probably it would be about
some sport; and most probably some sport in which they themselves never
dreamed of indulging. The approximate difference is that the American
talks about his work and the Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is
not labour but leisure. Like every other national characteristic, this
is not primarily a point for praise or blame; in essence it involves
neither and in effect it involves both. It is certainly connected with
that snobbishness which is the great sin of English society. The
Englishman does love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman;
and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather than in
Spain. For, as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as English as a Welsh
rarebit or an Irish stew. And if he talks less about money I fear it is
sometimes because in one sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mystery
in the old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech. Gold is
a god; and like the god of some agnostics has no name and is worshipped
only in his works. It is true in a sense that the English gentleman
wishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. But it may be
questioned whether he does entirely forget it. As against this weakness
the American has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity and
clatter, in making general a very real respect for work. He has partly
disenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sense
has achieved some degree of democracy; which is the most difficult
achievement in the world.

On the other hand, there is a good side to the Englishman's day-dream of
leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss. It may be
expressed in the word 'holiday' or still better in the word 'hobby.' The
Englishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has got two strings
to his bow. Indeed the Englishman really is well represented by Robin
Hood; for there is always something about him that may literally be
called outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the rules.
A Frenchman said of Browning that his centre was not in the middle; and
it may be said of many an Englishman that his heart is not where his
treasure is. Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he said:--


     I like to know a butcher paints,
     A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
     Candlestick-maker much acquaints
     His soul with song, or haply mute
     Blows out his brains upon the flute.


Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when he said that many
men he knew, who were meat-salesmen to the outward eye, might in the
life of contemplation sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary
achievement of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic enthusiasm
can really be for meat sales; not for money but for meat. An American
commercial traveller asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes,
whether I did not think that salesmanship could be an art. In England
there are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art; but seldom of the
art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby; a thing of leisure and
liberty. That is why the English traveller talks, if not of art, then of
sport. That is why the two city men in the London train, if they are not
talking about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they are not
talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, the reason lies
much deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire for
wealth. In the English case, at least, it lies very deep in the English
spirit. Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter and
looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. Even a masterpiece
has often been a by-product. The works of Shakespeare come out so
casually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people; even
to Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if out
of a wastepaper basket. The immortality of Dr. Johnson does not rest on
the written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted,
the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick is
almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into
something primary and pre-eminent. It began with mere words written to
illustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expanded
from an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwick
the author began as the servant of the artist. But, as in the same story
of Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. This
incalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has
its strength and weakness; but it does represent a certain reserve fund
of interests in the Englishman's life; and distinguishes him from the
other extreme type, of the millionaire who works till he drops, or who
drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American
civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about
the dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be called
the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when
anything less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to
become a superstition. When the candlestick-maker does not blow out his
brains upon the flute there is always a danger that he may blow them out
somewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market.

Now certainly one of the first impressions of America, or at any rate
of New York, which is by no means the same thing as America, is that of
a sort of mob of business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very
different from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every day
to the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as if
passing the pipe of peace; though, in fact, most of them are smoking
cigars and some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as one
of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that of
chewing gum. A man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were a
sugar-stick; but I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable
sugar-stick. Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do
not know; whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbol
of commercial conversation; or whether something of the same queer
outlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer and
ginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touching
tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be easy to make a merely
external sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always be
done in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners
looking alike; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with
spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all like
to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude
we realise the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can see
that these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking about
dollars we had much better not see them at all.

It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of his
worship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship,
even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The
Frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink
his wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly be
called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of
sense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort of
ideal vision. They follow success rather than money; they follow money
rather than meat and drink. If their national life in one sense is a
perpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or
counters as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of material
enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a coin is itself a
counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chipped
potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallows
red wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he worships the dollar,
they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicate
than they imagine. The dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it
is an image of success and not of enjoyment.

That this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there is
a queer sort of morality attached to it. The nearest parallel to it is
something like the sense of honour in the old duelling days. There is
not a material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied
obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear too much in
England of the phrase about 'making good'; for no sensible Englishman
favours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign
languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something
very particular in American. There is a fine shade of distinction
between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always
be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel a
man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man
doing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense
of being worthy of those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealism
wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some of us would call
stealing; any more than the duellist's honour was insincere when it
drove him to what some would call murder. A very clever American play
which I once saw acted contained a complete working model of this
morality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her engagement to a
young man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. The
atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he had been
accused of cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing whatever
the matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or other
in Arizona had not 'made good.' Now in England we should either be below
or above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should be content to
know that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too much
accustomed to private means to be expected to be businesslike. If we
were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as
wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps
one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling
of modern commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to admire him
for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an
outlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our hearts despise
him for being a failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctive
idealism that is the point at issue. Of course there is nothing new, or
peculiar to the new world, about a man's engagement practically failing
through his financial failure. An English girl might easily drop a man
because he was poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly
although he was poor. The point is that this girl was faithful but she
was not defiant; that is, she was not proud. The whole psychology of the
situation was that she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family,
and it was wounded as her patriotism would have been wounded if he had
betrayed his country. To do them justice, there was nothing to show that
they would have had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited
millions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man who could 'make
good.' That the process of making good would probably drag him through
the mire of everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing, lying,
swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did not seem to trouble
them in the least. Against this fanaticism there is this shadow of truth
even in the fiction of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least be
allowed to be good without being bothered to make it.

Another objection to the phrase about the almighty dollar is that it is
an almighty phrase, and therefore an almighty nuisance. I mean that it
is made to explain everything, and to explain everything much too well;
that is, much too easily. It does not really help people to understand a
foreign country; but it gives them the fatal illusion that they do
understand it. Dollars stood for America as frogs stood for France;
because it was necessary to connect particular foreigners with
something, or it would be so easy to confuse a Moor with a Montenegrin
or a Russian with a Red Indian. The only cure for this sort of satisfied
familiarity is the shock of something really unfamiliar. When people can
see nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee running after a
dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip them up as they run after
the Yankee, or run away with their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacle
of certain odd and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion.
And, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such obstacles to any
such generalisation; a number of notable facts that have to be
reconciled somehow to our previous notions. It does not matter for this
purpose whether the facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether the
qualities are merits or defects; especially as we do not even understand
them sufficiently to say which they are. The point is that we are
brought to a pause, and compelled to attempt to understand them rather
better than we do. We have found the one thing that we did not expect;
and therefore the one thing that we cannot explain. And we are moved to
an effort, probably an unsuccessful effort, to explain it.

For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That is the last thing that
a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and
vulgar ambition. But it is almost the first fact that strikes the
spectator on the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum English
business man and the hustling American business man is that the hustling
American business man is always late. Of course there is a great deal of
difference between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed the
fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which I
could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. I could easily
understand a crowd of commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at
all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the
crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. The
managers of these lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of
courtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless to
begin properly until about half an hour after time. Often people were
still coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time.
Not that I objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemed
to me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of a
people mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious and
interesting. I have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslike
person in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation
to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that company. I was
afterwards told by many Americans that my impression was quite correct;
that American unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended to
much more important things. But at least I was not content to lump this
along with all sorts of contrary things that I did not happen to like,
and call it America. I am not sure of what it really means, but I rather
fancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has
the same origin as the hustling. The American is not punctual because he
is not punctilious. He is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well
as an impulse to go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same
order of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation in
telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours which English business has
always observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed I think that in a
larger sense it is better than the other way. But it is better because
it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. In other
words, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great Venetian
merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old
English merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more
civilised; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play
dominoes is more civilised. And the reason is that the American has the
romance of business and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the
romance of life and is sane. But the romance of business really is a
romance, and the Americans are really romantic about it. And that
romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a
love-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but also
lingering.

The American is too busy to have business habits. He is also too much in
earnest to have business rules. If we wish to understand him, we must
compare him not with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but
with the same French shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the
trenches as a conscript soldier. Everybody used to the punctilious
Prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and
apparent laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the
unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every
detail of the business of war except fighting. There he is much too
swift to be smart. He is much too practical to be precise. By a strange
illusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism,
the American has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. He
varies his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. He gives
more time to more important and less time to less important things; and
he makes up his time-table as he goes along. Suppose he has three
appointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting a
tower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it;
the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printing
advertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; the
third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be
prevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manage
to sell it. He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he
goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down to
the discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speaker
indulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much American
conversation. Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he
suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt-front might
also be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz Ginger Champagne, he will
instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities,
in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at his
watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The consequence is
that he will come late into the great social movement against
chewing-gum, where an Englishman would probably have arrived at the
proper hour. But though the Englishman's conduct is more proper, it need
not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman's rules are better
for the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business.
And it is true that for many of these Americans business is the
business of life. It is really also, as I have said, the romance of
life. We shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are glad
to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much
poetry wasted on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any
other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their
imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this
commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of
commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like
gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the
legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal
with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a
fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing
but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the
romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business really
is romance; for it is not reality.

There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due
to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think
that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely
destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to
be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its
machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might
attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble
purposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger
and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum's Show, or Shelley to
hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it
would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that
Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here
touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either
course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that
Apollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite
another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because he
is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and
therefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of the
eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of
connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a
bonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchants
of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by
living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the
Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier to understand
the Americans if we connect them with the French who were their allies
than with the English who were their enemies. There are a great many
Franco-American resemblances which the practical Anglo-Saxons are of
course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. American history is
haunted with the shadow of the Plebiscitary President; they have a
tradition of classical architecture for public buildings. Their cities
are planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the labyrinth of
London. They call their cities Corinth and Syracuse, as the French
called their citizens Epaminondas and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the
French kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all.
But of all the French elements in America the most French is this real
practicality. They know that at certain times the most businesslike of
all qualities is 'l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de
l'audace.' The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but the
publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the Mississippi on
fire, if it would boil his particular pot. It is not so much that
Englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it is
not so much that Americans are clever as that they do not try to be any
stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has burnt that out of
America as it has burnt it out of Europe, and of almost every place
except England. This is one of the few points on which English
insularity really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the
only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the only
sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. This must be clearly
distinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world not
rising to the invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the
utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite
visible. He does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but
because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. For some time the
English aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual
ambition to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they did
not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of a great and
traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. In spite
of the merchants of London, Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spite
of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europe
persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had
made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their
flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no
fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against
them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a falling star.




_Presidents and Problems_


All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen.
All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.
This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of
the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and
their laws. The American national poet praised his people for their
readiness 'to _rise_ against the never-ending audacity of elected
persons.' The English national anthem is content to say heartily, but
almost hastily, 'Confound their politics,' and then more cheerfully, as
if changing the subject, 'God Save the King.' For this is especially the
secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm
the President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance in
politics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest he
should remind us of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending
audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never does
end. That is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the
subject, instead of changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish wit
observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the English crowned head
is not a King. He is a popular figure intended to remind us of the
England that politicians do not remember; the England of horses and
ships and gardens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such
purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of this
that their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a little
lacking in humanity and humour. It is the American, much more than the
Englishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely.

The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentary
countries, can be explained by any practical example. Let us suppose
that great social reform, The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begun
to be enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every good citizen
knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any
length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with
a hairdresser who charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal
close-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curative
detention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber who
charges threepence. Thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to
ornament the street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they
choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the State
protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner
condition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a
glance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among
them. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every way a compact and
convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport,
liquor and liberty in general. Well, the law has passed and the masses,
insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. The
ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her
hair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to
flap. Her father, his mind already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to
wonder who the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as he
knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quite
obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. The pressure may have come
from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from the
foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; it
may come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to
sell a million bad razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with
suspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest
snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. Anybody may
have to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly
he catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a
carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one person who has
certainly not originated any great scientific reform. He is the only
person in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people's
hair, or to take away other people's liberties. He at least is kept out
of politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to
appease the wrath of the gods. He is their King, and the only man they
know is not their ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular,
knowing how they are ruled.

The popularity of a President in America is exactly the opposite. The
American Republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. It is intended that
the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair
is cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in
vain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and Roosevelt,
have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as
constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have become curiously
interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought
to be called a King.

But it is not only true that the President could correctly be called a
King. It is also true that the King might correctly be called a
President. We could hardly find a more exact description of him than to
call him a President. What is expected in modern times of a modern
constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. We expect
him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. The
chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he is
not supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please everybody by
favouring nobody. The primary essentials of a President or Chairman are
that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be
popular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that
he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being
different from all of them. This is exactly what is demanded of the
constitutional monarch in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to
the American position; in which the President does not preside at all.
He moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for the
national idea is perpetual motion. Technically it is called a message;
and might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may truly say that
the King presides and the President reigns. Some would prefer to say
that the President rules; and some Senators and members of Congress
would prefer to say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves;
he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump.

Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President Wilson was a
denial of this almost despotic ideal in America. As a matter of fact it
was the strongest possible assertion of it. The idea is that the
President shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility means
being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. The theory is
that things are done by the President; and if things go wrong, or are
alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not
invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such
as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitutional princes are seldom deposed;
but despots were often deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands,
such as Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our own history
a King often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility
and reality of his office. But King John was attacked because he was
strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown
because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And
President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such,
in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a
matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate Mr. Wilson's real
failure. There are a great many people in America who justify and
applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on
pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. It
is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed
futile as a threat against Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation
for the threat against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did
disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of
the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy.

Thus the American King and the English President are the very opposite
of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national
indications of the same contemporary truth. It is the great weariness
and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. It
may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new American
President represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense
he marks a real rebuke to the last President and his more uncommon
politics. And it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power regard
him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may
roughly be translated into English by the word normality. And by this
they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist
conservatism of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding a
Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Perhaps these people do
entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was
normal. But there are very few who think so, and even they will not
think so long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present
troubles. The nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. It
suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political
equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice.
Capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is normal, and
is more normal in proportion as it is universal. Slavery may be normal
and even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature.
But Capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it was
never anything so good as a bad habit. It was never a custom; for men
never grew accustomed to it. It was never even conservative; for before
it was even created wise men had realised that it could not be
conserved. It was from the first a problem; and those who will not even
admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All
things considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that.

The recent Presidential election preserved some trace of the old Party
System of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of
the Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess
that he never quite understood the American Party System. It would
perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that
he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the
two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and
ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I
think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were
called 'Democrat' and 'Republican.' It does not at all cover the case to
identify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. The
Democrats are the party of the South and have some true tradition from
the Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and State Rights.
The Republicans rose in the North as the party of Lincoln, largely
condemning slavery. But the Republicans are also the party of Tariffs,
and are at least accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats are
the party of Free Trade; and in the great movement of twenty years ago
the party of Free Silver. The Democrats are also the party of the Irish;
and the stones they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at
Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and
bewildering; but I am inclined to think that they are as a whole more
coherent and rational than our own old division of Liberals and
Conservatives. There is even more doubt nowadays about what is the
connecting link between the different items in the old British party
programmes. I have never been able to understand why being in favour of
Protection should have anything to do with being opposed to Home Rule;
especially as most of the people who were to receive Home Rule were
themselves in favour of Protection. I could never see what giving people
cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party
which sympathises with Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot
see why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conservatives
conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle upon which the
causes were selected on both sides; and I incline to think that it was
with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both
sides. Heaven knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too;
towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. But when
all is said, I incline to think that there was more spiritual and
atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the American party than
in those of the English party; and I think this unity was all the more
real because it was more difficult to define. The Republican party
originally stood for the triumph of the North, and the North stood for
the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial
expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and
progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its
industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Democratic party
stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this
development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to
Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth
century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia
founded on grain rather than gold. Along with this went, not at all
unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the Southern squires,
who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison
romantic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the
pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a
religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition.
Above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should
favour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties,
and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the
Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally
silly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, when
he denounced the Democratic party as supported by 'Rome, rum, and
rebellion.' They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;
and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic
party, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party.
But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become
very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the
great Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for
an instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been
exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poem
bearing the characteristic title of 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.' And,
by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul does
not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of
Mr. Vachell Lindsay's great orchestra; which has the note of his whole
nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over
as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;
there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million
men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of
Bryan's fall over Free Silver as 'defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my
dream'; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as
the candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the man
whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr.
Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in its
nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight
rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for
them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very
indirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion that
made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a
Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a
debate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that
woman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I was
away in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling
courage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan
is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no
conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering
lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most
magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as
I understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as
it was already a part of the political system. And when I heard that, I
could not help a sigh; for I recognised something that I knew only too
well on the front benches of my own beloved land. The great and glorious
demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. I had never expected for a
moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all;
but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two
educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular
topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. What is
the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind.
There can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what
has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. We are
perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man
who will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who will undo things;
and that will be a real test of strength.

Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the Free Silver fight,
that the Democratic party was democratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson
it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes
into a hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, even where
it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In fact, it has been not so
much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after
certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the
strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more
normal than going to sleep. But an even larger truth is this; it is most
likely that America is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at
all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions
hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to be classified
as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. They are so large as to
be inside as well as outside the state. From an English standpoint the
most obvious example is the Irish; for the Irish problem is not a
British problem, but also an American problem. And this is true even of
the great external enigma of Japan. The Japanese question may be a part
of foreign policy for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for
California. And the same is true of that other intense and intelligent
Eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the
world so much longer. What the Japs are in California, the Jews are in
America. That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has become
imbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but still
has to be regarded from the outside. On these great international
matters I doubt if Americans got much guidance from their party system;
especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and
rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of them with fresh
minds. And that is the truth in the statement that the Washington
Conference has opened the gates of a new world.

On the relations to England and Ireland I will not attempt to dwell
adequately here. I have already noted that my first interview was with
an Irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid sense
of the importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and I have
said something of the Irish problem, prematurely and out of its proper
order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. Here I will only add
two remarks about the two countries respectively. A great many British
journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the
troubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the
downward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into a
butter-slide. They seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say
what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased
to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers
would probably like to know. They therefore informed the public that
'the majority of Americans' had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland,
because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that this majority of
Americans was now ardently in sympathy with its English brothers across
the sea. Now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are
saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. To anybody who
has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the
remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. It is
like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China would agree
with the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy
rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living
in those great central plains of the North American Continent of whom
it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of
England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional
movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is
perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might
sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being
pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian
might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that
large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and
large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say
that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of
them once in six months. Painting up large notices of 'Watch Us Grow,'
making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional
hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or
divorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the
time carelessly as in the golden age.

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real
'majority of Americans,' and confining ourselves to that older culture
on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall
find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false
comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this
eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as
a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall
with pride the branches of their family that belong to England or the
English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for
English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism
itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and
flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy
to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether
if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote
Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;
or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as
much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of
Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case
he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a
number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic
with England.

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were
only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes
rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these
chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were
_rallying_ to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old
England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody
or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible.
The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as
she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being
painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me
uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously
forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as
morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and
cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land.
Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during
the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and
commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that
note in a human voice. England was being _pitied_. I, as an Englishman,
was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be
an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of
the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But
the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an
end.

It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still
less of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put down
a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European
politics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that most
Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of
Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the
truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering,
or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success
is come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are
sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriously
considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially
the horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people.
I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled
in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the
painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we
ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland _might_ have put
herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had
not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude
towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;
but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating
blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker and
the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has made
surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase
the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But
unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception
of our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it would
have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have
succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an
attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly an
inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it
called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up
our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to
undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician
has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool,
except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick
first, received a kicking in return, and _then_ gave up the money; and
it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been
badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if
it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first
action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like
the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West
looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has
begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not
find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my
country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely
corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the
cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road.
There was something in their voices and the look in their eyes which
from the first disturbed me. So I have heard good Englishmen, who died
afterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, 'It seems
impossible, of those jolly Bavarians!' or, 'I will never believe it,
when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg!'

But there are other things besides the parallel of Prussia or the
problem of Ireland. The American press is much freer than our own; the
American public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption
than our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our
politics than we are. Almost any man in America may speak of the Marconi
Case; many a man in England does not even know what it means. Many
imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians
speculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it means a great deal to
Americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling India and
another is ruling Palestine. And this brings me to another problem,
which is also dealt with much more openly in America than in England. I
mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the
misunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks for an example
of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even
the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a
stronger case than the story of Henry Ford of Detroit.

When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and it
really was a pleasure. He is a man quite capable of views which I think
silly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent
boss. It must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot really
be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not a man who merely wants
to run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run away
with him. He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really invented
things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he is
something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. A man of that type
is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian
atmosphere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before and may be
wrong now. He is chiefly known in England for a project which I think
very preposterous; that of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe during
the war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much
more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and
with much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of the
Anti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anything
of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was a
national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least
some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgeless
inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for
freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a
high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed
fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of
all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal.
Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast
is enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world who
would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews.
They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which
they would call 'true Christianity,' and which specially forbids an
attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on
assimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product
of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a
man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is
because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is
an Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such
racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last
sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been
the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship,
and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very
wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of
Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have
prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on
peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on
Israel.

It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published some
studies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my
'prejudice.' I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong
word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point of
personal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man who dislikes Jews;
though I believe that some men do. I have had Jews among my most
intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have them
till I die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would be
illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a very lucid
Latin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case.
I might be said to be prejudiced against a Hairy Ainu because of his
name, for I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to
correct my preconceptions. But if after moving about in the modern world
and meeting Jews, knowing Jews, doing business with Jews, and reading
and hearing about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like
Jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. It would simply
be an opinion; and one I should be perfectly entitled to hold; though as
a matter of fact I do not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely
following on _experience_ of Jews can properly be called a prejudice.

Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semitism springs from
experience and nothing but experience. There is no prejudice for it to
spring from. Or rather the prejudice is all the other way. All the
traditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are in
favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. The
sympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were all
against Front-de-Boeuf and in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a
prejudice against Anti-Semitism; a prejudice of Anti-Anti-Semitism.
These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they
might have struck oil; because it is _there_, and not even because they
were looking for it. Their view of the problem, like their use of the
oil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely
disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a problem, and
others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new
country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient
superstition to explain it. It has appeared because it _is_ a problem;
and those are the best friends of the Jews, including many of the Jews
themselves, who are trying to find a solution. That is the meaning of
the incident of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit; and you will hardly hear an
intelligible word about it in England.

The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike the talk of
prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case our indifference has
really the excuse of ignorance. We used to lecture the Russians for
oppressing the Jews, before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to
lecture them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way we have
long lectured the Californians for oppressing the Japs, without allowing
for the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon be
the other way. As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is
not a prejudice. The Californians know more about the Japanese than we
do; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same position
generally say the same thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here
with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the
name of the new power in the Far East. It is possible that Japan, having
imitated European militarism, may imitate European pacifism. I cannot
honestly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one any more than
by the other. But when Englishmen, especially English Liberals like
myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards Americans and
especially Californians, I am moved to make a final remark. When a
considerable number of Englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of
our friendship with Japan and our friendship with America, when they
finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of
Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment.

We are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about the
bonds that bind us to America. We are perpetually crying aloud that
England and America are very much alike, especially England. We are
always insisting that the two are identical in all the things in which
they most obviously differ. We are always saying that both stand for
democracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half
a day. We are always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, when
we are descended from Romans and Normans and Britons and Danes, and they
are descended from Irishmen and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell
a people whose very existence is a revolt against the British Crown that
they are passionately devoted to the British Constitution. We tell a
nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with
us she can bear safely the White Man's Burden of universal empire. We
tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God that the Saxon can
always rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless
that together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own
law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor
anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they
have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into
existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical
analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in
which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten
to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of
the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one
language, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome,
when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience
of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an
implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as
with trumpets--_then_ many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder
whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose
heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore
two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado.




_Prohibition in Fact and Fancy_


I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I
soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss
it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to
dispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a general
philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised
by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. But
if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing
to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does
not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it
was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I
fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;
and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has
always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some
particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has
in history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet at
least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. But
if a test is needed, consider what part of Moslem culture has passed
permanently into our own modern culture. You will find the one Moslem
poem that has really pierced is a Moslem poem in praise of wine. The
crown of all the victories of the Crescent is that nobody reads the
Koran and everybody reads the Rubaiyat.

Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in _Punch_,
representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the
pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention
of a cabman to the calamity. The old lady says, 'I'm sure this poor
gentleman is ill,' and the cabman replies with fervour, 'Ill! I wish I
'ad 'alf 'is complaint.'

We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such a thing as
unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often
underground in the subconsciousness. Many a man talks sense when he
thinks he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as if it
were only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel when
he means only to make a pun. Some of the _Punch_ jokes of the best
period are examples of this; and that quoted above is a very strong
example of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a great deal
more than he meant. His utterance contained fine philosophical doctrines
and distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. The
spirit of the English language, the tragedy and comedy of the condition
of the English people, spoke through him as the god spoke through a
teraph-head or brazen mask of oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and in
some sense an omen of doom.

Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. Note his measure,
his moderation; or to use the yet truer term, his temperance. He only
wishes to have half the old gentleman's complaint. The old gentleman is
welcome to the other half, along with all the other pomps and luxuries
of his superior social station. There is nothing Bolshevist or even
Communist about the temperance cabman. He might almost be called
Distributist, in the sense that he wishes to distribute the old
gentleman's complaint more equally between the old gentleman and
himself. And, of course, the social relations there represented are very
much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. By the realism of
this picture Mr. Punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures, with
the opposite social moral. It will remain eternally among his real
glories that he exhibited a picture in which the cabman was sober and
the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to the contrary, it was
emphatically a picture of real life. The truth is subject to the
simplest of all possible tests. If the cabman were really and truly
drunk he would not be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he had
the whole of the old gentleman's complaint, he would be sitting happily
on the pavement beside the old gentleman; a symbol of social equality
found at last, and the levelling of all classes of mankind. I do not say
that there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman; I do
not say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudently
to three-quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severe
but wise conception of half of it. But I do say that most men of the
world, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples of
helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside cabs than of helplessly drunken
drivers on top of them. Philanthropists and officials, who never look at
people but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to
the contrary; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be
cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. Social workers
probably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments,
showing how the extreme intoxication of cabmen compares with the
parallel intoxication of costermongers; or measuring the drunkenness of
a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-sweeper. But there is
more practical experience embodied in the practical speech of the
English; and in the proverb that says 'as drunk as a lord.'

Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England or a pretence in
America, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have no
drink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. It means
that the old gentleman shall be carried home in the cab drunker than
ever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to drink to
excess, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even in
moderation. That is what it means; that is all it means; that is all it
ever will mean. It tends to that in Moslem countries; where the
luxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical
drink water. It means that in modern America; where the wealthy are all
at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder
labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity.
This is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it
according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept
called 'justice,' expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality
of men. So long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are
rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have Prohibition and
be as drunk as you choose.

I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, dealing with social
conditions in America, are reported in the press. They include some
observations about Sinn Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell's
allusions to Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin,
or the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the remarks about
America are valuable in the objective sense, over and above their
philosophy. He believes that Prohibition will survive and be a success,
nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any special
disfavour. But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have
asserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy are
concerned. He testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as will
any other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of America; and he
implies humorously that he asked no questions about the story told him
of the old stocks in the cellars. So there is no dispute about the
facts; and we come back as before to the principles. Is Mr. Campbell
content with a Prohibition which is another name for Privilege? If so,
he has simply absorbed along with his new theology a new morality which
is different from mine. But he does state both sides of the inequality
with equal logic and clearness; and in these days of intellectual fog
that alone is like a ray of sunshine.

Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based on any arguments
against it, but on the one argument for it. I need nothing more for its
condemnation than the only thing that is said in its defence. It is said
by capitalists all over America; and it is very clearly and correctly
reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument is that employees work
harder, and therefore employers get richer. That this idea should be
taken calmly, by itself, as the test of a problem of liberty, is in
itself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows that
people have completely forgotten that there is any other test except the
servile test. Employers are willing that workmen should have exercise,
as it may help them to do more work. They are even willing that workmen
should have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists can see that
this also really means that they can do more work. But they are not in
any way willing that workmen should have fun; for fun only increases the
happiness and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and in that
sense is an end in itself. It concerns the man not as a worker but as a
citizen, or even as a soul; and the soul in that sense is an end in
itself. That a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry
and even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which is
for the service of God; and not merely for his mechanical health, which
is now bound to the service of man. The very test adopted has all the
servile implication; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of
the test of what he can get out of life.

Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as a
conjecture than a prophecy, that England may find it necessary to become
teetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency and
economy of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the most economical and
efficient of all forms of labour. It did not happen to be feasible for
the English to compete with it by copying it. There were so many
humanitarian prejudices about in those days. But economically there
seems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that England
would be forced to adopt American Slavery then, as she is urged to adopt
American Prohibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have prophesied
rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that universal Slavery might
have been the vision of Calhoun as universal Prohibition seems to be the
vision of Campbell. The old England of 1830 would have said that such a
plea for slavery was monstrous; but what would it have said of a plea
for enforced water-drinking? Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State of
Calhoun collapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is always
the hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic Utopia
of Mr. Campbell and Soft Drinks.

Abstract morality is very important; and it may well clear the mind to
consider what would be the effect of Prohibition in America, if it were
introduced there. It would, of course, be a decisive departure from the
tradition of the Declaration of Independence. Those who deny that are
hardly serious enough to demand attention. It is enough to say that they
are reduced to minimising that document in defence of Prohibition,
exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence of
Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republic
meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. And they are
obviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery
question; that if that great charter was limited to certain events in
the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about in
the nineteenth--or in the twentieth. But they are also open to another
reply which is even more to the point, when they pretend that
Jefferson's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong.
They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that he
does not say at all. The great preamble does not say that all
monarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies
that most government is right. It speaks of human governments in general
as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. I
see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal
government that does defend those rights. Still less do I doubt what it
would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights.

But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about their
degree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody in
his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the
law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more
general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty
can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at
least be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the first
liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right
place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, if
they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in
relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend
that beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions
of civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched
it. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there can
be no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. It
is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and
licence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as liberty. It is
plainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. To say
that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the
choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat but
not a right to his head.

Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man, if there are
any rights of man. What its supporters really mean is that there are
none. And in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that every
sceptic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ultimate
scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out to
them that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressive
than we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. In the primary
metaphysics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make it out
for a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination.
If there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? Perhaps a
nation has no claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to good
government. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort of government or any
sort of independence. Perhaps they will say _that_ is not implied in the
Declaration of Independence. But without going deep into my reasons for
believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights (and
Jefferson certainly states them as supernatural), I am content here to
note that a man's treatment of his own body, in relation to traditional
and ordinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his
self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that when that is
gone there is nothing left. If coercion applies to that, it applies to
everything; and in the future of this controversy it obviously will
apply to everything. When I was in America, people were already applying
it to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply it to talking.
Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer; and what is more
relevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often
drives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging and
positively in the form of bad company. If the American Puritan is so
anxious to be a _censor morum_, he should obviously put a stop to the
evil communications that really corrupt good manners. He should
reintroduce the Scold's Bridle among the other Blue Laws for a land of
blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics; he
should cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud
things. Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is
done simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats allowed people
to talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because they
were fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights
of man. But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a final
fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should not be applied
intelligently; and in that case it would be applied to the control of
conversation. The State would provide us with forms already filled up
with the subjects suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps
allowing us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we should have to
make a formal application in writing, to be allowed to make a joke that
had just occurred to us in conversation. And the committee would
consider it in due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a more
practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as the
public-houses were shut up. Perhaps they would all wear gags, which the
policeman would remove at stated hours; and their mouths would be opened
from one to three, as now in England even the public-houses are from
time to time accessible to the public. To some this will sound
fantastic; but not so fantastic as Jefferson would have thought
Prohibition. But there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, for
by hypothesis it leaves out the favouritism that is the fundamental of
the whole matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic will
never go so far as this is that logic will never go the length of
equality. It is perfectly possible that the same forces that have
forbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco. But they will in a special
and limited sense forbid tobacco--but not cigars. Or at any rate not
expensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of ordinary men smoke
rather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity of
penalising a very ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionaire
will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring back the
Scold's Bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. It will only
be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking.

These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem of Prohibition; but
it would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causes
which, if not defences, are at least excuses. The first is that
Prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of
self-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of America
in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion of
what that national unanimity was like will smile when they see America
made a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly a
sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like every
poetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures of
renunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more
human, makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot remain
standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanent
policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or
uttering a battle-cry. We might as well expect all the Yale students to
remain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when
they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable as to expect
them to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cup
which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among
all the youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly in a
discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic,
a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment
of these healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the
passing of Prohibition, by asking, 'May not a man who is asked to give
up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his
country?' And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the
case. I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormal
crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up the
bread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer
in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic
really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the
sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted as
Prohibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he
misses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a special
regulation, as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do
indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drink
regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures.
But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong,
but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never denied that
there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions;
and war is in its nature an exception. Only, if war is the exception,
why should Prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy
to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be
flowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphia
and New York. If my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must draw
up rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinary
citizens. He must suppose that, through all their lives, they are
paraded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show that
they will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that every
evening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are made
to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. It
is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, the
citizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is that
sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal for
the State to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a
fighting regiment; and it is not normal for the State to be perpetually
regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every
citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying
that every Christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers because
the Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has a
right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his
body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health,
though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus,
though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that
comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that
Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal.

The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I have
already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real
power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing
employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen.
But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage,
there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case.
The whole business began with the problem of black labour. I have not
attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the
negro. I have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational;
that I do not think I have anything particularly valuable to say or
suggest. I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and
intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no solution filling
up the gap with sentimentalism. The chief thing that struck me about the
coloured people I saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness.
My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the Red Indians; and
indeed I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians.
They did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their
glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But the
negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give
it; and this book is controversial enough about things that I have
really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer
who shoots at sight. But I believe that it was always common ground to
people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes
had been the crime and catastrophe of American history. The only
difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once
committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other
thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their
slavery. It was only comparatively lately, by a process I shall have to
indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery
became possible. Now among the many problems of the presence of an alien
and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a
very real problem of drink. Drink certainly has a very exceptionally
destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was
alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the
United States; to call up the passions that are the particular
temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are
followed by appalling popular vengeance. However this may be, many of
the states of the American Union, which first forbade liquor to
citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the
moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About all their
political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on
modern politics; hypocrisy. The superior race had to rule by a sort of
secret society organised against the inferior. The American politicians
dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory
and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men became
as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the
Ku-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that
the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense
of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were
something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is
liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when
private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests
of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich
Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with,
because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may
well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were
using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply.
But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they
didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were
only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil
War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little
curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been
occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even
conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because
the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but
partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this
particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was
originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The
emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan
was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was made
professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is
only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried
successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We in
England have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in
this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The
true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be
to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to
rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this.
For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which
would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed,
just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it
for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet
because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;
and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were
an American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man
within the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor
to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;
and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We
apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as
Western democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American case
which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon
so important a change.

America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. In
this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been
put upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as much
enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a
model only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd if
the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan
for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports
in the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in
essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy
of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of
Voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White
Trash was being treated according to its name.




_Fads and Public Opinion_


A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is
perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a
reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a
foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own
laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner
have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant
to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous
ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is
generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are
so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to
consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have
arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And,
rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the
failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is
humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be
the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.

The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly
contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination,
piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The
most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to
the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly
on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole.
American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being
up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that
concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the
milk. The latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines
that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to
hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two come first into
contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance
will sound like boasting.

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier in the trenches,
'The Kaiser may want a place in the sun; I reckon he won't have a place
in the solar system when we begin to hustle.' The English soldier will
very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression
based on the extraordinary assumption that the American means what he
says. The American has merely indulged in a little art for art's sake,
and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an American short
story. But the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the other
man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the English
effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh,
you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking
for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American
will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty
answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably
have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her
being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the
extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that
the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper
carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national
sense of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes come from
the contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the American making
life more wild and impossible than it is, and the Englishman making it
more flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house of
life by a skylight and the other by a trap-door.

This difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for
practical people. Most of those who profess to remove all international
differences are not practical people. Most of the phrases offered for
the reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious
and even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not conducted in
those phrases. The normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a
flippant man. And the normal man is almost always the national man.
Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of
democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every
country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any
farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all
internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem
until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists.

It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. When
Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit
on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr.
Weller observes, 'Vell, Sammy, I hope you find your spirits rose by this
'ere lively visit.' I have never looked up this passage in the popular
and successful French version of _Pickwick_; but I confess I am curious
as to what French past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word
'rose.' A translator has not only to give the right translation of the
right word but the right translation of the wrong word. And in the same
way I am quite prepared to suspect that there are English jokes which an
Englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, without
asking for the sympathy of an American. But Englishmen are generally
only too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that the
fine edge of it cuts both ways. I have begun this chapter on the note of
national humour because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise how
easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious.
When I think something in America is really foolish, it may be I that am
made a fool of. It is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this;
but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers.
But when I seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic
side of America, I allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be
fantastic. And indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is
meant to be serious. But whether or no there is a joke, there is
certainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral
make-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me.

The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. There is even a
sort of double meaning in the word 'convention'; for it is also used for
the most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament not
summoned by any king. The Americans come together very easily without
any king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, and
even a very conventional convention. In a democracy riot is rather the
exception and respectability certainly the rule. And though a
superficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations,
and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he does
receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. Thus
Americans all dress well; one might almost say that American women all
look well; but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look very
different. They are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to be
conspicuously fashionable. Of course there are patches, both Bohemian
and Babylonian, of which this is not true, but I am talking of the
general tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is more
respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit
is behind both riot and respectability. It is the same social force that
makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the
riotous to lynch him. I do not object to it being called 'the herd
instinct,' so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an
explanation.

Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up everything that opposes
it; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of a
natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained in
England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what
patriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America had
entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always
perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their
worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would have
found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking
together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of
the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with
eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an
aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American
Pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have
been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats
like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil
could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a
true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a
gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad.
He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine
the psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons.
It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good
and sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but one
of the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance,
touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite
neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was
during the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, which
would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any
control, or where there was any union. And in this sense the United
States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is
something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind
the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something
even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy.
And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the
herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover
anything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious
people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to
ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a
looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are
certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal
appetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this very
vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that
when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is when
they are self-conscious that they are like each other.

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only because
it is an 'ism.' Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship
of personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal
selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong
self-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen in
any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary
Napoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of
Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes
of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by
more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must
thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the world
with the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length
of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely
clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to
prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the
fringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation,
not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming.
And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it is
carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce
real individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in the
abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will,
more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective
could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his
humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at
least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old
sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these
days against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would show
a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate
collectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim,
otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes
forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.
Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which
the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson
could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten
Commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of
them. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like
that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen.

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who is
certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire
with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked
me what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for such
generalisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who are
the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but
I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about
talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any
American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I
suggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating as
they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal
personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest
emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking
individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright
and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And
yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a
symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the
subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can
be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry
candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over
me, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she
would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full
of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate
proportion even in the most detached description. But the same thing
was in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irish
exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded
galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement of
style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: 'And I have been
in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or
write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.'

It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this land
the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt
Whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to
that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of the
lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might
almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in
which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more
honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older
women. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for
they do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in it
the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; they
only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the
old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal
presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poetic
vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering
multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman.
It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the
eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, I
cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for
another, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had been
travelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I
remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of
cherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be
only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and
superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an
illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the
train.

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity
favourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much of
a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen
an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should
produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human
dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am
not referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discuss
elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next
door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral
questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to
model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that
there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a
cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits
Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In
other words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man a
convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or
anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American
atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or
hanged for writing a post-card.

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are
full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it is
not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out of
many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children
to take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the children
were 'health-mad.' That it is not exactly the object of all mental
hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be
engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians
and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we may
say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot
caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would
have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted
to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which
that great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of its
episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle
of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a
cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of
exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has
climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical
thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of
imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they
themselves praise it for being mad?

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made
fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America
another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the
intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one
on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand
and even to employ the word 'annihilate.' When asked to say something
proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 'When
common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.' In reply to which,
by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve,
and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same
elegant diction, 'When psychological education comes in, common sense is
annihilated.' Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an
adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not
particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating
superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of
twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man
of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a
little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every
reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and
bushy beard.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American
cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce
psychoanalysis--that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I
confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit
of the mass. I can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, two
possible causes rather peculiar to America, which may have made this
great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so
manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea.

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Puritanism merely in
the sense of Prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might have
done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not
arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and
progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the
prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they
can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive
Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not
limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the
restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the
restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more
and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for
it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of
the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus
the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much
Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but
by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was
bound to choose the smallest piece. There is in America, I believe, a
large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from
Christendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing
buttons. I do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose,
for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some Puritan
body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. I
was going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot
bring myself to believe that any American, however insane, would object
to wearing badges. But the point is that as the holy spirit of
progressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented a
new objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to
the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. And from them
it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise
and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of
trouser-buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because it is
recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. That
is the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-century
sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evident
enemy of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying that the
majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always
right. Progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people are
prophets. Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism
anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the
people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that
kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people
are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their
own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the
ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something
that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

There is another cause of this strange servile disease in American
democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America
is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that
the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female
politicians at least as much as the majority of American men despise
their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a
minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the
atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. And
it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid
obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure
of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as
was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great
War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times,
then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is
snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly
challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful
solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it
is a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning
against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed
in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureole
which the East sees shining around an idiot.

But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist,
and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is
something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have
not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the
particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to
disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this
is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now
lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about,
according to which women in the past have always been in the position of
slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been
in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled
in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be
constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can
babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot
plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be
tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as
there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of
feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state
than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as
citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all
mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its
votes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a
danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the
excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not
an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street;
but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down
the chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger of
turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this
protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men
retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain
of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining
of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she has
too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having
too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost
irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that
power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds
to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the
family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be
something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad
mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as
well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be
interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening
influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will
most assuredly perish from the earth.

But there is always another possibility. Hints of it may be noted here
and there like muffled gongs of doom. The other day some people
preaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory of
motherhood, were suddenly silenced in New York; by a voice of deep and
democratic volume. The prigs who potter about the great plains are
pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as
they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance
in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are
indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of
culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some
lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried
religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running
like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the
prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its
sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries
have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had
under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of
the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it
can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their
arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the
last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never
knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all
the children of pride.




_The Extraordinary American_


When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign
than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating
rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks
the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the
almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in
countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox
that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found
something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character
easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we see
an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty
certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the
event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people
can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of
which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some
light on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiences
one isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in any
other country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no notion of
what it meant. I have heard even from Americans about five different
conjectures about its meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do
sincerely believe that if I did understand it, I should understand
America.

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book to
itself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is a
district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indian
territory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is
really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing
with the sense of having a great future--and nothing else. People are
just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich;
people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in
Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly
affirming that it wasn't there last week. It was against the colours of
this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the
fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of
interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, and
looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a
stranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curious
air of having authority to put the question, what I was doing in that
city.

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical
traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But the
most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered
with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars
and crescents. I was well accustomed by this time to Americans adorning
the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; it
is a part of the American passion for the ritual of comradeship. There
is nothing that an American likes so much as to have a secret society
and to make no secret of it. But in this case, if I may put it so, the
rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in a
fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor
mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisional
explanation. In answer to his question, touching my business in
Oklahoma, I replied with restraint that I was lecturing. To which he
replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiant
pride, 'I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.'

So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. I knew
it was unusual, in my own country, for the Astronomer Royal to walk down
the Strand with his coat plastered all over with the Solar System.
Indeed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lecturer to
advertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. But though it
would be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. In fact, I
think it might add to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did
adopt this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able to
recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders and
cockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. I should like to
see a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. An osteopath, I
suppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while
a botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a
Jack-in-the-Green. So while I regarded the astronomical lecturer in the
astronomical coat as a figure distinguishable, by a high degree of
differentiation, from the artless astronomers of my island home (enough
their simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing illogical, but
rather an imaginative extreme of logic. And then came another turn of
the wheel of topsy-turvydom, and all the logic was scattered to the
wind.

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one
who owned the street, the strange being continued, 'Yes, I am lecturing
on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology,
eschatology,' and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences
apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any
single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to
business. He apologised with true American courtesy for having
questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting
responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of
simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already
mentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something far
more serious was clouding his brow.

'I feel it to be my duty,' he said, 'to acquaint myself with any
stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome
here a member of the Upper Ten.' I assured him earnestly that I knew
nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; I
felt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be another secret
society. He waved my abnegation aside and continued, 'I have a great
responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I
have a great responsibility.' And then an extraordinary thing happened.
Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, he flashed something
before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again
almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it
was some sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it
like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which
has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories,
shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize
of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in
tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankee
detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone Hand
Crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the
desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, 'You mean you are
connected with the police authorities here, don't you? Well, if I commit
a murder here, I'll let you know.' Whereupon that astonishing man waved
a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing
master; and said, 'Oh, those are not things we expect from members of
the Upper Ten.'

Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark
tides of humanity, as the vision passed away down the dark tides from
Sir Galahad and, starlike, mingled with the stars.

That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and to all who claim
to understand America. Who and what was that man? Was he an astronomer?
Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a lunatic who
thought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was a
detective? If he was a detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did
he tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after
saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch over the city in a
quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blazon himself all over with
all the stars of the sky, and profess to give public lectures on all the
subjects of the world? Every wise and well-conducted student of murder
stories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes.
But nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes.
Why not wear his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger in
the street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uniform; for these
lands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilance
committees. Some Americans suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; the
regular hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and my
boyhood's dreams. Others suggested that he was an agent of the Ku-Klux
Klan, that great nameless revolution of the revival of which there were
rumours at the time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. But
whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator against
the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, I agree with the former
conjectures upon one point. I am perfectly certain he had something else
in his pocket besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under
certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me
dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. And that is the
last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems
that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may
not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence of that citizen of
Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with the fullness and depth of the
mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing
that we call a nation; and I salute the flag.

But even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moral
which affords another reason for mentioning him. Whether he was a
sheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him that
suggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of America;
and whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainly
violence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policeman.
The posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the
Hamon trial; a _cause célèbre_ which reached its crisis in Oklahoma
while I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a girl whom he had
wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called
vengeance. There was very great excitement culminating in the girl's
acquittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional in
that breezy borderland. The moment the town had received the news that
Clara Smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, 'Double
stabbing outrage near Oklahoma,' or 'Banker's throat cut on Main
Street,' or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. It seemed as
much as to say, 'Do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in
shooting a Senator,' or 'Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara
Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold.'

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite my
friend's mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere
of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for
persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social
compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. In
a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream
of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For
one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness is
never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the
boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots
cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it
would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of
the Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a
much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any
society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the
total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was
presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a
member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a
millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called
the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible
President. And the speeches of Clara Smith's counsel, who was known by
the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough
in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusion
that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and
Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when
Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and
even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about
English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism
about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life.
People do vaguely doubt the criminality of 'a man in that position';
that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis de
Sade. _Prima facie_, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade
that he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that he was a
millionaire. Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an
adventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he made
mountains out of the 'Hamon millions,' as if they made the matter much
worse; as indeed I think they do. But that is because I happen to share
a certain political philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffaloes
of the prairies. In other words, there is really present here a
democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. It does not
prevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination from
being regarded with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the
starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions about the Upper
Ten. McLean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted
the Senator with his gold.

But something more is involved. I became conscious, as I have been
conscious in reading the crime novels of America, that the millionaire
was taken as a type and not an individual. This is the great difference;
that America recognises rich crooks as a _class_. Any Englishman might
recognise them as individuals. Any English romance may turn on a crime
in high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife,
or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are
not always saying, either in romance or reality, 'What's to be done, if
our food is being poisoned by all these baronets?' They do not murmur in
indignation, 'If bishops will go on burgling like this, something must
be done.' The whole point of the English romance is the exceptional
character of a crime in high life. That is not the tone of American
novels or American newspapers or American trials like the trial in
Oklahoma. Americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught,
as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not at
his being discovered. To put the matter shortly, England recognises a
criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. America also
recognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. In both, for
various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted;
but in America the upper class of criminals is recognised. In both
America and England, of course, it exists.

This is an assumption at the back of the American mind which makes a
great difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for the
better. I wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars;
but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really does
in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an
Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated
school, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all
the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers,
when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a
crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a
house-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the
laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only
the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some
fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well
be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on
the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker
and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a
house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial
intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for
the home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the home.

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the
element of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and social
oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at
least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed
something which people call ruthless about the air of America,
especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door
without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a
truncheon; but the Irish policeman's truncheon hits both ways. It may be
brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the
difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the
bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all that
barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark
democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the
coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as
oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which
corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynical
charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high
and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police
system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongs
to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil
past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred
crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is
worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he
is any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are light
allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any
Christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven--not to
say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry's are those
of the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn
spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps.
There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism
which I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairly
sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish
policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;
his truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit; and yet I
believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be
found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads
and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in
fact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole
companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to
detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories
also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Ten
expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective
and not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the
horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this
chapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry and
the Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not
understand; and when I do not understand, I say so.




_The Republican in the Ruins_


The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to
a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in
pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most
superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait
of the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the police
are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been
photographed before he absconded. The scientific diagram may be a
hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. But it is always an
idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a
thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. The power of these
talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. We can never
forget that we have seen a portrait of the Missing Link; though we
should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were
told that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the Unknown God.
But there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the
same trick of fancy. We accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only
images of speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth
century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded
to put all its faith in metaphors. It dismissed the old doctrines about
the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to
talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that
could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of
progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following
our noses. Thus the purpose of God is an idea, true or false; but the
purpose of Nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God
there is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of
the purpose of God with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to
be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak
of the purpose of Nature in particular and practical problems of curing
babies or cutting up rabbits. This power of the modern metaphor must be
understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of
the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the
problem of America.

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be
a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a
metaphor at all. If somebody said that a certain deserving charity had
just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of
speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. If somebody
said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it
could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet
these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by
calling a corporate association of all sorts of people 'young'; that is,
that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. I am not
now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a
psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. I am not
even denying that America has it. I am only pointing out, to begin with,
that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor
which we do not recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old
mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the new
metaphors are metaphorical. They have some sort of hazy notion that
American society must be growing, must be promising, must have the
virtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely _because_ it has only
had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. And that is
exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that a
limited liability company will soon have its second teeth.

Now in truth this particular conception of American hopefulness would be
anything but hopeful for America. If the argument really were, as it is
still vaguely supposed to be, that America must have a long life before
it, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find a
very fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that did
start in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was called the
Age of Reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systems
were indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting from reason has
not saved them from ruin. If we survey the Europe of to-day with real
clarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is precisely
the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been
ruined. The two great States which did most definitely and emphatically
deserve to be called modern states were Prussia and Russia. There was no
real Prussia before Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before
Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised themselves as
rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate
barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do
for themselves. They did not, like the kings of England or France or
Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic
and patriotic people. In this sense there was no Russia but only an
Emperor of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before it was a
nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow both men were particularly
modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of
being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced
the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians.
Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther.
The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean
rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in
nothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done.

If then the promise of America were in the fact that she is one of the
latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the
latest born that were the first to die. If in this sense she is praised
as young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and have
not lived to be old. And if this be confused with the argument that she
came in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by old
superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition
have survived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of course, that
the real quality of America is much more subtle and complex than this;
and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, but
also of old and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the true
proportions of American life so interesting and so impossible.

To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed
metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; and
consequently opposite ways. We use the same word 'young' to mean two
opposite extremes. We mean something at an early stage of growth, and
also something having the latest fruits of growth. We might call a
commonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation by
wireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might also
call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints;
meaning that it was primitive. These two meanings of youth are
hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to America. But what is
more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in America.
America is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in
some ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a little
confusing to convey both notions by the same word.

On the one hand, Americans often are successful in the last inventions.
And for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one.
It is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that while
they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back
in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that this
is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of
wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of
wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very
vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies
from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts
anybody off; nobody says, 'Sorry you've been troubled.' But then the
postal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could never
discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in
some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to drive
me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into
his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near
West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, but
only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of
science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of
youth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the
excitement of a new one.

But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called
young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of
history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me
quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for
instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages.
There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the
great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the
curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as
a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as
it was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this is
one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of
stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorry
that tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette and
social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be
abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of
compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden
to do so.

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect
America is more historic than England; I might almost say more
archaeological than England. The record of one period of the past,
morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more
perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. In a more general
sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere
contrast between the old world and the new. There is a superficial
satire about the millionaire's daughter who has recently become the wife
of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in the
question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. There is
often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughter
and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage between
an upstart's daughter and an upstart's grandson. The sentimental
socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when
he wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains of
the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. Unfortunately (in
the interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialist
never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise the
colour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a
disappointment to him. There are certainly more American families that
really came over in the _Mayflower_ than English families that really
came over with the Conqueror; and an English county family clearly
dating from the time of the _Mayflower_ would be considered a very
traditional and historic house. Nevertheless, there are ancient things
in England, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are
buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in England which
do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past,
and even of the remote past. A man could study the Middle Ages in
Lincoln as well as in Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even
of the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; if
Shakespeare was later he was also greater than Ronsard. But the point is
that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness
and in freedom. The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they were
anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as they were anywhere.
Personally I do not admit that the men who served patrons were freer
than those who served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind
of freedom; and the point is that the English, in each case, had the
fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was another ideal of freedom
which the English never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all.
There was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built
no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You will find no traces of it in
England; but you will find them in America.

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. Its
religion, in the more defined sense, was generally Deism, as in
Robespierre or Jefferson. In the more general way of morals and
atmosphere it was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. It
had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as
that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. It
knew Latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the
Republic should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was
anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. Even of
the prigs and fanatics of the American and French Revolutions we can
often say, as Stevenson said of an American, that 'thrift and courage
glowed in him.' And its virtue and value for us is that it did remember
the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to
the danger of luxury. It did really believe in self-determination, in
the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. And its
determination was really determined. In short, it believed in
self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides
that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But there were in it the
marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a
crusade. Men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write
against its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, and
fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Independence. This was
the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century;
and there are still corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where
we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal
manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson would hardly surprise us.

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. In England the real
religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. It
never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building
called the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes
frigid figure called the Citizen.

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, partly perhaps by the
relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the
presence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept out
the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by
legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian
king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes
made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It
was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great
man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to
realise that there is something in history which we did not experience;
and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand.
There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism.
There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which
lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.

But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;
the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a
capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is
far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model.
For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy
with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I have
felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the
Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in
furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either.
But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the point
often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against
the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I
venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I
feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that
many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most
sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who
insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but
after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like
Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after
all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of
political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy
I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple.
That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost
cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world.

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; I doubt if I
should feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr.
M'Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive
himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the
crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that
the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though
it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering
about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the
inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matter
of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in
the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something
beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in
the spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and sober
religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in
Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of
Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is
there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,
whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It
is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican.

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I
should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has
collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is the
real Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of our
fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with
those parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-reading
Swinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem, 'Before a Crucifix,' in which
he bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the
way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United
Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic
exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the
old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal.
The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, as
represented by the actual Liberals, 'Have _you_ filled full men's
starved-out souls; have _you_ brought freedom on the earth?' For every
engine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted
has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression.
Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become a
monopoly. If the pure Church has been corrupted in the course of two
thousand years, what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a
filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred?


     O, hidden face of man, whereover
     The years have woven a viewless veil,
     If thou wert verily man's lover
     What did thy love or blood avail?
     Thy blood the priests make poison of;
     And in gold shekels coin thy love.


Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or the
politicians? Can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, as
such, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it in
anything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalists
make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers?

But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the
carven Christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its
consequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, but
not without regret, not even really without respect. I felt the same
myself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republic
not merely the American Republic, but the whole modern representative
system, as in France or even in England.




_Is the Atlantic Narrowing?_


A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. Because
of a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, it
is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hidden
weakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade
away; or how the Germans contrived to bring all their organisation into
a state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the
recent victory of Prussia. Or they will ask by what stages the modern
world has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapers
ceased to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politics
are free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certain
millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; in
short, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs
fly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they
twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of
answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles
the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a
gentleman who was asked, 'When did you leave off beating your wife?' But
there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the
forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the
reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took
trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving
with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;
of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no
special analysis. It is so with the international _rapprochement_ I have
to consider here.

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations
can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of
prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured
farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn
together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the
engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt
haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to
confess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are being
drawn together at all.

It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that
all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a
conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the
year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a
barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple
and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of
that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of
thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the
phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at
least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples
pointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, from
time to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very
hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have
been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very
name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which
that phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have dreamed of
uttering the watchword of 'Repeal' in Gaelic than of uttering it in
Zulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real
repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange
script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would
have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in
the picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away
from England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are
far less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretend
that the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or
decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural
that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the
sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the street
arm in arm would now arouse some remark.

I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement
of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted
company not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again become
separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have
started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now
nearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland,
that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the Turkish
Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the
Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple
and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least
equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference
between the Americans and the English.

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of
literature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book of
Snobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.
Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and
its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of
an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My
father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;
so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like _Gulliver's Travels_
or _Tristram Shandy_. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a great
deal more English than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an
almost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of O.
Henry. But never for one moment could I or any one else reading them
forget that they were stories by an American about America. The very
first fact about them is that they are told with an American accent,
that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating
foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which the
fame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that _The Spoon
River Anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book from
America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported
from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the
'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main
Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the
principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or
Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the
boarding-house of the Autocrat with any boarding-house I happened to
know in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the
point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick
the illusion. I said to myself, 'People are like this in
boarding-houses,' not 'People are like this in Boston.'

This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially in
the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the delightful sketch in the
causerie of Oliver Wendell Holmes; the character of the young man called
John. He is the very modern type in every modern country who does
specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in the
City; the everyday young man of the Gilbertian song, with a stick and a
pipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty
and commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends both to the
vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes's
book, his language was not very different from what it would have been
in a Brighton instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the
young man called John had more commonly been called 'Arry. If he had
appeared in a modern American book, his language would have been almost
literally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had to
read some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read the
dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. Nor is it an answer that this
depended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison
between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real
journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the
expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of
idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a
totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of
American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the very
name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein.

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give
and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take
rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and
indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other.
Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to
think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain
well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were
apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the
accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their
logical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical
punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have
been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or
less equal elements from England and America. It never included the
larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on the
whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an
interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then
all the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all
their past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up by
telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to
America; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to
forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of
forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago
was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an
inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that
conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less
justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the
Anglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of the
Americanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy
punishment.

It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it more
closely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it
is only on top. In that sense such Americanisation as there is is very
superficial. For instance, there is a certain amount of American slang
picked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalism
and drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of people
who have never spoken English beginning to speak American. I am far from
suggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may not
frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for
which there is no substitute; there are French phrases so used in
England and English phrases in France. The word 'high-brow,' for
instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary name
for something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, a
shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America and
belongs to the world, as much as 'The Raven' or _The Scarlet Letter_ or
the novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact, I can imagine
Henry James originating it in the throes of self-expression, and
bringing out a word like 'high-browed,' with a sort of gentle jerk, at
the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they found
the phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to be
borrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the point
is lost by translation into another context and culture. It is either
something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative
description, or of which there already exists a grotesque and
exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. For
instance, I cannot see that the strong and simple expression 'Now it is
for you to pull the police magistrate's nose' is in any way strengthened
by saying, 'Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate's nose.'
When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade 'Theirs but to do and
die,' the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. 'Up to them to do and
die' would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning.
This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there
is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like
ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and
fanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost its
humour. When Keats wrote the line, 'What pipes and timbrels, what wild
ecstasy!' I am willing to believe that the American humorist would have
expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'Some
pipe!' When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, it
was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion
of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird,
and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the
Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'Some bird?' as if he were
offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this
root and rationale of a joke, the English language already contains
quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, 'Some bird'; there is
a far finer irony in the old expression, 'Something like a bird.' It
suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike
about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a
bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like
the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of
imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical.
All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take
up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point
of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to
say, 'Something like a bird,' now say, 'Some bird,' with undiminished
weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; for
in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the
joke.

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these
American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our
climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain
that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or
scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British
public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the
eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key,
but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the
Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the
most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are
picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing
so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be
humorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes are
boomed as solemnly as American religions; and their supporters gravely
testify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment.
This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in
American democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. They make humour an
institution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the
violin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing; and
when these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not even
intelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and the
monopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England which
are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person; jokes
referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. I
saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole
of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a
housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly
true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box.
An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an
ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible to
tow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole, as to
trail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from the
New York papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements and
adaptations. I have already confessed that I took a considerable delight
in the dancing illuminations of Broadway--in Broadway. Everything there
is suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the toppling
houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city of
dissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting
dissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment of
Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. I
would as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland by
erecting a small Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James's
Park.

But all this commercial copying is very superficial; and above all, it
never copies anything that is really worth copying. Nations never
_learn_ anything from each other in this way. We have many things to
learn from America; but we only listen to those Americans who have still
to learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm but
only the big shop. In other words, we hear nothing of the democracy of
the Middle West, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who
is probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller in the Middle
Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be transplanted bodily from the
neighbourhood of his home town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his
frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in
the spot now occupied by Selfridge's (which could be easily cleared away
for the purpose), I think we could really get a great deal of good by
watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like
watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. Urban
crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze at
Mr. Pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonous
occupations. We could see him growing Indian corn with all the gravity
of an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. Pike blessing the
cornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. As I have said, there is a certain
lack of humane myth and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But we
could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a very
pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the American equivalent of
the glory of roasting chestnuts. Above all, many of us would learn for
the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something
more productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can really
be a free man, and have no lord but the law. Instead of that, America
can give nothing to London but those multiple modern shops, of which it
has too many already. I know that many people entertain the innocent
illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that is
only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as
well as trade. The big shop is not in the least remarkable for
efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is
secure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big shop,
considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shops
roofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of the
shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. If any one has any
doubts on this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider this
fact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercial
combination to anything that matters very much. We do not go to the
surgical department of the Stores to have a portion of our brain removed
by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to
employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of
being hanged. We go to men who own their own tools and are responsible
for the use of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that
other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen
across us like the gigantic shadow of America. Nations do not arm
themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine
they have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it about
something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by
having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate
sort of submarine. A nation may indeed perish slowly by having a
second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and
much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. But nobody wins a
great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that
Cadgerboy's Cavalry Is the Best. It may be that commercial enterprise
will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will
provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier.
When that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will
die. But though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of
being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience,
we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity.

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as a traveller, I
may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. Both
in England and America the normal people are the national people; and I
repeat that I think they are growing more and more national. I do not
think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and I am sure
I do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant
advertisement. I have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic
shadow of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it is not the
light of America. The light lies far beyond, a level light upon the
lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple
and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it.




_Lincoln and Lost Causes_


It has already been remarked here that the English know a great deal
about past American literature, but nothing about past American history.
They do not know either, of course, as well as they know the present
American advertising, which is the least important of the three. But it
is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how
illogically that little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of the
fame and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But it would be
unwise to cross-examine any Englishman, who may be consuming that luxury
at the moment, about the Missouri Compromise or the controversies with
Andrew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky is a cigar, so the
state of Virginia is a cigarette. But there is perhaps one exception, or
half-exception, to this simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration
to say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English person keeping
chickens, and chiefly interested in Plymouth Rocks considered as
chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the
word somewhere before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth
Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name connotes something
not only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful name
for a chicken. There would rise up before him something memorable in
the haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history books
of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats
struggling with sea-waves or Red Indians. The whole thing would suddenly
become clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called
Pilgrim Fathers.

Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim Fathers were champions
of religious liberty; and they discovered America. It is true that he
has also heard of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was in
connection with an egg. He has also heard of somebody known as Sir
Walter Raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it is
also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it
be possible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigarettes come
from? Gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together
for the average hen-wife who learnt history at the English elementary
schools, and who has now something better to do. Even when the narrative
becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. It is not
strictly true to say that the Pilgrim Fathers discovered America. But it
is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious
liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would have died
heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we
should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real
truth that is their due. The whole Puritan movement, from the Solemn
League and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was a
struggle _against_ religious toleration, or what they would have called
religious indifference. The first religious equality on earth was
established by a Catholic cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in
this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and
virilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to the
credit of their consistency and conviction. But there is no doubt that
the note of their whole experiment in New England was intolerance, and
even inquisition. And there is no doubt that New England was then only
the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. At least
two Cavaliers had been in the field before any Puritans. And they had
carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal
Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. They had established
it especially in Virginia, which had been founded by a great Elizabethan
and named after the great Elizabeth. Before there was any New England in
the North, there was something very like Old England in the South.
Relatively speaking, there is still.

Whenever the anniversary of the _Mayflower_ comes round, there is a
chorus of Anglo-American congratulation and comradeship, as if this at
least were a matter on which all can agree. But I knew enough about
America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many
people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a
protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of
Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and
why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record
that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes
Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America
until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great
Presidents and most of the Fathers of the Republic. Its adherence to
the Southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a
doubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies it produced what
is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like St. Louis
in the lost battle, or Hector dying before holy Troy.

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing
about Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that they
know is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of
his considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his
moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as
self-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which
Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;
and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it
seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean
his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical
truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a
merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he
reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not
apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was
intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to
be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very
bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash
what they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistency
beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved
the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something,
there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell
from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost
like a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worth
mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A
wise man's attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like
Lincoln's attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure
capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He will
recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of
knowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance of
having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the
opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse
things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will
not call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call all
planters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard many
alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded
John Brown's raid; because they are. But he will clear his _mind_ from
cant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth about
Trusts and Trade Combines and the concentration of capital; and it is
the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven,
over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell.

But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate reference to the
international matters I am considering here. His name has been much
invoked by English politicians and journalists in connection with the
quarrel with Ireland. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire
the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians.

History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take a
clearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, than
the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many
politicians. I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish
independence and the attempted secession of the Southern Confederacy in
America. Superficially any one might say that the comparison is natural
enough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the
North and South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South in
America. In both cases the South was on the whole agricultural, the
North on the whole industrial. True, the parallel exaggerates the
position of Belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole Federal
system to have consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was more
successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both the same
political terms were used, such as the term 'Union' and 'Unionism.' An
ordinary Englishman comes to America, knowing these main lines of
American history, and knowing that the American knows the similar main
lines of Irish history. He knows that there are strong champions of
Ireland in America; possibly he also knows that there are very genuine
champions of England in America. By every possible historical analogy,
he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in the South and the
pro-English in the North. As a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly
the opposite. He finds Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashville
containing people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds Virginians
not only of British blood, like George Washington, but of British
opinions almost worthy of George the Third.

But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism of
the comparative Toryism of the South. I say it as a criticism of the
superlative stupidity of English propaganda. On another page I remark on
the need for a new sort of English propaganda; a propaganda that should
be really English and have some remote reference to England. Now if it
were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities
of England, there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the
Americans of the Southern States. As I have already hinted, some of them
are so loyal to the English humanities, that they think it their duty to
defend even the English inhumanities. New England is turning into New
Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly traced in Old Dixie. It
contains some of the best things that England herself has had, and
therefore (of course) the things that England herself has lost, or is
trying to lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in these
places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to
us, not by alliance but by affection. Indeed, they have the affection in
spite of the alliance. They love us in spite of our compliments and
courtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutations
and speeches cannot kill their love. They manage even to respect us in
spite of the shady Jew stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or
the 'efficient' men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners
because they have been too tactless with trades unionists. This type of
traditional American, North or South, really has some traditions
connecting him with England; and though he is now in a very small
minority, I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it smaller.
England once sympathised with the South. The South still sympathises
with England. It would seem that the South, or some elements in the
South, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and
fidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand every
shock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in the
world, our political propagandists must try to bolster British
Imperialism up, by kicking Southern Secession when it is down. The
English politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified in
crushing Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most English
part of America. It does not seem to occur to them that this comparison
between the Unionist triumph in America and a Unionist triumph in
Britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not
triumph. When England exults in Lincoln's victory over his foes, she is
exulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continues
as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her
only friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of her
only defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness
to some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it,
at least, that there are some people in the South who will not be
pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and
ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even
being classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners.

Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the
Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a good
many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to
understand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was
never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost
very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days
in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more
dangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this one
moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage,
that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is
called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it
is not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the
reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an
unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient
argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as
delicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are as
criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the
American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be
followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the
film called 'The Birth of a Nation.' And, indeed, there is a further
inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan.
It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of
the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the
Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the
Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon the whole,
I do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in
the opposite sense. For reasons I have already given elsewhere, I do
believe that in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in what?

If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not
really a Northern nation and a Southern nation, but only one American
nation. And if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the
fact that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel a
patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, if it really was
wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their
being converted. Now, if the English politicians must insist on this
parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves.
The very test which proved Lincoln right has proved them wrong. The very
judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns
them. We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have never come an
inch nearer to converting Ireland. We have had not one Gettysburg, but
twenty Gettysburgs; but we have had no Union. And that is where, as I
have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision
on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them.
I heard when I was in America rumours of the local reappearance of the
Ku-Klux Klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as
compared with the old Southern or the new Irish case, is alone a
sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. To approximate
to any resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the Ku-Klux
Klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the
wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. If there were
really such a revival of the Southern action, there would equally be a
revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear that Lee was right
and Lincoln was wrong; that the Southern States were national and were
as indestructible as nations. If the South were as rebellious as
Ireland, the North would be as wrong as England.

But I desire a new English diplomacy that will exhibit, not the things
in which England is wrong but the things in which England is right. And
England is right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and it is
exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at once
most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. Now the
Irishman, and to some extent the American, has remained alien to
England, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishman
loves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves
England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting
the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really
have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even love
it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not
know the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be
expected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising
Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that
worst and vilest of all reasons--that he succeeded. None of them seems
to have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and they
would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it
elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, that
they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if
they found it, they would kill it.

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this
sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise
Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising
Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally
different. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such
cross-purposes about some such word as 'Lincoln'; in which one party
should be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral.
It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how
a President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a
church could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which I
would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in
disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could not
produce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the
moral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that on
which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quite
certain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years,
could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of an
attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the
illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is
always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is not by
mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting
New York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred
significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes
importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get
any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best
of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;
and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so
he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of
imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the
only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English
traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language
and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything 'This is
passing strange,' he may remember that it was no inconsiderable
Englishman who appended to it the answer, 'And therefore as a stranger
give it welcome.'




_Wells and the World State_


There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the
past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the
most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L.
Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific
aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful
felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note
was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless
after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash
the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I
been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it
when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war
would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like
saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist,
that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when
all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the
inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing
alliance and affection between England and America.

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. But I resent
quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might
be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and
Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden
next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if
somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented,
of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a
bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be
very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only
way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my
neighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose
a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose
somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new
vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his
wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.
Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles
and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone
bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to
a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the
newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter,
however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the
aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an
international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else
was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will
almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may
remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and
materialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's
argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly
when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already
get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual
invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get
from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through
nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with
arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson
went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get
there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at
Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these the
amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when
Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance
seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that
endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the
Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the
men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.
I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would
carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute
for the superstitious symbols of the past. I know not if the English, on
ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. But
anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each
other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there
would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. As
a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it
was most difficult to bring under control. And our own traditional
position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. We have
always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore
isolated. We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having
enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. And now they
are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with
our neighbours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because
a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier
as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of
fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will
not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And we
must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces
friendliness.

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong
abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. If
it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if
they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the
most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved would be, in an
exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he
cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is
incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of
the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers
in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The
light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men
are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety,
their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere
international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is
that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not
practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as
remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All the
visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least
their visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best we
shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of
cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes
so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far
more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like
Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to
suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to
embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a
man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the
motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he
proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of
necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and
differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else
(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by
the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men
must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this,
surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific
over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but
nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point,
everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele,
or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not
be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of
philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to
manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even
logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be
the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from
perfection as from a pestilence. But my business is not with the
scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he
proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the
foundation and the future of America. Now it is not too much to say that
Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the
United States of the World. He answers almost all objections to the
practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the
American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that
another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.
The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for
the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing
in that Constitution. The point appeared in answer to a question which
many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of
despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the
danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard
enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough
to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town,
even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the
street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. What the same
town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their
fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision
of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane. This
difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not
least in America. But I think that if there is one truth apparent in
such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than
oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most
genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a
President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or
Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can
only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oligarchy
is obscure. For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is
necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of
them. And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as
everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard
of the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President. I think the
mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even
where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long
run they judge him. I think, therefore, that the American Constitution
has a real popular institution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would
appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency. If I
understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy
without its popular institution. Alluding to this danger, that the
World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely
in the sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of the World
State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest
in answer that there need not even be any such person. He seems to imply
that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any
one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. I cannot
imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an
acephalous aristocracy. But while Mr. Wells's decision seems to me
strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State
because 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy.' A World State ought
doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a
good training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will be no wars
and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we
cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. It is rather
as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by
uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all
it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy
need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should naturally
say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied
command was not a fiction. So the universal peace would only be a
reality if the World State were not a fiction. And it could not be even
a state if it were not a government. This argument amounts to saying,
first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and
then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. I do not say it is
incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a
compromise between the two. The only purely popular government is local,
and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because
they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen
who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote
and altogether alien cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort
of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same
things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in
Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland. To make all
politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If
your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend
of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have
been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more
select minority who have come back.

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, I
think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. At any rate I think
it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as Andrew
Jackson created in America. And I believe it is true to say that the two
men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with
impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic
and honourable, are the Pope and the President of the United States.

But to admire the United States as the United States is one thing. To
admire them as the World State is quite another. The attempt of Mr.
Wells to make America a sort of model for the federation of all the free
nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really
as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of Mr. Kipling to
cover the world with British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to
cover it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, we no longer
believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. Nor do I
believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if
they are called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism does not
lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. As a
matter of fact, it has not. It has been effected largely by commerce, by
colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery
and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is
certainly the truth that among all the things that have called
themselves empires, the British has been perhaps the least purely
military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory
that goes with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperialism is
not that it is imperial, let alone military. The insufficiency of
British Imperialism is that it is British; when it is not merely Jewish.
It is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more
than a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model.
Any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. Any polity is
narrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. It would be just the same
if Ireland began to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it
black. The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that,
among other things, you have to spread it very thin.

But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in another sense
rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very truly that there was a moment in
history when America might well have broken up into independent states
like those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that it was in all
respects an advantage that this was avoided. Yet there is surely a case,
however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still
attaching to Europe. There are some who find France as interesting as
Florida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity
in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the
Middle West. Europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not
destroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world
been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing
it, either in its extension in America or its imitation in Japan. But
the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. There is now
no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all Europe, as the
Catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. There is
no culture broadly superior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture
was superior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If Europe were
united in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one of
its types over others, possibly over all the others. And when America
was united finally in the nineteenth century, it _was_ by the victory of
one of its types over others. It is not yet certain that this victory
was a good thing. It is not yet certain that the world will be better
for the triumph of the North over the Southern traditions of America.
It may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North
Germans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe.

The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free.
They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They
are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all
for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a
theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It
is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far
more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the
purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost
insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and
uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor
bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making
a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal
newspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.
Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that
progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say
that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and
Capitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northern
tribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism by
the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when
the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back.
In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war,
and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America the
introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that
the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of a
mistake.

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end of
the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it
coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end
in the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different as
some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists
have already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the free
peasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders to
whitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. The
cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it so
very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan Jews who are
Capitalists in the West. The Western Jews would be willing to admit a
nominal Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted that their
Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist leader himself who said,
'Russia is again a Capitalist country.' But whoever makes the bargain,
and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be
servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense;
that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and
livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to
continue to labour. Of course it will not be called the Servile State;
it is very probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But
nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries are
to it. At any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory
arbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers
is by definition slavery. When workmen receive unemployment pay, and at
the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may
seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid
them the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is by
definition slavery. And Trotsky can beat any Trust magnate as a
strike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labour
is a free bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to a working
compromise, that compromise will be a Servile State. But it will also be
the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of
the industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money;
of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions
and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society
of the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see
that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the
Northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of
commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely
mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another
American type; just as much as any European war might mean the triumph
of one European type over another. A victory of England over France
would be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory of
Northerners over Southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. So
that that very unity, which Mr. Wells contrasts so favourably with war,
was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most
questionable and even perilous of the results of war. That result was a
change in the balance of power, the predominance of a particular
partner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse of
excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international
influence. In short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of
which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, or that
it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should Prussianise the whole
world. America would have been very different if the leadership had
remained with Virginia. The world would have been very different if
America had been very different. It is quite reasonable to rejoice that
the issue went as it did; indeed, as I have explained elsewhere, for
other reasons I do on the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not
self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of American
state conquered and subjugated another type of American state; and the
virtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. So
if Mr. Wells insists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he
must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He must suppose that
the peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; and
that one or other of them becomes the European tradition to the neglect
of the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in
America is, after all, the situation which would result in Europe if the
Germanic Empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special
development of the Slavs; or if the influence of France had really
broken off short under a blow from Britain. The Old South had qualities
of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any
rate have not sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the
agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the
agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in
another place, that the West does give the New America something that is
nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. But
this is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In
so far as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would be
ruined if the Western patch had the same fate as the Southern patch.
When all is said, therefore, the advantages of American unification are
not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. The doubt
could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples.
For that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the
Middle West in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the
sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to
be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution,
or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation
of California. In a word, the American system is a good one as
governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved
by making it larger. And for this reason alone I should reject this
second method of uniting England and America; which is not only
Americanising England, but Americanising everything else.

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in
America and England in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would
not be tolerated on top of the world. To unite all the systems at the
top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below,
would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise
above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than
before. To create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to
build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only
usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. This
is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an
artificial oppression upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to
see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split from end to
end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not
only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that
they are bankrupt. The peasantries are growing not only more prosperous
but more politically effective; the Russian moujik has held up the
Bolshevist Government of Moscow and Petersburg; a huge concession has
been made by England to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for
Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that industrialism will not
wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas
will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan
culture is one of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the
other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and
scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all.
It may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and
famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean
and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating
machine. Capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such
reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for
labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and
recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast model factory for all who
will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women
in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented
and secure. And on the day when that social security is established for
the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more
logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and
ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all
those graves in the Wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant
gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a
social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a
slave a slave.




_A New Martin Chuzzlewit_


The aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the
very worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an
Anglo-American. There is only one thing lower, of course, which is being
an Anglo-Saxon. It is lower, because at least Englishmen do exist and
Americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine
an American and an Englishman in some way blended together. But if
Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and
the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of
monster would be made by mixing one with the other. But my thesis is
that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things
together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. That is the
only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside
each other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as they are
different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a
divided mind and a staggering balance. It may be that in the first
twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if
they did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked
up its heels. Then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and
they fell in love with each other.

Should the reader require an example a little more within historical
range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above
prehistoric anecdote (which I need not say was revealed to me in a
vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical
and a historical form. It is obvious enough in a general way that if we
begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not
only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous,
superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and
Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain
guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy;
it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of
Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison
between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against
the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other
way; it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on the map
has received insufficient study. In both cases there will not only be
rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases,
therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent
enmity. But so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no
enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can argue about whether
the Swiss climb mountains better than the Dutch build dykes; just as
nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a
circle is round.

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple;
but, having used it for convenience, I could easily give similar
examples not of fancy but of fact. I had occasion recently to attend the
Christmas festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the
Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the first thing that
struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was
dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant
craftsmanship. There were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in
evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb
of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of
any other room in London. Now, according to the ideal formula of the
ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to
have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to
have felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, and
I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could come
between us. I ought to have felt that we were standing for the same
principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers;
or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers.
Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floated
in fancy over my head as the banner of Europe or the League of Nations.
I am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me;
and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. So far as
those things were concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal
enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the
room. Precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for that
northern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably
lacking in my own nation. It was something corresponding to the one
great gap in English history, corresponding to the one great blot on
English civilisation. It was the spiritual presence of a peasantry,
dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own
creations.

The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is generally regarded as
something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an
apology. Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that
day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true
reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other
things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also
true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens
tended too much to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum;
but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited
to the description of lunatic asylums. As it was his finest poetic fancy
that created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy that
created a lunatic over the western sea. To read some of the complaints,
one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented a low and
farcical America to be a contrast to his high and exalted England. It is
suggested that he showed America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal
Chollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while England was
full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime,
Montague Tigg, and Mr. Pecksniff. If _Martin Chuzzlewit_ makes America a
lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make England? We can only say
a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of course, that Dickens so
described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for
the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp or
Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he was an artist in
absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own
peculiar art. In a word, he created a laughable Pogram for the same
reason that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was only because
no other creature could have created them.

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if
they were characters in real life. I wish we could sometimes love the
characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are
a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even
appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a
story. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even
unfortunate example; for it is, among its author's other works, a rather
unusually harsh and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel
towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that
we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. Our enjoyment of the foreigner
should rather resemble our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of
Pecksniff. But there is this amount of appropriateness even in the
particular example; that Dickens did show in both countries how men can
be made amusing to each other. So far the point is not that he made fun
of America, but that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already
pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and
exaggeration to England. In the other English stories, written in a more
amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply
it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. We
can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee
traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine
example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely
British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller
to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the
refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained
Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; but he might like the
American who made fun of Mugby Junction. But the point is that, while he
supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two
comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused
at each other. And the American would think the Englishman funny because
he was English; and a very good reason too. The Englishman would think
the American amusing because he was American; nor can I imagine a better
ground for his amusement.

Now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a
friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of
comparisons. But I will say of this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G.
Wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. If
it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing
possible except war. If we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we
shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. There is no
hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism.

And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of Dickens. It was
not in thinking his Americans funny, but in thinking them foolish
because they were funny. In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens's
American sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptions
of public life and not private life. Mr. Jefferson Brick had no private
life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and even
kept some parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a
domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Quilp had
slightly different ways of surprising their families; Mr. Pecksniff by
playfully observing 'Boh!' when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming home
at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. Hannibal Chollop playfully
surprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by not
shooting at them. We can only say that he would rather surprise us by
having a family at all. We do not know how the Mother of the Modern
Gracchi managed the Modern Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a
public than a private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of the
love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against the love story of Seth
Pecksniff. These figures are all in a special sense theatrical; all
facing one way and lit up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous
characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any
real characters. And the author might perfectly well be right about what
is ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. He might be as right in
smiling at the Pograms and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and
the Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. Pogram as a
hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a
monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. He might
still be as wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a cheat as
was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, in tracing every
wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick's
spectacles and gaiters and Mrs. Boffin's bonnets and boudoir are after
all superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we saw
beneath them. A man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man may
also make us smile and not be a villain. He may make us smile and not
even be a fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly
wise man.

Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens never discovered.
Elijah Pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and the
most grotesque feature of Brick and Chollop was hidden from him. The
really strange thing was that Pogram probably did say, 'Rough he may be.
So air our bars. Wild he may be. So air our buffalers,' and yet was a
perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The
extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really have said, 'The
libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,' and yet
Jefferson Brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. There
really has been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States which
has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such
things. It is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is
always amusing; just as English idiom and English costume are amusing to
Americans. But about this kind of difference there can be no kind of
doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as Ingersoll could say
of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as Blaine, 'Like an
arméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, James G. Blaine strode down the
hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of
every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.'
Compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which Mr.
Pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really a
very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are
wild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throw
their lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting
post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as
James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated
Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very
rapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop
long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, even
after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at
or to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop
was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true a
prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had something
about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of
heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at
that period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum
up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal
Chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed
his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian has
justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: 'We have fought through this
war together. I have done my best for you.' It is not fair to forget
Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of Jefferson
Brick.

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to
form something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of his
time most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, the
only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure
the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the
victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all
international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and
supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes
that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple
foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realise
that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his
vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is
so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is
so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of
the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so
that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it
for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he
goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to
complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has
the French faults and _not_ the English faults is a paradox too wild to
cross his mind.

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing
ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because
obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is
like an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes
of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently
tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind
up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestial
thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that
we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our
ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly
enough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an
inch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat
rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a
sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse
the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar.
That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an
independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a
dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we
have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that
peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that a
Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some
millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust.
Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow,
as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a critic
that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal
because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring
of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous
pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;
the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is
black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting
their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washing
themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. The particular case
of it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding of America;
and it is based, as in all these cases, on the English misunderstanding
of England.

For the truth is that England has suffered of late from not having
enough of the free shooting of Hannibal Chollop; from not understanding
enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood.
The prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperous
Englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. That is
what he is suffering from. Until lately at least he refused to realise
that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them
being contentment. For all the real virtue in contentment evaporates,
when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is only
self-satisfaction. Now it is perfectly true that America and not England
has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty.
But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of
such official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions in
England. And nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the American
character would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop began to be
used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is perfectly true that the
libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more
(one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in
beer. But America, as compared with England, is the country where one
can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of
blood. Vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but I
think there is now more kick of reaction against it in America than in
England. The Americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover
their reason when they disobey them. I wish I could believe that there
was as much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed there
certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradually like a dying fire
through the Victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities that
Dickens did not understand. But any one who does understand it will know
that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for English democracy;
and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would
have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the
first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark
Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the
mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not
really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But
if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a
truer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that this
illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real
virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in
that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and
reluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains
with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists--or convicts.
Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one
in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by
Martin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. Then
America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick's England, a
fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still
have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with
the rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as
with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be
written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _Edwin
Drood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and
episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiers
or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I
met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerely
like and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the
converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they
remember they laugh.




_The Spirit of America_


I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend
some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes,
founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have
the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious
tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;
but there have been moments when I thought that if we spoke Greek and
they spoke Latin we might understand each other better. For Greek and
Latin are at least fixed, while American at least is still very fluid. I
do not know the American language, and therefore I do not claim to
distinguish between the American language and the American slang. But I
know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the
words as part of the English slang or the English language. I have
already given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy,' which in
the States is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on
the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce
or duel or something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches a
mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. Every proof-reader knows
that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which
makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is
hideously right. He who has essayed to write 'he got the book,' and has
found it rendered mysteriously as 'he got the boob' is pensively
resigned. It is when it is rendered quite lucidly as 'he got the boot'
that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. I have had
conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled
me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. An American friend
of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in
the south-west where real Red Indians were procurable. He said that
certain Indians were 'very bad actors.' It passed for me as a very
ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. It would
hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild Arab chieftain
was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the Grand Llama of
Thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the remark might be
natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible
farmyard for his menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I
supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema actors. But the
phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had
wholly missed. A bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally
reprehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red Indian who was
dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there
was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the
theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not
to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find
herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish
'Little Blue Bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his
financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all
sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;
but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed.
There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually
used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to
illustrate a more serious fact.

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an
American girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming
to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the
stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and
will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than
any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they
are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever
haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the
stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend's
fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, 'I suppose he's bound to
come and see you.' And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will
boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the
suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to
do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go
from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both
English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket
dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is
very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English 'he is bound to
come and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained to come and
see you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is bent
on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will
surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace
as the curtain falls.

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant and
congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and
hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and I
could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In
the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to
understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this
American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again,
the road to international friendship is through really understanding
jokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quite
legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white
hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all
the man has _some_ reason for what he does; and until we know the reason
we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the
outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious
relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the
things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be
found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing
simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture.

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of
what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I
should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs.
Asquith's lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she was
typically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a great
and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure
without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in
wanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spends
money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we
acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a
truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used
these words: 'I've risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and I
want my money back.'

The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely the
element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American.
But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach
the admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for
what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady
of considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the
experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the
sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no other
claim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. This
being so, it is rather as if somebody said, 'I have risked my life in
fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall,' or, 'I have
fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing
Totty Toddles do her new dance.' And there is something rather more
subtle involved here. There is something in an Englishman which would
make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear
Totty Toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would
feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere
amusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. He
would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after
Totty Toddles, or after Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But
there is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admitting
enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed to
justify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing.
But he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for
what is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that a little
thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or lose
his balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly.

Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the
enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is
dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise
from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His
ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a 'live
wire' that anything can touch or anybody can use. In a word, there is a
difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. A
live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility
becomes actually a part of virility. Something more is involved than the
vulgar simplification of the American as the irresistible force and the
Englishman as the immovable post. As a fact, those who speak of such
things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something
simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even in
motion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon.
Prussian militarism was praised in that way--until it met a French force
of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. But that is not what
an American means by energy; that sort of Prussian energy is only
monotony without repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for
it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small
box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point is
that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement.
He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his
manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks
four billion butterflies an hour.

That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the least
sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it
is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the
paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is
sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous
because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their
lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a
Highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but
it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American
athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of
the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes
in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the
great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an
ascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any
militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age,
they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of
fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour
of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual
atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is
subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern
world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be
rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. They
would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would
rise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith.

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not
that Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only
cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on an
average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are well
aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a
mythologist. It is not that they do not know that the object is small in
itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great
in itself. They admire people for being impressionable. They admire
people for being excited. An American so struggling for some
disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a
mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be
keen. So long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels
he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society
behind him, and God and the whole universe behind him. Wedged on one leg
in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity
is at rest. That is what he means when he says he is bound to come to
the lecture.

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. But these things are not
larks; nor are they occasional. It is the essential of the Englishman's
lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even
when he does it. Being English myself, I like it; but being English
myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. In its
irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. This patronage
is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic
tradition of society. The larks are a variant of laziness because of
leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy
of the gentleman. When an undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred
windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. He can be
trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a
trifle. He does not say, even in the American sense, that he was bound
to smash the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed
to smash the windows. He does not especially think he has risen at all;
he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or
sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of
the English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into something
entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not
think so. This rather indescribable element runs through a hundred
English things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of
proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for
somebody named Sally rather than Salome, and for a place called Wapping
rather than a place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into
rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There is also what is
so large a part of comfort; carelessness. The undergraduate breaks
windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care
about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a German
poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they
come between him and the voice of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he
do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its
aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He is not 'bound' to
smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. He is not
bound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only a
relaxation but a laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only
smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when some
fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature
whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. But the American
is always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder and
more suicidal course of going to lectures. And this is because to him
such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another
connection, much of the English mystery would be clear to Americans if
they understood the word 'mood.' Englishmen are very moody, especially
when they smash windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand
exactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood.

It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an Englishman
can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship;
which is really liking an American to be American. If we only think that
parts of him are excellent because parts of him are English, it would be
far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a
whole complete Englishman. But anybody who does understand this can take
the same pleasure in an American being American that he does in a
thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. He can see that
a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all
the ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. He can see that
the American uses his great practical powers upon very small
provocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of
honour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked.
Indeed, there is some parallel between the American man of action,
however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with a
sword at his side. The gentleman may have been proud of being strong or
sturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he
was not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he was proud of
being thin-skinned. He also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a
part of masculinity. It may be very absurd to read of two Irish
gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two
Irish-American millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But the
very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same
conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. And it is
really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful
mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its
industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that the nerves
should be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be like
nerves.

Another approximation to the truth would be to say that an American is
really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not so simple as it looks. Men
will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado,
just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few
people are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people are
really proud of longing to look through a key-hole. I do not speak of
looking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control;
but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now I fancy the
American, at least by comparison with the Englishman, does feel that his
curiosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistent
with vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity of Paul Pry, but
the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. He is not a spy but an explorer;
and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as
a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the
Nile or the North-West Passage. Many an Englishman has had that feeling
about discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have it
about discoveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the
indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. It has nothing
to do with ethics in the merely external sense. It involves no
particular comparison in practical morals and manners. It is something
in the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carries
himself. For men are not only affected by what they are; but still more,
when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they are
wise, by what they wish to be.

There are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful.
There are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to
use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. This point
about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the American
interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against the American child. And
in the same way I feel the danger of it being identified with the cant
about 'a young nation' if I say that it has some of the attractions, not
of American childhood, but of real childhood. There is some truth in the
tradition that the children of wealthy Americans tend to be too
precocious and luxurious. But there is a sense in which we can really
say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children.
And that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is something
which the modern world does not understand. It is something that modern
Americans do not understand, even when they possess it; but I think they
do possess it.

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture
which he now most commonly quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is within
you.' That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and
prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in
creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace
that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it
is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a
little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but
the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It
is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is
outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his
appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that
the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it
somewhere else.




_The Spirit of England_


Nine times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness is necessarily the
narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is,
when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his own
village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own
nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision of
the world is probably smaller than the world. His vision of the universe
is certainly much smaller than the universe. Hence he is never so
inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he
generalises. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a
creedless creed, at something variously described as essential
Christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace
all the faiths in the world. It is that every sectarian is more
sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. The emancipation
of a Baptist is a very Baptist emancipation. The charity of a Buddhist
is a very Buddhist charity, and very different from Christian charity.
When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything,
and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily
assimilates. When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a
cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this sense it is even
possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and for
men to move about not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos
under Clapham moon and stars.

But if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the
Englishman. The Englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial;
except indeed when he is international. In private life he is a good
friend and in practical politics generally a good ally. But theoretical
politics are more practical than practical politics. And in theoretical
politics the Englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. This is
all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical
life in the character of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances
and never understood one of them. He has never been farther away from
European politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of
them. I myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really
splendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be
imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being international,
with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of
being impartial. Generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and
hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. They are
performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil;
they are claiming the throne of God. Even when it is not hypocrisy but
only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse
confounded. We see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,
who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam
wrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval than
Macaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaeval
sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was a
fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own
rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who
simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the
controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters.
And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure
before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them.

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving
Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather too
strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of
achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be
Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be
Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the
Englishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English and
not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish
nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not English
imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English
internationalism, which is a revolutionary one.

For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not
imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it
badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are
disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she
has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic because
she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen for
ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has
conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is
always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause.
For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called
the British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of
these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;
which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making
strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing
strange countries because they were different from our own. The
adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune,
but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes; he wished to trade
with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained
different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer
saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the
Robinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as
insular as on his own island.

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman with
enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the
inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has
never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry
or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England
attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or
weak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, but
what England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying,
but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and
conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than
pompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals which
England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as
every civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which the
picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic
imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that
the Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they
lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men who
wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that
they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the
rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What we
want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden
what was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand the
Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,
what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants
doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as a
small nationality.

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other
because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are
really alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each
other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but
because they are different. It can easily be shown, I fancy, that in
every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate
foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and
positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign
externals. The man who made a romance of the Scotch High-lander made a
romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians
was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be
interested in scalping. To take a more serious example, such nations as
Serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the
study of Serbian epics, or Serbian songs. The epoch of negro
emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over
Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just as the admiration for
the Redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious
fascination of the African has sometimes almost led us into the fringes
of the black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is felt
even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the
devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the
Englishman.

And this is the more extraordinary because the Englishman is really very
interesting. He is interesting in a special degree in this special
manner; he is interesting because he is individual. No man in the world
is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary
sense national. A description of English life must be a description of
private life. In that sense there is no public life. In that sense there
is no public opinion. There have never been those prairie fires of
public opinion in England which often sweep over America. At any rate,
there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular
revolutions of the Middle Ages. The English are a nation of amateurs;
they are even a nation of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more
English than when he is considered a lunatic by the other Englishmen.
This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. Johnson, who has become
national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. To express this
mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and
heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences,
and why they alone among Christians have kept quite consistently the
great Christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and
stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the
souls of strange peoples. That would be the true way to create a
friendship between England and America, or between England and anything
else; yes, even between England and Ireland. For this justice at least
has already been done to Ireland; and as an indignant patriot I demand a
more equal treatment for the two nations.

I have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach
internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as
nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love
each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by
describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary
emotions. As this has a particular application to the emotions of the
Englishman, I will return to the topic once more. Now Americans have a
power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of
spontaneous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane ideals
are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might
almost say in unofficial officialism. Nobody who has felt the presence
of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that Whitman
was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the
love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm collides with the
Englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. They say he
is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. And the Englishman, having
been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the
criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is reserved because he is
stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and
candid. But as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at
least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference
lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not only high
but level; that the hilarious American spirit is like a plateau, and the
humorous English spirit like a ragged mountain range.

The Englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the
Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was
boisterously English. Dickens was moody when he wrote _Oliver Twist_;
but he was also moody when he wrote _Pickwick_. That is, he was in
another and much healthier mood. The mood was normal to him in the sense
that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and
hilarious mood. But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and
all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of moods. But it
was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding
with America.

In America there are no moods, or there is only one mood. It is the same
whether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as the
heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It
has been said of the typical English aristocrats of the Government
offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from
ten till four; and it is true that an Englishman, even an English
aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. But
American sociability is not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like
Niagara. It never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms.
There seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it
is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements
and announcements. The temperature can be regulated; but it is not. And
it is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose mood changes
like his own mutable and shifting sky. The English mood is very like the
English weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity.

If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between Dickens and the
Americans, let him turn to that chapter in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which
young Martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total
strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. There
are several things to be noticed about this incident. To begin with, it
did not happen to Martin Chuzzlewit; but it did happen to Charles
Dickens. Dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage
from a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included the
admirable account of the prison petition of John Dickens as the prison
petition of Wilkins Micawber. There is no particular reason why even the
gregarious Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure
steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. There was every reason why
they should throng the portals of the author of _Pickwick_ and _Oliver
Twist_. And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the aleatory image,
you bet they did. Similar troops of sociable human beings have visited
much more insignificant English travellers in America, with some of whom
I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a little more
stodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly less
sensitive than Dickens. But I know what it was that annoyed him about
that unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; it was the
unending and unchanging stream of American sociability and high spirits.
A people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understand
the ups and downs of the English temperament; the temper of a nation of
eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. There is
something very national in the very name of the old play of _Every Man
in His Humour_. But the play more often acted in real life is 'Every Man
Out of His Humour.' It is true, as Matthew Arnold said, that an
Englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that
he likes what he likes. An Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel
friendly. Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or he can
feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. He can
think, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance who
would be bores if they came in at the door.

American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. It cannot be
expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the Englishman, who
thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. That is the truth in the
suggestion that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he probably felt
most sociable when he was solitary. In all these attempts to describe
the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences
between the two peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the
irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics always cut
both ways. On one side this comradeship makes possible a certain
communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places,
that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On the
other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equality
and fraternity. But the richest compensation of the Englishman is not
even in the word 'liberty,' but rather in the word 'poetry.' That humour
of escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded
friendship by what Christian Science would call absent treatment, that
is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and out
of that came 'bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' and
'Thou wast not made for death, immortal bird.' In this sense it is
indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which may
be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. There is in it a
spirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which does
desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only over the hills but
also far away. In other words, in so far as it is true that the
Englishman is an exception to the great truth of Aristotle, it is
because he is not so near to Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as
he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical
animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint and
almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose political
rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or
fishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless
literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speechless poetry. It
would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts,
to make a satire about the sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately
to shoot the skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic
suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining
the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird
was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. But these
international satires are never just; and the real relations of an
Englishman and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be
equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against
American democracy; and represent Americans merely as birds of a feather
who can do nothing but flock together. But this would leave out the fact
that at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of
defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls of great nations,
these criticisms are generally false because they are critical.

But when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation's strength, then
and not before we are justified in judging its weakness. I am quite sure
that I rejoice in any democratic success without _arrière pensée_; and
nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic
equality. And this being granted, I do think there is a danger in the
gregariousness of American society. The danger of democracy is not
anarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. And it is touching this that
all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is
called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female
convention. Now the males of every community are far too conventional;
it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of
the tribe. If the females become conventional also, there is a danger of
individuality being lost. This indeed is not peculiar to America; it is
common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which
substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the State for the personal
atmosphere of the home. But it is emphasised in America by the curious
contradiction that Americans do in theory value and even venerate the
individual. But individualism is still the foe of individuality. Where
men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each
other. They become featureless by 'featuring' the same part.
Personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In
this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the
Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life.
Those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the American
hotels and none of the American houses are sometimes driven to the
excess of saying that the Americans have no private life. But even if
the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the
corresponding truth; that the English have no public life. They on their
side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic;
and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very
State itself has become a State secret.

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form of
nationalism. It is being national without understanding the meaning of a
nation. The Americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving
too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to
superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with
too much appetite for outside criticism. But the English are much too
unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of
consciousness, including consciousness of sin. But even their sin is
ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable English things are
not the things that are most admired by the English, or for which the
English admire themselves. They are things now blindly neglected and in
daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that they should be
destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. That
is why I have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for
the English; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the
nature of things. We say of some ballad from the Balkans or some peasant
costume in the Netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of
England really are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars and
revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. The particular kind
of beauty there is in an English village, the particular kind of humour
there is in an English public-house, are things that cannot be found in
lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or
where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. Yet we shall
not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of
contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms
would allow us to do so. We must in a sense get far away from England in
order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be
practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote
things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they
are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the
dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a
peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul.




_The Future of Democracy_


The title of this final chapter requires an apology. I do not need to be
reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. It is written
in accordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no particular
harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which
it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes
to America for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly
everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trouville or Dieppe is not
confronted on his return with the question, 'When is your book on France
going to appear?' A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the
winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 'I suppose your
History of the Helvetian Republic is coming out this spring?' Lecturing,
at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious
than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker
far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. Of all this
I am only too well aware; and my only defence is that I am at least
sincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere
in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think a very serious
problem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. Democracy
may be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians
who only have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a very
serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not apologise for the word
democracy; but I do apologise for the word future. I am no Futurist; and
any conjectures I make must be taken with the grain of salt which is
indeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility which
comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in itself a divine
doubt. I do not believe in any of the scientific predictions about
mankind; I notice that they always fail to predict any of the purely
human developments of men; I also notice that even their successes prove
the same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions are
not about men but about machines. But there are two things which a man
may reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do
not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to tell the truth,
and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that have
already accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about which
must at least mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being
right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong
about the future, if we are wrong about the past. The other thing that
he can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own
nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it
follows that this final chapter must consist of two things. The first is
a summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recent
times; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which is
necessary for its triumph at any time.

The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic
idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a
paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught
history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual
inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation
of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican
orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and
backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction
was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American
Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It
was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of
conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of
peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.
These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises
in relation to the practical politics of their time; in England they
preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But though
they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their time
democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political
doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious
doubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the
modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the
great American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of
intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers of
the Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no
better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England said
recently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence did
not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quite
consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;
the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of
brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black
beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of
American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South,
the eighteenth century was _more_ liberal than the nineteenth century.
There was _more_ sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than
in the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of his
simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble,
remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of
the world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did
not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And they
were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that
nature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, to
the mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But that
the slave was human and the servitude inhuman--that was, if anything,
clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter
separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a _progress_;
it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a
triumph of science over superstition. It was 'the way the world was
going,' as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;
perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson's
definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Father
who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the
practice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.
It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was
really disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the
superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by
the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of
science and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawn
of Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the
monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the
baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modern
and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the
Missing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than
one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal
under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive
sort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of
Lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and
competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may say
with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were
Huxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great
many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they
were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of
the best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of
the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism
which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision
of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth
century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the
anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution
lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least
with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of
the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the
preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening,
which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing
evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race,
or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The
South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The
South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of
monkeys.

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years.
Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with
the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far
more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson
than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen
Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the
age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil
Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a
consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the
old mystical doctrines of equality. He 'did not care whether slavery was
voted up or voted down.' His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care
very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln
exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not
much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I
am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular
mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical
ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of
indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what
some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a
sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the
slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt
whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition
was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other
reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes
and Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would
ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the
modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been
emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black
man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe
the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its
real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a
primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the
tables of an ancient law, _against_ the trend of the nineteenth century;
repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a
generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this:
'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all
things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity
and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so
on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded
a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never
have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to
produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical
imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of
monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as
the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species,
so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat
devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and
his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that
were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the
bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the
chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree
and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference
between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and
eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort.

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Against
all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be
symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro
can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the
Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the
manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it
could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute
democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood,
in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black
bishop. And he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual
privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a
monkey in a mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic
democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more
democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is
indestructible. And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was
destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to
destroy itself. And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly
moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old
tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hundreds have heard the story
about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme


     When Adam delved and Eve span,
     Who was then the gentleman?


Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, 'The
Serpent.' But few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern
answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding
it. 'Adam never delved and Eve never span, for the simple reason that
they never existed. They are fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos,
and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the
real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin's _Origin of
Species_.' And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to
the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the
Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by
means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad.
Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the
literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think
the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that
of the prehistoric 'strongest man' who could fight a hundred men. But I
do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the
form of an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form of an
appeal to Science. And I do note also that democrats were still driven
to make the same appeal even in the very century of Science. Tennyson
was, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an
aristocrat in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John Bull was
evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these Frenchmen. He did not
pretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But
when human dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the same
old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that 'the
gardener Adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent'; their
own descent being by no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored
off him pretty smartly by quoting from 'Maud' and 'In Memoriam' about
evolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. But Tennyson has
evidently forgotten all about Darwin and the long descent of man. If
this was true of an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten
times truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration of
Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created
all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they
were certainly evolved unequal.

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine
origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world
will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of
sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds.
Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of
constraining the tyrant. An idealist may say to a capitalist, 'Don't you
sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the
distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' But it
is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and
decision, 'No, I don't,' and there is no more disputing about it further
than about the beauty of a fading cloud. And the modern world of moods
is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds.

For I have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case of
negro slavery; because it was long peculiar to America and is popularly
associated with it. It is more and more obvious that the line is no
longer running between black and white but between rich and poor. As I
have already noted in the case of Prohibition, the very same arguments
of the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility of
freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought
from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is argued
even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged
below the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the Missing
Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and
that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific
hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the
masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the
dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any
man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the
millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the
sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the
eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they
are not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St.
Benedict.

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make
secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular
perfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument
for a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What has
become of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to the
democratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all that
purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the
good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name of
knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the
very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of all
that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high
tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty
that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that
they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a
mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a
symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when
the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to
Jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its
turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all
the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as
flowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of the
Humanists, for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird in
spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that
these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a
lodgment in the Catholic tradition of Christendom, and made themselves
friends for ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.
Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis is the only
surviving knight.

It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even
so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American
democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also
the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or
remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic.
In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly
undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond
the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at
least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen
slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in
method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human
appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals,
formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves
the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents
depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are
still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men
will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if
there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in
anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an
authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every
ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that
finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of
Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them
as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures
may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats
existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land
of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went
forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.





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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heretics, by Gilbert K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: Heretics

Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton

Posting Date: September 13, 2008 [EBook #470]
Release Date: March, 1996
[Last updated: July 2, 2011]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERETICS ***




Produced by Mike Piff and Martin Ward.  HTML version by Al Haines.








HERETICS


by

Gilbert K. Chesterton



"To My Father"



Source

Heretics was copyrighted in 1905 by the John Lane Company. This
electronic text is derived from the twelfth (1919) edition published by
the John Lane Company of New York City and printed by the Plimpton
Press of Norwood, Massachusetts.  The text carefully follows that of
the published edition (including British spelling).


The Author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of
May, 1874.  Though he considered himself a mere "rollicking
journalist," he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually
every area of literature.  A man of strong opinions and enormously
talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless
allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people--such as George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells--with whom he vehemently disagreed.

Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was
one of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His 1922 "Eugenics
and Other Evils" attacked what was at that time the most progressive of
all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a
superior version of itself. In the Nazi experience, history
demonstrated the wisdom of his once "reactionary" views.

His poetry runs the gamut from the comic 1908 "On Running After One's
Hat" to dark and serious ballads.  During the dark days of 1940, when
Britain stood virtually alone against the armed might of Nazi Germany,
these lines from his 1911 Ballad of the White Horse were often quoted:

    I tell you naught for your comfort,
    Yea, naught for your desire,
    Save that the sky grows darker yet
    And the sea rises higher.

Though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors
and historical figures like Charles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi
often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His Father Brown
mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read
and adapted for television.

His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and
power of any sort.  Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books
like the 1910 "What's Wrong with the World" he advocated a view called
"Distributionism" that was best summed up by his expression that every
man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though not known
as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world.
Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a
newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a
"genuine" nationalism for India rather than one that imitated the
British.

Heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton
excelled.  A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless
troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide.  In Christianity he
found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other
books in that same series include his 1908 Orthodoxy (written in
response to attacks on this book) and his 1925 The Everlasting Man.
Orthodoxy is also available as electronic text.

Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, England.  During his life he published 69 books and at
least another ten based on his writings have been published after his
death.  Many of those books are still in print. Ignatius Press is
systematically publishing his collected writings.




Table of Contents

   1. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Othodoxy
   2. On the Negative Spirit
   3. On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small
   4. Mr. Bernard Shaw
   5. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants
   6. Christmas and the Esthetes
   7. Omar and the Sacred Vine
   8. The Mildness of the Yellow Press
   9. The Moods of Mr. George Moore
  10. On Sandals and Simplicity
  11. Science and the Savages
  12. Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson
  13. Celts and Celtophiles
  14. On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
  15. On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set
  16. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity
  17. On the Wit of Whistler
  18. The Fallacy of the Young Nation
  19. Slum Novelists and the Slums
  20. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy



I. Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern
society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word
"orthodox."  In former days the heretic was proud of not being a
heretic.  It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the
judges who were heretics. He was orthodox.  He had no pride in having
rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him.  The armies with
their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous
processes of State, the reasonable processes of law--all these like
sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud
of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more
than a man; he was a church.  He was the centre of the universe; it was
round him that the stars swung.  All the tortures torn out of forgotten
hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern
phrases have made him boast of it.  He says, with a conscious laugh, "I
suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause.  The word
"heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means
being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no
longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.  All this
can mean one thing, and one thing only.  It means that people care less
for whether they are philosophically right.  For obviously a man ought
to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The
Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The
dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at
least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to
another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in
their theory of the universe.  That was done very frequently in the
last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its
object.  But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and
unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of
saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done
universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great
revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the
doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the
Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day.
Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much
of a restraint. We will have no generalizations.  Mr. Bernard Shaw has
put the view in a perfect epigram:  "The golden rule is that there is
no golden rule." We are more and more to discuss details in art,
politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion
on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter.  He
may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that
strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion,
and be lost. Everything matters--except everything.

Examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of
cosmic philosophy.  Examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever
else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it
matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian or a
Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. Let me, however, take a
random instance.  At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man
say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the
statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly
have any serious effect on the man or on the world.  And yet if that
utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.
Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would
be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as
medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal
Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we
never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will
strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories
do not matter.

This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom.
When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their
idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be
made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one
ought to bear independent testimony.  The modern idea is that cosmic
truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The
former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees
inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never
has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now,
when, for the first time, any one can discuss it.  The old restriction
meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern
liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the
last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us
where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be
an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men,
the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it.  It is
still bad taste to be an avowed atheist.  But their agony has achieved
just his--that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as
the heresiarch.  Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather, and
call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.

But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them--who
think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still
his view of the universe.  We think that for a landlady considering a
lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to
know his philosophy.  We think that for a general about to fight an
enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more
important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not
whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the
long run, anything else affects them. In the fifteenth century men
cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral
attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde
because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal
servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the
two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which
was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the
disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very
same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict
for practising.

Now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about
ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from
two fields which it used to occupy.  General ideals used to dominate
literature.  They have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's
sake."  General ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven
out by the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as
"politics for politics' sake." Persistently for the last twenty years
the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the
ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments.
Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely
become less literary. General theories of the relation of things have
thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position to ask, "What
have we gained or lost by this extrusion?  Is literature better, is
politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"

When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and
ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency.  So it is that when a
man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about
health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about
their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency
of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the
world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency
of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of
the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There
can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency
to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of
infancy that we cry for the moon. None of the strong men in the strong
ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency.
Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but
for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not
for efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity.  Even if the
ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs,
they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics.
They did not say, "Efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you will
notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent
order, I--" Their feeling was quite different. They were so filled with
the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase
that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash.  In practice, the
habit of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly
weakness. The time of big theories was the time of big results.  In the
era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century,
men were really robust and effective.  The sentimentalists conquered
Napoleon. The cynics could not catch De Wet.  A hundred years ago our
affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. Now
our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. And just as
this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race
of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men
in the arts.  Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of
Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure
and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a
mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic
philosophers call for the same moral license, for a freedom to wreck
heaven and earth with their energy; but the upshot of it all is that a
mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I do not say that there are no stronger
men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger
than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and
steeped in their religion? Whether bondage be better than freedom may
be discussed. But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it
will be difficult for any one to deny.

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in
the strictly artistic classes.  They are free to produce anything they
like.  They are free to write a "Paradise Lost" in which Satan shall
conquer God.  They are free to write a "Divine Comedy" in which heaven
shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done?  Have they
produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than
the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid
Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few
roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them
at their own irreverence.  In all their little books of verse you will
not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the
grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described
Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very
obvious.  Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends
upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is
fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and
try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.  I think his family will
find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.

Neither in the world of politics nor that of literature, then, has the
rejection of general theories proved a success. It may be that there
have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals that have from time to
time perplexed mankind.  But assuredly there has been no ideal in
practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality.
Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord
Rosebery.  He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch--the man who
is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than
any theorist.  Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of
worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether
this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause
is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough
to make it succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should
abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf
because he was beaten at golf.  There is nothing which is so weak for
working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate
victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

And having discovered that opportunism does fail, I have been induced
to look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must
fail. I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the
beginning and discuss theories.  I see that the men who killed each
other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than
the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the
Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and
trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our
modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty
without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty.  If
the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously
took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern
mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine
without even stating it.

For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have come to believe in
going back to fundamentals.  Such is the general idea of this book.  I
wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries, not personally
or in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of
doctrine which they teach. I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling
as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as
a Heretic--that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood
to differ from mine.  I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one
of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am
concerned with him as a Heretic--that is to say, a man whose philosophy
is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong. I revert to the
doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general
hope of getting something done.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,
let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull
down.  A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is
approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of
the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of
Light.  If Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat
excusably knocked down.  All the people make a rush for the lamp-post,
the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating
each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they
do not work out so easily.  Some people have pulled the lamp-post down
because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old
iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil.
Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted
because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they
wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man
knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day,
to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the
monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the
philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the
gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.



II.  On the negative spirit

Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the
hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But
let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense,
necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It
is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of
success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in
what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity, "the lost
fight of virtue."  A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point
with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law;
its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only point to
imperfection.  It has no perfection to point to. But the monk
meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect
health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He may contemplate this
ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may
contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential THINGS he may
contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still
it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. He may even go
mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student
of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread
of insanity.

The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a
healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who
is walking down Cheapside.  For many such are good only through a
withering knowledge of evil. I am not at this moment claiming for the
devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may
be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his
thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that
has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are
other objections which can be urged without unreason against the
influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or
street.  But this advantage the mystic morality must always have--it is
always jollier.  A young man may keep himself from vice by continually
thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually
thinking of the Virgin Mary.  There may be question about which method
is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But
surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.

I remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, Mr. G. W.
Foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these
two methods.  The pamphlet was called BEER AND BIBLE, those two very
noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which Mr. Foote, in his
stern old Puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which I confess to
thinking appropriate and charming. I have not the work by me, but I
remember that Mr. Foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to
deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or
intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be
more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise.
In that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied
the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In that temple the lights are
low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted.  But that upon
the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the
body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is
diseased. It is the drunkard's liver of the New Testament that is
marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him.

Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid
pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the
real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of
the nineteenth century.  If any ordinary man ever said that he was
horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the
plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was
lying.  The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of
modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never
dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a
new habit. On the contrary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence
which is new still, though it is already dying.  The tradition of
calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes
down very late.  But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,
whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not
either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. What
disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear
realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine
religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the
contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing
that called names.  This is the great difference between some recent
developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the
seventeenth century.  It was the whole point of the Puritans that they
cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish
themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which
the founders of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at
kings and queens. But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke
plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly
about good. The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly
resented, in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is
that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things
increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what
things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it
goes almost blind with doubt.  If we compare, let us say, the morality
of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen's GHOSTS, we shall see
all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse
the author of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a
Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral
instruments--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the
vision of improvement, and the vision of failure.  Ibsen has only
one--Hell. It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could
read a play like GHOSTS and remain indifferent to the necessity of an
ethical self-command. That is quite true, and the same is to be said of
the most monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire. It is
quite certain the realists like Zola do in one sense promote
morality--they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes
it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect
that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage.  Most
healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the
possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed
Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their
effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are
well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately
hopeless, of using science to promote morality.

I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague
persons who imagine that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There are
plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of
happy people, plenty of examples of men acting wisely and things ending
well.  That is not my meaning. My meaning is that Ibsen has throughout,
and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as
well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in
this life--a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the
decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he perceives to
be a root of evil, some convention, some deception, some ignorance. We
know that the hero of GHOSTS is mad, and we know why he is mad. We do
also know that Dr. Stockman is sane; but we do not know why he is sane.
Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and happiness are brought
about, in the sense that he professes to know how our modern sexual
tragedies are brought about. Falsehood works ruin in THE PILLARS OF
SOCIETY, but truth works equal ruin in THE WILD DUCK.  There are no
cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen.  All this
is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful
of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF
IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The golden
rule is that there is no golden rule."  In his eyes this absence of an
enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue,
is the one great Ibsen merit. I am not discussing now with any fullness
whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out, with an
increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us
face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very
definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good. To us
light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot
speak.  To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness
that is visible.  The human race, according to religion, fell once, and
in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a
second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in
our time fallen on our Northern civilization.  All previous ages have
sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the
right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern
world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no
answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a
few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for
instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere
existence of their neighbours.  Ibsen is the first to return from the
baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order
to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about
"liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what
is good.  We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
"education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good.  The
modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and
embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what
is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it."  He says,
"Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically
stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle
whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor
morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education."
This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let
us give it to our children."

Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in
a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic
questions. The old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they
were (in Mr. Wells's view) mostly wrong.  But the new economists, he
says, seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all.
And they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific
cases, regarded as "experts", a claim "proper enough in a hairdresser
or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of
science." But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr.
Wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has
fallen into the same enormous modern error.  In the opening pages of
that excellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of
art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is
going to consider men in their chief function, the function of
parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a "tissue of births."  He is
not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory
heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers.  The
whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least
before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious
shirking.  What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled
what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a
problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked,
"What is the use of a hammer?" and answered, "To make hammers"; and
when asked, "And of those hammers, what is the use?" answered, "To make
hammers again". Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the
question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the
rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question
of the ultimate value of the human life.

The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one.
As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we
have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion,
patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of
progress--that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something
that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great
deal more of nobody knows what.  Progress, properly understood, has,
indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning.  But as used in
opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.  So far from it
being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of
ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any
business to use the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and
a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being
doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without
being infallible--at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.
For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we
are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same
degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning
of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word
"progress" than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic
eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one,
men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what
direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and
consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is
precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future
excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less
liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut
up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin
intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love
everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;--these are the
things about which we are actually fighting most.  It is not merely
true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this
"progressive" age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have
settled least what is progress are the most "progressive" people in it.
The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress,
might be trusted perhaps to progress.  The particular individuals who
talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven
when the pistol-shot started the race. I do not, therefore, say that
the word "progress" is unmeaning; I say it is unmeaning without the
previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be
applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common.
Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that
it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only
rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.



III.  On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only
thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly
required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the
bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist
entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he
counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn
happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical.  The bored
has certainly proved himself prosaic.

We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass
or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our
boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The
bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as
splendid as the swords of an army.  The bore is stronger and more
joyous than we are; he is a demigod--nay, he is a god. For it is the
gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall
is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.

The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it
is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion.  It is not merely
true, it is ascertainable.  Men may be challenged to deny it; men may
be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. I
remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a
book in his hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith Family," or some
such thing.  He said, "Well, you won't get any of your damned mysticism
out of this," or words to that effect.  I am happy to say that I
undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy. In most cases
the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of
Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic
matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of
the one trade that even kings respected, it could claim half the glory
of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed.  The spirit of the
smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million
poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.

Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is
poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast
on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that
creative violence.  The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning
of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly
elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the
wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying
of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written,
briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith.
Yet our novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence," which means
nothing, or "Vernon Raymond," which means nothing, when it is in their
power to give him this sacred name of Smith--this name made of iron and
flame. It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain
carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every
one whose name is Smith.  Perhaps it does; I trust so. Whoever else are
parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus. From the darkest dawn of history
this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its
name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the
Hammer of Thor. But as I also remarked, it is not quite the usual case.
It is common enough that common things should be poetical; it is not so
common that common names should be poetical. In most cases it is the
name that is the obstacle. A great many people talk as if this claim of
ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a
play on words. Precisely the contrary is true.  It is the idea that
some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product
of words. The word "signal-box" is unpoetical.  But the thing
signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of
vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from
death. That is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose
only comes in with what it is called.  The word "pillar-box" is
unpoetical. But the thing pillar-box is not unpoetical; it is the place
to which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when
they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched, not only by
others, but even (religious touch!) by themselves. That red turret is
one of the last of the temples.  Posting a letter and getting married
are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be
entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable. We think a pillar-box
prosaic, because there is no rhyme to it. We think a pillar-box
unpoetical, because we have never seen it in a poem.  But the bold fact
is entirely on the side of poetry. A signal-box is only called a
signal-box; it is a house of life and death. A pillar-box is only
called a pillar-box; it is a sanctuary of human words.  If you think
the name of "Smith" prosaic, it is not because you are practical and
sensible; it is because you are too much affected with literary
refinements.  The name shouts poetry at you. If you think of it
otherwise, it is because you are steeped and sodden with verbal
reminiscences, because you remember everything in Punch or Comic Cuts
about Mr. Smith being drunk or Mr. Smith being henpecked.  All these
things were given to you poetical. It is only by a long and elaborate
process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic.

Now, the first and fairest thing to say about Rudyard Kipling is that
he has borne a brilliant part in thus recovering the lost provinces of
poetry.  He has not been frightened by that brutal materialistic air
which clings only to words; he has pierced through to the romantic,
imaginative matter of the things themselves. He has perceived the
significance and philosophy of steam and of slang. Steam may be, if you
like, a dirty by-product of science. Slang may be, if you like, a dirty
by-product of language. But at least he has been among the few who saw
the divine parentage of these things, and knew that where there is
smoke there is fire--that is, that wherever there is the foulest of
things, there also is the purest. Above all, he has had something to
say, a definite view of things to utter, and that always means that a
man is fearless and faces everything. For the moment we have a view of
the universe, we possess it.

Now, the message of Rudyard Kipling, that upon which he has really
concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying about in him or in any
other man.  He has often written bad poetry, like Wordsworth.  He has
often said silly things, like Plato. He has often given way to mere
political hysteria, like Gladstone. But no one can reasonably doubt
that he means steadily and sincerely to say something, and the only
serious question is, What is that which he has tried to say?  Perhaps
the best way of stating this fairly will be to begin with that element
which has been most insisted by himself and by his opponents--I mean
his interest in militarism. But when we are seeking for the real merits
of a man it is unwise to go to his enemies, and much more foolish to go
to himself.

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but
his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The evil
of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty
and excessively warlike.  The evil of militarism is that it shows most
men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional
soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community
declines.  Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in
Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble.  The military
man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the
military virtues. And as it was in ancient Rome so it is in
contemporary Europe. There never was a time when nations were more
militarist. There never was a time when men were less brave.  All ages
and all epics have sung of arms and the man; but we have effected
simultaneously the deterioration of the man and the fantastic
perfection of the arms. Militarism demonstrated the decadence of Rome,
and it demonstrates the decadence of Prussia.

And unconsciously Mr. Kipling has proved this, and proved it admirably.
For in so far as his work is earnestly understood the military trade
does not by any means emerge as the most important or attractive. He
has not written so well about soldiers as he has about railway men or
bridge builders, or even journalists. The fact is that what attracts
Mr. Kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage, but the idea of
discipline. There was far more courage to the square mile in the Middle
Ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or
sword. But the fascination of the standing army upon Mr. Kipling is not
courage, which scarcely interests him, but discipline, which is, when
all is said and done, his primary theme.  The modern army is not a
miracle of courage; it has not enough opportunities, owing to the
cowardice of everybody else.  But it is really a miracle of
organization, and that is the truly Kiplingite ideal. Kipling's subject
is not that valour which properly belongs to war, but that
interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to
engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines. And thus it is
that when he writes of engineers, or sailors, or mules, or
steam-engines, he writes at his best.  The real poetry, the "true
romance" which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romance of the division
of labour and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of
peace much more accurately than the arts of war. And his main
contention is vital and valuable.  Every thing is military in the sense
that everything depends upon obedience.  There is no perfectly
epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere
men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling
ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. But we are
glad that the net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine
carelessness.  We may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke. But
we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for
a joke.  So far from having merely preached that a soldier cleaning his
side-arm is to be adored because he is military, Kipling at his best
and clearest has preached that the baker baking loaves and the tailor
cutting coats is as military as anybody.

Being devoted to this multitudinous vision of duty, Mr. Kipling is
naturally a cosmopolitan.  He happens to find his examples in the
British Empire, but almost any other empire would do as well, or,
indeed, any other highly civilized country. That which he admires in
the British army he would find even more apparent in the German army;
that which he desires in the British police he would find flourishing,
in the French police. The ideal of discipline is not the whole of life,
but it is spread over the whole of the world.  And the worship of it
tends to confirm in Mr. Kipling a certain note of worldly wisdom, of
the experience of the wanderer, which is one of the genuine charms of
his best work.

The great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of
patriotism--that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of
attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for
all finality must be tragic.  He admires England, but he does not love
her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.
He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.
There is no harshness in saying this, for, to do him justice, he avows
it with his usual picturesque candour.  In a very interesting poem, he
says that--

  "If England was what England seems"

--that is, weak and inefficient; if England were not what (as he
believes) she is--that is, powerful and practical--

  "How quick we'd chuck 'er! But she ain't!"

He admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism, and
this is quite enough to put it in another category altogether from the
patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded down in South Africa. In
speaking of the really patriotic peoples, such as the Irish, he has
some difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation out of his language. The
frame of mind which he really describes with beauty and nobility is the
frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who has seen men and cities.

  "For to admire and for to see,
   For to be'old this world so wide."

He is a perfect master of that light melancholy with which a man looks
back on having been the citizen of many communities, of that light
melancholy with which a man looks back on having been the lover of many
women.  He is the philanderer of the nations. But a man may have learnt
much about women in flirtations, and still be ignorant of first love; a
man may have known as many lands as Ulysses, and still be ignorant of
patriotism.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they can
know of England who know England only.  It is a far deeper and sharper
question to ask, "What can they know of England who know only the
world?" for the world does not include England any more than it
includes the Church.  The moment we care for anything deeply, the
world--that is, all the other miscellaneous interests--becomes our
enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self
"unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when
they talk of the "world well lost."  Astronomically speaking, I
understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose
that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers
inhabitants of that orb.  But they all felt a certain truth--the truth
that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr.
Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with
all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He
knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has
been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long
visits.  But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof
of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are
rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the
whole strength of the universe.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is
always breathing, an air of locality.  London is a place, to be
compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo.
But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who
regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the
winds of the world.  The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the
races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men--diet,
dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in
Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern
Britons.  The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he
is thinking of the things that unite men--hunger and babies, and the
beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.  Mr. Kipling,
with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to
become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be
accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism
is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his
finest poems, "The Sestina of the Tramp Royal," in which a man declares
that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not
permanent presence in one place.  In this there is certainly danger.
The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about;
dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in
South Africa.  Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy
fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile.  In the heated idleness of
youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of
that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss.  We were
inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?"
But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The
rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is
dead.  The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.
The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope
makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it
larger.  Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the
telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and
live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a
large world.  It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car
round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash
of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a
flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange
virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must
not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of
children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to
lose them.  The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland
opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas.  His mind creates
distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it.  Moderns think of the
earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of
a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made
about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas,
but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man,
but he certainly had large ideas.  The truth is that he was not a man
essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good
intentions, but a man with singularly small views.  There is nothing
large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children.
It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones.
The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of
them. Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable
comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question of
thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And
under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its
empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned
with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song,
totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its
splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car
civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming
space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture
of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars
suburban.



IV.  Mr. Bernard Shaw

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when
genial old Ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly
tales of the forgotten Emile Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it
used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. It may be
doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. The man
who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that
they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out
against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. There are
several modern examples of this situation.  Mr. Chamberlain, for
instance, is a very good one.  He constantly eludes or vanquishes his
opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different
to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. His
friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict
him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor
the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has
one power which is the soul of melodrama--the power of pretending, even
when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For
all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of
misfortune--that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to
weakness.  He talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city
that has never deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic flower,
like a decadent minor poet. As for his bluffness and toughness and
appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick
of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of
Mark Antony--

  "I am no orator, as Brutus is;
   But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."

It is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of
any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the
sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the
orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. Once let Mr.
Chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won.  He
has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these
plain men say great things on great occasions. He has only to drift in
the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and
people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all.
All his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did
not confuse. About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like the Gaels
in Matthew Arnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always
fell." He is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still
a mountain.  And a mountain is always romantic.

There is another man in the modern world who might be called the
antithesis of Mr. Chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing
monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is
always represented by those who disagree with him, and, I fear, also
(if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a
dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is said that he cannot be
taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that
he will do anything to startle and amuse. All this is not only untrue,
but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to
say that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of Jane Austen.
The whole force and triumph of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he
is a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his power consisting in
jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in
holding his own fortress night and day. He puts the Shaw test rapidly
and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth.  His
standard never varies. The thing which weak-minded revolutionists and
weak-minded Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly
this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his
law, such as it is, is justly enforced.  You may attack his principles,
as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack
their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the
lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists.  If he
dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen
as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of
marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that
are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he
laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science.  If he condemns the
irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the
equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by
saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by
suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just;
he has something of the terrible quality of a machine.  The man who is
really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and
incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average Cabinet Minister.  It is
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach who jumps through hoops.  It is Sir Henry
Fowler who stands on his head. The solid and respectable statesman of
that type does really leap from position to position; he is really
ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken
seriously. I know perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be saying
thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. If
thirty years hence I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver
beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, "One can never, of course,
make a verbal attack upon a lady," the patriarch will lift his aged
hand and fell me to the earth. We know, I say, what Mr. Shaw will be,
saying thirty years hence. But is there any one so darkly read in stars
and oracles that he will dare to predict what Mr. Asquith will be
saying thirty years hence?

The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of
definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who
believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons
about him.  He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in
conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces;
similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the
sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand.  But this is not
really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is
aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief
always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he
has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a
zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and
sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity,
because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of
the world.

People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that
black is white."  But they never ask whether the current
colour-language is always correct.  Ordinary sensible phraseology
sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green
white and reddish-brown white. We call wine "white wine" which is as
yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which
are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is
a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"--a picture
more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a
restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes,
the waiter would think him mad.  It is undoubtedly true that if a
Government official, reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said, "There
are only two thousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking
jokes, and kicked out of his post.  But it is equally obvious that both
men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. That too
truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr.
Bernard Shaw.  He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not
accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his
brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact
that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of
necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit
ourselves.

So much then a reasonable appreciation will find in Mr. Shaw to be
bracing and excellent.  He claims to see things as they are; and some
things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our
civilization does not see at all. But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is
something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious.

Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented
in "The Quintessence of Ibsenism."  It was, in brief, that conservative
ideals were bad, not because They were conservative, but because they
were ideals.  Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the
particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual;
the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this
is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from
doing the only thing that men want to do. What is the good of telling a
community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws?
The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.  And what
is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every
liberty except the liberty to make generalizations.  Making
generalizations is what makes him a man. In short, when Mr. Shaw
forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who
should forbid them to have children. The saying that "the golden rule
is that there is no golden rule," can, indeed, be simply answered by
being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule.  It is an iron
rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man.

But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw in recent years has been his
sudden development of the religion of the Superman. He who had to all
appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new
god in the unimaginable future.  He who had laid all the blame on
ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new
creature.  But the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who knows Mr.
Shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all
this long ago.

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really
are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has
always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this
world.  He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with
something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise
Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius
Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman.  Now, to have this inner and
merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may
be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are.
It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a
hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two.
It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus
with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if
he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a
demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the
latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.  And this
is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done.  When we really see
men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly.
For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange
dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that
baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite
arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which
makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of
superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make, our
knees knock under as with religious fear.  It is the fact that every
instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact
that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a
fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not
any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic
and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another.  Mr. Shaw, on
the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense
inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary
intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion
that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other
things.  The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be
inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps
a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of
empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he
sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he
did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet.
"What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine
him murmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not
why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I
was born?  What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must
I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?"

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery
of humility and almost of darkness.  The man who said, "Blessed is he
that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the
eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely.  The truth "Blessed is he
that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man
who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and
greener grass, and a more startling sun.  Blessed is he that expecteth
nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is
the meek, for he shall inherit the earth.  Until we realize that things
might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the
background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and
created thing.  As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is
lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we
underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of
His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we
know nothing until we know nothing.

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of
Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is
not easily pleased.  He is an almost solitary exception to the general
and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from
this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes
incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring
a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr.
Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very
doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be
progressive at all.  Having come to doubt whether humanity can be
combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected
to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being
easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations
and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is
incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new
kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man.  It is rather as if a
nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on
discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food
and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a
new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable
and lovable in our eyes is man--the old beer-drinking, creed-making,
fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have
been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have
been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying
civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a
symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its
corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a
shuffler, a snob a coward--in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has
built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.
All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent
and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon
strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was
founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no
chain is stronger than its weakest link.



V. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man
in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues
that he cannot.  And the more we approach the problems of human history
with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we
shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The hypocrites shall not
deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us
into thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will
crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no
question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous
that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.

There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. It is
always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of
inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost
crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and
considerable triumph in attaining it.  It is felt as a piece of humbug,
that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable
sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France.
But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between
the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there
is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The
truth is that there are no things for which men will make such
herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.
There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained
every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there
never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to
have it.  The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies
in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the
removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly
released for incredible voyages.  If we ask a sane man how much he
merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. It is
doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what
he can conquer--he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called
Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures;
he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe which
asserted humility gained Romance; the civilization which gained Romance
has gained the habitable globe. How different the Pagan and Stoical
feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous
quotation.  Addison makes the great Stoic say--

  "'Tis not in mortals to command success;
   But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."

But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every
lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European
adventure, is quite opposite.  'Tis not in mortals to deserve success.
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.

And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready
for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that
every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and
mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be
a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is
mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a
certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will
always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which
refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much.  In a
word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is
too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue.
Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for
this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.

The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of
the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a
modern one.  Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who
is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down
temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old
gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby
and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and
the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to
realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the
great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one.  It is
hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a
new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this
almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great
scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous
power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of
cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their
quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever
there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there
was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly
humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to
Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin.  He was convincing
because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his
dulness.  This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the
world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as
the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of
their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of
the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk
of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the
discoveries that their forbears made.  Like the modern English, they
are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming
conscious of their own strength--that is, they are growing weaker.  But
one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who
does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old
world of science.  One man of genius we have who is an artist, but who
was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with
this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H. G. Wells.  And in his
case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great
preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a
virtue is predicable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work
with violent visions--visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it
be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble?  He went on to
wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting
angels like birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into
men humble? Since then he has done something bolder than either of
these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men;
prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of
detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble?  It will indeed
be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such
things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be
humble who does such big things and such bold things. For the only
answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay.  It
is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who
does the bold things.  It is the humble man who has the sensational
sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvious reasons:  first,
that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second,
that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come;
third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less
adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday
self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that
is, most romantic.  Adventures are to the shy:  in this sense
adventures are to the unadventurous.

Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a
great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to
illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I
should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most
interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of
his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing.  One can
lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident
manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere
change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to
another like that of Mr. George Moore.  It is a quite continuous
advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction.  But
the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the
fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling
opinions to more humdrum opinions.  It has been even in some sense an
advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This
fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr.
Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be
so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the
other.  Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments
for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for
something yet more startling.  Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of
the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated
or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of
engineers.  He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same
honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he
thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the
most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion
that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and
wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand
people and tell them that twice two is four.

Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of
conservativism.  He is finding out more and more that conventions,
though silent, are alive.  As good an example as any of this humility
and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of
science and marriage.  He once held, I believe, the opinion which some
singular sociologists still hold, that human creatures could
successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses.  He
no longer holds that view. Not only does he no longer hold that view,
but he has written about it in "Mankind in the Making" with such
smashing sense and humour, that I find it difficult to believe that
anybody else can hold it either. It is true that his chief objection to
the proposal is that it is physically impossible, which seems to me a
very slight objection, and almost negligible compared with the others.
The one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final
attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on
unthinkable slaves and cowards.  I do not know whether the scientific
marriage-mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says)
in saying that medical supervision would produce strong and healthy
men. I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and
healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.

The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it
connects the idea of health with the idea of care.  What has health to
do with care?  Health has to do with carelessness.  In special and
abnormal cases it is necessary to have care.  When we are peculiarly
unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But
even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If
we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they
ought to be told to be careful.  But when we are sociologists we are
addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity
ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental
functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with
pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed
with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a
good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to
sustain.  A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but
because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for
their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love,
and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The
food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking
about his tissues.  The exercise will really get him into training so
long as he is thinking about something else.  And the marriage will
really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if
it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the
first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as
necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be
careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness,
or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all
sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as
marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.

Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower
scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually
ought not to be scientific.  He is still slightly affected with the
great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the
human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some
such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in
his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow
for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for
instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in
original sin.  If he had begun with the human soul--that is, if he had
begun on himself--he would have found original sin almost the first
thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter
shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the
mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or
ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take
the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then
give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They
first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are
very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by
motor-car or balloon.  And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's
indifference to the human psychology can be found in his
cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic
boundaries.  He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a
world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to
occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we
should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit
that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in
thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very
simple.  Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being
good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible
to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is
impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were
no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a
strife between Utopias.  For the highest thing does not tend to union
only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often
get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from
fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest
thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism
of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the
meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhat
deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the
introductory part of the new Utopia.  His philosophy in some sense
amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least,
he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we
can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer,
however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself.

He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the
mind of a pedant)....  Being indeed!--there is no being, but a
universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on
truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals." Mr. Wells
says, again, "There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from
weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our
hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities
below."  Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I speak with all
respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental
distinction. It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we
know. For if that were so we should not know it all and should not call
it knowledge.  Our mental state may be very different from that of
somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely
different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr.
Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that
sit by the springs of truth.  He must surely see that the fact of two
things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the
tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in
the quality of motion.  The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an
isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves
faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when we say of a thing that
it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things
that do not move. And even in the act of saying that things change, we
say that there is something unchangeable.

But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells's fallacy can be found in
the example which he himself chooses.  It is quite true that we see a
dim light which, compared with a darker thing, is light, but which,
compared with a stronger light, is darkness. But the quality of light
remains the same thing, or else we should not call it a stronger light
or recognize it as such. If the character of light were not fixed in
the mind, we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a
stronger light, or vice versa If the character of light became even for
an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair's-breadth doubtful, if,
for example, there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of
blueness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new
light has more light or less.  In brief, the progress may be as varying
as a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road. North
and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and
South of Spitzbergen.  But if there be any doubt of the position of the
North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am South of
Spitzbergen at all.  The absolute idea of light may be practically
unattainable.  We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be
able to get to the North Pole.  But because the North Pole is
unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only
because the North Pole is not indefinable that we can make a
satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.

In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back on Mr. H.
G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. It is
precisely here that Plato shows his sense.  It is not true that
everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and
material things.  There is something that does not change; and that is
precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. Mr. Wells says
truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in one connection as dark
we may see in another connection as light. But the thing common to both
incidents is the mere idea of light--which we have not seen at all.
Mr. Wells might grow taller and taller for unending aeons till his head
was higher than the loneliest star. I can imagine his writing a good
novel about it.  In that case he would see the trees first as tall
things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high
and then as low. But there would remain with him through the ages in
that starry loneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful
spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was
growing taller and not (for instance) growing fatter.

And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has written a
very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that
here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague
relativism.  "The Food of the Gods" is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw's play,
in essence a study of the Superman idea.  And it lies, I think, even
through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same
intellectual attack.  We cannot be expected to have any regard for a
great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards.
For unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him
great.  Nietszche summed up all that is interesting in the Superman
idea when he said, "Man is a thing which has to be surpassed."  But the
very word "surpass" implies the existence of a standard common to us
and the thing surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men
are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to
kill him first. But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite
indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless
monstrosity. He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us.
Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make
men think a man their superior.  Giants, as in the wise old
fairy-tales, are vermin.  Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer" told from
the point of view of the giant.  This has not, I think, been done
before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological
substance of it existed in fact.  I have little doubt that the giant
whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely
enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished
to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not
unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would
point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than
one.  He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment,
enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to
correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the
enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one
man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the
single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the
giant was a particularly gigantic giant.  All he wished to know was
whether he was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us.
What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and
the duties of the citizen?  Was he fond of children--or fond of them
only in a dark and sinister sense?  To use a fine phrase for emotional
sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him
up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack
the Giant-Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were
understood we should need no Bibles or histories. But the modern world
in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world,
like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and
therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world, when it
praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave:  but it
does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of
these ideas. The strong cannot be brave.  Only the weak can be brave;
and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,
in time of doubt, to be strong.  The only way in which a giant could
really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by
continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. That is
by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack. Thus that sympathy with
the small or the defeated as such, with which we Liberals and
Nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless
sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and his friends fancy.  It is the
first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in
the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity
more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like
dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight
him; but in that case, why not call him the Saint?  But if he is merely
stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not
care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for
all the strength we have.  It we are weaker than he, that is no reason
why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to
touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter
by falling on our own. But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern
hero-worship and celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the
Superman. That he may be something more than man, we must be something
less.

Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the
old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity
itself.  Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so
foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of
his bereavement.  Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, "He
who has never hoped can never despair." The Man-God of old answers from
his awful hill, "Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?"  A great man is
not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so
strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, "A new commandment
I give to you, 'be hard,'" he is really saying, "A new commandment I
give to you, 'be dead.'" Sensibility is the definition of life.

I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelt on this
matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it is specially
prominent in his mind; I know that the Superman does not bulk so large
in his cosmos as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have dwelt on it for
the opposite reason; because this heresy of immoral hero-worship has
taken, I think, a slighter hold of him, and may perhaps still be
prevented from perverting one of the best thinkers of the day.  In the
course of "The New Utopia" Mr. Wells makes more than one admiring
allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That clever and unhappy man lived in
admiration of a vague violence, and was always going back to rude old
tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive literatures, to
find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny.  But he
could not find it. It is not there.  The primitive literature is shown
in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all
in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities
as any modern political idealist.  The rude old ballads are as
sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection
Society. When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks
and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only
two kinds of songs.  The first was a rejoicing that the weak had
conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for
once in a way, conquered the weak.  For this defiance of the statu quo,
this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature
challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the
psychological adventure which is called man. It is his strength to
disdain strength.  The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the
only real hope of mankind. In the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men
are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what is more to
the point, the hero. The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman,
that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor
tinker whom he thought to thrust aside.  And the chivalrous chronicler
makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration. This
magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism; it is not a
product of anything to do with peace. This magnanimity is merely one of
the lost arts of war. The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting
England, and they go back to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and
fighting English. And the thing that they find written across that
fierce old literature everywhere, is "the policy of Majuba."



VI.  Christmas and the Aesthetes

The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism
have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up.
The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and
evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what
evil. Hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions."
They profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but they
appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them. All the
colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white. Mixed
together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
thing very like many new religions.  Such a blend is often something
much worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the
Thugs. The error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really
the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the
misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts commonly
counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted bad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire
it in a photographic negative.  It is difficult to congratulate all
their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness.
This will often happen to us in connection with human religions. Take
two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy of the
nineteenth century.  Take the Salvation Army and the philosophy of
Auguste Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is expressed
in some such words as these:  "I have no doubt they do a great deal of
good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style; their aims are
excellent, but their methods are wrong." To me, unfortunately, the
precise reverse of this appears to be the truth.  I do not know whether
the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent, but I am quite sure their
methods are admirable. Their methods are the methods of all intense and
hearty religions; they are popular like all religion, military like all
religion, public and sensational like all religion.  They are not
reverent any more than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in
the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only
possible to infidels. That beautiful twilight you will find in
Euripides, in Renan, in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will
not find it--you will find only laughter and war.  A man cannot pay
that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be
reverent towards a beautiful lie.  And the Salvation Army, though their
voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are
really the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of
Dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for
a philosophy. Professor Huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called
the Salvation Army "corybantic Christianity."  Huxley was the last and
noblest of those Stoics who have never understood the Cross.  If he had
understood Christianity he would have known that there never has been,
and never can be, any Christianity that is not corybantic.

And there is this difference between the matter of aims and the matter
of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing like the Salvation
Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual and atmosphere very
easy.  No one, perhaps, but a sociologist can see whether General
Booth's housing scheme is right. But any healthy person can see that
banging brass cymbals together must be right.  A page of statistics, a
plan of model dwellings, anything which is rational, is always
difficult for the lay mind. But the thing which is irrational any one
can understand. That is why religion came so early into the world and
spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not
spread at all. History unanimously attests the fact that it is only
mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the
people. Common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark
temple of culture.  And so while the philanthropy of the Salvationists
and its genuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of
the doctors, there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass
bands, for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quicken
the internal life.  The object of philanthropy is to do good; the
object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment, amid a crash of
brass.

And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--I mean
the religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worship of
humanity.  Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliant and
chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality, speaks for
the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophy of Comte, but
not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffs and ceremonials, the
new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days. He does not mean that
we should dress ourselves up as priests of humanity or let off
fireworks because it is Milton's birthday. To the solid English Comtist
all this appears, he confesses, to be a little absurd.  To me it
appears the only sensible part of Comtism. As a philosophy it is
unsatisfactory.  It is evidently impossible to worship humanity, just
as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club; both are excellent
institutions to which we may happen to belong. But we perceive clearly
that the Savile Club did not make the stars and does not fill the
universe.  And it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the
Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to
worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither
confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte was
wisdom.  In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as
something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw
that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. He saw that while
the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human
are the useless ones.  He saw the falsehood of that almost universal
notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something
artificial, additional, and corrupt. Ritual is really much older than
thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought.  A feeling
touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there
are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are
certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of
dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable,
of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But
everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man
was a ritualist before he could speak.  If Comtism had spread the world
would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the
Comtist calendar.  By discouraging what they conceive to be the
weakness of their master, the English Positivists have broken the
strength of their religion.  A man who has faith must be prepared not
only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man
is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready
to wear a wreath round his head for them. I myself, to take a corpus
vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through
for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with
the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has
succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist
ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God.  When
Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point
was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its
alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies
have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered
it.  They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's
merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of
gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the
birthday of Victor Hugo.  Mr. William Archer does not sing carols
descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.
In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out
of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or
Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In
all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."
A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy. A
half-holiday means, I suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is only
partially holy.  It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing
as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin.
Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each
other presents in honour of anything--the birth of Michael Angelo or
the opening of Euston Station.  But it does not work. As a fact, men
only become greedily and gloriously material about something
spiritualistic.  Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and you
do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. Take away the strange
beauty of the saints, and what has remained to us is the far stranger
ugliness of Wandsworth. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is
the unnatural.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter.  There are in the
modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on
behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do
long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.
William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark
ages than the age of Manchester.  Mr. W. B. Yeats frames his steps in
prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten
choruses that no one but he can hear.  Mr. George Moore collects every
fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic
Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable
persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of
the maypole or the Olympian games. But there is about these people a
haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible
that they do not keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature
in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore
does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight. It is
even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers. If so, where
is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a solid
and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the
streets, and they think it vulgar. if this is so, let them be very
certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of
the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of
the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage
vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the
Olympian games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they
were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean
coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and
some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy,
wherever there was faith in the gods.  Wherever you have belief you
will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some
dangers.  And as creed and mythology produce this gross and vigorous
life, so in its turn this gross and vigorous life will always produce
creed and mythology. If we ever get the English back on to the English
land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a
superstitious people. The absence from modern life of both the higher
and lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and
the trees and clouds. If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly
from the lack of turnips.



VII.  Omar and the Sacred Vine

A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with
the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from
the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes
American bars with an axe.  In these discussions it is almost always
felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or
such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should
venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely
dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a
medicine.  And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain
pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he
does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a
little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day.  But if a
man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get
something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without;
something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being
without.  The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being
ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of
being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a
strong man, and said, "This will enable you to jump off the Monument,"
doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jump off the
Monument all day long to the delight of the City. But if we took it to
a blind man, saying, "This will enable you to see," he would be under a
heavier temptation.  It would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes
whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at
daybreak.  It is easy to deny one's self festivity; it is difficult to
deny one's self normality. Hence comes the fact which every doctor
knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when
they need it. I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the
giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily
unjustifiable. But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is
the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound
rules--a paradox.  Drink because you are happy, but never because you
are miserable.  Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you
will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you
would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of
Italy.  Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking,
and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it,
for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

For more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a great Eastern
figure has lain upon our English literature. Fitzgerald's translation
of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark
and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that
work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of
men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an
epigram with the vague sadness of a song. But of its philosophical,
ethical, and religious influence which has been almost as great as its
brilliancy, I should like to say a word, and that word, I confess, one
of uncompromising hostility. There are a great many things which might
be said against the spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its prodigious
influence. But one matter of indictment towers ominously above the
rest--a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us.  This is the
terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and
the joy of life.  Some one called Omar "the sad, glad old Persian." Sad
he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever. He has been a
worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.

A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under the rose-tree with his
wine-pot and his scroll of poems.  It may seem strange that any one's
thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him, fly back to the dark
bedside where the doctor doles out brandy. It may seem stranger still
that they should go back to the grey wastrel shaking with gin in
Houndsditch. But a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil
bond. Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is
wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical
wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not
happy. His is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that
reveals it. It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and
instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an
investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile.  Whole heavens above
it, from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style, rises the
splendour of some old English drinking-song--

  "Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
   And let the zider vlow."

For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly
worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and kindly
leisure of the poor.  Of course, the great part of the more stolid
reproaches directed against the Omarite morality are as false and
babyish as such reproaches usually are.  One critic, whose work I have
read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omar an atheist and a
materialist.  It is almost impossible for an Oriental to be either; the
East understands metaphysics too well for that. Of course, the real
objection which a philosophical Christian would bring against the
religion of Omar, is not that he gives no place to God, it is that he
gives too much place to God. His is that terrible theism which can
imagine nothing else but deity, and which denies altogether the
outlines of human personality and human will.

  "The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
   But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
   And He that tossed you down into the field,
   He knows about it all--he knows--he knows."

A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to this
because it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the
soul. The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism is
not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God; it is
that it denies the existence of man.

In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyat stands
first in our time; but it does not stand alone. Many of the most
brilliant intellects of our time have urged us to the same
self-conscious snatching at a rare delight. Walter Pater said that we
were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy
exquisite moments simply for those moments' sake.  The same lesson was
taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar
Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is
not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy
does, not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the
immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of
immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all
space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in
"Tristram Shandy" or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and
incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an
endless tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in
certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of
them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake." To do
this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do
not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean something
with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. A man may
have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
victory in battle.  The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for
the moment's sake.  He enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake.
The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he
enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for
may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a
week.  But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks
of his love as something that cannot end.  These moments are filled
with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem
momentary. Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they
become as cold as Pater and his style.  Man cannot love mortal things.
He can only love immortal things for an instant.

Pater's mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase. He asks us to
burn with a hard, gem-like flame.  Flames are never hard and never
gem-like--they cannot be handled or arranged. So human emotions are
never hard and never gem-like; they are always dangerous, like flames,
to touch or even to examine. There is only one way in which our
passions can become hard and gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold
as gems. No blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and
laughter of men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes. For
any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required; a certain
shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certain boyish expectation.
Purity and simplicity are essential to passions--yes even to evil
passions.  Even vice demands a sort of virginity.

Omar's (or Fitzgerald's) effect upon the other world we may let go, his
hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing. The Puritans, as I
have said, are far jollier than he. The new ascetics who follow Thoreau
or Tolstoy are much livelier company; for, though the surrender of
strong drink and such luxuries may strike us as an idle negation, it
may leave a man with innumerable natural pleasures, and, above all,
with man's natural power of happiness. Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise
without a cup of coffee.  If Tolstoy cannot admire marriage, at least
he is healthy enough to admire mud. Nature can be enjoyed without even
the most natural luxuries. A good bush needs no wine.  But neither
nature nor wine nor anything else can be enjoyed if we have the wrong
attitude towards happiness, and Omar (or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong
attitude towards happiness. He and those he has influenced do not see
that if we are to be truly gay, we must believe that there is some
eternal gaiety in the nature of things. We cannot enjoy thoroughly even
a pas-de-quatre at a subscription dance unless we believe that the
stars are dancing to the same tune.  No one can be really hilarious but
the serious man.  "Wine," says the Scripture, "maketh glad the heart of
man," but only of the man who has a heart. The thing called high
spirits is possible only to the spiritual. Ultimately a man cannot
rejoice in anything except the nature of things. Ultimately a man can
enjoy nothing except religion.  Once in the world's history men did
believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and
they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan
eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he
has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a
saint.  Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre
like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a
sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a
sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine.  He
feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.
"Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for
you know not when you go nor where.  Drink, because the stars are cruel
and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing
worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things
are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace."  So he stands
offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity
stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine.
"Drink" he says "for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the
crimson of the love and wrath of God.  Drink, for the trumpets are
blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my
blood of the new testament that is shed for you.  Drink, for I know of
whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where."



VIII.  The Mildness of the Yellow Press

There is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or another
nowadays against the influence of that new journalism which is
associated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson. But
almost everybody who attacks it attacks on the ground that it is very
sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling. I am speaking in no
affected contrariety, but in the simplicity of a genuine personal
impression, when I say that this journalism offends as being not
sensational or violent enough.  The real vice is not that it is
startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame. The whole object is
to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the
commonplace; it may be low, but it must take care also to be flat.
Never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency
which can be heard from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary street.  We
have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things
should be funny without being vulgar, but the standard of this decorum
demands that if things are vulgar they shall be vulgar without being
funny.  This journalism does not merely fail to exaggerate life--it
positively underrates it; and it has to do so because it is intended
for the faint and languid recreation of men whom the fierceness of
modern life has fatigued. This press is not the yellow press at all; it
is the drab press. Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not address to the tired
clerk any observation more witty than the tired clerk might be able to
address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth.  It must not expose anybody (anybody
who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody, it must not even
please anybody, too much.  A general vague idea that in spite of all
this, our yellow press is sensational, arises from such external
accidents as large type or lurid headlines. It is quite true that these
editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters.
But they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is
soothing.  To people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted
train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in
this vast and obvious manner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in
dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents
and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to
spell. The nursery authorities do not use an A as big as a horseshoe in
order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to put the
child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident. Of the
same character is the dim and quiet dame school which Sir Alfred
Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep.  All their sentiments are
spelling-book sentiments--that is to say, they are sentiments with
which the pupil is already respectfully familiar. All their wildest
posters are leaves torn from a copy-book.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and
in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in
Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking
about.  He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he
charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy.
When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he
discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered
three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as
this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the
same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they
can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version
of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not
interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or
sorrow.  It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the
Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be
impressive except a great deal of blood.  Real sensationalism, of which
I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when
it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the
most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody.  If you
make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable
that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no
moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in
saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody
else says casually, and without remembering what they have said.  When
they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point
of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with
the shock.  They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the
judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in
England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War
Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers
to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers.
just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it to shout, so
they show the hopelessly unsensational nature of their minds when they
really try to be sensational. With the whole world full of big and
dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness of civilization staring
them in the face, their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the
War Office. They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or
form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor
is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the
sensational such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words
of Cowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me."
The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational
journalism. This has been discovered by that very able and honest
journalist, Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against
Christianity, warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his
paper, but who continued from an honourable sense of intellectual
responsibility. He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly
shocked his readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper. It was
bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read
it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted
to write him letters.  Those letters were voluminous (I helped, I am
glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted
with a generous fulness.  Thus was accidentally discovered (like the
steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if an editor can only
make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him
for nothing.

Some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the proper objects of
so serious a consideration; but that can scarcely be maintained from a
political or ethical point of view. In this problem of the mildness and
tameness of the Harmsworth mind there is mirrored the outlines of a
much larger problem which is akin to it.

The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of success and
violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity. But he is not
alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merely because he happens
personally to be stupid.  Every man, however brave, who begins by
worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity. Every man, however
wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity.
This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual,
but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the
man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom.  The
worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of
which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves
and cowards. A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's ciphers
or for the sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success.
For obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves Mrs. Gallup or
human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success.
When the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure
long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful,
hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is
hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all.  Like all the
Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all
these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and
acquiescence. They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was
to admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu
quo. They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the
strong. They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to
be strong must despise the strong.  They sought to be everything, to
have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy that
would drive the stars.  But they did not realize the two great
facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the first and most
difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment a man is
something, he is essentially defying everything. The lower animals, say
the men of science, fought their way up with a blind selfishness.  If
this be so, the only real moral of it is that our unselfishness, if it
is to triumph, must be equally blind. The mammoth did not put his head
on one side and wonder whether mammoths were a little out of date.
Mammoths were at least as much up to date as that individual mammoth
could make them. The great elk did not say, "Cloven hoofs are very much
worn now." He polished his own weapons for his own use.  But in the
reasoning animal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may
fail through perceiving his own failure.  When modern sociologists talk
of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time,
they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of
people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it
consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating
themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and
more the situation of modern England. Every man speaks of public
opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
Every man makes his contribution negative under the erroneous
impression that the next man's contribution is positive.  Every man
surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender. And
over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome
and platitudinous press, incapable of invention, incapable of audacity,
capable only of a servility all the more contemptible because it is not
even a servility to the strong. But all who begin with force and
conquest will end in this.

The chief characteristic of the "New journalism" is simply that it is
bad journalism.  It is beyond all comparison the most shapeless,
careless, and colourless work done in our day.

I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold
and adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of Empire. I
found it (as the reader has already eagerly guessed) in Pearson's
Magazine, while I was communing (soul to soul) with Mr. C. Arthur
Pearson, whose first and suppressed name I am afraid is Chilperic. It
occurred in an article on the American Presidential Election. This is
the sentence, and every one should read it carefully, and roll it on
the tongue, till all the honey be tasted.

"A little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of
American working-men than much high-flown argument.  A speaker who, as
he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won
hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential Election."

I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment; the words of
Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. But just think for a
moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable mind, of the man who wrote
that, of the editor who approved it, of the people who are probably
impressed by it, of the incredible American working-man, of whom, for
all I know, it may be true. Think what their notion of "common sense"
must be!  It is delightful to realize that you and I are now able to
win thousands of votes should we ever be engaged in a Presidential
Election, by doing something of this kind.  For I suppose the nails and
the board are not essential to the exhibition of "common sense;" there
may be variations. We may read--

"A little common sense impresses American working-men more than
high-flown argument.  A speaker who, as he made his points, pulled
buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of votes for his side." Or,
"Sound common sense tells better in America than high-flown argument.
Thus Senator Budge, who threw his false teeth in the air every time he
made an epigram, won the solid approval of American working-men." Or
again, "The sound common sense of a gentleman from Earlswood, who stuck
straws in his hair during the progress of his speech, assured the
victory of Mr. Roosevelt."

There are many other elements in this article on which I should love to
linger.  But the matter which I wish to point out is that in that
sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth of what our
Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, Empire-builders, and strong,
silent men, really mean by "commonsense."  They mean knocking, with
deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bits of iron into a
useless bit of wood.  A man goes on to an American platform and behaves
like a mountebank fool with a board and a hammer; well, I do not blame
him; I might even admire him. He may be a dashing and quite decent
strategist.  He may be a fine romantic actor, like Burke flinging the
dagger on the floor. He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic,
profoundly impressed with the ancient meaning of the divine trade of
the Carpenter, and offering to the people a parable in the form of a
ceremony. All I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in
which such wild ritualism can be called "sound common sense." And it is
in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone, that the new
Imperialism lives and moves and has its being. The whole glory and
greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this: that if a man hits the
right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits it to or what it
does.  They care about the noise of the hammer, not about the silent
drip of the nail.  Before and throughout the African war, Mr.
Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.
But when we ask, "But what have these nails held together? Where is
your carpentry?  Where are your contented Outlanders? Where is your
free South Africa?  Where is your British prestige? What have your
nails done?" then what answer is there? We must go back (with an
affectionate sigh) to our Pearson for the answer to the question of
what the nails have done: "The speaker who hammered nails into a board
won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new
journalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which has
just purchased the Standard.  To take one instance out of hundreds, the
incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson's
article as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "Lie number
one. Nailed to the Mast!  Nailed to the Mast!"  In the whole office
there was apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that we
speak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast. Nobody
in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was falling into a stale
Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick. This is the real and
essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard. It is not merely that
journalism is victorious over literature. It is that bad journalism is
victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is
being ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or
unclean. It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to
a better. If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that
Pearson's Magazine is poor and weak popular journalism.  You will know
it as certainly as you know bad butter.  You will know as certainly
that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand, in the
great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism. Mr. Pearson
has been a monument of this enormous banality. About everything he says
and does there is something infinitely weak-minded. He clamours for
home trades and employs foreign ones to print his paper.  When this
glaring fact is pointed out, he does not say that the thing was an
oversight, like a sane man. He cuts it off with scissors, like a child
of three.  His very cunning is infantile.  And like a child of three,
he does not cut it quite off. In all human records I doubt if there is
such an example of a profound simplicity in deception.  This is the
sort of intelligence which now sits in the seat of the sane and
honourable old Tory journalism. If it were really the triumph of the
tropical exuberance of the Yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still
tropical.  But it is not. We are delivered over to the bramble, and
from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of
Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure that
journalists of this order represent public opinion. It may be doubted
whether any honest and serious Tariff Reformer would for a moment
maintain that there was any majority for Tariff Reform in the country
comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it
among the great dailies. The only inference is that for purposes of
real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy.
Doubtless the public buys the wares of these men, for one reason or
another. But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admires
their politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophy of
Mr. Crosse or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell. If these
men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say except that there are
plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road, and many much better.  But
if they make any sort of attempt to be politicians, we can only point
out to them that they are not as yet even good journalists.



IX.  The Moods of Mr. George Moore

Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal
confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them
for the remainder of his life.  He is a man of genuinely forcible mind
and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction
which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary
honesty.  He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until
they could stand it no longer.  Everything he writes, it is to be fully
admitted, has a genuine mental power.  His account of his reason for
leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable
tribute to that communion which has been written of late years. For the
fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the
many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the
Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating. Mr. Moore hates
Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which
he lives.  Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in
the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does
fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of
other people. Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real
quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the
dreamer. It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that
troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of this world.

The truth is that the tradition of Christianity (which is still the
only coherent ethic of Europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or
mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily
justified in life. One of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or
faith--that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be
the man. Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot
understand Stevenson.  Another is the paradox of charity or chivalry
that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected, that the
more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a
certain kind of defence.  Thackeray understood this, and therefore Mr.
Moore does not understand Thackeray.  Now, one of these very practical
and working mysteries in the Christian tradition, and one which the
Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done her best work in singling
out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride. Pride is a weakness
in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up
chivalry and energy. The Christian tradition understands this;
therefore Mr. Moore does not understand the Christian tradition.

For the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal
doctrine of the sin of pride.  It is not only true that humility is a
much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. It is also true that
vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.  Vanity is
social--it is almost a kind of comradeship; pride is solitary and
uncivilized.  Vanity is active; it desires the applause of infinite
multitudes; pride is passive, desiring only the applause of one person,
which it already has. Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even
of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even smile.  And the whole of this
difference is the difference between Stevenson and Mr. George Moore,
who, as he informs us, has "brushed Stevenson aside."  I do not know
where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is having a
good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud.
Stevenson had a windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism. Hence
Stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity; while the
richest effects of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden from his eyes.

If we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which
Stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics, we shall
not find it difficult to guess why it is that Stevenson at least found
a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always
walking the world looking for a new one. Stevenson had found that the
secret of life lies in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon.
Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it
for itself and is turned to stone.

It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because it is
really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr.
Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant
and influential aesthetic weakness as well. We should really be much
more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not quite so interested in
himself.  We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really
fine pictures, into each of which, by some useless and discordant
convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same
attitude.  "The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore," "Effect
of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist," "Mr. Moore by Firelight," "Ruins
of Mr. Moore by Moonlight," and so on, seems to be the endless series.
He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to
reveal himself. But the answer is that in such a book as this he does
not succeed. One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies
precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys
self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try
to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will
try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality
will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking about himself will
lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead
to ceasing to be anything. If, on the other hand, a man is sensible
enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his
own individual way. He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see
the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has
ever known. This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's
"Confessions." In reading them we do not feel the presence of a
clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold. We
only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called
upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore. He
is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism, realism
and mysticism--he or rather his name.  He is profoundly absorbed even
in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be. And he intrudes
the capital "I" even where it need not be intruded--even where it
weakens the force of a plain statement. Where another man would say,
"It is a fine day," Mr. Moore says, "Seen through my temperament, the
day appeared fine." Where another man would say "Milton has obviously a
fine style," Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had always
impressed me." The Nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being
totally ineffectual.  Mr. Moore has started many interesting crusades,
but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin. Even when
he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of
falsehood.  Even when he has found reality he cannot find rest. One
Irish quality he has which no Irishman was ever without--pugnacity; and
that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. But he
has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit
in a man like Bernard Shaw.  His weakness of introspection and
selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they
will always prevent him winning.



X. On Sandals and Simplicity

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are
more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are
boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of
without losing them.  A Frenchman can be proud of being bold and
logical, and still remain bold and logical. A German can be proud of
being reflective and orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly.
But an Englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct, and still
remain simple and direct. In the matter of these strange virtues, to
know them is to kill them. A man may be conscious of being heroic or
conscious of being divine, but he cannot (in spite of all the
Anglo-Saxon poets) be conscious of being unconscious.

Now, I do not think that it can be honestly denied that some portion of
this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own
opinion, at least, to the school of Anglo-Saxonism. I mean that school
of the simple life, commonly associated with Tolstoy. If a perpetual
talk about one's own robustness leads to being less robust, it is even
more true that a perpetual talking about one's own simplicity leads to
being less simple. One great complaint, I think, must stand against the
modern upholders of the simple life--the simple life in all its varied
forms, from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the
Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us
simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things.
They would make us simple in the things that do not matter--that is, in
diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system. But they would make
us complex in the things that do matter--in philosophy, in loyalty, in
spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection. It does not so very much
matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does
very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind.
The only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the
heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys. There may be a
reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this; there can surely be
no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it. There is more
simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who
eats grape-nuts on principle. The chief error of these people is to be
found in the very phrase to which they are most attached--"plain living
and high thinking." These people do not stand in need of, will not be
improved by, plain living and high thinking.  They stand in need of the
contrary. They would be improved by high living and plain thinking. A
little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility, a
little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human
festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the
world.  It would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is,
if anything, older than the natural. It would teach them that the
loving-cup is as old as any hunger. It would teach them that ritualism
is older than any religion. And a little plain thinking would teach
them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very
civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who
really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to
strike a blow.

A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held
firmly in his right hand, and says, "The affections of family and
country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;"
but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged
with admiration, "What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in
order to feel like that." High living will reject the tomato.  Plain
thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable
sinfulness of war. High living will convince us that nothing is more
materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material.  And plain
thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to
reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If
that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular
clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not
quenched. If that remain, it matters very little if a few Early
Victorian armchairs remain along with it.  Let us put a complex entree
into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a
complex old gentleman.  So long as human society will leave my
spiritual inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative submission,
to work its wild will with my physical interior.  I will submit to
cigars. I will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy.  I will humble
myself to a hansom cab.  If only by this means I may preserve to myself
the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. I
do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. I incline
to the belief that there are others.  But I will have nothing to do
with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy
alike.  I will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child
who is too simple to like toys.

The child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide.
And in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does
he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the
fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex
things.  The false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction
between the natural and the artificial. The higher kind of naturalness
ignores that distinction. To the child the tree and the lamp-post are
as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them
are natural but both supernatural.  For both are splendid and
unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame
with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the
gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most
rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only
spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men
pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men
are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil
is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is
not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired
enough.  The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are
mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book,
our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a
philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit or
social routine.  The things we need most for immediate practical
purposes are all abstractions.  We need a right view of the human lot,
a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly and
angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto, be
living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense. Desire and danger
make every one simple.  And to those who talk to us with interfering
eloquence about Jaeger and the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and
the coats of the stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that
are hurled at fops and gluttons, "Take no thought what ye shall eat or
what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed.  For after all
these things do the Gentiles seek. But seek first the kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
Those amazing words are not only extraordinarily good, practical
politics; they are also superlatively good hygiene.  The one supreme
way of making all those processes go right, the processes of health,
and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of making
certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else. If a man
is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may be quite easy about
the pores of his skin.  If he harnesses his waggon to a star, the
process will have a most satisfactory effect upon the coats of his
stomach.  For the thing called "taking thought," the thing for which
the best modern word is "rationalizing," is in its nature, inapplicable
to all plain and urgent things. Men take thought and ponder
rationalistically, touching remote things--things that only
theoretically matter, such as the transit of Venus. But only at their
peril can men rationalize about so practical a matter as health.



XI Science and the Savages

A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects
is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very
frequently a man of the world.  He is a student of nature; he is
scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty
is overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is
only a very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being
human.  For the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in
one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific
studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he
can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps,
an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely
by being a man.  He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence
arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of
ethnology and folk-lore--the fact that the same frigid and detached
spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads
to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary
to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not
necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men.  That
same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or
guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the
stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing
with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to
understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many
men of science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from
ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this world.  For
the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best
learnt, not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of
man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or
the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and
taking down their answers in a note-book, although the cleverest man
may pursue this course.  The answer to the riddle is in England; it is
in London; nay, it is in his own heart.  When a man has discovered why
men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have
discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the
heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of
scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball.  If a
man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the
Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the
origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically
speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go
into society.

This total misunderstanding of the real nature of ceremonial gives rise
to the most awkward and dehumanized versions of the conduct of men in
rude lands or ages.  The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial
is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a
reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be supposed, the
reason is generally a very absurd one--absurd because it originates not
in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of
the professor.  The teamed man will say, for instance, "The natives of
Mumbojumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat and will require food
upon his journey to the other world.  This is attested by the fact that
they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with
this rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe." To
any one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It
is like saying, "The English in the twentieth century believed that a
dead man could smell.  This is attested by the fact that they always
covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly
and tribal terrors were evidently attached to the neglect of this
action, as we have records of several old ladies who were very much
disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not arrived in time for the
funeral."  It may be of course that savages put food with a dead man
because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man
because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally I do not
believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food
or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because
it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do.  We do not
understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and
natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human
existence it is essentially irrational.  We do not understand the
savage for the same reason that the savage does not understand himself.
And the savage does not understand himself for the same reason that we
do not understand ourselves either.

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the
human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of
science.  It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this
mortal has put on immortality.  Even what we call our material desires
are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop,
and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but
science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much
of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a
haunting love of the beautiful.  The man's desire for the pork-chop
remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven.
All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science
of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by
their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain
in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire
for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire
for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the
primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything
in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few
instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could
construct a science with unreliable instruments.  A man might work out
the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a
handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and
falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and
earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of
the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source.
Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place
in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their
museum of fables.  The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and
the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world.
That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other,
not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even
faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened.
That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have
caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question
of whether any one ever really did so.  That numberless journalists
announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way or
the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred.
Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German wars
that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of any belief
in the legendary war of '70 which did. But that will be because if
folk-lore students remain at all, their nature will be unchanged; and
their services to folk-lore will be still as they are at present,
greater than they know. For in truth these men do something far more
godlike than studying legends; they create them.

There are two kinds of stories which the scientists say cannot be true,
because everybody tells them.  The first class consists of the stories
which are told everywhere, because they are somewhat odd or clever;
there is nothing in the world to prevent their having happened to
somebody as an adventure any more than there is anything to prevent
their having occurred, as they certainly did occur, to somebody as an
idea. But they are not likely to have happened to many people. The
second class of their "myths" consist of the stories that are told
everywhere for the simple reason that they happen everywhere. Of the
first class, for instance, we might take such an example as the story
of William Tell, now generally ranked among legends upon the sole
ground that it is found in the tales of other peoples. Now, it is
obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true or
fictitious it is what is called "a good story;" it is odd, exciting,
and it has a climax.  But to suggest that some such eccentric incident
can never have happened in the whole history of archery, or that it did
not happen to any particular person of whom it is told, is stark
impudence.  The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or
beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to
any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that might easily occur to
any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic caprices of some
story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices of
some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur in
legends. Or it might just as well occur first in legends and afterwards
occur in real life.  If no apple has ever been shot off a boy's head
from the beginning of the world, it may be done tomorrow morning, and
by somebody who has never heard of William Tell.

This type of tale, indeed, may be pretty fairly paralleled with the
ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee or an Irish bull. Such a
retort as the famous "je ne vois pas la necessite" we have all seen
attributed to Talleyrand, to Voltaire, to Henri Quatre, to an anonymous
judge, and so on.  But this variety does not in any way make it more
likely that the thing was never said at all. It is highly likely that
it was really said by somebody unknown. It is highly likely that it was
really said by Talleyrand. In any case, it is not any more difficult to
believe that the mot might have occurred to a man in conversation than
to a man writing memoirs. It might have occurred to any of the men I
have mentioned. But there is this point of distinction about it, that
it is not likely to have occurred to all of them.  And this is where
the first class of so-called myth differs from the second to which I
have previously referred.  For there is a second class of incident
found to be common to the stories of five or six heroes, say to Sigurd,
to Hercules, to Rustem, to the Cid, and so on. And the peculiarity of
this myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to imagine that it
really happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to imagine
that it really happened to all of them. Such a story, for instance, is
that of a great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the
mysterious weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of
William Tell, is as I have said, popular, because it is peculiar.  But
this kind of story, the story of Samson and Delilah of Arthur and
Guinevere, is obviously popular because it is not peculiar.  It is
popular as good, quiet fiction is popular, because it tells the truth
about people. If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of
Hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying
to know that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a
woman and the ruin of Parnell by a woman.  And, indeed, I have no doubt
whatever that, some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will
refuse altogether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert
Browning, and will prove their point up to the hilt by the
unquestionable fact that the whole fiction of the period was full of
such elopements from end to end.

Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students
of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing they call
anthropomorphism.  They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena
to a god in human form in order to explain them, because his mind in
its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish
existence.  The thunder was called the voice of a man, the lightning
the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more
reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of
philosophy is to walk down a lane at night.  Any one who does so will
discover very quickly that men pictured something semi-human at the
back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because
it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible,
but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and
mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the
conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she
has no power with us at all.  As long as a tree is a tree, it is a
top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one
leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all.
It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it
looks like ourselves.  When a tree really looks like a man our knees
knock under us.  And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall
on our faces.



XII Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

Of the New Paganism (or neo-Paganism), as it was preached flamboyantly
by Mr. Swinburne or delicately by Walter Pater, there is no necessity
to take any very grave account, except as a thing which left behind it
incomparable exercises in the English language.  The New Paganism is no
longer new, and it never at any time bore the smallest resemblance to
Paganism. The ideas about the ancient civilization which it has left
loose in the public mind are certainly extraordinary enough. The term
"pagan" is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning
a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with
about half a dozen.  The pagans, according to this notion, were
continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an
irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best
pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too
rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted
as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all
things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when
they had only one great virtue--civic obedience.  They are envied and
admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin--despair.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson, the most pregnant and provocative of recent
writers on this and similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have
fallen into this old error of the mere anarchy of Paganism. In order to
make hay of that Hellenic enthusiasm which has as its ideal mere
appetite and egotism, it is not necessary to know much philosophy, but
merely to know a little Greek. Mr. Lowes Dickinson knows a great deal
of philosophy, and also a great deal of Greek, and his error, if error
he has, is not that of the crude hedonist.  But the contrast which he
offers between Christianity and Paganism in the matter of moral
ideals--a contrast which he states very ably in a paper called "How
long halt ye?" which appeared in the Independent Review--does, I think,
contain an error of a deeper kind.  According to him, the ideal of
Paganism was not, indeed, a mere frenzy of lust and liberty and
caprice, but was an ideal of full and satisfied humanity. According to
him, the ideal of Christianity was the ideal of asceticism. When I say
that I think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of philosophy and
history, I am not talking for the moment about any ideal Christianity
of my own, or even of any primitive Christianity undefiled by after
events.  I am not, like so many modern Christian idealists, basing my
case upon certain things which Christ said. Neither am I, like so many
other Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things that
Christ forgot to say. I take historic Christianity with all its sins
upon its head; I take it, as I would take Jacobinism, or Mormonism, or
any other mixed or unpleasing human product, and I say that the meaning
of its action was not to be found in asceticism.  I say that its point
of departure from Paganism was not asceticism.  I say that its point of
difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St.
Simeon Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that
the main Christian impulse cannot be described as asceticism, even in
the ascetics.

Let me set about making the matter clear.  There is one broad fact
about the relations of Christianity and Paganism which is so simple
that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns
forget it.  The primary fact about Christianity and Paganism is that
one came after the other.  Mr. Lowes Dickinson speaks of them as if
they were parallel ideals--even speaks as if Paganism were the newer of
the two, and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan
ideal will be the ultimate good of man; but if that is so, we must at
least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man
actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it
away again. It is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose to
attempt an answer.

There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face
with Paganism; there is only one thing in the modern world which in
that sense knows anything about Paganism: and that is Christianity.
That fact is really the weak point in the whole of that hedonistic
neo-Paganism of which I have spoken. All that genuinely remains of the
ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly
come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the
festivals of the Christian Church. If any one wants to hold the end of
a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better
take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at
Christmas. Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin,
even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution
is of Christian origin.  The newspaper is of Christian origin. The
anarchists are of Christian origin.  Physical science is of Christian
origin.  The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is
one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which
can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is
Christianity.

The real difference between Paganism and Christianity is perfectly
summed up in the difference between the pagan, or natural, virtues, and
those three virtues of Christianity which the Church of Rome calls
virtues of grace.  The pagan, or rational, virtues are such things as
justice and temperance, and Christianity has adopted them. The three
mystical virtues which Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are
faith, hope, and charity.  Now much easy and foolish Christian rhetoric
could easily be poured out upon those three words, but I desire to
confine myself to the two facts which are evident about them.  The
first evident fact (in marked contrast to the delusion of the dancing
pagan)--the first evident fact, I say, is that the pagan virtues, such
as justice and temperance, are the sad virtues, and that the mystical
virtues of faith, hope, and charity are the gay and exuberant virtues.
And the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the fact
that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and that the
Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as
unreasonable as they can be.

As the word "unreasonable" is open to misunderstanding, the matter may
be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or
mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is
not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice
consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving
it to him.  Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a
particular indulgence and adhering to that.  But charity means
pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means
hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith
means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the
fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind.
Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the
gigantic firelight of Dickens.  Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day;
our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet
of Stevenson.  But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every
side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody
mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is "the
power of believing that which we know to be untrue." Yet it is not one
atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of
defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of
being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.  It is
true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects
and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope
exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a
thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving
poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice.
It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not
exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is
at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue
either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment.
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to
be useful. Now the old pagan world went perfectly straightforward until
it discovered that going straightforward is an enormous mistake. It was
nobly and beautifully reasonable, and discovered in its death-pang this
lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that
reasonableness will not do.  The pagan age was truly an Eden or golden
age, in this essential sense, that it is not to be recovered. And it is
not to be recovered in this sense again that, while we are certainly
jollier than the pagans, and much more right than the pagans, there is
not one of us who can, by the utmost stretch of energy, be so sensible
as the pagans. That naked innocence of the intellect cannot be
recovered by any man after Christianity; and for this excellent reason,
that every man after Christianity knows it to be misleading. Let me
take an example, the first that occurs to the mind, of this impossible
plainness in the pagan point of view.  The greatest tribute to
Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's "Ulysses." The poet
reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire
to wander.  But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He
desires to get home.  He displays his heroic and unconquerable
qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is
all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a
Christian product.  There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that
is a Christian product.  Everything in that old world would appear to
have been clean and obvious.  A good man was a good man; a bad man was
a bad man.  For this reason they had no charity; for charity is a
reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul. For this
reason they had no such thing as the art of fiction, the novel; for the
novel is a creation of the mystical idea of charity. For them a
pleasant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant landscape
unpleasant.  Hence they had no idea of romance; for romance consists in
thinking a thing more delightful because it is dangerous; it is a
Christian idea.  In a word, we cannot reconstruct or even imagine the
beautiful and astonishing pagan world. It was a world in which common
sense was really common.

My general meaning touching the three virtues of which I have spoken
will now, I hope, be sufficiently clear. They are all three
paradoxical, they are all three practical, and they are all three
paradoxical because they are practical. it is the stress of ultimate
need, and a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which led men to
set up these riddles, and to die for them. Whatever may be the meaning
of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only kind of hope that is
of any use in a battle is a hope that denies arithmetic.  Whatever may
be the meaning of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only kind
of charity which any weak spirit wants, or which any generous spirit
feels, is the charity which forgives the sins that are like scarlet.
Whatever may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty
about something we cannot prove.  Thus, for instance, we believe by
faith in the existence of other people.

But there is another Christian virtue, a virtue far more obviously and
historically connected with Christianity, which will illustrate even
better the connection between paradox and practical necessity. This
virtue cannot be questioned in its capacity as a historical symbol;
certainly Mr. Lowes Dickinson will not question it. It has been the
boast of hundreds of the champions of Christianity. It has been the
taunt of hundreds of the opponents of Christianity. It is, in essence,
the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between
Christianity and Paganism.  I mean, of course, the virtue of humility.
I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern
humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the
main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we
speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a
thousand years.  But of this virtue even more than of the other three,
I would maintain the general proposition adopted above.  Civilization
discovered Christian humility for the same urgent reason that it
discovered faith and charity--that is, because Christian civilization
had to discover it or die.

The great psychological discovery of Paganism, which turned it into
Christianity, can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase. The
pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of
his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and
continue to enjoy anything else. Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed out in
words too excellent to need any further elucidation, the absurd
shallowness of those who imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in
a materialistic sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only
intellectually even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself
spiritually. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of
it, a very natural thing to do.  Now, the psychological discovery is
merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest
possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the
truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing
our ego to zero.

Humility is the thing which is for ever renewing the earth and the
stars. It is humility, and not duty, which preserves the stars from
wrong, from the unpardonable wrong of casual resignation; it is through
humility that the most ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong. The
curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be
weary of wonders.  If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the
most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the
hundredth time we call it, in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of
Wordsworth, "the light of common day." We are inclined to increase our
claims.  We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to
demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the
primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and
instantaneous. Until we understand that original dark, in which we have
neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike
praise to the splendid sensationalism of things.  The terms "pessimism"
and "optimism," like most modern terms, are unmeaning. But if they can
be used in any vague sense as meaning something, we may say that in
this great fact pessimism is the very basis of optimism.  The man who
destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man, and to the
humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to
the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the
faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he
realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.

I have not spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility as a
psychological necessity, because it is more commonly insisted on, and
is in itself more obvious.  But it is equally clear that humility is a
permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination. It
is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation is
stronger for despising other nations.  As a matter of fact, the
strongest nations are those, like Prussia or Japan, which began from
very mean beginnings, but have not been too proud to sit at the feet of
the foreigner and learn everything from him.  Almost every obvious and
direct victory has been the victory of the plagiarist. This is, indeed,
only a very paltry by-product of humility, but it is a product of
humility, and, therefore, it is successful. Prussia had no Christian
humility in its internal arrangements; hence its internal arrangements
were miserable.  But it had enough Christian humility slavishly to copy
France (even down to Frederick the Great's poetry), and that which it
had the humility to copy it had ultimately the honour to conquer.  The
case of the Japanese is even more obvious; their only Christian and
their only beautiful quality is that they have humbled themselves to be
exalted. All this aspect of humility, however, as connected with the
matter of effort and striving for a standard set above us, I dismiss as
having been sufficiently pointed out by almost all idealistic writers.

It may be worth while, however, to point out the interesting disparity
in the matter of humility between the modern notion of the strong man
and the actual records of strong men.  Carlyle objected to the
statement that no man could be a hero to his valet. Every sympathy can
be extended towards him in the matter if he merely or mainly meant that
the phrase was a disparagement of hero-worship. Hero-worship is
certainly a generous and human impulse; the hero may be faulty, but the
worship can hardly be.  It may be that no man would be a hero to his
valet.  But any man would be a valet to his hero. But in truth both the
proverb itself and Carlyle's stricture upon it ignore the most
essential matter at issue.  The ultimate psychological truth is not
that no man is a hero to his valet. The ultimate psychological truth,
the foundation of Christianity, is that no man is a hero to himself.
Cromwell, according to Carlyle, was a strong man.  According to
Cromwell, he was a weak one.

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies,
indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were
mostly fools.  Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism,
says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the
doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of
the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that
whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect
all men. All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes,
if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle's
pathetic belief (or any one else's pathetic belief) in "the wise few."
There are no wise few.  Every aristocracy that has ever existed has
behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. Every
oligarchy is merely a knot of men in the street--that is to say, it is
very jolly, but not infallible.  And no oligarchies in the world's
history have ever come off so badly in practical affairs as the very
proud oligarchies--the oligarchy of Poland, the oligarchy of Venice.
And the armies that have most swiftly and suddenly broken their enemies
in pieces have been the religious armies--the Moslem Armies, for
instance, or the Puritan Armies.  And a religious army may, by its
nature, be defined as an army in which every man is taught not to exalt
but to abase himself.  Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the
sturdy descendants of their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they
would run away from a cow.  If you asked one of their Puritan fathers,
if you asked Bunyan, for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have
answered, with tears, that he was as weak as water.  And because of
this he would have borne tortures. And this virtue of humility, while
being practical enough to win battles, will always be paradoxical
enough to puzzle pedants. It is at one with the virtue of charity in
this respect. Every generous person will admit that the one kind of sin
which charity should cover is the sin which is inexcusable.  And every
generous person will equally agree that the one kind of pride which is
wholly damnable is the pride of the man who has something to be proud
of. The pride which, proportionally speaking, does not hurt the
character, is the pride in things which reflect no credit on the person
at all. Thus it does a man no harm to be proud of his country, and
comparatively little harm to be proud of his remote ancestors. It does
him more harm to be proud of having made money, because in that he has
a little more reason for pride. It does him more harm still to be proud
of what is nobler than money--intellect.  And it does him most harm of
all to value himself for the most valuable thing on earth--goodness.
The man who is proud of what is really creditable to him is the
Pharisee, the man whom Christ Himself could not forbear to strike.

My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan
ideal is, then, this.  I accuse them of ignoring definite human
discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as
material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot
go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered
that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of
pride and enjoyment.  For mankind has discovered that pride does not
lead to enjoyment.  I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident
modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea
of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of
independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic
thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all
probability, just as far as his father before him.  But if there really
be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things,
the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.  I accuse
Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense.
If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries--the mystery
of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes,
let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive
and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we
shall end--where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in
destruction.  I mean that we shall end in Christianity.



XIII.  Celts and Celtophiles

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is
to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word
"kleptomania" is a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a par with
that strange theory, always advanced when a wealthy or prominent person
is in the dock, that exposure is more of a punishment for the rich than
for the poor.  Of course, the very reverse is the truth. Exposure is
more of a punishment for the poor than for the rich. The richer a man
is the easier it is for him to be a tramp. The richer a man is the
easier it is for him to be popular and generally respected in the
Cannibal Islands.  But the poorer a man is the more likely it is that
he will have to use his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for
the night.  Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity
for hall-porters. This is a secondary matter, but it is an example of
the general proposition I offer--the proposition that an enormous
amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the
indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these
defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of
appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or
pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is
none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

When a wealthy nation like the English discovers the perfectly patent
fact that it is making a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer
nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in consternation, and
then begins to talk about Celts and Teutons.  As far as I can
understand the theory, the Irish are Celts and the English are Teutons.
Of course, the Irish are not Celts any more than the English are
Teutons. I have not followed the ethnological discussion with much
energy, but the last scientific conclusion which I read inclined on the
whole to the summary that the English were mainly Celtic and the Irish
mainly Teutonic.  But no man alive, with even the glimmering of a real
scientific sense, would ever dream of applying the terms "Celtic" or
"Teutonic" to either of them in any positive or useful sense.

That sort of thing must be left to people who talk about the
Anglo-Saxon race, and extend the expression to America. How much of the
blood of the Angles and Saxons (whoever they were) there remains in our
mixed British, Roman, German, Dane, Norman, and Picard stock is a
matter only interesting to wild antiquaries. And how much of that
diluted blood can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool of America
into which a cataract of Swedes, Jews, Germans, Irishmen, and Italians
is perpetually pouring, is a matter only interesting to lunatics.  It
would have been wiser for the English governing class to have called
upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least
boast of being constant.  But science boasts of being in a flux for
ever; boasts of being unstable as water.

And England and the English governing class never did call on this
absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no
other god to call on.  All the most genuine Englishmen in history would
have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk about
Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to substitute the ideal of race for
the ideal of nationality, I really do not like to think what they would
have said.  I certainly should not like to have been the officer of
Nelson who suddenly discovered his French blood on the eve of
Trafalgar.  I should not like to have been the Norfolk or Suffolk
gentleman who had to expound to Admiral Blake by what demonstrable ties
of genealogy he was irrevocably bound to the Dutch.  The truth of the
whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the
world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret
society; it is a product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual
product. And there are men in the modern world who would think anything
and do anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual
product.

A nation, however, as it confronts the modern world, is a purely
spiritual product.  Sometimes it has been born in independence, like
Scotland.  Sometimes it has been born in dependence, in subjugation,
like Ireland.  Sometimes it is a large thing cohering out of many
smaller things, like Italy.  Sometimes it is a small thing breaking
away from larger things, like Poland. But in each and every case its
quality is purely spiritual, or, if you will, purely psychological.  It
is a moment when five men become a sixth man.  Every one knows it who
has ever founded a club.  It is a moment when five places become one
place. Every one must know it who has ever had to repel an invasion.
Mr. Timothy Healy, the most serious intellect in the present House of
Commons, summed up nationality to perfection when he simply called it
something for which people will die, As he excellently said in reply to
Lord Hugh Cecil, "No one, not even the noble lord, would die for the
meridian of Greenwich." And that is the great tribute to its purely
psychological character. It is idle to ask why Greenwich should not
cohere in this spiritual manner while Athens or Sparta did.  It is like
asking why a man falls in love with one woman and not with another.

Now, of this great spiritual coherence, independent of external
circumstances, or of race, or of any obvious physical thing, Ireland is
the most remarkable example.  Rome conquered nations, but Ireland has
conquered races.  The Norman has gone there and become Irish, the
Scotchman has gone there and become Irish, the Spaniard has gone there
and become Irish, even the bitter soldier of Cromwell has gone there
and become Irish.  Ireland, which did not exist even politically, has
been stronger than all the races that existed scientifically. The
purest Germanic blood, the purest Norman blood, the purest blood of the
passionate Scotch patriot, has not been so attractive as a nation
without a flag.  Ireland, unrecognized and oppressed, has easily
absorbed races, as such trifles are easily absorbed. She has easily
disposed of physical science, as such superstitions are easily disposed
of.  Nationality in its weakness has been stronger than ethnology in
its strength.  Five triumphant races have been absorbed, have been
defeated by a defeated nationality.

This being the true and strange glory of Ireland, it is impossible to
hear without impatience of the attempt so constantly made among her
modern sympathizers to talk about Celts and Celticism. Who were the
Celts?  I defy anybody to say.  Who are the Irish? I defy any one to be
indifferent, or to pretend not to know. Mr. W. B. Yeats, the great
Irish genius who has appeared in our time, shows his own admirable
penetration in discarding altogether the argument from a Celtic race.
But he does not wholly escape, and his followers hardly ever escape,
the general objection to the Celtic argument. The tendency of that
argument is to represent the Irish or the Celts as a strange and
separate race, as a tribe of eccentrics in the modern world immersed in
dim legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is to exhibit the Irish
as odd, because they see the fairies.  Its trend is to make the Irish
seem weird and wild because they sing old songs and join in strange
dances. But this is quite an error; indeed, it is the opposite of the
truth. It is the English who are odd because they do not see the
fairies. It is the inhabitants of Kensington who are weird and wild
because they do not sing old songs and join in strange dances. In all
this the Irish are not in the least strange and separate, are not in
the least Celtic, as the word is commonly and popularly used. In all
this the Irish are simply an ordinary sensible nation, living the life
of any other ordinary and sensible nation which has not been either
sodden with smoke or oppressed by money-lenders, or otherwise corrupted
with wealth and science. There is nothing Celtic about having legends.
It is merely human. The Germans, who are (I suppose) Teutonic, have
hundreds of legends, wherever it happens that the Germans are human.
There is nothing Celtic about loving poetry; the English loved poetry
more, perhaps, than any other people before they came under the shadow
of the chimney-pot and the shadow of the chimney-pot hat.  It is not
Ireland which is mad and mystic; it is Manchester which is mad and
mystic, which is incredible, which is a wild exception among human
things. Ireland has no need to play the silly game of the science of
races; Ireland has no need to pretend to be a tribe of visionaries
apart. In the matter of visions, Ireland is more than a nation, it is a
model nation.



XIV On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human
institution.  Every one would admit that it has been the main cell and
central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such
societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went in for "efficiency," and
has, therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind.  Christianity,
even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and
savage sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of
father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run
child, mother, father. This it called, not the family, but the Holy
Family, for many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But
some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the
family.  They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders
have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the
family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful,
pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which
is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not
peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the
small community.  We are told that we must go in for large empires and
large ideas.  There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the
city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The
man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He
knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences
of men.  The reason is obvious.  In a large community we can choose our
companions.  In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into
existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real
world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing
really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the
clique.  The men of the clan live together because they all wear the
same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their
souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours
than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because
they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness
of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.
A big society exists in order to form cliques.  A big society is a
society for the promotion of narrowness.  It is a machinery for the
purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all
experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the
most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of
Christian knowledge.

We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of
the thing called a club.  When London was smaller, and the parts of
London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is
in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the
club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club
is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the
enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on the more the
club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and
becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat
fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man
comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite
of sociable.  Sociability, like all good things, is full of
discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the
most degraded of all combinations--the luxurious anchorite, the man who
combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of
St. Simeon Stylites.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live,
we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than
we have ever known.  And it is the whole effort of the typically modern
person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents
modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and
goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to
Timbuctoo.  He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth.  He pretends
to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel.  And in all this he is
still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of
this flight he is always ready with his own explanation.  He says he is
fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying.  He is really
fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is
exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He
can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the
people in his own street are men.  He can stare at the Chinese because
for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares
at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to
flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals--of free
men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.  The
street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and
quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles.  These
creatures are indeed very different from himself.  But they do not put
their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual
competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles
and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do
seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine
sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman
at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The
vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the
major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they
will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really
mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did
not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their
rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean
when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much
deeper.  We do not dislike them because they have so little force and
fire that they cannot be interested in themselves.  We dislike them
because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in
us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the
narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it.
And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character.
They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its
energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its
weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.

Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety
of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as
it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls
itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie
that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out.
Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most
unpardonable of virtues.  Nietzsche, who represents most prominently
this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description
somewhere--a very powerful description in the purely literary sense--of
the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common
people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common
minds.  As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may
regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the
sacredness that belongs to the weak.  When he makes us feel that he
cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the
overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the
sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a
crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a
man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog,
humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell.  But when Nietzsche
has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to
believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an
aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It
is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door
neighbour.  Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of
nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as
the rain.  He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the
old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom
when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty
towards one's neighbour.  The duty towards humanity may often take the
form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty
may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East
End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or
because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international
peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous
martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice
or a kind of taste.  We may be so made as to be particularly fond of
lunatics or specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes
because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic.
But we have to love our neighbour because he is there--a much more
alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of
humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be
anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.

Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very
deadly.  But this is natural enough; for they are not fleeing from
death.  They are fleeing from life.  And this principle applies to ring
within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly
reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the
human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human
type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British
diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he
wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different
from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with
the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should
come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London.  But
if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile
and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a
row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if
he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate--a difficult thing to
imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate "for a
change," then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic
change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The
consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities
of Ramsgate hygiene.

Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation
within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street within
the city, so it applies to the home within the street. The institution
of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that
the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in
this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a
family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be
besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in
the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to
be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is
not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside.  Above all, they all
insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and
fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of
ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less
open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally
confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or
pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course
the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is
wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and
varieties.  It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom,
and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of
something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George
is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in
the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing
qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry
does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that
the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons
and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad,
simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like
mankind.  Papa is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is
mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is
old, like the world.

Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do
definitely wish to step into a narrower world.  They are dismayed and
terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to
find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to
think the Trocadero a cosmos.  I do not say, for a moment, that the
flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the
individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a
monastery.  But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which
tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they
are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than
their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to
encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a
chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with
the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on
the day that he was born.

This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family.  It is
romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is
everything that its enemies call it.  It is romantic because it is
arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there.  So long as you have
groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian
atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that
you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an
adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us.  It is a thing
that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.  Falling in love has been
often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.
In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of
a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and
transfigure and torture us.  It does break our hearts with an
unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far
as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we
are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into
it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even
judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly
adventurous at all.  In this degree the supreme adventure is not
falling in love.  The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk
suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something
of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in
wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush.  Our uncle
is a surprise.  Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born,
we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has
its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a
world that we have not made.  In other words, when we step into the
family we step into a fairy-tale.

This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family
and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest
thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality.  For even if
reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved
to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they
are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected
and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably
interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or
pessimistic; but the "circumstances over which we have no control"
remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and
renew their strength.  People wonder why the novel is the most popular
form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of
science or books of metaphysics.  The reason is very simple; it is
merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes
legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear,
and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics.  But life
is always a novel.  Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease
even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible
justice, or even a recognizable wrong.  But our existence is still a
story.  In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be
continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish
a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are
finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any
scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right.
But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest
or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That
is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly
mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative
writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter
but one.  He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the
author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he
chooses.  And the same civilization, the chivalric European
civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century,
produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas
Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad
novels in the circulating libraries.

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is
necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for
us without our permission.  If we wish life to be a system, this may be
a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential.  It
may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody
else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the
author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the
whole trouble of inventing the next act.  A man has control over many
things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of
a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much
hero that there would be no novel.  And the reason why the lives of the
rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can
choose the events.  They are dull because they are omnipotent. They
fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing
which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the
existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to
meet the things we do not like or do not expect.  It is vain for the
supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To
be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into
this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be
born into a romance.  Of all these great limitations and frameworks
which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is
the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the
moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a
complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man
makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the
sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing
about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky.  They are seeking
under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations--that
is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there
are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity.  They say
they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the
whole universe as weak as themselves.



XV On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature
than good literature.  Good literature may tell us the mind of one man;
but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells
us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about
its author.  It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about
its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more
cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.  The more
dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public
document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular
man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The
pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in
scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions
and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and
halfpenny novelettes.  Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our
day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to
appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to
govern empires and look over the map of mankind.

There is one rather interesting example of this state of things in
which the weaker literature is really the stronger and the stronger the
weaker.  It is the case of what may be called, for the sake of an
approximate description, the literature of aristocracy; or, if you
prefer the description, the literature of snobbishness. Now if any one
wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case
for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern
philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow
Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more
doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously
the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with
curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship
him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here,
however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority,
because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do
commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a
rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn
against weakness which only exists among invalids.  It is not, however,
of the secondary merits of the great German philosopher, but of the
primary merits of the Bow Bells Novelettes, that it is my present
affair to speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental
novelette seems to me very satisfactory as a permanent political and
philosophical guide. It may be inaccurate about details such as the
title by which a baronet is addressed or the width of a mountain chasm
which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it is not a bad description
of the general idea and intention of aristocracy as they exist in human
affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is magnificence and valour;
and if the Family Herald Supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates
these things, at least, it does not fall short in them. It never errs
by making the mountain chasm too narrow or the title of the baronet
insufficiently impressive.  But above this sane reliable old literature
of snobbishness there has arisen in our time another kind of literature
of snobbishness which, with its much higher pretensions, seems to me
worthy of very much less respect.  Incidentally (if that matters), it
is much better literature.  But it is immeasurably worse philosophy,
immeasurably worse ethics and politics, immeasurably worse vital
rendering of aristocracy and humanity as they really are. From such
books as those of which I wish now to speak we can discover what a
clever man can do with the idea of aristocracy. But from the Family
Herald Supplement literature we can learn what the idea of aristocracy
can do with a man who is not clever. And when we know that we know
English history.

This new aristocratic fiction must have caught the attention of
everybody who has read the best fiction for the last fifteen years. It
is that genuine or alleged literature of the Smart Set which represents
that set as distinguished, not only by smart dresses, but by smart
sayings.  To the bad baronet, to the good baronet, to the romantic and
misunderstood baronet who is supposed to be a bad baronet, but is a
good baronet, this school has added a conception undreamed of in the
former years--the conception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat is
not merely to be taller than mortal men and stronger and handsomer, he
is also to be more witty. He is the long man with the short epigram.
Many eminent, and deservedly eminent, modern novelists must accept some
responsibility for having supported this worst form of snobbishness--an
intellectual snobbishness.  The talented author of "Dodo" is
responsible for having in some sense created the fashion as a fashion.
Mr. Hichens, in the "Green Carnation," reaffirmed the strange idea that
young noblemen talk well; though his case had some vague biographical
foundation, and in consequence an excuse.  Mrs. Craigie is considerably
guilty in the matter, although, or rather because, she has combined the
aristocratic note with a note of some moral and even religious
sincerity.  When you are saving a man's soul, even in a novel, it is
indecent to mention that he is a gentleman. Nor can blame in this
matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a
man who has proved his possession of the highest of human instinct, the
romantic instinct--I mean Mr. Anthony Hope. In a galloping, impossible
melodrama like "The Prisoner of Zenda," the blood of kings fanned an
excellent fantastic thread or theme. But the blood of kings is not a
thing that can be taken seriously. And when, for example, Mr. Hope
devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called
Tristram of Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of
nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Hope the hint of
this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for any
ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim
is to own the house of Blent at the time when every other young man is
owning the stars.

Mr. Hope, however, is a very mild case, and in him there is not only an
element of romance, but also a fine element of irony which warns us
against taking all this elegance too seriously. Above all, he shows his
sense in not making his noblemen so incredibly equipped with impromptu
repartee.  This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes
is the last and most servile of all the servilities.  It is, as I have
said, immeasurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the
novelette which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or
riding a mad elephant. These may be exaggerations of beauty and
courage, but beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals of
aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats.

The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close
or conscientious attention to the daily habits of noblemen.  But he is
something more important than a reality; he is a practical ideal. The
gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the
gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not
be particularly good-looking, but he would rather be good-looking than
anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a
pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole,
the upper class not only especially desire these qualities of beauty
and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them.
Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular
literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high.  It is
snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an
exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon
something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there.  The
English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the
least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship
them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all;
it is in the slums.  It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the
Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in
the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a
certain spirit.  It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a
man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a
gentleman.  From a democratic point of view he might as well say that
he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern
English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the
cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness
of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing
kindness of the poor to the rich.

The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is not servile; but the
snobbishness of good literature is servile.  The old-fashioned
halfpenny romance where the duchesses sparkled with diamonds was not
servile; but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is
servile. For in thus attributing a special and startling degree of
intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper
classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their
virtue or even especially their aim.  We are, in the words of Disraeli
(who, being a genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps primarily to
answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry),
we are performing the essential function of flattery which is
flattering the people for the qualities they have not got. Praise may
be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery so long
as it is praise of something that is noticeably in existence.  A man
may say that a giraffe's head strikes the stars, or that a whale fills
the German Ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a
favourite animal. But when he begins to congratulate the giraffe on his
feathers, and the whale on the elegance of his legs, we find ourselves
confronted with that social element which we call flattery. The middle
and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely,
admire the health and grace of the English aristocracy. And this for
the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the whole, more
healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the
wit of the aristocrats. And this for the simple reason that the
aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal
less so.  A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of
verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner.  Where he
really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in
Holborn.  The witty peer whose impromptus fill the books of Mrs.
Craigie or Miss Fowler, would, as a matter of fact, be torn to shreds
in the art of conversation by the first boot-black he had the
misfortune to fall foul of. The poor are merely sentimental, and very
excusably sentimental, if they praise the gentleman for having a ready
hand and ready money. But they are strictly slaves and sycophants if
they praise him for having a ready tongue.  For that they have far more
themselves.

The element of oligarchical sentiment in these novels, however, has, I
think, another and subtler aspect, an aspect more difficult to
understand and more worth understanding. The modern gentleman,
particularly the modern English gentleman, has become so central and
important in these books, and through them in the whole of our current
literature and our current mode of thought, that certain qualities of
his, whether original or recent, essential or accidental, have altered
the quality of our English comedy. In particular, that stoical ideal,
absurdly supposed to be the English ideal, has stiffened and chilled
us.  It is not the English ideal; but it is to some extent the
aristocratic ideal; or it may be only the ideal of aristocracy in its
autumn or decay. The gentleman is a Stoic because he is a sort of
savage, because he is filled with a great elemental fear that some
stranger will speak to him.  That is why a third-class carriage is a
community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits. But
this matter, which is difficult, I may be permitted to approach in a
more circuitous way.

The haunting element of ineffectualness which runs through so much of
the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or
ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying
ingenuity as "Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or even "Some
Emotions and a Moral," may be expressed in various ways, but to most of
us I think it will ultimately amount to the same thing. This new
frivolity is inadequate because there is in it no strong sense of an
unuttered joy.  The men and women who exchange the repartees may not
only be hating each other, but hating even themselves. Any one of them
might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be shot the next.  They are
joking, not because they are merry, but because they are not; out of
the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh. Even when they talk pure
nonsense it is a careful nonsense--a nonsense of which they are
economical, or, to use the perfect expression of Mr. W. S. Gilbert in
"Patience," it is such "precious nonsense." Even when they become
light-headed they do not become light-hearted. All those who have read
anything of the rationalism of the moderns know that their Reason is a
sad thing.  But even their unreason is sad.

The causes of this incapacity are also not very difficult to indicate.
The chief of all, of course, is that miserable fear of being
sentimental, which is the meanest of all the modern terrors--meaner
even than the terror which produces hygiene.  Everywhere the robust and
uproarious humour has come from the men who were capable not merely of
sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism.  There has been no
humour so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist Steele or
the sentimentalist Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These
creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men.
It is true that the humour of Micawber is good literature and that the
pathos of little Nell is bad.  But the kind of man who had the courage
to write so badly in the one case is the kind of man who would have the
courage to write so well in the other. The same unconsciousness, the
same violent innocence, the same gigantesque scale of action which
brought the Napoleon of Comedy his Jena brought him also his Moscow.
And herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble limitations of our
modern wits. They make violent efforts, they make heroic and almost
pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write badly.  There are
moments when we almost think that they are achieving the effect, but
our hope shrivels to nothing the moment we compare their little
failures with the enormous imbecilities of Byron or Shakespeare.

For a hearty laugh it is necessary to have touched the heart. I do not
know why touching the heart should always be connected only with the
idea of touching it to compassion or a sense of distress. The heart can
be touched to joy and triumph; the heart can be touched to amusement.
But all our comedians are tragic comedians. These later fashionable
writers are so pessimistic in bone and marrow that they never seem able
to imagine the heart having any concern with mirth.  When they speak of
the heart, they always mean the pangs and disappointments of the
emotional life. When they say that a man's heart is in the right place,
they mean, apparently, that it is in his boots.  Our ethical societies
understand fellowship, but they do not understand good fellowship.
Similarly, our wits understand talk, but not what Dr. Johnson called a
good talk.  In order to have, like Dr. Johnson, a good talk, it is
emphatically necessary to be, like Dr. Johnson, a good man--to have
friendship and honour and an abysmal tenderness. Above all, it is
necessary to be openly and indecently humane, to confess with fulness
all the primary pities and fears of Adam. Johnson was a clear-headed
humorous man, and therefore he did not mind talking seriously about
religion.  Johnson was a brave man, one of the bravest that ever
walked, and therefore he did not mind avowing to any one his consuming
fear of death.

The idea that there is something English in the repression of one's
feelings is one of those ideas which no Englishman ever heard of until
England began to be governed exclusively by Scotchmen, Americans, and
Jews.  At the best, the idea is a generalization from the Duke of
Wellington--who was an Irishman.  At the worst, it is a part of that
silly Teutonism which knows as little about England as it does about
anthropology, but which is always talking about Vikings. As a matter of
fact, the Vikings did not repress their feelings in the least.  They
cried like babies and kissed each other like girls; in short, they
acted in that respect like Achilles and all strong heroes the children
of the gods.  And though the English nationality has probably not much
more to do with the Vikings than the French nationality or the Irish
nationality, the English have certainly been the children of the
Vikings in the matter of tears and kisses. It is not merely true that
all the most typically English men of letters, like Shakespeare and
Dickens, Richardson and Thackeray, were sentimentalists.  It is also
true that all the most typically English men of action were
sentimentalists, if possible, more sentimental. In the great
Elizabethan age, when the English nation was finally hammered out, in
the great eighteenth century when the British Empire was being built up
everywhere, where in all these times, where was this symbolic stoical
Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings?
Were all the Elizabethan palladins and pirates like that?  Were any of
them like that? Was Grenville concealing his emotions when he broke
wine-glasses to pieces with his teeth and bit them till the blood
poured down? Was Essex restraining his excitement when he threw his hat
into the sea? Did Raleigh think it sensible to answer the Spanish guns
only, as Stevenson says, with a flourish of insulting trumpets? Did
Sydney ever miss an opportunity of making a theatrical remark in the
whole course of his life and death?  Were even the Puritans Stoics? The
English Puritans repressed a good deal, but even they were too English
to repress their feelings.  It was by a great miracle of genius
assuredly that Carlyle contrived to admire simultaneously two things so
irreconcilably opposed as silence and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was the
very reverse of a strong, silent man. Cromwell was always talking, when
he was not crying.  Nobody, I suppose, will accuse the author of "Grace
Abounding" of being ashamed of his feelings.  Milton, indeed, it might
be possible to represent as a Stoic; in some sense he was a Stoic, just
as he was a prig and a polygamist and several other unpleasant and
heathen things. But when we have passed that great and desolate name,
which may really be counted an exception, we find the tradition of
English emotionalism immediately resumed and unbrokenly continuous.
Whatever may have been the moral beauty of the passions of Etheridge
and Dorset, Sedley and Buckingham, they cannot be accused of the fault
of fastidiously concealing them. Charles the Second was very popular
with the English because, like all the jolly English kings, he
displayed his passions. William the Dutchman was very unpopular with
the English because, not being an Englishman, he did hide his emotions.
He was, in fact, precisely the ideal Englishman of our modern theory;
and precisely for that reason all the real Englishmen loathed him like
leprosy. With the rise of the great England of the eighteenth century,
we find this open and emotional tone still maintained in letters and
politics, in arts and in arms.  Perhaps the only quality which was
possessed in common by the great Fielding, and the great Richardson was
that neither of them hid their feelings. Swift, indeed, was hard and
logical, because Swift was Irish. And when we pass to the soldiers and
the rulers, the patriots and the empire-builders of the eighteenth
century, we find, as I have said, that they were, If possible, more
romantic than the romancers, more poetical than the poets.  Chatham,
who showed the world all his strength, showed the House of Commons all
his weakness. Wolfe walked about the room with a drawn sword calling
himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his
mouth. Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for
the matter of that, Johnson--that is, he was a strong, sensible man
with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like
Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid. The tales
of all the admirals and adventurers of that England are full of
braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation. But it is
scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic
Englishman when one example towers above them all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling
has said complacently of the English, "We do not fall on the neck and
kiss when we come together." It is true that this ancient and universal
custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England.  Sydney would
have thought nothing of kissing Spenser.  But I willingly concede that
Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be
any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England.
But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether
given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea-hero of
the Napoleonic war.  You cannot break the legend of Nelson. And across
the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters for ever the
great English sentiment, "Kiss me, Hardy."

This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever else it is, not
English. It is, perhaps, somewhat Oriental, it is slightly Prussian,
but in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national
source. It is, as I have said, in some sense aristocratic; it comes not
from a people, but from a class.  Even aristocracy, I think, was not
quite so stoical in the days when it was really strong. But whether
this unemotional ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman, or
only one of the inventions of the modern gentleman (who may be called
the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the
unemotional quality in these society novels. From representing
aristocrats as people who suppressed their feelings, it has been an
easy step to representing aristocrats as people who had no feelings to
suppress.  Thus the modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the
oligarchy of the hardness as well as the brightness of the diamond.
Like a sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he
seems to use the word "cold" almost as a eulogium, and the word
"heartless" as a kind of compliment.  Of course, in people so incurably
kind-hearted and babyish as are the English gentry, it would be
impossible to create anything that can be called positive cruelty; so
in these books they exhibit a sort of negative cruelty. They cannot be
cruel in acts, but they can be so in words. All this means one thing,
and one thing only.  It means that the living and invigorating ideal of
England must be looked for in the masses; it must be looked for where
Dickens found it--Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist,
to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an
Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all
mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice
the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he
could not describe a gentleman.



XVI On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant
reasonableness, "If you must make jokes, at least you need not make
them on such serious subjects."  I replied with a natural simplicity
and wonder, "About what other subjects can one make jokes except
serious subjects?"  It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting.
All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the
sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so
very solemn after all. If a joke is not a joke about religion or
morals, it is a joke about police-magistrates or scientific professors
or undergraduates dressed up as Queen Victoria.  And people joke about
the police-magistrate more than they joke about the Pope, not because
the police-magistrate is a more frivolous subject, but, on the
contrary, because the police-magistrate is a more serious subject than
the Pope. The Bishop of Rome has no jurisdiction in this realm of
England; whereas the police-magistrate may bring his solemnity to bear
quite suddenly upon us.  Men make jokes about old scientific
professors, even more than they make them about bishops--not because
science is lighter than religion, but because science is always by its
nature more solemn and austere than religion.  It is not I; it is not
even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about
the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race.
If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who
has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always
speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about
the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about
the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of
cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party
politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are
the oldest jokes in the world--being married; being hanged.

One gentleman, however, Mr. McCabe, has in this matter made to me
something that almost amounts to a personal appeal; and as he happens
to be a man for whose sincerity and intellectual virtue I have a high
respect, I do not feel inclined to let it pass without some attempt to
satisfy my critic in the matter. Mr. McCabe devotes a considerable part
of the last essay in the collection called "Christianity and
Rationalism on Trial" to an objection, not to my thesis, but to my
method, and a very friendly and dignified appeal to me to alter it.  I
am much inclined to defend myself in this matter out of mere respect
for Mr. McCabe, and still more so out of mere respect for the truth
which is, I think, in danger by his error, not only in this question,
but in others. In order that there may be no injustice done in the
matter, I will quote Mr. McCabe himself.  "But before I follow Mr.
Chesterton in some detail I would make a general observation on his
method. He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect
him for that.  He knows, as I do, that humanity stands at a solemn
parting of the ways.  Towards some unknown goal it presses through the
ages, impelled by an overmastering desire of happiness. To-day it
hesitates, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how
momentous the decision may be.  It is, apparently, deserting the path
of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. Will it lose
itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil
through years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn it had
lost the road, and must return to religion? Or will it find that at
last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it; that it is
ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and
making straight for the long-sought Utopia? This is the drama of our
time, and every man and every woman should understand it.

"Mr. Chesterton understands it.  Further, he gives us credit for
understanding it.  He has nothing of that paltry meanness or strange
density of so many of his colleagues, who put us down as aimless
iconoclasts or moral anarchists. He admits that we are waging a
thankless war for what we take to be Truth and Progress.  He is doing
the same. But why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should we,
when we are agreed on the momentousness of the issue either way,
forthwith desert serious methods of conducting the controversy? Why,
when the vital need of our time is to induce men and women to collect
their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women--nay, to remember
that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their
knees--why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is
inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the
Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have their
place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the
thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving
people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of
settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors
and inaccurate 'facts,' and the substitution of imagination for
judgment, I cannot see."

I quote this passage with a particular pleasure, because Mr. McCabe
certainly cannot put too strongly the degree to which I give him and
his school credit for their complete sincerity and responsibility of
philosophical attitude.  I am quite certain that they mean every word
they say.  I also mean every word I say.  But why is it that Mr. McCabe
has some sort of mysterious hesitation about admitting that I mean
every word I say; why is it that he is not quite as certain of my
mental responsibility as I am of his mental responsibility? If we
attempt to answer the question directly and well, we shall, I think,
have come to the root of the matter by the shortest cut.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr.
McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the
opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a
man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a
stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of
moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and
self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long
sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses
to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his
gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he
preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny
in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of
whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe
would not maintain that the more funny "Gulliver" is in its method the
less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said,
that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have
nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable
than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere.  Mr.
George Robey is funny and not sincere.  Mr. McCabe is sincere and not
funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.

In short, Mr. McCabe is under the influence of a primary fallacy which
I have found very common in men of the clerical type. Numbers of
clergymen have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about
religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that
very sensible commandment which says, "Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord thy God in vain." Of course, I pointed out that I was not in
any conceivable sense taking the name in vain.  To take a thing and
make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain.  It is, on the
contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object.  To use
a thing in vain means to use it without use.  But a joke may be
exceedingly useful; it may contain the whole earthly sense, not to
mention the whole heavenly sense, of a situation.  And those who find
in the Bible the commandment can find in the Bible any number of the
jokes. In the same book in which God's name is fenced from being taken
in vain, God himself overwhelms Job with a torrent of terrible
levities. The same book which says that God's name must not be taken
vainly, talks easily and carelessly about God laughing and God winking.
Evidently it is not here that we have to look for genuine examples of
what is meant by a vain use of the name.  And it is not very difficult
to see where we have really to look for it. The people (as I tactfully
pointed out to them) who really take the name of the Lord in vain are
the clergymen themselves.  The thing which is fundamentally and really
frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and
really frivolous is a careless solemnity.  If Mr. McCabe really wishes
to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by
the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy
Sunday in going the round of the pulpits.  Or, better still, let him
drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords.  Even Mr. McCabe
would admit that these men are solemn--more solemn than I am. And even
Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous--more
frivolous than I am.  Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the
danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be
so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very
many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number
of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and
verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything
that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How
can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can
think that paradox and jesting stop the way?  It is solemnity that is
stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own
favourite "serious methods;" it is his own favourite "momentousness;"
it is his own favourite "judgment" which stops the way everywhere.
Every man who has ever headed a deputation to a minister knows this.
Every man who has ever written a letter to the Times knows it.  Every
rich man who wishes to stop the mouths of the poor talks about
"momentousness."  Every Cabinet minister who has not got an answer
suddenly develops a "judgment." Every sweater who uses vile methods
recommends "serious methods." I said a moment ago that sincerity had
nothing to do with solemnity, but I confess that I am not so certain
that I was right. In the modern world, at any rate, I am not so sure
that I was right. In the modern world solemnity is the direct enemy of
sincerity. In the modern world sincerity is almost always on one side,
and solemnity almost always on the other.  The only answer possible to
the fierce and glad attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of
solemnity. Let Mr. McCabe, or any one else who is much concerned that
we should be grave in order to be sincere, simply imagine the scene in
some government office in which Mr. Bernard Shaw should head a
Socialist deputation to Mr. Austen Chamberlain.  On which side would be
the solemnity? And on which the sincerity?

I am, indeed, delighted to discover that Mr. McCabe reckons Mr. Shaw
along with me in his system of condemnation of frivolity. He said once,
I believe, that he always wanted Mr. Shaw to label his paragraphs
serious or comic.  I do not know which paragraphs of Mr. Shaw are
paragraphs to be labelled serious; but surely there can be no doubt
that this paragraph of Mr. McCabe's is one to be labelled comic.  He
also says, in the article I am now discussing, that Mr. Shaw has the
reputation of deliberately saying everything which his hearers do not
expect him to say. I need not labour the inconclusiveness and weakness
of this, because it has already been dealt with in my remarks on Mr.
Bernard Shaw. Suffice it to say here that the only serious reason which
I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that
the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a
fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to
say. It may be a paradox, but that is because paradoxes are true. It
may not be rational, but that is because rationalism is wrong. But
clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or
teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect
eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect.  We may not expect
the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the
unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at
all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it
by ourselves?  If Mr. McCabe means merely this about Mr. Shaw, that he
always has some unexpected application of his doctrine to give to those
who listen to him, what he says is quite true, and to say it is only to
say that Mr. Shaw is an original man. But if he means that Mr. Shaw has
ever professed or preached any doctrine but one, and that his own, then
what he says is not true. It is not my business to defend Mr. Shaw; as
has been seen already, I disagree with him altogether.  But I do not
mind, on his behalf offering in this matter a flat defiance to all his
ordinary opponents, such as Mr. McCabe.  I defy Mr. McCabe, or anybody
else, to mention one single instance in which Mr. Shaw has, for the
sake of wit or novelty, taken up any position which was not directly
deducible from the body of his doctrine as elsewhere expressed.  I have
been, I am happy to say, a tolerably close student of Mr. Shaw's
utterances, and I request Mr. McCabe, if he will not believe that I
mean anything else, to believe that I mean this challenge.

All this, however, is a parenthesis.  The thing with which I am here
immediately concerned is Mr. McCabe's appeal to me not to be so
frivolous. Let me return to the actual text of that appeal.  There are,
of course, a great many things that I might say about it in detail. But
I may start with saying that Mr. McCabe is in error in supposing that
the danger which I anticipate from the disappearance of religion is the
increase of sensuality.  On the contrary, I should be inclined to
anticipate a decrease in sensuality, because I anticipate a decrease in
life.  I do not think that under modern Western materialism we should
have anarchy.  I doubt whether we should have enough individual valour
and spirit even to have liberty. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy
to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the
discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes
the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere
restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.  The McCabe
school advocates a political liberty, but it denies spiritual liberty.
That is, it abolishes the laws which could be broken, and substitutes
laws that cannot.  And that is the real slavery.

The truth is that the scientific civilization in which Mr. McCabe
believes has one rather particular defect; it is perpetually tending to
destroy that democracy or power of the ordinary man in which Mr. McCabe
also believes.  Science means specialism, and specialism means
oligarchy.  If you once establish the habit of trusting particular men
to produce particular results in physics or astronomy, you leave the
door open for the equally natural demand that you should trust
particular men to do particular things in government and the coercing
of men.  If, you feel it to be reasonable that one beetle should be the
only study of one man, and that one man the only student of that one
beetle, it is surely a very harmless consequence to go on to say that
politics should be the only study of one man, and that one man the only
student of politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the
expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat
is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows
better. But if we look at the progress of our scientific civilization
we see a gradual increase everywhere of the specialist over the popular
function. Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man
sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If
scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man
will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

I do not know that I can express this more shortly than by taking as a
text the single sentence of Mr. McCabe, which runs as follows: "The
ballets of the Alhambra and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace and Mr.
Chesterton's Daily News articles have their places in life." I wish
that my articles had as noble a place as either of the other two things
mentioned.  But let us ask ourselves (in a spirit of love, as Mr.
Chadband would say), what are the ballets of the Alhambra? The ballets
of the Alhambra are institutions in which a particular selected row of
persons in pink go through an operation known as dancing.  Now, in all
commonwealths dominated by a religion--in the Christian commonwealths
of the Middle Ages and in many rude societies--this habit of dancing
was a common habit with everybody, and was not necessarily confined to
a professional class. A person could dance without being a dancer; a
person could dance without being a specialist; a person could dance
without being pink. And, in proportion as Mr. McCabe's scientific
civilization advances--that is, in proportion as religious civilization
(or real civilization) decays--the more and more "well trained," the
more and more pink, become the people who do dance, and the more and
more numerous become the people who don't. Mr. McCabe may recognize an
example of what I mean in the gradual discrediting in society of the
ancient European waltz or dance with partners, and the substitution of
that horrible and degrading oriental interlude which is known as
skirt-dancing. That is the whole essence of decadence, the effacement
of five people who do a thing for fun by one person who does it for
money. Now it follows, therefore, that when Mr. McCabe says that the
ballets of the Alhambra and my articles "have their place in life," it
ought to be pointed out to him that he is doing his best to create a
world in which dancing, properly speaking, will have no place in life
at all.  He is, indeed, trying to create a world in which there will be
no life for dancing to have a place in. The very fact that Mr. McCabe
thinks of dancing as a thing belonging to some hired women at the
Alhambra is an illustration of the same principle by which he is able
to think of religion as a thing belonging to some hired men in white
neckties. Both these things are things which should not be done for us,
but by us.  If Mr. McCabe were really religious he would be happy. If
he were really happy he would dance.

Briefly, we may put the matter in this way.  The main point of modern
life is not that the Alhambra ballet has its place in life. The main
point, the main enormous tragedy of modern life, is that Mr. McCabe has
not his place in the Alhambra ballet. The joy of changing and graceful
posture, the joy of suiting the swing of music to the swing of limbs,
the joy of whirling drapery, the joy of standing on one leg,--all these
should belong by rights to Mr. McCabe and to me; in short, to the
ordinary healthy citizen. Probably we should not consent to go through
these evolutions. But that is because we are miserable moderns and
rationalists. We do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty;
we actually love ourselves more than we love joy.

When, therefore, Mr. McCabe says that he gives the Alhambra dances (and
my articles) their place in life, I think we are justified in pointing
out that by the very nature of the case of his philosophy and of his
favourite civilization he gives them a very inadequate place. For (if I
may pursue the too flattering parallel) Mr. McCabe thinks of the
Alhambra and of my articles as two very odd and absurd things, which
some special people do (probably for money) in order to amuse him. But
if he had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, elemental, human
instinct to dance, he would have discovered that dancing is not a
frivolous thing at all, but a very serious thing. He would have
discovered that it is the one grave and chaste and decent method of
expressing a certain class of emotions. And similarly, if he had ever
had, as Mr. Shaw and I have had, the impulse to what he calls paradox,
he would have discovered that paradox again is not a frivolous thing,
but a very serious thing. He would have found that paradox simply means
a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.  I should regard any
civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing
as being, from the full human point of view, a defective civilization.
And I should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or
another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of
view, a defective mind. It is vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet
is a part of him. He should be part of a ballet, or else he is only
part of a man. It is in vain for him to say that he is "not quarrelling
with the importation of humour into the controversy." He ought himself
to be importing humour into every controversy; for unless a man is in
part a humorist, he is only in part a man. To sum up the whole matter
very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a
discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part
of the nature of man.  If he asks me why I introduce what he calls
paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all
philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my
treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot.  And I say
that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the
fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy.
About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity--like
preparations for Guy Fawkes' day. Eternity is the eve of something.  I
never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a
schoolboy's rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.



XVII On the Wit of Whistler

That capable and ingenious writer, Mr. Arthur Symons, has included in a
book of essays recently published, I believe, an apologia for "London
Nights," in which he says that morality should be wholly subordinated
to art in criticism, and he uses the somewhat singular argument that
art or the worship of beauty is the same in all ages, while morality
differs in every period and in every respect.  He appears to defy his
critics or his readers to mention any permanent feature or quality in
ethics. This is surely a very curious example of that extravagant bias
against morality which makes so many ultra-modern aesthetes as morbid
and fanatical as any Eastern hermit.  Unquestionably it is a very
common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one
age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a
great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally
nothing at all.  If the two moralities are entirely different, why do
you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, "Camels in
various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none,
some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings,
some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have
in common."  The ordinary man of sense would reply, "Then what makes
you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel?  How do you know
a camel when you see one?" Of course, there is a permanent substance of
morality, as much as there is a permanent substance of art; to say that
is only to say that morality is morality, and that art is art.  An
ideal art critic would, no doubt, see the enduring beauty under every
school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under
every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived
could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the
Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of
artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance,
could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal energy of Gothic.

This bias against morality among the modern aesthetes is nothing very
much paraded.  And yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is
a bias against other people's morality.  It is generally founded on a
very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life, pagan,
plausible, humane.  The modern aesthete, wishing us to believe that he
values beauty more than conduct, reads Mallarme, and drinks absinthe in
a tavern.  But this is not only his favourite kind of beauty; it is
also his favourite kind of conduct. If he really wished us to believe
that he cared for beauty only, he ought to go to nothing but Wesleyan
school treats, and paint the sunlight in the hair of the Wesleyan
babies.  He ought to read nothing but very eloquent theological sermons
by old-fashioned Presbyterian divines.  Here the lack of all possible
moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or
pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to
the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality.  The champion of
l'art pour l'art is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he
were really a champion of l'art pour l'art, he would be always
insisting on Ruskin for his style.

The doctrine of the distinction between art and morality owes a great
part of its success to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up in
the persons and performances of its greatest exponents. Of this lucky
contradiction the very incarnation was Whistler. No man ever preached
the impersonality of art so well; no man ever preached the
impersonality of art so personally. For him pictures had nothing to do
with the problems of character; but for all his fiercest admirers his
character was, as a matter of fact far more interesting than his
pictures. He gloried in standing as an artist apart from right and
wrong. But he succeeded by talking from morning till night about his
rights and about his wrongs.  His talents were many, his virtues, it
must be confessed, not many, beyond that kindness to tried friends, on
which many of his biographers insist, but which surely is a quality of
all sane men, of pirates and pickpockets; beyond this, his outstanding
virtues limit themselves chiefly to two admirable ones--courage and an
abstract love of good work.  Yet I fancy he won at last more by those
two virtues than by all his talents. A man must be something of a
moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach unmorality.
Professor Walter Raleigh, in his "In Memoriam: James McNeill Whistler,"
insists, truly enough, on the strong streak of an eccentric honesty in
matters strictly pictorial, which ran through his complex and slightly
confused character. "He would destroy any of his works rather than
leave a careless or inexpressive touch within the limits of the frame.
He would begin again a hundred times over rather than attempt by
patching to make his work seem better than it was."

No one will blame Professor Raleigh, who had to read a sort of funeral
oration over Whistler at the opening of the Memorial Exhibition, if,
finding himself in that position, he confined himself mostly to the
merits and the stronger qualities of his subject. We should naturally
go to some other type of composition for a proper consideration of the
weaknesses of Whistler. But these must never be omitted from our view
of him. Indeed, the truth is that it was not so much a question of the
weaknesses of Whistler as of the intrinsic and primary weakness of
Whistler. He was one of those people who live up to their emotional
incomes, who are always taut and tingling with vanity.  Hence he had no
strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; for
geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had no god-like
carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole life was, to use his
own expression, an arrangement. He went in for "the art of living"--a
miserable trick. In a word, he was a great artist; but emphatically not
a great man. In this connection I must differ strongly with Professor
Raleigh upon what is, from a superficial literary point of view, one of
his most effective points.  He compares Whistler's laughter to the
laughter of another man who was a great man as well as a great artist.
"His attitude to the public was exactly the attitude taken up by Robert
Browning, who suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake, in
those lines of 'The Ring and the Book'--

 "'Well, British Public, ye who like me not,
   (God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
   At the dark question; laugh it!  I'd laugh first.'

"Mr. Whistler," adds Professor Raleigh, "always laughed first." The
truth is, I believe, that Whistler never laughed at all. There was no
laughter in his nature; because there was no thoughtlessness and
self-abandonment, no humility.  I cannot understand anybody reading
"The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" and thinking that there is any
laughter in the wit.  His wit is a torture to him. He twists himself
into arabesques of verbal felicity; he is full of a fierce carefulness;
he is inspired with the complete seriousness of sincere malice.  He
hurts himself to hurt his opponent. Browning did laugh, because
Browning did not care; Browning did not care, because Browning was a
great man.  And when Browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible
people who did not like his books, "God love you!" he was not sneering
in the least. He was laughing--that is to say, he meant exactly what he
said.

There are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great
men--that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something
without losing their souls.  The satirist of the first type is the man
who, first of all enjoys himself, and then enjoys his enemies. In this
sense he loves his enemy, and by a kind of exaggeration of Christianity
he loves his enemy the more the more he becomes an enemy. He has a sort
of overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger; his
curse is as human as a benediction. Of this type of satire the great
example is Rabelais.  This is the first typical example of satire, the
satire which is voluble, which is violent, which is indecent, but which
is not malicious. The satire of Whistler was not this.  He was never in
any of his controversies simply happy; the proof of it is that he never
talked absolute nonsense.  There is a second type of mind which
produces satire with the quality of greatness.  That is embodied in the
satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable
sense of wrong. He is maddened by the sense of men being maddened; his
tongue becomes an unruly member, and testifies against all mankind.
Such a man was Swift, in whom the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to
others, because it was a bitterness to himself.  Such a satirist
Whistler was not.  He did not laugh because he was happy, like
Rabelais. But neither did he laugh because he was unhappy, like Swift.

The third type of great satire is that in which he satirist is enabled
to rise superior to his victim in the only serious sense which
superiority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the
man even while he satirises both.  Such an achievement can be found in
a thing like Pope's "Atticus" a poem in which the satirist feels that
he is satirising the weaknesses which belong specially to literary
genius.  Consequently he takes a pleasure in pointing out his enemy's
strength before he points out his weakness. That is, perhaps, the
highest and most honourable form of satire. That is not the satire of
Whistler.  He is not full of a great sorrow for the wrong done to human
nature; for him the wrong is altogether done to himself.

He was not a great personality, because he thought so much about
himself.  And the case is stronger even than that. He was sometimes not
even a great artist, because he thought so much about art.  Any man
with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most
profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a
great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or
saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very
solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a
congestion and a kind of difficulty.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a
disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression
to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is
healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is
essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all
costs.  Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art
easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of
less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain,
which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are
able to be ordinary men--men like Shakespeare or Browning.  There are
many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or
violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is
that it cannot produce any art.

Whistler could produce art; and in so far he was a great man. But he
could not forget art; and in so far he was only a man with the artistic
temperament.  There can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is
a really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of
art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish art at the bottom of the sea.
Similarly, we should always be much more inclined to trust a solicitor
who did not talk about conveyancing over the nuts and wine.  What we
really desire of any man conducting any business is that the full force
of an ordinary man should be put into that particular study.  We do not
desire that the full force of that study should be put into an ordinary
man. We do not in the least wish that our particular law-suit should
pour its energy into our barrister's games with his children, or rides
on his bicycle, or meditations on the morning star. But we do, as a
matter of fact, desire that his games with his children, and his rides
on his bicycle, and his meditations on the morning star should pour
something of their energy into our law-suit. We do desire that if he
has gained any especial lung development from the bicycle, or any
bright and pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that the should be
placed at our disposal in that particular forensic controversy. In a
word, we are very glad that he is an ordinary man, since that may help
him to be an exceptional lawyer.

Whistler never ceased to be an artist.  As Mr. Max Beerbohm pointed out
in one of his extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques, Whistler
really regarded Whistler as his greatest work of art. The white lock,
the single eyeglass, the remarkable hat--these were much dearer to him
than any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off.  He could
throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious reason he could not throw
off the hat. He never threw off from himself that disproportionate
accumulation of aestheticism which is the burden of the amateur.

It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing
which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the
extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in
history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded;
hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious.  Hence people say
that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.  The modern artistic temperament cannot
understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote,
could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a
little town in Warwickshire.  The explanation is simple enough; it is
that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so
got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did
not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a
sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an
ordinary man.

All very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming
their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which
would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely
superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the
equality of man.  We can see this, for instance, in that strange and
innocent rationality with which Christ addressed any motley crowd that
happened to stand about Him. "What man of you having a hundred sheep,
and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness,
and go after that which was lost?" Or, again, "What man of you if his
son ask for bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish
will he give him a serpent?" This plainness, this almost prosaic
camaraderie, is the note of all very great minds.

To very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably
more important than the things on which they differ, that the latter,
for all practical purposes, disappear.  They have too much in them of
an ancient laughter even to endure to discuss the difference between
the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the
subtly varied cultures of two men who have both to die. The first-rate
great man is equal with other men, like Shakespeare. The second-rate
great man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate
great man is superior to other men, like Whistler.



XVIII The Fallacy of the Young Nation

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man;
but, nevertheless, it might be possible to effect some valid
distinction between one kind of idealist and another. One possible
distinction, for instance, could be effected by saying that humanity is
divided into conscious idealists and unconscious idealists. In a
similar way, humanity is divided into conscious ritualists and
unconscious ritualists.  The curious thing is, in that example as in
others, that it is the conscious ritualism which is comparatively
simple, the unconscious ritual which is really heavy and complicated.
The ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the
ritual which people call "ritualistic."  It consists of plain things
like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. But the
ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate, and
needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it.
It consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really
peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things--things like
door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and
white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti. The truth is that the modern
man scarcely ever gets back to very old and simple things except when
he is performing some religious mummery. The modern man can hardly get
away from ritual except by entering a ritualistic church.  In the case
of these old and mystical formalities we can at least say that the
ritual is not mere ritual; that the symbols employed are in most cases
symbols which belong to a primary human poetry.  The most ferocious
opponent of the Christian ceremonials must admit that if Catholicism
had not instituted the bread and wine, somebody else would most
probably have done so. Any one with a poetical instinct will admit that
to the ordinary human instinct bread symbolizes something which cannot
very easily be symbolized otherwise; that wine, to the ordinary human
instinct, symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized
otherwise. But white ties in the evening are ritual, and nothing else
but ritual. No one would pretend that white ties in the evening are
primary and poetical.  Nobody would maintain that the ordinary human
instinct would in any age or country tend to symbolize the idea of
evening by a white necktie.  Rather, the ordinary human instinct would,
I imagine, tend to symbolize evening by cravats with some of the
colours of the sunset, not white neckties, but tawny or crimson
neckties--neckties of purple or olive, or some darkened gold.  Mr. J.
A. Kensit, for example, is under the impression that he is not a
ritualist. But the daily life of Mr. J. A. Kensit, like that of any
ordinary modern man, is, as a matter of fact, one continual and
compressed catalogue of mystical mummery and flummery.  To take one
instance out of an inevitable hundred:  I imagine that Mr. Kensit takes
off his hat to a lady; and what can be more solemn and absurd,
considered in the abstract, than, symbolizing the existence of the
other sex by taking off a portion of your clothing and waving it in the
air? This, I repeat, is not a natural and primitive symbol, like fire
or food. A man might just as well have to take off his waistcoat to a
lady; and if a man, by the social ritual of his civilization, had to
take off his waistcoat to a lady, every chivalrous and sensible man
would take off his waistcoat to a lady.  In short, Mr. Kensit, and
those who agree with him, may think, and quite sincerely think, that
men give too much incense and ceremonial to their adoration of the
other world. But nobody thinks that he can give too much incense and
ceremonial to the adoration of this world.  All men, then, are
ritualists, but are either conscious or unconscious ritualists.  The
conscious ritualists are generally satisfied with a few very simple and
elementary signs; the unconscious ritualists are not satisfied with
anything short of the whole of human life, being almost insanely
ritualistic. The first is called a ritualist because he invents and
remembers one rite; the other is called an anti-ritualist because he
obeys and forgets a thousand.  And a somewhat similar distinction to
this which I have drawn with some unavoidable length, between the
conscious ritualist and the unconscious ritualist, exists between the
conscious idealist and the unconscious idealist. It is idle to inveigh
against cynics and materialists--there are no cynics, there are no
materialists.  Every man is idealistic; only it so often happens that
he has the wrong ideal. Every man is incurably sentimental; but,
unfortunately, it is so often a false sentiment.  When we talk, for
instance, of some unscrupulous commercial figure, and say that he would
do anything for money, we use quite an inaccurate expression, and we
slander him very much. He would not do anything for money.  He would do
some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance;
and, as Mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise "to take money
for muck." He would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens
that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are
not his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate ideals; and he
would not violate these for money.  He would not drink out of the
soup-tureen, for money. He would not wear his coat-tails in front, for
money.  He would not spread a report that he had softening of the
brain, for money. In the actual practice of life we find, in the matter
of ideals, exactly what we have already found in the matter of ritual.
We find that while there is a perfectly genuine danger of fanaticism
from the men who have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent danger
of fanaticism is from the men who have worldly ideals.

People who say that an ideal is a dangerous thing, that it deludes and
intoxicates, are perfectly right.  But the ideal which intoxicates most
is the least idealistic kind of ideal. The ideal which intoxicates
least is the very ideal ideal; that sobers us suddenly, as all heights
and precipices and great distances do. Granted that it is a great evil
to mistake a cloud for a cape; still, the cloud, which can be most
easily mistaken for a cape, is the cloud that is nearest the earth.
Similarly, we may grant that it may be dangerous to mistake an ideal
for something practical. But we shall still point out that, in this
respect, the most dangerous ideal of all is the ideal which looks a
little practical. It is difficult to attain a high ideal; consequently,
it is almost impossible to persuade ourselves that we have attained it.
But it is easy to attain a low ideal; consequently, it is easier still
to persuade ourselves that we have attained it when we have done
nothing of the kind.  To take a random example. It might be called a
high ambition to wish to be an archangel; the man who entertained such
an ideal would very possibly exhibit asceticism, or even frenzy, but
not, I think, delusion. He would not think he was an archangel, and go
about flapping his hands under the impression that they were wings. But
suppose that a sane man had a low ideal; suppose he wished to be a
gentleman.  Any one who knows the world knows that in nine weeks he
would have persuaded himself that he was a gentleman; and this being
manifestly not the case, the result will be very real and practical
dislocations and calamities in social life. It is not the wild ideals
which wreck the practical world; it is the tame ideals.

The matter may, perhaps, be illustrated by a parallel from our modern
politics.  When men tell us that the old Liberal politicians of the
type of Gladstone cared only for ideals, of course, they are talking
nonsense--they cared for a great many other things, including votes.
And when men tell us that modern politicians of the type of Mr.
Chamberlain or, in another way, Lord Rosebery, care only for votes or
for material interest, then again they are talking nonsense--these men
care for ideals like all other men. But the real distinction which may
be drawn is this, that to the older politician the ideal was an ideal,
and nothing else. To the new politician his dream is not only a good
dream, it is a reality. The old politician would have said, "It would
be a good thing if there were a Republican Federation dominating the
world." But the modern politician does not say, "It would be a good
thing if there were a British Imperialism dominating the world." He
says, "It is a good thing that there is a British Imperialism
dominating the world;" whereas clearly there is nothing of the kind.
The old Liberal would say "There ought to be a good Irish government in
Ireland."  But the ordinary modern Unionist does not say, "There ought
to be a good English government in Ireland."  He says, "There is a good
English government in Ireland;" which is absurd. In short, the modern
politicians seem to think that a man becomes practical merely by making
assertions entirely about practical things. Apparently, a delusion does
not matter as long as it is a materialistic delusion.  Instinctively
most of us feel that, as a practical matter, even the contrary is true.
I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who
thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a
grasshopper. To be continually haunted by practical images and
practical problems, to be constantly thinking of things as actual, as
urgent, as in process of completion--these things do not prove a man to
be practical; these things, indeed, are among the most ordinary signs
of a lunatic. That our modern statesmen are materialistic is nothing
against their being also morbid.  Seeing angels in a vision may make a
man a supernaturalist to excess.  But merely seeing snakes in delirium
tremens does not make him a naturalist.

And when we come actually to examine the main stock notions of our
modern practical politicians, we find that those main stock notions are
mainly delusions.  A great many instances might be given of the fact.
We might take, for example, the case of that strange class of notions
which underlie the word "union," and all the eulogies heaped upon it.
Of course, union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a
good thing in itself.  To have a party in favour of union and a party
in favour of separation is as absurd as to have a party in favour of
going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. The question
is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and
what we are going, for?  Union is strength; union is also weakness.  It
is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good
thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning
ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten
shillings into one half-sovereign. Also it may happen to be as
preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. The question in
all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of
identity or absence of identity. Owing to certain historical and moral
causes, two nations may be so united as upon the whole to help each
other.  Thus England and Scotland pass their time in paying each other
compliments; but their energies and atmospheres run distinct and
parallel, and consequently do not clash.  Scotland continues to be
educated and Calvinistic; England continues to be uneducated and happy.
But owing to certain other Moral and certain other political causes,
two nations may be so united as only to hamper each other; their lines
do clash and do not run parallel.  Thus, for instance, England and
Ireland are so united that the Irish can sometimes rule England, but
can never rule Ireland. The educational systems, including the last
Education Act, are here, as in the case of Scotland, a very good test
of the matter. The overwhelming majority of Irishmen believe in a
strict Catholicism; the overwhelming majority of Englishmen believe in
a vague Protestantism. The Irish party in the Parliament of Union is
just large enough to prevent the English education being indefinitely
Protestant, and just small enough to prevent the Irish education being
definitely Catholic. Here we have a state of things which no man in his
senses would ever dream of wishing to continue if he had not been
bewitched by the sentimentalism of the mere word "union."

This example of union, however, is not the example which I propose to
take of the ingrained futility and deception underlying all the
assumptions of the modern practical politician. I wish to speak
especially of another and much more general delusion. It pervades the
minds and speeches of all the practical men of all parties; and it is a
childish blunder built upon a single false metaphor. I refer to the
universal modern talk about young nations and new nations; about
America being young, about New Zealand being new.  The whole thing is a
trick of words.  America is not young, New Zealand is not new. It is a
very discussable question whether they are not both much older than
England or Ireland.

Of course we may use the metaphor of youth about America or the
colonies, if we use it strictly as implying only a recent origin. But
if we use it (as we do use it) as implying vigour, or vivacity, or
crudity, or inexperience, or hope, or a long life before them or any of
the romantic attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as
daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of speech. We can easily
see the matter clearly by applying it to any other institution parallel
to the institution of an independent nationality. If a club called "The
Milk and Soda League" (let us say) was set up yesterday, as I have no
doubt it was, then, of course, "The Milk and Soda League" is a young
club in the sense that it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense.
It may consist entirely of moribund old gentlemen.  It may be moribund
itself. We may call it a young club, in the light of the fact that it
was founded yesterday.  We may also call it a very old club in the
light of the fact that it will most probably go bankrupt to-morrow. All
this appears very obvious when we put it in this form. Any one who
adopted the young-community delusion with regard to a bank or a
butcher's shop would be sent to an asylum. But the whole modern
political notion that America and the colonies must be very vigorous
because they are very new, rests upon no better foundation.  That
America was founded long after England does not make it even in the
faintest degree more probable that America will not perish a long time
before England. That England existed before her colonies does not make
it any the less likely that she will exist after her colonies.  And
when we look at the actual history of the world, we find that great
European nations almost invariably have survived the vitality of their
colonies. When we look at the actual history of the world, we find,
that if there is a thing that is born old and dies young, it is a
colony. The Greek colonies went to pieces long before the Greek
civilization. The Spanish colonies have gone to pieces long before the
nation of Spain--nor does there seem to be any reason to doubt the
possibility or even the probability of the conclusion that the colonial
civilization, which owes its origin to England, will be much briefer
and much less vigorous than the civilization of England itself.  The
English nation will still be going the way of all European nations when
the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads.  Now, of course, the
interesting question is, have we, in the case of America and the
colonies, any real evidence of a moral and intellectual youth as
opposed to the indisputable triviality of a merely chronological youth?
Consciously or unconsciously, we know that we have no such evidence,
and consciously or unconsciously, therefore, we proceed to make it up.
Of this pure and placid invention, a good example, for instance, can be
found in a recent poem of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's. Speaking of the
English people and the South African War Mr. Kipling says that "we
fawned on the younger nations for the men that could shoot and ride."
Some people considered this sentence insulting.  All that I am
concerned with at present is the evident fact that it is not true. The
colonies provided very useful volunteer troops, but they did not
provide the best troops, nor achieve the most successful exploits. The
best work in the war on the English side was done, as might have been
expected, by the best English regiments. The men who could shoot and
ride were not the enthusiastic corn merchants from Melbourne, any more
than they were the enthusiastic clerks from Cheapside.  The men who
could shoot and ride were the men who had been taught to shoot and ride
in the discipline of the standing army of a great European power.  Of
course, the colonials are as brave and athletic as any other average
white men. Of course, they acquitted themselves with reasonable credit.
All I have here to indicate is that, for the purposes of this theory of
the new nation, it is necessary to maintain that the colonial forces
were more useful or more heroic than the gunners at Colenso or the
Fighting Fifth.  And of this contention there is not, and never has
been, one stick or straw of evidence.

A similar attempt is made, and with even less success, to represent the
literature of the colonies as something fresh and vigorous and
important. The imperialist magazines are constantly springing upon us
some genius from Queensland or Canada, through whom we are expected to
smell the odours of the bush or the prairie.  As a matter of fact, any
one who is even slightly interested in literature as such (and I, for
one, confess that I am only slightly interested in literature as such),
will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing
but printer's ink, and that not of first-rate quality. By a great
effort of Imperial imagination the generous English people reads into
these works a force and a novelty. But the force and the novelty are
not in the new writers; the force and the novelty are in the ancient
heart of the English. Anybody who studies them impartially will know
that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly
novel in their note and atmosphere, are not only not producing a new
kind of good literature, but are not even in any particular sense
producing a new kind of bad literature.  The first-rate writers of the
new countries are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of
the old countries.  Of course they do feel the mystery of the
wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel
this in Melbourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras. But when they
write most sincerely and most successfully, it is not with a background
of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed or
assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization. What really moves
their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness,
but the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. The one
really arresting exception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as
certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Schreiner is a
fierce, brilliant, and realistic novelist; but she is all this
precisely because she is not English at all. Her tribal kinship is with
the country of Teniers and Maarten Maartens--that is, with a country of
realists.  Her literary kinship is with the pessimistic fiction of the
continent; with the novelists whose very pity is cruel.  Olive
Schreiner is the one English colonial who is not conventional, for the
simple reason that South Africa is the one English colony which is not
English, and probably never will be. And, of course, there are
individual exceptions in a minor way. I remember in particular some
Australian tales by Mr. McIlwain which were really able and effective,
and which, for that reason, I suppose, are not presented to the public
with blasts of a trumpet. But my general contention if put before any
one with a love of letters, will not be disputed if it is understood.
It is not the truth that the colonial civilization as a whole is giving
us, or shows any signs of giving us, a literature which will startle
and renovate our own.  It may be a very good thing for us to have an
affectionate illusion in the matter; that is quite another affair. The
colonies may have given England a new emotion; I only say that they
have not given the world a new book.

Touching these English colonies, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I
do not say of them or of America that they have not a future, or that
they will not be great nations.  I merely deny the whole established
modern expression about them.  I deny that they are "destined" to a
future.  I deny that they are "destined" to be great nations. I deny
(of course) that any human thing is destined to be anything. All the
absurd physical metaphors, such as youth and age, living and dying,
are, when applied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal
from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls.

In the case of America, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and
essential.  America, of course, like every other human thing, can in
spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses. But at the present
moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not
how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to
its end.  It is only a verbal question whether the American
civilization is young; it may become a very practical and urgent
question whether it is dying. When once we have cast aside, as we
inevitably have after a moment's thought, the fanciful physical
metaphor involved in the word "youth," what serious evidence have we
that America is a fresh force and not a stale one?  It has a great many
people, like China; it has a great deal of money, like defeated
Carthage or dying Venice. It is full of bustle and excitability, like
Athens after its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline.  It
is fond of new things; but the old are always fond of new things.
Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers.  It admires
strength and good looks; it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its
women, for instance; but so did Rome when the Goth was at the gates.
All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and
decay. There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can
show itself essentially glad and great--by the heroic in government, by
the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art.  Beyond government, which
is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most
significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a
holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight--that is, his way of
accepting life and his way of accepting death.

Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means
as particularly fresh or untouched.  She appears with all the weakness
and weariness of modern England or of any other Western power. In her
politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a
bewildering opportunism and insincerity.  In the matter of war and the
national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more
manifest and melancholy.  It may be said with rough accuracy that there
are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small
power, and fights small powers.  Then it is a great power, and fights
great powers.  Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but
pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of
its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become
a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very
badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in
the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than
anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a
strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added
to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the
Caracallan triumph, the triumph over nobody.

But when we come to the last test of nationality, the test of art and
letters, the case is almost terrible.  The English colonies have
produced no great artists; and that fact may prove that they are still
full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has
produced great artists.  And that fact most certainly proves that she
is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the
American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young
world.  Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and
headlong?  Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a
schoolboy?  No; the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their
silence may be the silence of the unborn.  But out of America has come
a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.



XIX Slum Novelists and the Slums

Odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the
doctrine of human fraternity.  The real doctrine is something which we
do not, with all our modern humanitarianism, very clearly understand,
much less very closely practise.  There is nothing, for instance,
particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. It may
be wrong, but it is not unfraternal.  In a certain sense, the blow or
kick may be considered as a confession of equality: you are meeting
your butler body to body; you are almost according him the privilege of
the duel.  There is nothing, undemocratic, though there may be
something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from the butler, and
being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of
the divine stature.  The thing which is really undemocratic and
unfraternal is not to expect the butler to be more or less divine.  The
thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so
many modern humanitarians say, "Of course one must make allowances for
those on a lower plane." All things considered indeed, it may be said,
without undue exaggeration, that the really undemocratic and
unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler
downstairs.

It is only because such a vast section of the modern world is out of
sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this statement will
seem to many to be lacking in seriousness. Democracy is not
philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is
not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on
reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him.  It
does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is
so sublime.  It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a
slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of
the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.

Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a
hereditary despotism.  I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely
no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness
for the post. Rational despotism--that is, selective despotism--is
always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man
misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect
for him at all.  But irrational despotism is always democratic, because
it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that
which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man
as despot because he is suitable.  For that means that men choose a
representative, not because he represents them, but because he does
not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV. because
they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an
ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man
because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great
men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of
great men until the time when all other men are small.

Hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and sentiment democratic
because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that
every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it
declares that any man may rule. Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse
and more dangerous thing, because the numbers and multiplicity of an
aristocracy make it sometimes possible for it to figure as an
aristocracy of intellect. Some of its members will presumably have
brains, and thus they, at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy
within the social one. They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of
their intellect, and they will rule the country by virtue of their
aristocracy. Thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the
images of God, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are
neither gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like Mr.
Balfour or Mr. Wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called
merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. But
even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident, from
time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to
a hereditary despotism.  It is amusing to think how much conservative
ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men
who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords
consisted of clever men.  There is one really good defence of the House
of Lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using
it; and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper
strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible
defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the
clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in
the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed
their power to accident. Of course, there would be many answers to such
a contention, as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no
longer a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers, or
that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so leave the
chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with
hobbies.  But on some occasions the House of Lords, even under all
these disadvantages, is in some sense representative. When all the
peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule
Bill, for instance, those who said that the peers represented the
English people, were perfectly right. All those dear old men who
happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question,
the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born
paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really
represent the English people--that is to say, it was honest, ignorant,
vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong.  Of course,
rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than
the haphazard hereditary method. While we are about having any kind of
democracy, let it be rational democracy.  But if we are to have any
kind of oligarchy, let it be irrational oligarchy.  Then at least we
shall be ruled by men.

But the thing which is really required for the proper working of
democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic
philosophy, but the democratic emotion.  The democratic emotion, like
most elementary and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to
describe at any time. But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in
our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly
difficult to find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels
the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all
the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost
unspeakably unimportant.  The nearest approach to it in our ordinary
life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere
humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say, after a
somewhat disturbing discovery, "There is a dead man under the sofa."
We should not be likely to say, "There is a dead man of considerable
personal refinement under the sofa." We should say, "A woman has fallen
into the water."  We should not say, "A highly educated woman has
fallen into the water."  Nobody would say, "There are the remains of a
clear thinker in your back garden." Nobody would say, "Unless you hurry
up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped
off that cliff." But this emotion, which all of us have in connection
with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and
constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places.  It was
native to St. Francis of Assisi.  It was native to Walt Whitman. In
this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to
pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one
commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one
civilization much more than another civilization. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Franciscans. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so little as ours.

Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally
undemocratic quality.  In religion and morals we should admit, in the
abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or
perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in
practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is
that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the
ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the
educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of
intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it
more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such
thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the
rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or
prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little
kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or
prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet
was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little
kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to
despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them.
It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that
admonished the gentleman.  And just as we are undemocratic in faith and
morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters,
undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient
proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are
always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats,
we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the
governing class is always saying to itself, "What laws shall we make?"
In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, "What laws can
we obey?"  A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been.  But
even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every
feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all
probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for
breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason.
But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed
class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but
not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity
and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and
hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy--that is,
against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a
rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge.  But we have no laws
against heresy--that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the
whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be
likely to be successful.  The evil of aristocracy is not that it
necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of
sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the
hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never
suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad,
they become equally frivolous.  The case against the governing class of
modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you
may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case
against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they
always omit themselves.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts
to "raise" the poor.  We are undemocratic in our government, as is
proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. But above all we
are undemocratic in our literature, as is proved by the torrent of
novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from
our publishers every month. And the more "modern" the book is the more
certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money.  This may seem a simple
and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern
fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists
and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an
alligator.  There is no more need to study the psychology of poverty
than to study the psychology of bad temper, or the psychology of
vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits. A man ought to know
something of the emotions of an insulted man, not by being insulted,
but simply by being a man.  And he ought to know something of the
emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply by being a man.
Therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty, my first objection
to him will be that he has studied his subject. A democrat would have
imagined it.

A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and
political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is
artistic slumming.  The religious teacher is at least supposed to be
interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is
in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because
he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in
the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger.  Nevertheless, so
long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his
trade, though dull, is honest. But when he endeavours to represent that
he is describing the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices
and his delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is
preposterous; we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing
else. He has far less psychological authority even than the foolish
missionary. For he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
while the missionary is an eternalist.  The missionary at least
pretends to have a version of the man's lot for all time; the
journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. The
missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition
with all men.  The journalist comes to tell other people how different
the poor man is from everybody else.

If the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur
Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are
intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and
reasonable object, and that they attain it.  A sensation, a shock to
the imagination, like the contact with cold water, is always a good and
exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this
sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study of the strange
antics of remote or alien peoples.  In the twelfth century men obtained
this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa. In the
twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed Boers in
Africa.  The men of the twentieth century were certainly, it must be
admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two. For it is not
recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they organized a
sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular
formation of the heads of the Africans.  But it may be, and it may even
legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded from the
popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of
the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful
and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. But the Middle Ages
(with a great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable
to admit) regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke;
they regarded the soul as very important. Hence, while they had a
natural history of dog-headed men, they did not profess to have a
psychology of dog-headed men. They did not profess to mirror the mind
of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest secrets, or mount with his
most celestial musings. They did not write novels about the semi-canine
creature, attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the
newest fads. It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to
make the reader jump; and to make anybody jump is always a Christian
act. But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves
as monsters, or as making themselves jump.  To summarize, our slum
fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible
as spiritual fact.

One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who
write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the
upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated
classes.  Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees
it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
Rich men write stories about poor men, and describe them as speaking
with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation. But if poor men wrote
novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some
absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess
in a three-act farce.  The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the
fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the
nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to
the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his
effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory
and the dingy tavern.  But to the man he is supposed to be studying
there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the
tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the
office and a supper at Pagani's. The slum novelist is content with
pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks
dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be
studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the
difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe.  The chiaroscuro of
the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows
are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light
grey in that life any more than in any other.  The kind of man who
could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind
of man who could share them.  In short, these books are not a record of
the psychology of poverty.  They are a record of the psychology of
wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a
description of the state of the slums.  They are only a very dark and
dreadful description of the state of the slummers. One might give
innumerable examples of the essentially unsympathetic and unpopular
quality of these realistic writers. But perhaps the simplest and most
obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that
these writers are realistic. The poor have many other vices, but, at
least, they are never realistic. The poor are melodramatic and romantic
in grain; the poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy-book
maxims; probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying,
"Blessed are the poor." Blessed are the poor, for they are always
making life, or trying to make life like an Adelphi play.  Some
innocent educationalists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists
can be innocent) have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses
prefer shilling shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to
problem plays. The reason is very simple.  The realistic story is
certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story.  If what you
desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic
atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the
melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the
realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama.  But, at
least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic
story. The melodrama is much more like life.  It is much more like man,
and especially the poor man.  It is very banal and very inartistic when
a poor woman at the Adelphi says, "Do you think I will sell my own
child?" But poor women in the Battersea High Road do say, "Do you think
I will sell my own child?"  They say it on every available occasion;
you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down the
street.  It is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all) when
the workman confronts his master and says, "I'm a man." But a workman
does say "I'm a man" two or three times every day. In fact, it is
tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the
footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being
melodramatic in the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it is dull,
is dull because it is too accurate. Somewhat the same problem exists in
the case of stories about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling's "Stalky and Co."
is much more amusing (if you are talking about amusement) than the late
Dean Farrar's "Eric; or, Little by Little."  But "Eric" is immeasurably
more like real school-life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full
of the things of which Eric is full--priggishness, a crude piety, a
silly sin, a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word,
melodrama. And if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help
the poor, we must not become realistic and see them from the outside.
We must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside. The novelist
must not take out his notebook and say, "I am an expert."  No; he must
imitate the workman in the Adelphi play. He must slap himself on the
chest and say, "I am a man."



XX.  Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little
discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social
philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.
But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the
past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement
of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to
be raised against the modern version of that improvement.  The vice of
the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something
concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the
casting away of dogmas.  But if there be such a thing as mental growth,
it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into
more and more dogmas.  The human brain is a machine for coming to
conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear
of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having
almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of
a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too
strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the
fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and
many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an
apparatus.  Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.  As he
piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the
formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is,
in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable,
becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another
in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system,
when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he
disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God,
holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very
process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant
animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.  Trees have no dogmas.
Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental
advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life.  And that
philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. Now
of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom I have briefly
studied in this book, this is especially and pleasingly true, that they
do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they
do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. There is nothing
merely sceptically progressive about Mr. Rudyard Kipling. There is
nothing in the least broad minded about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The paganism
of Mr. Lowes Dickinson is more grave than any Christianity. Even the
opportunism of Mr. H. G. Wells is more dogmatic than the idealism of
anybody else.  Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he
was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, "That may be true; but
you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and
Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." The strong humour of the remark ought
not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense;
no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks
that he is in truth and the other man in error.  In similar style, I
hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and
wrong.  But my main point, at present, is to notice that the chief
among these writers I have discussed do most sanely and courageously
offer themselves as dogmatists, as founders of a system.  It may be
true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most interesting to me, is the fact
that Mr. Shaw is wrong. But it is equally true that the thing in Mr.
Shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is right.
Mr. Shaw may have none with him but himself; but it is not for himself
he cares. It is for the vast and universal church, of which he is the
only member.

The two typical men of genius whom I have mentioned here, and with
whose names I have begun this book, are very symbolic, if only because
they have shown that the fiercest dogmatists can make the best artists.
In the fin de siecle atmosphere every one was crying out that
literature should be free from all causes and all ethical creeds. Art
was to produce only exquisite workmanship, and it was especially the
note of those days to demand brilliant plays and brilliant short
stories. And when they got them, they got them from a couple of
moralists. The best short stories were written by a man trying to
preach Imperialism. The best plays were written by a man trying to
preach Socialism. All the art of all the artists looked tiny and
tedious beside the art which was a byproduct of propaganda.

The reason, indeed, is very simple.  A man cannot be wise enough to be
a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A
man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the
energy to wish to pass beyond it.  A small artist is content with art;
a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find
that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and G. B. S., enter
our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art,
but very startling and arresting dogmas.  And they care even more, and
desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas
than about their startling and arresting art. Mr. Shaw is a good
dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good
politician.  Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice and natural
genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything
else to be is a conventional poet. He desires to be the poet of his
people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding
their origins, celebrating their destiny. He desires to be Poet
Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire.
Having been given by the gods originality--that is, disagreement with
others--he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking
instance of all, more striking, I think, even than either of these, is
the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy
of pure art.  He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the
same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or
button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order
to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke.  He has
since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably
do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial.  He
was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about
the London omnibus. He was careless in "The Time Machine," for that
dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even
cautious, in "Mankind in the Making," for that deals with the day after
to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now
he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult.
But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The
men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the
uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to
be writing "with a purpose."  Suppose that any cool and cynical
art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that
artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that
a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max
Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast
his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the
year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and
promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think,
most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real
artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things
that stood first were "Soldiers Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms
and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and "The Time Machine," by a man
called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly
didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we
want doctrines we go to the great artists.  But it is clear from the
psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true
statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have
to go to the doctrinaires.

In concluding this book, therefore, I would ask, first and foremost,
that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by
being taken for artists.  No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy
the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of
his country by the French.  Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to
enrage us.  No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a
politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us,
it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us
at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's
from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the
poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are
disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. If a man comes into
Hyde Park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is
discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. And an artist is only
a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has
anything to say.

There is, indeed, one class of modern writers and thinkers who cannot
altogether be overlooked in this question, though there is no space
here for a lengthy account of them, which, indeed, to confess the
truth, would consist chiefly of abuse.  I mean those who get over all
these abysses and reconcile all these wars by talking about "aspects of
truth," by saying that the art of Kipling represents one aspect of the
truth, and the art of William Watson another; the art of Mr. Bernard
Shaw one aspect of the truth, and the art of Mr. Cunningham Grahame
another; the art of Mr. H. G. Wells one aspect, and the art of Mr.
Coventry Patmore (say) another. I will only say here that this seems to
me an evasion which has not even had the sense to disguise itself
ingeniously in words. If we talk of a certain thing being an aspect of
truth, it is evident that we claim to know what is truth; just as, if
we talk of the hind leg of a dog, we claim to know what is a dog.
Unfortunately, the philosopher who talks about aspects of truth
generally also asks, "What is truth?"  Frequently even he denies the
existence of truth, or says it is inconceivable by the human
intelligence.  How, then, can he recognize its aspects? I should not
like to be an artist who brought an architectural sketch to a builder,
saying, "This is the south aspect of Sea-View Cottage. Sea-View
Cottage, of course, does not exist."  I should not even like very much
to have to explain, under such circumstances, that Sea-View Cottage
might exist, but was unthinkable by the human mind. Nor should I like
any better to be the bungling and absurd metaphysician who professed to
be able to see everywhere the aspects of a truth that is not there.  Of
course, it is perfectly obvious that there are truths in Kipling, that
there are truths in Shaw or Wells. But the degree to which we can
perceive them depends strictly upon how far we have a definite
conception inside us of what is truth. It is ludicrous to suppose that
the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything.  It is
clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see
good in everything.

I plead, then, that we should agree or disagree with these men.  I
plead that we should agree with them at least in having an abstract
belief. But I know that there are current in the modern world many
vague objections to having an abstract belief, and I feel that we shall
not get any further until we have dealt with some of them. The first
objection is easily stated.

A common hesitation in our day touching the use of extreme convictions
is a sort of notion that extreme convictions specially upon cosmic
matters, have been responsible in the past for the thing which is
called bigotry. But a very small amount of direct experience will
dissipate this view. In real life the people who are most bigoted are
the people who have no convictions at all.  The economists of the
Manchester school who disagree with Socialism take Socialism seriously.
It is the young man in Bond Street, who does not know what socialism
means much less whether he agrees with it, who is quite certain that
these socialist fellows are making a fuss about nothing. The man who
understands the Calvinist philosophy enough to agree with it must
understand the Catholic philosophy in order to disagree with it. It is
the vague modern who is not at all certain what is right who is most
certain that Dante was wrong.  The serious opponent of the Latin Church
in history, even in the act of showing that it produced great infamies,
must know that it produced great saints. It is the hard-headed
stockbroker, who knows no history and believes no religion, who is,
nevertheless, perfectly convinced that all these priests are knaves.
The Salvationist at the Marble Arch may be bigoted, but he is not too
bigoted to yearn from a common human kinship after the dandy on church
parade. But the dandy on church parade is so bigoted that he does not
in the least yearn after the Salvationist at the Marble Arch. Bigotry
may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.  It is
the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people
whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the
appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is
in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely
pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared
who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently
numerous.  It was the people who did not care who filled the world with
fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the
faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.
There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate
certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very
different and a somewhat admirable thing.  Bigotry in the main has
always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing
out those who care in darkness and blood.

There are people, however, who dig somewhat deeper than this into the
possible evils of dogma.  It is felt by many that strong philosophical
conviction, while it does not (as they perceive) produce that sluggish
and fundamentally frivolous condition which we call bigotry, does
produce a certain concentration, exaggeration, and moral impatience,
which we may agree to call fanaticism. They say, in brief, that ideas
are dangerous things. In politics, for example, it is commonly urged
against a man like Mr. Balfour, or against a man like Mr. John Morley,
that a wealth of ideas is dangerous.  The true doctrine on this point,
again, is surely not very difficult to state.  Ideas are dangerous, but
the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is
acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas
are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man
of no ideas.  The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his
head like wine to the head of a teetotaller. It is a common error, I
think, among the Radical idealists of my own party and period to
suggest that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire
because they are so sordid or so materialistic. The truth is that
financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can
be sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any
ideal that they find lying about. just as a boy who has not known much
of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these
practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think
that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal.
Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a
vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a
man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a
monstrosity as a noseless man.  People say of such a figure, in almost
feverish whispers, "He knows his own mind," which is exactly like
saying in equally feverish whispers, "He blows his own nose." Human
nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as
the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision
the people perisheth.  But it is precisely because an ideal is
necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of
fanaticism.  There is nothing which is so likely to leave a man open to
the sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced vision as the
cultivation of business habits. All of us know angular business men who
think that the earth is flat, or that Mr. Kruger was at the head of a
great military despotism, or that men are graminivorous, or that Bacon
wrote Shakespeare. Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as
dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of
danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against
the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy
and soaked in religion.

Briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and
fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which
is a too great concentration.  We say that the cure for the bigot is
belief; we say that the cure for the idealist is ideas. To know the
best theories of existence and to choose the best from them (that is,
to the best of our own strong conviction) appears to us the proper way
to be neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more firm than a bigot
and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion.  But
that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of
human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as
religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as
irrelevant. Even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it
irrelevant. Even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities,
we must feel that wherever such a view exists in a man it must be more
important than anything else in him.  The instant that the thing ceases
to be the unknowable, it becomes the indispensable. There can be no
doubt, I think, that the idea does exist in our time that there is
something narrow or irrelevant or even mean about attacking a man's
religion, or arguing from it in matters of politics or ethics.  There
can be quite as little doubt that such an accusation of narrowness is
itself almost grotesquely narrow. To take an example from comparatively
current events:  we all know that it was not uncommon for a man to be
considered a scarecrow of bigotry and obscurantism because he
distrusted the Japanese, or lamented the rise of the Japanese, on the
ground that the Japanese were Pagans.  Nobody would think that there
was anything antiquated or fanatical about distrusting a people because
of some difference between them and us in practice or political
machinery. Nobody would think it bigoted to say of a people, "I
distrust their influence because they are Protectionists."  No one
would think it narrow to say, "I lament their rise because they are
Socialists, or Manchester Individualists, or strong believers in
militarism and conscription."  A difference of opinion about the nature
of Parliaments matters very much; but a difference of opinion about the
nature of sin does not matter at all.  A difference of opinion about
the object of taxation matters very much; but a difference of opinion
about the object of human existence does not matter at all. We have a
right to distrust a man who is in a different kind of municipality; but
we have no right to mistrust a man who is in a different kind of
cosmos.  This sort of enlightenment is surely about the most
unenlightened that it is possible to imagine. To recur to the phrase
which I employed earlier, this is tantamount to saying that everything
is important with the exception of everything. Religion is exactly the
thing which cannot be left out--because it includes everything.  The
most absent-minded person cannot well pack his Gladstone-bag and leave
out the bag. We have a general view of existence, whether we like it or
not; it alters or, to speak more accurately, it creates and involves
everything we say or do, whether we like it or not.  If we regard the
Cosmos as a dream, we regard the Fiscal Question as a dream. If we
regard the Cosmos as a joke, we regard St. Paul's Cathedral as a joke.
If everything is bad, then we must believe (if it be possible) that
beer is bad; if everything be good, we are forced to the rather
fantastic conclusion that scientific philanthropy is good.  Every man
in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The
possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to
have forgotten all about its existence.

This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the
situation of the whole modern world.  The modern world is filled with
men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they
are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate
body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they
are dogmas.  It may be thought "dogmatic," for instance, in some
circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement
of man in another world.  But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume
the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of
progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a
rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be
one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought
dogmatic.  Or, again, we see nothing "dogmatic" in the inspiring, but
certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should
collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless
as sticks and straws. This is a great and suggestive idea, and its
utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the
abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles
or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. Thus, because
we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or
sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to
find the sepulchre of Christ.  But being in a civilization which does
believe in this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see the full
frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole.  I am not
speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the
Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the
superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the
idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where
a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling
quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can
live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the
meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.

Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search.
Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own
opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and,
perhaps, far more beautiful than we think.  In the course of these
essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and
rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense.  Being full of that
kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book,
I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists.
There are no rationalists.  We all believe fairy-tales, and live in
them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of
the lady clothed with the sun.  Some, with a more rustic, elvish
instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself.
Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the
equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every
man who utters a doubt defines a religion.  And the scepticism of our
time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives
them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are
Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been
disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in
patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little
more about it.  Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be
right.  We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common
sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers
pointed it out to us.  The great march of mental destruction will go
on.  Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed.  It is
a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a
religious dogma to assert them.  It is a rational thesis that we are
all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all
awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall
be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of
human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible
universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible
prodigies as if they were invisible.  We shall look on the impossible
grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who
have seen and yet have believed.



THE END










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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ball and The Cross, by G.K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Ball and The Cross

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5265]
Posting Date: March 24, 2009

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BALL AND THE CROSS ***




Produced by Ben Crowder







THE BALL AND THE CROSS

G.K. Chesterton



CONTENTS

    I. A Discussion Somewhat in the Air
   II. The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate
  III. Some Old Curiosities
   IV. A Discussion at Dawn
    V. The Peacemaker
   VI. The Other Philosopher
  VII. The Village of Grassley-in-the-Hole
 VIII. An Interlude of Argument
   IX. The Strange Lady
    X. The Swords Rejoined
   XI. A Scandal in the Village
  XII. The Desert Island
 XIII. The Garden of Peace
  XIV. A Museum of Souls
   XV. The Dream of MacIan
  XVI. The Dream of Turnbull
 XVII. The Idiot
XVIII. A Riddle of Faces
  XIX. The Last Parley
   XX. Dies Irae




I. A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR

The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a
silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak
blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no
expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the
stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had
also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus
had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look
which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and
evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the
world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas
remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone
mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin,
forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an enormous key
with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver. That
object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews
was really the key. The thing which might have been mistaken for a
tricycle turned upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument
to which the corkscrew was the key. All these things, as I say, the
professor had invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship,
with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too
late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had
considerably improved it.

There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time. Him,
also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him
he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with
a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure
object of improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely
covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he
seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect
he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony
garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations
of exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been
burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They
were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really
a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been
intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune
was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to
understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael,
and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our
Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite
happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild
animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in
the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.

"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer,
"of endeavouring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your
traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere ordinary
knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us
not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious
people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the
rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders
with men of all kinds----"

"You will forgive me," said the monk, meekly from under loads of white
beard, "but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub
my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?"

"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the
Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own
basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion
and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky
is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now
you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it
how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man's
real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the
heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth
is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This
mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the
terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom
has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing,
more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath
you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old.
The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once
condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more
homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you
will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."

"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a
slight cough, "but I have always noticed----"

"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really like
to draw out your simple ideas."

"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your
rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point
of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I
have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular conclusion,
which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign
language."

"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you out. How
did my view strike you?"

"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow
it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most
eloquence, when--er--when----"

"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.

"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run
into something. I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's
running into something now."

Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the
handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they
had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now,
through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them
what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded
in a sea of cloud. The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.

"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a new
planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other vulgar
one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will have no
chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be
as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel--here the
intellect----"

"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking up in
the middle of it."

"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship,
his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. "What can it be? It
might of course be merely a----"

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung
up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way;
he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the
world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they
see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of
the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by
driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing
into St. Paul's Cathedral.

A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the
Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding
on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of
cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert. Hence it
gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship
cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without
resistance. There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there
was no shock. It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so
much butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than
those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and
nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness
warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog
fell until it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they
could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath
them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a
passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames;
or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the
ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable
dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of
voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting
above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side,
a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to
London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance
of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come into a temple
of twilight.

They were so near to the ball that Lucifer leaned his hand against it,
holding the vessel away, as men push a boat off from a bank. Above it
the cross already draped in the dark mists of the borderland was shadowy
and more awful in shape and size.

Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the great
orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal. "This is the fellow,"
he said, "this is the one for my money."

"May I with all respect inquire," asked the old monk, "what on earth you
are talking about?"

"Why this," cried Lucifer, smiting the ball again, "here is the only
symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy individual,
stretching his arms in stark weariness." And he pointed up to the cross,
his face dark with a grin. "I was telling you just now, Michael, that I
can prove the best part of the rationalist case and the Christian humbug
from any symbol you liked to give me, from any instance I came across.
Here is an instance with a vengeance. What could possibly express your
philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and
the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable; that cross is
unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the
others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the
globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all
things at enmity with itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile
lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is
essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that
sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of
desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each
other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes.
Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms."

"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity. "But we
like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a
beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen. That
cross is, as you say, an eternal collision; so am I. That is a struggle
in stone. Every form of life is a struggle in flesh. The shape of
the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is
irrational. You say the cross is a quadruped with one limb longer than
the rest. I say man is a quadruped who only uses two of his legs."

The Professor frowned thoughtfully for an instant, and said: "Of
course everything is relative, and I would not deny that the element
of struggle and self-contradiction, represented by that cross, has a
necessary place at a certain evolutionary stage. But surely the cross
is the lower development and the sphere the higher. After all it is
easy enough to see what is really wrong with Wren's architectural
arrangement."

"And what is that, pray?" inquired Michael, meekly.

"The cross is on top of the ball," said Professor Lucifer, simply. "That
is surely wrong. The ball should be on top of the cross. The cross is a
mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection. The cross at its best is but
the bitter tree of man's history; the ball is the rounded, the ripe and
final fruit. And the fruit should be at the top of the tree, not at the
bottom of it."

"Oh!" said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, "so you think
that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should be on top of
the cross?"

"It sums up my whole allegory," said the professor.

"Well, that is really very interesting," resumed Michael slowly,
"because I think in that case you would see a most singular effect, an
effect that has generally been achieved by all those able and powerful
systems which rationalism, or the religion of the ball, has produced to
lead or teach mankind. You would see, I think, that thing happen which
is always the ultimate embodiment and logical outcome of your logical
scheme."

"What are you talking about?" asked Lucifer. "What would happen?"

"I mean it would fall down," said the monk, looking wistfully into the
void.

Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he
could bring out a word.

"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this----"

"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the
ship.

"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all
unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory
of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by
refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck,
or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary
and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was
paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would
batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic
country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of
the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and
uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still
summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration
which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the
front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not
a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change
in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses
linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick
and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path
he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling
is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal
madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the
cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung
himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike
things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture
because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made
of crosses. He was found in the river."

Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.

"Is that story really true?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you
and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you
end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave you saying that nobody
ought to join the Church against his will. When we meet you again you
are saying that no one has any will to join it with. We leave you saying
that there is no such place as Eden. We find you saying that there is no
such place as Ireland. You start by hating the irrational and you come
to hate everything, for everything is irrational and so----"

Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast's. "Ah," he
screamed, "to every man his madness. You are mad on the cross. Let it
save you."

And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the
reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball. Michael, with
as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and saved
himself from falling. At the same instant Lucifer drove down a lever and
the ship shot up with him in it alone.

"Ha! ha!" he yelled, "what sort of a support do you find it, old
fellow?"

"For practical purposes of support," replied Michael grimly, "it is at
any rate a great deal better than the ball. May I ask if you are going
to leave me here?"

"Yes, yes. I mount! I mount!" cried the professor in ungovernable
excitement. "_Altiora peto_. My path is upward."

"How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up or
down in space?" said the monk. "I shall mount up as much as you will."

"Indeed," said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship. "May I
ask what you are going to do?"

The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill. "I am going," he said, "to
climb up into a star."

Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as
something which belongs to jesting and light journalism. Paradox of this
kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy,
"Life is much too important to be taken seriously." Those who look at
the matter a little more deeply or delicately see that paradox is a
thing which especially belongs to all religions. Paradox of this kind is
to be found in such a saying as "The meek shall inherit the earth."
But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that
paradox is a thing which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid
and violent practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox may
be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in mid-space,
clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.

Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism
(or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old
gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of
air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the
brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which
is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old
gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as
every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger
was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness
amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal
swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too
desperately desiring to be safe. There might be footholds down that
awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or
no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would
stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone. And this
antinomy kept on repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large
and staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered
having often heard the words, "Whosoever shall lose his life the same
shall save it." He remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had
always been made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save
his spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters,
and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even his animal life
could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.

Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately
in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such
extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about. Frequently they
produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the mere intellect,
thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is
impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible
to describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind
succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal
in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is
victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable
hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human
words. But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow
a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver. And of this ultimate
resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is
something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the
secrets of God. At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there
will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment.
It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and
defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for
the intellect seems to have no particular part in it. Nor is it (as the
modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative
paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it
is as positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It
seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance
in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we
should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.

Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of
this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him
to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross
was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was
going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least
whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to
start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror
had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder. By
the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some
impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm,
careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map,
was wise, careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let
himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he dropped
into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe
as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little,
panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving
a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul.
A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a
prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way. Michael
had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown
moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He
merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He
thought how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with
that one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the nameless
shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement about
the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles. A moment
before he had been dying alone. Now he was living in the same world with
a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball Father
Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most
lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the
heroes--man Friday.

In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only
in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this beautiful solid
man seemed to be making to him; remarks about something or other being
after hours and against orders. He also seemed to be asking how Michael
"got up" there. This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did that
the earth was a star and was set in heaven.

At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice
of the man in buttons. He began to listen to what he said, and even to
make some attempt at answering a question which appeared to have been
put several times and was now put with some excess of emphasis. Michael
realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking him how
he had come there. He said that he had come in Lucifer's ship. On
his giving this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a
remarkable change. From addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a
malefactor, he began suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager
and feverish amiability as if he were a child. He seemed particularly
anxious to coax him away from the balustrade. He led him by the arm
towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the
time. He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge of the
world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous pleasures
and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed him,
however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable
spiral of staircase. At one point a door opened. Michael stepped through
it, and the unaccountable man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned
him where he stood. But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare.
He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of
another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and
green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in
shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate
plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still
in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of darkness.
And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or
motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a terrible organ
seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and through it there
came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful
everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the beginning to the
end of the world. Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the
voices were hurled at him.

"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi-god in buttons,
caressingly. "The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with me.
There's something that will surprise you downstairs; something you want
very much to see."

Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no
attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough
down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had no notion where or at
what level he was. He was still full of the cold splendour of space,
and of what a French writer has brilliantly named the "vertigo of the
infinite," when another door opened, and with a shock indescribable he
found himself on the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the
houses and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed into a
child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as children's do, as
if it were a thing with which something satisfactory could be done.
He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut
themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but
which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have
it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men
whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating
buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean
angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the
shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of
some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected
with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted
meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the
children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half
slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been
destroyed and re-created.

Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass.
With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made
in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop of the potted
meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about the pavement. And
the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, with dark,
lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who
had just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.

"I'd do it again," said the young man, with a furious white face.
"Anybody would have done it. Did you see what it said? I swear I'd do it
again." Then his eyes encountered the monkish habit of Michael, and he
pulled off his grey tam-o'-shanter with the gesture of a Catholic.

"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling. "Did you see
what they dared to say? I didn't understand it at first. I read it half
through before I broke the window."

Michael felt he knew not how. The whole peace of the world was pent up
painfully in his heart. The new and childlike world which he had seen
so suddenly, men had not seen at all. Here they were still at their old
bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much to be said on
both sides, and so little that need be said at all. A fierce inspiration
fell on him suddenly; he would strike them where they stood with the
love of God. They should not move till they saw their own sweet and
startling existence. They should not go from that place till they went
home embracing like brothers and shouting like men delivered. From the
Cross from which he had fallen fell the shadow of its fantastic mercy;
and the first three words he spoke in a voice like a silver trumpet,
held men as still as stones. Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour
in his illumination he might have founded a religion on Ludgate Hill.
But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder.

"This poor fellow is dotty," he said good-humouredly to the crowd. "I
found him wandering in the Cathedral. Says he came in a flying ship. Is
there a constable to spare to take care of him?"

There was a constable to spare. Two other constables attended to the
tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the owner of the
shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent. They took the tall young
man away to a magistrate, whither we shall follow him in an ensuing
chapter. And they took the happiest man in the world away to an asylum.




II. THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE

The editorial office of _The Atheist_ had for some years past become
less and less prominently interesting as a feature of Ludgate Hill. The
paper was unsuited to the atmosphere. It showed an interest in the Bible
unknown in the district, and a knowledge of that volume to which nobody
else on Ludgate Hill could make any conspicuous claim. It was in vain
that the editor of _The Atheist_ filled his front window with fierce
and final demands as to what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the
giraffe. It was in vain that he asked violently, as for the last time,
how the statement "God is Spirit" could be reconciled with the statement
"The earth is His footstool." It was in vain that he cried with an
accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a year for
pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It was in vain
that he hung in conspicuous places the most thrilling scientific
calculations about the width of the throat of a whale. Was it nothing
to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden and splendid and truly
sincere indignation never stir any of the people pouring down Ludgate
Hill? Never. The little man who edited _The Atheist_ would rush from his
shop on starlit evenings and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion
of his holy war upon the holy place. He might have spared his emotion.
The cross at the top of St. Paul's and _The Atheist_ shop at the foot of
it were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were equally
uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.

To the little man who edited _The Atheist_, a fiery little Scotchman,
with fiery, red hair and beard, going by the name of Turnbull, all this
decline in public importance seemed not so much sad or even mad, but
merely bewildering and unaccountable. He had said the worst thing that
could be said; and it seemed accepted and ignored like the ordinary
second best of the politicians. Every day his blasphemies looked more
glaring, and every day the dust lay thicker upon them. It made him feel
as if he were moving in a world of idiots. He seemed among a race of men
who smiled when told of their own death, or looked vacantly at the Day
of Judgement. Year after year went by, and year after year the death of
God in a shop in Ludgate became a less and less important occurrence.
All the forward men of his age discouraged Turnbull. The socialists
said he was cursing priests when he should be cursing capitalists.
The artists said that the soul was most spiritual, not when freed from
religion, but when freed from morality. Year after year went by, and at
least a man came by who treated Mr. Turnbull's secularist shop with a
real respect and seriousness. He was a young man in a grey plaid, and he
smashed the window.

He was a young man, born in the Bay of Arisaig, opposite Rum and the
Isle of Skye. His high, hawklike features and snaky black hair bore the
mark of that unknown historic thing which is crudely called Celtic, but
which is probably far older than the Celts, whoever they were. He was in
name and stock a Highlander of the Macdonalds; but his family took, as
was common in such cases, the name of a subordinate sept as a surname,
and for all the purposes which could be answered in London, he called
himself Evan MacIan. He had been brought up in some loneliness and
seclusion as a strict Roman Catholic, in the midst of that little wedge
of Roman Catholics which is driven into the Western Highlands. And he
had found his way as far as Fleet Street, seeking some half-promised
employment, without having properly realized that there were in the
world any people who were not Roman Catholics. He had uncovered himself
for a few moments before the statue of Queen Anne, in front of St.
Paul's Cathedral, under the firm impression that it was a figure of the
Virgin Mary. He was somewhat surprised at the lack of deference shown to
the figure by the people bustling by. He did not understand that their
one essential historical principle, the one law truly graven on their
hearts, was the great and comforting statement that Queen Anne is dead.
This faith was as fundamental as his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any
persons he had talked to since he had touched the fringe of our fashion
or civilization had been by a coincidence, sympathetic or hypocritical.
Or if they had spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable
to understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction of his
mind.

On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a boy,
the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to humble
itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his little
village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed resolved to go to
heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the hills; the hills took
hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset of gold and purple and
peacock green cloudlets and islets were the same. Evan lived like a man
walking on a borderland, the borderland between this world and another.
Like so many men and nations who grow up with nature and the common
things, he understood the supernatural before he understood the natural.
He had looked at dim angels standing knee-deep in the grass before he
had looked at the grass. He knew that Our Lady's robes were blue before
he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The deeper his memory
plunged into the dark house of childhood the nearer and nearer he came
to the things that cannot be named. All through his life he thought of
the daylight world as a sort of divine debris, the broken remainder
of his first vision. The skies and mountains were the splendid
off-scourings of another place. The stars were lost jewels of the Queen.
Our Lady had gone and left the stars by accident.

His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his last
instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather, then a boy of
ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand of the dead and hung
it up in his house, burnishing it and sharpening it for sixty years, to
be ready for the next rebellion. His father, the youngest son and the
last left alive, had refused to attend on Queen Victoria in Scotland.
And Evan himself had been of one piece with his progenitors; and was not
dead with them, but alive in the twentieth century. He was not in the
least the pathetic Jacobite of whom we read, left behind by a final
advance of all things. He was, in his own fancy, a conspirator, fierce
and up to date. In the long, dark afternoons of the Highland winter, he
plotted and fumed in the dark. He drew plans of the capture of London on
the desolate sand of Arisaig.

When he came up to capture London, it was not with an army of white
cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed him a little,
not because he thought it grand or even terrible, but because it
bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even hell; it was Limbo.
He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned that wonderful corner of
Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sitting in the sky.

"Ah," he said, after a long pause, "that sort of thing was built under
the Stuarts!" Then with a sour grin he asked himself what was
the corresponding monument of the Brunswicks and the Protestant
Constitution. After some warning, he selected a sky-sign of some pill.

Half an hour afterwards his emotions left him with an emptied mind on
the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle investigation that he
happened to come to a standstill opposite the office of _The Atheist_.
He did not see the word "atheist", or if he did, it is quite possible
that he did not know the meaning of the word. Even as it was, the
document would not have shocked even the innocent Highlander, but for
the troublesome and quite unforeseen fact that the innocent Highlander
read it stolidly to the end; a thing unknown among the most enthusiastic
subscribers to the paper, and calculated in any case to create a new
situation.

With a smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his school, the
editor of _The Atheist_ had put first in his paper and most prominently
in his window an article called "The Mesopotamian Mythology and its
Effects on Syriac Folk Lore." Mr. Evan MacIan began to read this quite
idly, as he would have read a public statement beginning with a young
girl dying in Brighton and ending with Bile Beans. He received the very
considerable amount of information accumulated by the author with
that tired clearness of the mind which children have on heavy summer
afternoons--that tired clearness which leads them to go on asking
questions long after they have lost interest in the subject and are
as bored as their nurse. The streets were full of people and empty of
adventures. He might as well know about the gods of Mesopotamia as not;
so he flattened his long, lean face against the dim bleak pane of the
window and read all there was to read about Mesopotamian gods. He read
how the Mesopotamians had a god named Sho (sometimes pronounced Ji), and
that he was described as being very powerful, a striking similarity to
some expressions about Jahveh, who is also described as having power.
Evan had never heard of Jahveh in his life, and imagining him to be some
other Mesopotamian idol, read on with a dull curiosity. He learnt that
the name Sho, under its third form of Psa, occurs in an early legend
which describes how the deity, after the manner of Jupiter on so many
occasions, seduced a Virgin and begat a hero. This hero, whose name is
not essential to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and
Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph
giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of
some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a
paragraph--but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then
again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments
on to the pavement, and Evan sprang over the barrier into the shop,
brandishing his stick.

"What is this?" cried little Mr. Turnbull, starting up with hair aflame.
"How dare you break my window?"

"Because it was the quickest cut to you," cried Evan, stamping. "Stand
up and fight, you crapulous coward. You dirty lunatic, stand up, will
you? Have you any weapons here?"

"Are you mad?" asked Turnbull, glaring.

"Are you?" cried Evan. "Can you be anything else when you plaster your
own house with that God-defying filth? Stand up and fight, I say."

A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turnbull's face. Behind his red
hair and beard he turned deadly pale with pleasure. Here, after twenty
lone years of useless toil, he had his reward. Someone was angry with
the paper. He bounded to his feet like a boy; he saw a new youth opening
before him. And as not unfrequently happens to middle-aged gentlemen
when they see a new youth opening before them, he found himself in the
presence of the police.

The policemen, after some ponderous questionings, collared both the two
enthusiasts. They were more respectful, however, to the young man who
had smashed the window, than to the miscreant who had had his window
smashed. There was an air of refined mystery about Evan MacIan, which
did not exist in the irate little shopkeeper, an air of refined mystery
which appealed to the policemen, for policemen, like most other
English types, are at once snobs and poets. MacIan might possibly be a
gentleman, they felt; the editor manifestly was not. And the editor's
fine rational republican appeals to his respect for law, and his ardour
to be tried by his fellow citizens, seemed to the police quite as much
gibberish as Evan's mysticism could have done. The police were not used
to hearing principles, even the principles of their own existence.

The police magistrate, before whom they were hurried and tried, was
a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably
celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his
conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of theoretic
rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men who took
pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way about the
desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact
that the wives seemed even more angry with him than with their
husbands. He was a tall, spruce man, with a twist of black moustache
and incomparable morning dress. He looked like a gentleman, and yet,
somehow, like a stage gentleman.

He had often treated serious crimes against mere order or property
with a humane flippancy. Hence, about the mere breaking of an editor's
window, he was almost uproarious.

"Come, Mr. MacIan, come," he said, leaning back in his chair, "do you
generally enter you friends' houses by walking through the glass?"
(Laughter.)

"He is not my friend," said Evan, with the stolidity of a dull child.

"Not your friend, eh?" said the magistrate, sparkling. "Is he your
brother-in-law?" (Loud and prolonged laughter.)

"He is my enemy," said Evan, simply; "he is the enemy of God."

Mr. Vane shifted sharply in his seat, dropping the eye-glass out of his
eye in a momentary and not unmanly embarrassment.

"You mustn't talk like that here," he said, roughly, and in a kind of
hurry, "that has nothing to do with us."

Evan opened his great, blue eyes; "God," he began.

"Be quiet," said the magistrate, angrily, "it is most undesirable that
things of that sort should be spoken about--a--in public, and in an
ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is--a--too personal a matter to be
mentioned in such a place."

"Is it?" answered the Highlander, "then what did those policemen swear
by just now?"

"That is no parallel," answered Vane, rather irritably; "of course there
is a form of oath--to be taken reverently--reverently, and there's an
end of it. But to talk in a public place about one's most sacred and
private sentiments--well, I call it bad taste. (Slight applause.) I
call it irreverent. I call it irreverent, and I'm not specially orthodox
either."

"I see you are not," said Evan, "but I am."

"We are wondering from the point," said the police magistrate, pulling
himself together.

"May I ask why you smashed this worthy citizen's window?"

Evan turned a little pale at the mere memory, but he answered with the
same cold and deadly literalism that he showed throughout.

"Because he blasphemed Our Lady."

"I tell you once and for all," cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his
knuckles angrily on the table, "I tell you, once and for all, my man,
that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or cant here.
Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most religious people are
not those who talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions and do
nothing else."

"I did nothing else," said Evan, with a slight smile.

"Eh," cried Vane, glaring through his eye-glass.

"You asked me why I broke his window," said MacIan, with a face of wood.
"I answered, 'Because he blasphemed Our Lady.' I had no other reason. So
I have no other answer." Vane continued to gaze at him with a sternness
not habitual to him.

"You are not going the right way to work, Sir," he said, with severity.
"You are not going the right way to work to--a--have your case treated
with special consideration. If you had simply expressed regret for what
you had done, I should have been strongly inclined to dismiss the matter
as an outbreak of temper. Even now, if you say that you are sorry I
shall only----"

"But I am not in the least sorry," said Evan, "I am very pleased."

"I really believe you are insane," said the stipendiary, indignantly,
for he had really been doing his best as a good-natured man, to compose
the dispute. "What conceivable right have you to break other people's
windows because their opinions do not agree with yours? This man only
gave expression to his sincere belief."

"So did I," said the Highlander.

"And who are you?" exploded Vane. "Are your views necessarily the right
ones? Are you necessarily in possession of the truth?"

"Yes," said MacIan.

The magistrate broke into a contemptuous laugh.

"Oh, you want a nurse to look after you," he said. "You must pay L10."

Evan MacIan plunged his hands into his loose grey garment and drew out a
queer looking leather purse. It contained exactly twelve sovereigns.
He paid down the ten, coin by coin, in silence, and equally silently
returned the remaining two to the receptacle. Then he said, "May I say a
word, your worship?"

Cumberland Vane seemed half hypnotized with the silence and automatic
movements of the stranger; he made a movement with his head which might
have been either "yes" or "no". "I only wished to say, your worship,"
said MacIan, putting back the purse in his trouser pocket, "that
smashing that shop window was, I confess, a useless and rather irregular
business. It may be excused, however, as a mere preliminary to further
proceedings, a sort of preface. Wherever and whenever I meet that man,"
and he pointed to the editor of _The Atheist_, "whether it be outside
this door in ten minutes from now, or twenty years hence in some distant
country, wherever and whenever I meet that man, I will fight him. Do not
be afraid. I will not rush at him like a bully, or bear him down with
any brute superiority. I will fight him like a gentleman; I will fight
him as our fathers fought. He shall choose how, sword or pistol, horse
or foot. But if he refuses, I will write his cowardice on every wall
in the world. If he had said of my mother what he said of the Mother of
God, there is not a club of clean men in Europe that would deny my
right to call him out. If he had said it of my wife, you English would
yourselves have pardoned me for beating him like a dog in the market
place. Your worship, I have no mother; I have no wife. I have only that
which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally
with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely,
because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is
kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human
than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for
anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend, I should
still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country,
I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should
not be--I should burst like a bubble and be gone. I could not live in
that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence?"

The magistrate recovered his voice and his presence of mind. The first
part of the speech, the bombastic and brutally practical challenge,
stunned him with surprise; but the rest of Evan's remarks, branching off
as they did into theoretic phrases, gave his vague and very English
mind (full of memories of the hedging and compromise in English public
speaking) an indistinct sensation of relief, as if the man, though mad,
were not so dangerous as he had thought. He went into a sort of weary
laughter.

"For Heaven's sake, man," he said, "don't talk so much. Let other people
have a chance (laughter). I trust all that you said about asking Mr.
Turnbull to fight, may be regarded as rubbish. In case of accidents,
however, I must bind you over to keep the peace."

"To keep the peace," repeated Evan, "with whom?"

"With Mr. Turnbull," said Vane.

"Certainly not," answered MacIan. "What has he to do with peace?"

"Do you mean to say," began the magistrate, "that you refuse to..." The
voice of Turnbull himself clove in for the first time.

"Might I suggest," he said, "That I, your worship, can settle to some
extent this absurd matter myself. This rather wild gentleman promises
that he will not attack me with any ordinary assault--and if he does,
you may be sure the police shall hear of it. But he says he will not. He
says he will challenge me to a duel; and I cannot say anything stronger
about his mental state than to say that I think that it is highly
probable that he will. (Laughter.) But it takes two to make a duel, your
worship (renewed laughter). I do not in the least mind being described
on every wall in the world as the coward who would not fight a man
in Fleet Street, about whether the Virgin Mary had a parallel in
Mesopotamian mythology. No, your worship. You need not trouble to bind
him over to keep the peace. I bind myself over to keep the peace, and
you may rest quite satisfied that there will be no duel with me in it."

Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief.

"You're like a breath of April, sir," he cried. "You're ozone after
that fellow. You're perfectly right. Perhaps I have taken the thing too
seriously. I should love to see him sending you challenges and to see
you smiling. Well, well."

Evan went out of the Court of Justice free, but strangely shaken, like
a sick man. Any punishment of suppression he would have felt as natural;
but the sudden juncture between the laughter of his judge and the
laughter of the man he had wronged, made him feel suddenly small, or at
least, defeated. It was really true that the whole modern world regarded
his world as a bubble. No cruelty could have shown it, but their
kindness showed it with a ghastly clearness. As he was brooding, he
suddenly became conscious of a small, stern figure, fronting him
in silence. Its eyes were grey and awful, and its beard red. It was
Turnbull.

"Well, sir," said the editor of _The Atheist_, "where is the fight to
be? Name the field, sir."

Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something, he knew not what;
he only guessed it by the answer of the other.

"Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious
Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you
think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you
hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny
their faith? Do you think we don't want to fight? Night and day I have
prayed--I have longed--for an atheist revolution--I have longed to see
your blood and ours on the streets. Let it be yours or mine?"

"But you said..." began MacIan.

"I know," said Turnbull scornfully. "And what did you say? You damned
fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and
shadowed by the coppers for half a decade. If you wanted to fight, why
did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got you out, to fight if you want
to. Now, fight if you dare."

"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that
nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in
my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the
God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it
by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my
fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and
by the chalice of the Blood of God."

The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."




III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES

The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single sunset
cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mellow
light. It made a little greasy street of St. Martin's Lane look as if it
were paved with gold. It made the pawnbroker's half-way down it shine as
if it were really that Mountain of Piety that the French poetic instinct
has named it; it made the mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to
it, a shop packed with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of
Parisian colour. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the
shop of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world beauty,
for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in itself. The front
window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by a few stars,
by the sparks of what were alleged to be jewels; for it was in brief,
a shop of bric-a-brac and old curiosities. A row of half-burnished
seventeenth-century swords ran like an ornate railing along the front of
the window; behind was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour;
and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or
utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking
them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop, had
its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front
door that opened on the street and a back door that opened on an odd
green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square of gold. There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the
sun a secret lamp of the place.

I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say
that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute
to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he
had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type. But
he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very
well-sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating
the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is
that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called
Thornton Percy. The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton
Percy branch of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes
whose industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy handsome
clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked at the first
glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name over his shop was
Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his shop that evening could
come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.

These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal and the
authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had seen somewhere
before), was a small, sturdy fellow, with fine grey eyes, a square red
tie and a square red beard, that he carried aggressively forward as if
he defied anyone to pull it. The other kept so much in the background in
comparison that he looked almost ghostly in his grey cloak or plaid, a
tall, sallow, silent young man.

The two Scotchmen were interested in seventeenth-century swords. They
were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of these weapons
brought out and rolled clattering about the counter, until they found
two of precisely the same length. Presumably they desired the exact
symmetry for some decorative trophy. Even then they felt the points,
poised the swords for balance and bent them in a circle to see that they
sprang straight again; which, for decorative purposes, seems carrying
realism rather far.

"These will do," said the strange person with the red beard. "And
perhaps I had better pay for them at once. And as you are the
challenger, Mr. MacIan, perhaps you had better explain the situation."

The tall Scotchman in grey took a step forward and spoke in a voice
quite clear and bold, and yet somehow lifeless, like a man going through
an ancient formality.

"The fact is, Mr. Gordon, we have to place our honour in your hands.
Words have passed between Mr. Turnbull and myself on a grave
and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for by fighting.
Unfortunately, as the police are in some sense pursuing us, we are
hurried, and must fight now and without seconds. But if you will be so
kind as to take us into your little garden and see far play, we shall
feel how----"

The shopman recovered himself from a stunning surprise and burst out:

"Gentlemen, are you drunk? A duel! A duel in my garden. Go home,
gentlemen, go home. Why, what did you quarrel about?"

"We quarrelled," said Evan, in the same dead voice, "about religion."
The fat shopkeeper rolled about in his chair with enjoyment.

"Well, this is a funny game," he said. "So you want to commit murder
on behalf of religion. Well, well my religion is a little respect for
humanity, and----"

"Excuse me," cut in Turnbull, suddenly and fiercely, pointing towards
the pawnbroker's next door. "Don't you own that shop?"

"Why--er--yes," said Gordon.

"And don't you own that shop?" repeated the secularist, pointing
backward to the pornographic bookseller.

"What if I do?"

"Why, then," cried Turnbull, with grating contempt. "I will leave
the religion of humanity confidently in your hands; but I am sorry
I troubled you about such a thing as honour. Look here, my man. I do
believe in humanity. I do believe in liberty. My father died for it
under the swords of the Yeomanry. I am going to die for it, if need be,
under that sword on your counter. But if there is one sight that makes
me doubt it it is your foul fat face. It is hard to believe you were not
meant to be ruled like a dog or killed like a cockroach. Don't try your
slave's philosophy on me. We are going to fight, and we are going to
fight in your garden, with your swords. Be still! Raise your voice above
a whisper, and I run you through the body."

Turnbull put the bright point of the sword against the gay waistcoat of
the dealer, who stood choking with rage and fear, and an astonishment so
crushing as to be greater than either.

"MacIan," said Turnbull, falling almost into the familiar tone of a
business partner, "MacIan, tie up this fellow and put a gag in his
mouth. Be still, I say, or I kill you where you stand."

The man was too frightened to scream, but he struggled wildly, while
Evan MacIan, whose long, lean hands were unusually powerful, tightened
some old curtain cords round him, strapped a rope gag in his mouth and
rolled him on his back on the floor.

"There's nothing very strong here," said Evan, looking about him. "I'm
afraid he'll work through that gag in half an hour or so."

"Yes," said Turnbull, "but one of us will be killed by that time."

"Well, let's hope so," said the Highlander, glancing doubtfully at the
squirming thing on the floor.

"And now," said Turnbull, twirling his fiery moustache and fingering his
sword, "let us go into the garden. What an exquisite summer evening!"

MacIan said nothing, but lifting his sword from the counter went out
into the sun.

The brilliant light ran along the blades, filling the channels of them
with white fire; the combatants stuck their swords in the turf and took
off their hats, coats, waistcoats, and boots. Evan said a short Latin
prayer to himself, during which Turnbull made something of a parade of
lighting a cigarette which he flung away the instant after, when he saw
MacIan apparently standing ready. Yet MacIan was not exactly ready. He
stood staring like a man stricken with a trance.

"What are you staring at?" asked Turnbull. "Do you see the bobbies?"

"I see Jerusalem," said Evan, "all covered with the shields and
standards of the Saracens."

"Jerusalem!" said Turnbull, laughing. "Well, we've taken the only
inhabitant into captivity."

And he picked up his sword and made it whistle like a boy's wand.

"I beg your pardon," said MacIan, dryly. "Let us begin."

MacIan made a military salute with his weapon, which Turnbull copied or
parodied with an impatient contempt; and in the stillness of the garden
the swords came together with a clear sound like a bell. The instant
the blades touched, each felt them tingle to their very points with a
personal vitality, as if they were two naked nerves of steel. Evan had
worn throughout an air of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy
of one who wants nothing. But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy
of one who wants something and will care for nothing else. And this was
seen suddenly; for the instant Evan engaged he disengaged and lunged
with an infernal violence. His opponent with a desperate promptitude
parried and riposted; the parry only just succeeded, the riposte failed.
Something big and unbearable seemed to have broken finally out of
Evan in that first murderous lunge, leaving him lighter and cooler and
quicker upon his feet. He fell to again, fiercely still, but now with a
fierce caution. The next moment Turnbull lunged; MacIan seemed to catch
the point and throw it away from him, and was thrusting back like a
thunderbolt, when a sound paralysed him; another sound beside their
ringing weapons. Turnbull, perhaps from an equal astonishment, perhaps
from chivalry, stopped also and forebore to send his sword through his
exposed enemy.

"What's that?" asked Evan, hoarsely.

A heavy scraping sound, as of a trunk being dragged along a littered
floor, came from the dark shop behind them.

"The old Jew has broken one of his strings, and he's crawling about,"
said Turnbull. "Be quick! We must finish before he gets his gag out."

"Yes, yes, quick! On guard!" cried the Highlander. The blades crossed
again with the same sound like song, and the men went to work again with
the same white and watchful faces. Evan, in his impatience, went back a
little to his wildness. He made windmills, as the French duellists say,
and though he was probably a shade the better fencer of the two, he
found the other's point pass his face twice so close as almost to graze
his cheek. The second time he realized the actual possibility of defeat
and pulled himself together under a shock of the sanity of anger. He
narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations: he fenced (as the
swordsman's boast goes), in a wedding ring; he turned Turnbull's thrusts
with a maddening and almost mechanical click, like that of a machine.
Whenever Turnbull's sword sought to go over that other mere white streak
it seemed to be caught in a complex network of steel. He turned one
thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at
the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but
Evan lunged and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or
battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there broke
into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the
highest pitch of pain. "Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder!" The gag was
broken; and the tongue of terror was loose.

"Keep on!" gasped Turnbull. "One may be killed before they come."

The voice of the screaming shopkeeper was loud enough to drown not only
the noise of the swords but all other noises around it, but even through
its rending din there seemed to be some other stir or scurry. And Evan,
in the very act of thrusting at Turnbull, saw something in his eyes that
made him drop his sword. The atheist, with his grey eyes at their
widest and wildest, was staring straight over his shoulder at the little
archway of shop that opened on the street beyond. And he saw the archway
blocked and blackened with strange figures.

"We must bolt, MacIan," he said abruptly. "And there isn't a damned
second to lose either. Do as I do."

With a bound he was beside the little cluster of his clothes and boots
that lay on the lawn; he snatched them up, without waiting to put any of
them on; and tucking his sword under his other arm, went wildly at
the wall at the bottom of the garden and swung himself over it. Three
seconds after he had alighted in his socks on the other side, MacIan
alighted beside him, also in his socks and also carrying clothes and
sword in a desperate bundle.

They were in a by-street, very lean and lonely itself, but so close to
a crowded thoroughfare that they could see the vague masses of vehicles
going by, and could even see an individual hansom cab passing the
corner at the instant. Turnbull put his fingers to his mouth like a
gutter-snipe and whistled twice. Even as he did so he could hear the
loud voices of the neighbours and the police coming down the garden.

The hansom swung sharply and came tearing down the little lane at his
call. When the cabman saw his fares, however, two wild-haired men
in their shirts and socks with naked swords under their arms, he
not unnaturally brought his readiness to a rigid stop and stared
suspiciously.

"You talk to him a minute," whispered Turnbull, and stepped back into
the shadow of the wall.

"We want you," said MacIan to the cabman, with a superb Scotch drawl of
indifference and assurance, "to drive us to St. Pancras Station--verra
quick."

"Very sorry, sir," said the cabman, "but I'd like to know it was all
right. Might I arst where you come from, sir?"

A second after he spoke MacIan heard a heavy voice on the other side of
the wall, saying: "I suppose I'd better get over and look for them. Give
me a back."

"Cabby," said MacIan, again assuming the most deliberate and lingering
lowland Scotch intonation, "if ye're really verra anxious to ken whar a'
come fra', I'll tell ye as a verra great secret. A' come from Scotland.
And a'm gaein' to St. Pancras Station. Open the doors, cabby."

The cabman stared, but laughed. The heavy voice behind the wall said:
"Now then, a better back this time, Mr. Price." And from the shadow
of the wall Turnbull crept out. He had struggled wildly into his coat
(leaving his waistcoat on the pavement), and he was with a fierce pale
face climbing up the cab behind the cabman. MacIan had no glimmering
notion of what he was up to, but an instinct of discipline, inherited
from a hundred men of war, made him stick to his own part and trust the
other man's.

"Open the doors, cabby," he repeated, with something of the obstinate
solemnity of a drunkard, "open the doors. Did ye no hear me say St.
Pancras Station?"

The top of a policeman's helmet appeared above the garden wall. The
cabman did not see it, but he was still suspicious and began:

"Very sorry, sir, but..." and with that the catlike Turnbull tore him
out of his seat and hurled him into the street below, where he lay
suddenly stunned.

"Give me his hat," said Turnbull in a silver voice, that the other
obeyed like a bugle. "And get inside with the swords."

And just as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above the
wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the whip and the
two went whirling away like a boomerang.

They had spun through seven streets and three or four squares before
anything further happened. Then, in the neighbourhood of Maida Vale,
the driver opened the trap and talked through it in a manner not wholly
common in conversations through that aperture.

"Mr. MacIan," he said shortly and civilly.

"Mr. Turnbull," replied his motionless fare.

"Under circumstances such as those in which we were both recently placed
there was no time for anything but very abrupt action. I trust therefore
that you have no cause to complain of me if I have deferred until this
moment a consultation with you on our present position or future action.
Our present position, Mr. MacIan, I imagine that I am under no special
necessity of describing. We have broken the law and we are fleeing
from its officers. Our future action is a thing about which I myself
entertain sufficiently strong views; but I have no right to assume or to
anticipate yours, though I may have formed a decided conception of your
character and a decided notion of what they will probably be. Still, by
every principle of intellectual justice, I am bound to ask you now and
seriously whether you wish to continue our interrupted relations."

MacIan leant his white and rather weary face back upon the cushions in
order to speak up through the open door.

"Mr. Turnbull," he said, "I have nothing to add to what I have said
before. It is strongly borne in upon me that you and I, the sole
occupants of this runaway cab, are at this moment the two most important
people in London, possibly in Europe. I have been looking at all the
streets as we went past, I have been looking at all the shops as we went
past, I have been looking at all the churches as we went past. At
first, I felt a little dazed with the vastness of it all. I could not
understand what it all meant. But now I know exactly what it all means.
It means us. This whole civilization is only a dream. You and I are the
realities."

"Religious symbolism," said Mr. Turnbull, through the trap, "does not,
as you are probably aware, appeal ordinarily to thinkers of the school
to which I belong. But in symbolism as you use it in this instance, I
must, I think, concede a certain truth. We _must_ fight this thing
out somewhere; because, as you truly say, we have found each other's
reality. We _must_ kill each other--or convert each other. I used to
think all Christians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards
them really. But I know you are sincere--and my soul is mad against you.
In the same way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought
atheism would leave them free for immorality--and yet in your heart you
tolerated them entirely. Now you _know_ that I am an honest man, and you
are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be
angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong--why one thirsts for his
blood. Yes, you open for me a vista of thought."

"Don't run into anything," said Evan, immovably.

"There's something in that view of yours, too," said Turnbull, and shut
down the trap.

They sped on through shining streets that shot by them like arrows. Mr.
Turnbull had evidently a great deal of unused practical talent which was
unrolling itself in this ridiculous adventure. They had got away with
such stunning promptitude that the police chase had in all probability
not even properly begun. But in case it had, the amateur cabman chose
his dizzy course through London with a strange dexterity. He did not
do what would have first occurred to any ordinary outsider desiring to
destroy his tracks. He did not cut into by-ways or twist his way through
mean streets. His amateur common sense told him that it was precisely
the poor street, the side street, that would be likely to remember
and report the passing of a hansom cab, like the passing of a royal
procession. He kept chiefly to the great roads, so full of hansoms that
a wilder pair than they might easily have passed in the press. In one of
the quieter streets Evan put on his boots.

Towards the top of Albany Street the singular cabman again opened the
trap.

"Mr. MacIan," he said, "I understand that we have now definitely settled
that in the conventional language honour is not satisfied. Our action
must at least go further than it has gone under recent interrupted
conditions. That, I believe, is understood."

"Perfectly," replied the other with his bootlace in his teeth.

"Under those conditions," continued Turnbull, his voice coming through
the hole with a slight note of trepidation very unusual with him, "I
have a suggestion to make, if that can be called a suggestion, which
has probably occurred to you as readily as to me. Until the actual event
comes off we are practically in the position if not of comrades, at
least of business partners. Until the event comes off, therefore
I should suggest that quarrelling would be inconvenient and rather
inartistic; while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and
man would be not only elegant but uncommonly practical."

"You are perfectly right," answered MacIan, with his melancholy voice,
"in saying that all this has occurred to me. All duellists should behave
like gentlemen to each other. But we, by the queerness of our position,
are something much more than either duellists or gentlemen. We are, in
the oddest and most exact sense of the term, brothers--in arms."

"Mr. MacIan," replied Turnbull, calmly, "no more need be said." And he
closed the trap once more.

They had reached Finchley Road before he opened it again.

Then he said, "Mr. MacIan, may I offer you a cigar. It will be a touch
of realism."

"Thank you," answered Evan. "You are very kind." And he began to smoke
in the cab.




IV. A DISCUSSION AT DAWN

The duellists had from their own point of view escaped or conquered the
chief powers of the modern world. They had satisfied the magistrate,
they had tied the tradesman neck and heels, and they had left the
police behind. As far as their own feelings went they had melted into a
monstrous sea; they were but the fare and driver of one of the million
hansoms that fill London streets. But they had forgotten something; they
had forgotten journalism. They had forgotten that there exists in the
modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people
whose interest is not that things should happen well or happen badly,
should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to
the advantage of this party or the advantage of that part, but whose
interest simply is that things should happen.

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern
existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We
announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding.
We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a
scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as
indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still
abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is
really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common.
But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the
permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their
posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not
Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They
cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages
that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they
give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what
is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with
the minority.

The incident of the religious fanatic who broke a window on Ludgate Hill
was alone enough to set them up in good copy for the night. But when the
same man was brought before a magistrate and defied his enemy to
mortal combat in the open court, then the columns would hardly hold the
excruciating information, and the headlines were so large that there was
hardly room for any of the text. The _Daily Telegraph_ headed a column,
"A Duel on Divinity," and there was a correspondence afterwards which
lasted for months, about whether police magistrates ought to mention
religion. The _Daily Mail_ in its dull, sensible way, headed the events,
"Wanted to fight for the Virgin." Mr. James Douglas, in _The Star_,
presuming on his knowledge of philosophical and theological terms,
described the Christian's outbreak under the title of "Dualist and
Duellist." The _Daily News_ inserted a colourless account of the matter,
but was pursued and eaten up for some weeks, with letters from outlying
ministers, headed "Murder and Mariolatry." But the journalistic
temperature was steadily and consistently heated by all these
influences; the journalists had tasted blood, prospectively, and were
in the mood for more; everything in the matter prepared them for further
outbursts of moral indignation. And when a gasping reporter rushed in in
the last hours of the evening with the announcement that the two heroes
of the Police Court had literally been found fighting in a London back
garden, with a shopkeeper bound and gagged in the front of the house,
the editors and sub-editors were stricken still as men are by great
beatitudes.

The next morning, five or six of the great London dailies burst out
simultaneously into great blossoms of eloquent leader-writing. Towards
the end all the leaders tended to be the same, but they all began
differently. The _Daily Telegraph_, for instance began, "There will
be little difference among our readers or among all truly English and
law-abiding men touching the, etc. etc." The _Daily Mail_ said, "People
must learn, in the modern world, to keep their theological differences
to themselves. The fracas, etc. etc." The _Daily News_ started, "Nothing
could be more inimical to the cause of true religion than, etc. etc."
The _Times_ began with something about Celtic disturbances of the
equilibrium of Empire, and the _Daily Express_ distinguished itself
splendidly by omitting altogether so controversial a matter and
substituting a leader about goloshes.

And the morning after that, the editors and the newspapers were in such
a state, that, as the phrase is, there was no holding them. Whatever
secret and elvish thing it is that broods over editors and suddenly
turns their brains, that thing had seized on the story of the broken
glass and the duel in the garden. It became monstrous and omnipresent,
as do in our time the unimportant doings of the sect of the
Agapemonites, or as did at an earlier time the dreary dishonesties
of the Rhodesian financiers. Questions were asked about it, and even
answered, in the House of Commons. The Government was solemnly denounced
in the papers for not having done something, nobody knew what, to
prevent the window being broken. An enormous subscription was started
to reimburse Mr. Gordon, the man who had been gagged in the shop. Mr.
MacIan, one of the combatants, became for some mysterious reason, singly
and hugely popular as a comic figure in the comic papers and on the
stage of the music hall. He was always represented (in defiance of
fact), with red whiskers, and a very red nose, and in full Highland
costume. And a song, consisting of an unimaginable number of verses,
in which his name was rhymed with flat iron, the British Lion, sly 'un,
dandelion, Spion (With Kop in the next line), was sung to crowded houses
every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the capture of
the fugitives; and when they had not been caught for forty-eight hours,
they suddenly turned the whole matter into a detective mystery. Letters
under the heading, "Where are They," poured in to every paper, with
every conceivable kind of explanation, running them to earth in the
Monument, the Twopenny Tube, Epping Forest, Westminster Abbey, rolled up
in carpets at Shoolbreds, locked up in safes in Chancery Lane. Yes, the
papers were very interesting, and Mr. Turnbull unrolled a whole bundle
of them for the amusement of Mr. MacIan as they sat on a high common to
the north of London, in the coming of the white dawn.

The darkness in the east had been broken with a bar of grey; the bar
of grey was split with a sword of silver and morning lifted itself
laboriously over London. From the spot where Turnbull and MacIan were
sitting on one of the barren steeps behind Hampstead, they could see
the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and
growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their
feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and
parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous
hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of
them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what
the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and
passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by deserts
or dead men or men neglected and barbarous, which can only be invoked by
the sight of the enormous genius of man applied to anything other than
the best. Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had so often reviled
the democracy and reviled them justly for their supineness, their
snobbishness, their evil reverence for idle things. He was right enough;
for our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic. And
after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years as
sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in Hampstead
and saw what gods they are. Their achievement seemed all the more heroic
and divine, because it seemed doubtful whether it was worth doing at
all. There seemed to be something greater than mere accuracy in making
such a mistake as London. And what was to be the end of it all? what was
to be the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London
man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in
Cheapside? Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself
the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who had
intoxicated his youth:

        "And still we ask if God or man
        Can loosen thee Lazarus;
        Bid thee rise up republican,
        And save thyself and all of us.
        But no disciple's tongue can say
        If thou can'st take our sins away."

Turnbull shivered slightly as if behind the earthly morning he felt the
evening of the world, the sunset of so many hopes. Those words were from
"Songs before Sunrise". But Turnbull's songs at their best were songs
after sunrise, and sunrise had been no such great thing after all.
Turnbull shivered again in the sharp morning air. MacIan was also gazing
with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and
mystical stare that told one, so to speak, that his eyes were turned
inwards. When Turnbull said something to him about London, they seemed
to move as at a summons and come out like two householders coming out
into their doorways.

"Yes," he said, with a sort of stupidity. "It's a very big place."

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again:

"It's a very big place. When I first came into it I was frightened of
it. Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a
man forty feet high. I am used to big things where I come from, big
mountains that seem to fill God's infinity, and the big sea that goes
to the end of the world. But then these things are all shapeless and
confused things, not made in any familiar form. But to see the plain,
square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets
so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some
devil's magnifying glass into one's eye. It was like seeing a porridge
bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants."

"Like the land of the Brobdingnagians," said Turnbull, smiling.

"Oh! Where is that?" said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, "In a book," and the silence fell suddenly
between them again.

They were sitting in a sort of litter on the hillside; all the things
they had hurriedly collected, in various places, for their flight, were
strewn indiscriminately round them. The two swords with which they had
lately sought each other's lives were flung down on the grass at random,
like two idle walking-sticks. Some provisions they had bought last
night, at a low public house, in case of undefined contingencies, were
tossed about like the materials of an ordinary picnic, here a basket
of chocolate, and there a bottle of wine. And to add to the disorder
finally, there were strewn on top of everything, the most disorderly
of modern things, newspapers, and more newspapers, and yet again
newspapers, the ministers of the modern anarchy. Turnbull picked up one
of them drearily, and took out a pipe.

"There's a lot about us," he said. "Do you mind if I light up?"

"Why should I mind?" asked MacIan.

Turnbull eyed with a certain studious interest, the man who did not
understand any of the verbal courtesies; he lit his pipe and blew great
clouds out of it.

"Yes," he resumed. "The matter on which you and I are engaged is at this
moment really the best copy in England. I am a journalist, and I know.
For the first time, perhaps, for many generations, the English are
really more angry about a wrong thing done in England than they are
about a wrong thing done in France."

"It is not a wrong thing," said MacIan.

Turnbull laughed. "You seem unable to understand the ordinary use of the
human language. If I did not suspect that you were a genius, I should
certainly know you were a blockhead. I fancy we had better be getting
along and collecting our baggage."

And he jumped up and began shoving the luggage into his pockets, or
strapping it on to his back. As he thrust a tin of canned meat, anyhow,
into his bursting side pocket, he said casually:

"I only meant that you and I are the most prominent people in the
English papers."

"Well, what did you expect?" asked MacIan, opening his great grave blue
eyes.

"The papers are full of us," said Turnbull, stooping to pick up one of
the swords.

MacIan stooped and picked up the other.

"Yes," he said, in his simple way. "I have read what they have to say.
But they don't seem to understand the point."

"The point of what?" asked Turnbull.

"The point of the sword," said MacIan, violently, and planted the steel
point in the soil like a man planting a tree.

"That is a point," said Turnbull, grimly, "that we will discuss later.
Come along."

Turnbull tied the last tin of biscuits desperately to himself with
string; and then spoke, like a diver girt for plunging, short and sharp.

"Now, Mr. MacIan, you must listen to me. You must listen to me, not
merely because I know the country, which you might learn by looking at
a map, but because I know the people of the country, whom you could
not know by living here thirty years. That infernal city down there is
awake; and it is awake against us. All those endless rows of windows and
windows are all eyes staring at us. All those forests of chimneys are
fingers pointing at us, as we stand here on the hillside. This thing has
caught on. For the next six mortal months they will think of nothing
but us, as for six mortal months they thought of nothing but the Dreyfus
case. Oh, I know it's funny. They let starving children, who don't
want to die, drop by the score without looking round. But because two
gentlemen, from private feelings of delicacy, do want to die, they will
mobilize the army and navy to prevent them. For half a year or more, you
and I, Mr. MacIan, will be an obstacle to every reform in the British
Empire. We shall prevent the Chinese being sent out of the Transvaal and
the blocks being stopped in the Strand. We shall be the conversational
substitute when anyone recommends Home Rule, or complains of sky signs.
Therefore, do not imagine, in your innocence, that we have only to melt
away among those English hills as a Highland cateran might into your
god-forsaken Highland mountains. We must be eternally on our guard; we
must live the hunted life of two distinguished criminals. We must expect
to be recognized as much as if we were Napoleon escaping from Elba. We
must be prepared for our descriptions being sent to every tiny village,
and for our faces being recognized by every ambitious policeman. We
must often sleep under the stars as if we were in Africa. Last and most
important we must not dream of effecting our--our final settlement,
which will be a thing as famous as the Phoenix Park murders, unless we
have made real and precise arrangements for our isolation--I will not
say our safety. We must not, in short, fight until we have thrown them
off our scent, if only for a moment. For, take my word for it, Mr.
MacIan, if the British Public once catches us up, the British Public
will prevent the duel, if it is only by locking us both up in asylums
for the rest of our days."

MacIan was looking at the horizon with a rather misty look.

"I am not at all surprised," he said, "at the world being against us. It
makes me feel I was right to----"

"Yes?" said Turnbull.

"To smash your window," said MacIan. "I have woken up the world."

"Very well, then," said Turnbull, stolidly. "Let us look at a few
final facts. Beyond that hill there is comparatively clear country.
Fortunately, I know the part well, and if you will follow me exactly,
and, when necessary, on your stomach, we may be able to get ten miles
out of London, literally without meeting anyone at all, which will be
the best possible beginning, at any rate. We have provisions for at
least two days and two nights, three days if we do it carefully. We may
be able to get fifty or sixty miles away without even walking into an
inn door. I have the biscuits and the tinned meat, and the milk. You
have the chocolate, I think? And the brandy?"

"Yes," said MacIan, like a soldier taking orders.

"Very well, then, come on. March. We turn under that third bush and so
down into the valley." And he set off ahead at a swinging walk.

Then he stopped suddenly; for he realized that the other was not
following. Evan MacIan was leaning on his sword with a lowering face,
like a man suddenly smitten still with doubt.

"What on earth is the matter?" asked Turnbull, staring in some anger.

Evan made no reply.

"What the deuce is the matter with you?" demanded the leader, again, his
face slowly growing as red as his beard; then he said, suddenly, and in
a more human voice, "Are you in pain, MacIan?"

"Yes," replied the Highlander, without lifting his face.

"Take some brandy," cried Turnbull, walking forward hurriedly towards
him. "You've got it."

"It's not in the body," said MacIan, in his dull, strange way. "The
pain has come into my mind. A very dreadful thing has just come into my
thoughts."

"What the devil are you talking about?" asked Turnbull.

MacIan broke out with a queer and living voice.

"We must fight now, Turnbull. We must fight now. A frightful thing has
come upon me, and I know it must be now and here. I must kill you here,"
he cried, with a sort of tearful rage impossible to describe. "Here,
here, upon this blessed grass."

"Why, you idiot," began Turnbull.

"The hour has come--the black hour God meant for it. Quick, it will soon
be gone. Quick!"

And he flung the scabbard from him furiously, and stood with the
sunlight sparkling along his sword.

"You confounded fool," repeated Turnbull. "Put that thing up again,
you ass; people will come out of that house at the first clash of the
steel."

"One of us will be dead before they come," said the other, hoarsely,
"for this is the hour God meant."

"Well, I never thought much of God," said the editor of _The Atheist_,
losing all patience. "And I think less now. Never mind what God meant.
Kindly enlighten my pagan darkness as to what the devil _you_ mean."

"The hour will soon be gone. In a moment it will be gone," said the
madman. "It is now, now, now that I must nail your blaspheming body to
the earth--now, now that I must avenge Our Lady on her vile slanderer.
Now or never. For the dreadful thought is in my mind."

"And what thought," asked Turnbull, with frantic composure, "occupies
what you call your mind?"

"I must kill you now," said the fanatic, "because----"

"Well, because," said Turnbull, patiently.

"Because I have begun to like you."

Turnbull's face had a sudden spasm in the sunlight, a change so
instantaneous that it left no trace behind it; and his features seemed
still carved into a cold stare. But when he spoke again he seemed like
a man who was placidly pretending to misunderstand something that he
understood perfectly well.

"Your affection expresses itself in an abrupt form," he began, but
MacIan broke the brittle and frivolous speech to pieces with a violent
voice. "Do not trouble to talk like that," he said. "You know what I
mean as well as I know it. Come on and fight, I say. Perhaps you are
feeling just as I do."

Turnbull's face flinched again in the fierce sunlight, but his attitude
kept its contemptuous ease.

"Your Celtic mind really goes too fast for me," he said; "let me be
permitted in my heavy Lowland way to understand this new development. My
dear Mr. MacIan, what do you really mean?"

MacIan still kept the shining sword-point towards the other's breast.

"You know what I mean. You mean the same yourself. We must fight now or
else----"

"Or else?" repeated Turnbull, staring at him with an almost blinding
gravity.

"Or else we may not want to fight at all," answered Evan, and the end of
his speech was like a despairing cry.

Turnbull took out his own sword suddenly as if to engage; then planting
it point downwards for a moment, he said, "Before we begin, may I ask
you a question?"

MacIan bowed patiently, but with burning eyes.

"You said, just now," continued Turnbull, presently, "that if we did not
fight now, we might not want to fight at all. How would you feel about
the matter if we came not to want to fight at all?"

"I should feel," answered the other, "just as I should feel if you had
drawn your sword, and I had run away from it. I should feel that because
I had been weak, justice had not been done."

"Justice," answered Turnbull, with a thoughtful smile, "but we are
talking about your feelings. And what do you mean by justice, apart from
your feelings?"

MacIan made a gesture of weary recognition! "Oh, Nominalism," he said,
with a sort of sigh, "we had all that out in the twelfth century."

"I wish we could have it out now," replied the other, firmly. "Do you
really mean that if you came to think me right, you would be certainly
wrong?"

"If I had a blow on the back of my head, I might come to think you a
green elephant," answered MacIan, "but have I not the right to say now,
that if I thought that I should think wrong?"

"Then you are quite certain that it would be wrong to like me?" asked
Turnbull, with a slight smile.

"No," said Evan, thoughtfully, "I do not say that. It may not be the
devil, it may be some part of God I am not meant to know. But I had a
work to do, and it is making the work difficult."

"And I suppose," said the atheist, quite gently, "that you and I know
all about which part of God we ought to know."

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. "If the
Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve
and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to
something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you
talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but
it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church
would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I
am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you
ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned
upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You
ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the
thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood
in my body."

"Stop a moment," said Turnbull, in the same easy tone, "Even in the very
act of saying that you believe this or that, you imply that there is a
part of yourself that you trust even if there are many parts which you
mistrust. If it is only you that like me, surely, also, it is only you
that believe in the Catholic Church."

Evan remained in an unmoved and grave attitude. "There is a part of me
which is divine," he answered, "a part that can be trusted, but there
are also affections which are entirely animal and idle."

"And you are quite certain, I suppose," continued Turnbull, "that if
even you esteem me the esteem would be wholly animal and idle?" For the
first time MacIan started as if he had not expected the thing that was
said to him. At last he said:

"Whatever in earth or heaven it is that has joined us two together, it
seems to be something which makes it impossible to lie. No, I do not
think that the movement in me towards you was...was that surface sort of
thing. It may have been something deeper...something strange. I cannot
understand the thing at all. But understand this and understand it
thoroughly, if I loved you my love might be divine. No, it is not some
trifle that we are fighting about. It is not some superstition or some
symbol. When you wrote those words about Our Lady, you were in that act
a wicked man doing a wicked thing. If I hate you it is because you have
hated goodness. And if I like you...it is because you are good."

Turnbull's face wore an indecipherable expression.

"Well, shall we fight now?" he said.

"Yes," said MacIan, with a sudden contraction of his black brows, "yes,
it must be now."

The bright swords crossed, and the first touch of them, travelling
down blade and arm, told each combatant that the heart of the other was
awakened. It was not in that way that the swords rang together when they
had rushed on each other in the little garden behind the dealer's shop.

There was a pause, and then MacIan made a movement as if to thrust,
and almost at the same moment Turnbull suddenly and calmly dropped his
sword. Evan stared round in an unusual bewilderment, and then realized
that a large man in pale clothes and a Panama hat was strolling serenely
towards them.




V. THE PEACEMAKER

When the combatants, with crossed swords, became suddenly conscious of
a third party, they each made the same movement. It was as quick as
the snap of a pistol, and they altered it instantaneously and recovered
their original pose, but they had both made it, they had both seen it,
and they both knew what it was. It was not a movement of anger at being
interrupted. Say or think what they would, it was a movement of relief.
A force within them, and yet quite beyond them, seemed slowly and
pitilessly washing away the adamant of their oath. As mistaken lovers
might watch the inevitable sunset of first love, these men watched the
sunset of their first hatred.

Their hearts were growing weaker and weaker against each other. When
their weapons rang and riposted in the little London garden, they
could have been very certain that if a third party had interrupted them
something at least would have happened. They would have killed each
other or they would have killed him. But now nothing could undo or
deny that flash of fact, that for a second they had been glad to be
interrupted. Some new and strange thing was rising higher and higher in
their hearts like a high sea at night. It was something that seemed all
the more merciless, because it might turn out an enormous mercy. Was
there, perhaps, some such fatalism in friendship as all lovers talk
about in love? Did God make men love each other against their will?

"I'm sure you'll excuse my speaking to you," said the stranger, in a
voice at once eager and deprecating.

The voice was too polite for good manners. It was incongruous with the
eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane
and free man. It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though
rather loose physique of the man who spoke. At the first glance he
looked a fine animal, with curling gold beard and hair, and blue eyes,
unusually bright. It was only at the second glance that the mind felt
a sudden and perhaps unmeaning irritation at the way in which the gold
beard retreated backwards into the waistcoat, and the way in which the
finely shaped nose went forward as if smelling its way. And it was
only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes,
which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with
intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a
heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the
loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their
extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics. But
a closer examination of his attire would have shown that even in the
tropics it would have been unique; but it was all woven according to
some hygienic texture which no human being had ever heard of before, and
which was absolutely necessary even for a day's health. He wore a huge
broad-brimmed hat, equally hygienic, very much at the back of his head,
and his voice coming out of so heavy and hearty a type of man was, as I
have said, startlingly shrill and deferential.

"I'm sure you'll excuse my speaking to you," he said. "Now, I wonder if
you are in some little difficulty which, after all, we could settle very
comfortably together? Now, you don't mind my saying this, do you?"

The face of both combatants remained somewhat solid under this appeal.
But the stranger, probably taking their silence for a gathering shame,
continued with a kind of gaiety:

"So you are the young men I have read about in the papers. Well, of
course, when one is young, one is rather romantic. Do you know what I
always say to young people?"

A blank silence followed this gay inquiry. Then Turnbull said in a
colourless voice:

"As I was forty-seven last birthday, I probably came into the world too
soon for the experience."

"Very good, very good," said the friendly person. "Dry Scotch humour.
Dry Scotch humour. Well now. I understand that you two people want to
fight a duel. I suppose you aren't much up in the modern world. We've
quite outgrown duelling, you know. In fact, Tolstoy tells us that we
shall soon outgrow war, which he says is simply a duel between nations.
A duel between nations. But there is no doubt about our having outgrown
duelling."

Waiting for some effect upon his wooden auditors, the stranger stood
beaming for a moment and then resumed:

"Now, they tell me in the newspapers that you are really wanting to
fight about something connected with Roman Catholicism. Now, do you know
what I always say to Roman Catholics?"

"No," said Turnbull, heavily. "Do _they_?" It seemed to be a
characteristic of the hearty, hygienic gentleman that he always forgot
the speech he had made the moment before. Without enlarging further on
the fixed form of his appeal to the Church of Rome, he laughed cordially
at Turnbull's answer; then his wandering blue eyes caught the sunlight
on the swords, and he assumed a good-humoured gravity.

"But you know this is a serious matter," he said, eyeing Turnbull and
MacIan, as if they had just been keeping the table in a roar with their
frivolities. "I am sure that if I appealed to your higher natures...your
higher natures. Every man has a higher nature and a lower nature. Now,
let us put the matter very plainly, and without any romantic nonsense
about honour or anything of that sort. Is not bloodshed a great sin?"

"No," said MacIan, speaking for the first time.

"Well, really, really!" said the peacemaker.

"Murder is a sin," said the immovable Highlander. "There is no sin of
bloodshed."

"Well, we won't quarrel about a word," said the other, pleasantly.

"Why on earth not?" said MacIan, with a sudden asperity. "Why shouldn't
we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren't
important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than
another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a
woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel
about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you
going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by
moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about
words, because they are the only things worth fighting about. I say
that murder is a sin, and bloodshed is not, and that there is as much
difference between those words as there is between the word 'yes' and
the word 'no'; or rather more difference, for 'yes' and 'no', at least,
belong to the same category. Murder is a spiritual incident. Bloodshed
is a physical incident. A surgeon commits bloodshed.

"Ah, you're a casuist!" said the large man, wagging his head. "Now, do
you know what I always say to casuists...?"

MacIan made a violent gesture; and Turnbull broke into open laughter.
The peacemaker did not seem to be in the least annoyed, but continued in
unabated enjoyment.

"Well, well," he said, "let us get back to the point. Now Tolstoy has
shown that force is no remedy; so you see the position in which I am
placed. I am doing my best to stop what I'm sure you won't mind my
calling this really useless violence, this really quite wrong violence
of yours. But it's against my principles to call in the police against
you, because the police are still on a lower moral plane, so to speak,
because, in short, the police undoubtedly sometimes employ force.
Tolstoy has shown that violence merely breeds violence in the person
towards whom it is used, whereas Love, on the other hand, breeds Love.
So you see how I am placed. I am reduced to use Love in order to stop
you. I am obliged to use Love."

He gave to the word an indescribable sound of something hard and heavy,
as if he were saying "boots". Turnbull suddenly gripped his sword and
said, shortly, "I see how you are placed quite well, sir. You will not
call the police. Mr. MacIan, shall we engage?" MacIan plucked his sword
out of the grass.

"I must and will stop this shocking crime," cried the Tolstoian,
crimson in the face. "It is against all modern ideas. It is against the
principle of love. How you, sir, who pretend to be a Christian..."

MacIan turned upon him with a white face and bitter lip. "Sir," he said,
"talk about the principle of love as much as you like. You seem to me
colder than a lump of stone; but I am willing to believe that you may at
some time have loved a cat, or a dog, or a child. When you were a baby,
I suppose you loved your mother. Talk about love, then, till the world
is sick of the word. But don't you talk about Christianity. Don't you
dare to say one word, white or black, about it. Christianity is, as far
as you are concerned, a horrible mystery. Keep clear of it, keep silent
upon it, as you would upon an abomination. It is a thing that has made
men slay and torture each other; and you will never know why. It is a
thing that has made men do evil that good might come; and you will never
understand the evil, let alone the good. Christianity is a thing that
could only make you vomit, till you are other than you are. I would not
justify it to you even if I could. Hate it, in God's name, as Turnbull
does, who is a man. It is a monstrous thing, for which men die. And if
you will stand here and talk about love for another ten minutes it is
very probable that you will see a man die for it."

And he fell on guard. Turnbull was busy settling something loose in his
elaborate hilt, and the pause was broken by the stranger.

"Suppose I call the police?" he said, with a heated face.

"And deny your most sacred dogma," said MacIan.

"Dogma!" cried the man, in a sort of dismay. "Oh, we have no _dogmas_,
you know!"

There was another silence, and he said again, airily:

"You know, I think, there's something in what Shaw teaches about no
moral principles being quite fixed. Have you ever read _The Quintessence
of Ibsenism_? Of course he went very wrong over the war."

Turnbull, with a bent, flushed face, was tying up the loose piece of the
pommel with string. With the string in his teeth, he said, "Oh, make up
your damned mind and clear out!"

"It's a serious thing," said the philosopher, shaking his head. "I must
be alone and consider which is the higher point of view. I rather feel
that in a case so extreme as this..." and he went slowly away. As he
disappeared among the trees, they heard him murmuring in a sing-song
voice, "New occasions teach new duties," out of a poem by James Russell
Lowell.

"Ah," said MacIan, drawing a deep breath. "Don't you believe in prayer
now? I prayed for an angel."

"An hour ago," said the Highlander, in his heavy meditative voice, "I
felt the devil weakening my heart and my oath against you, and I prayed
that God would send an angel to my aid."

"Well?" inquired the other, finishing his mending and wrapping the rest
of the string round his hand to get a firmer grip.

"Well?"

"Well, that man was an angel," said MacIan.

"I didn't know they were as bad as that," answered Turnbull.

"We know that devils sometimes quote Scripture and counterfeit good,"
replied the mystic. "Why should not angels sometimes come to show us the
black abyss of evil on whose brink we stand. If that man had not tried
to stop us...I might...I might have stopped."

"I know what you mean," said Turnbull, grimly.

"But then he came," broke out MacIan, "and my soul said to me: 'Give up
fighting, and you will become like That. Give up vows and dogmas, and
fixed things, and you may grow like That. You may learn, also, that
fog of false philosophy. You may grow fond of that mire of crawling,
cowardly morals, and you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts,
and not because it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong,
because it is violent, and not because it is unjust. Oh, you blasphemer
of the good, an hour ago I almost loved you! But do not fear for me now.
I have heard the word Love pronounced in _his_ intonation; and I know
exactly what it means. On guard!'"

The swords caught on each other with a dreadful clang and jar, full of
the old energy and hate; and at once plunged and replunged. Once more
each man's heart had become the magnet of a mad sword. Suddenly, furious
as they were, they were frozen for a moment motionless.

"What noise is that?" asked the Highlander, hoarsely.

"I think I know," replied Turnbull.

"What?... What?" cried the other.

"The student of Shaw and Tolstoy has made up his remarkable mind," said
Turnbull, quietly. "The police are coming up the hill."




VI. THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER

Between high hedges in Hertfordshire, hedges so high as to create a
kind of grove, two men were running. They did not run in a scampering
or feverish manner, but in the steady swing of the pendulum. Across the
great plains and uplands to the right and left of the lane, a long tide
of sunset light rolled like a sea of ruby, lighting up the long terraces
of the hills and picking out the few windows of the scattered hamlets
in startling blood-red sparks. But the lane was cut deep in the hill
and remained in an abrupt shadow. The two men running in it had an
impression not uncommonly experienced between those wild green English
walls; a sense of being led between the walls of a maze.

Though their pace was steady it was vigorous; their faces were heated
and their eyes fixed and bright. There was, indeed, something a little
mad in the contrast between the evening's stillness over the empty
country-side, and these two figures fleeing wildly from nothing. They
had the look of two lunatics, possibly they were.

"Are you all right?" said Turnbull, with civility. "Can you keep this
up?"

"Quite easily, thank you," replied MacIan. "I run very well."

"Is that a qualification in a family of warriors?" asked Turnbull.

"Undoubtedly. Rapid movement is essential," answered MacIan, who never
saw a joke in his life.

Turnbull broke out into a short laugh, and silence fell between them,
the panting silence of runners.

Then MacIan said: "We run better than any of those policemen. They are
too fat. Why do you make your policemen so fat?"

"I didn't do much towards making them fat myself," replied Turnbull,
genially, "but I flatter myself that I am now doing something towards
making them thin. You'll see they will be as lean as rakes by the time
they catch us. They will look like your friend, Cardinal Manning."

"But they won't catch us," said MacIan, in his literal way.

"No, we beat them in the great military art of running away," returned
the other. "They won't catch us unless----"

MacIan turned his long equine face inquiringly. "Unless what?" he
said, for Turnbull had gone silent suddenly, and seemed to be listening
intently as he ran as a horse does with his ears turned back.

"Unless what?" repeated the Highlander.

"Unless they do--what they have done. Listen." MacIan slackened his
trot, and turned his head to the trail they had left behind them. Across
two or three billows of the up and down lane came along the ground the
unmistakable throbbing of horses' hoofs.

"They have put the mounted police on us," said Turnbull, shortly. "Good
Lord, one would think we were a Revolution."

"So we are," said MacIan calmly. "What shall we do? Shall we turn on
them with our points?"

"It may come to that," answered Turnbull, "though if it does, I reckon
that will be the last act. We must put it off if we can." And he stared
and peered about him between the bushes. "If we could hide somewhere
the beasts might go by us," he said. "The police have their faults, but
thank God they're inefficient. Why, here's the very thing. Be quick and
quiet. Follow me."

He suddenly swung himself up the high bank on one side of the lane. It
was almost as high and smooth as a wall, and on the top of it the black
hedge stood out over them as an angle, almost like a thatched roof of
the lane. And the burning evening sky looked down at them through the
tangle with red eyes as of an army of goblins.

Turnbull hoisted himself up and broke the hedge with his body. As his
head and shoulders rose above it they turned to flame in the full glow
as if lit up by an immense firelight. His red hair and beard looked
almost scarlet, and his pale face as bright as a boy's. Something
violent, something that was at once love and hatred, surged in the
strange heart of the Gael below him. He had an unutterable sense of epic
importance, as if he were somehow lifting all humanity into a prouder
and more passionate region of the air. As he swung himself up also into
the evening light he felt as if he were rising on enormous wings.

Legends of the morning of the world which he had heard in childhood or
read in youth came back upon him in a cloudy splendour, purple tales
of wrath and friendship, like Roland and Oliver, or Balin and Balan,
reminding him of emotional entanglements. Men who had loved each other
and then fought each other; men who had fought each other and then loved
each other, together made a mixed but monstrous sense of momentousness.
The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of some
sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken.

Turnbull was wholly unaffected by any written or spoken poetry; his was
a powerful and prosaic mind. But even upon him there came for the moment
something out of the earth and the passionate ends of the sky. The only
evidence was in his voice, which was still practical but a shade more
quiet.

"Do you see that summer-house-looking thing over there?" he asked
shortly. "That will do for us very well."

Keeping himself free from the tangle of the hedge he strolled across
a triangle of obscure kitchen garden, and approached a dismal shed or
lodge a yard or two beyond it. It was a weather-stained hut of grey
wood, which with all its desolation retained a tag or two of trivial
ornament, which suggested that the thing had once been a sort of
summer-house, and the place probably a sort of garden.

"That is quite invisible from the road," said Turnbull, as he entered
it, "and it will cover us up for the night."

MacIan looked at him gravely for a few moments. "Sir," he said, "I ought
to say something to you. I ought to say----"

"Hush," said Turnbull, suddenly lifting his hand; "be still, man."

In the sudden silence, the drumming of the distant horses grew louder
and louder with inconceivable rapidity, and the cavalcade of police
rushed by below them in the lane, almost with the roar and rattle of an
express train.

"I ought to tell you," continued MacIan, still staring stolidly at the
other, "that you are a great chief, and it is good to go to war behind
you."

Turnbull said nothing, but turned and looked out of the foolish lattice
of the little windows, then he said, "We must have food and sleep
first."

When the last echo of their eluded pursuers had died in the distant
uplands, Turnbull began to unpack the provisions with the easy air of
a man at a picnic. He had just laid out the last items, put a bottle
of wine on the floor, and a tin of salmon on the window-ledge, when the
bottomless silence of that forgotten place was broken. And it was broken
by three heavy blows of a stick delivered upon the door.

Turnbull looked up in the act of opening a tin and stared silently at
his companion. MacIan's long, lean mouth had shut hard.

"Who the devil can that be?" said Turnbull.

"God knows," said the other. "It might be God."

Again the sound of the wooden stick reverberated on the wooden door. It
was a curious sound and on consideration did not resemble the ordinary
effects of knocking on a door for admittance. It was rather as if the
point of a stick were plunged again and again at the panels in an absurd
attempt to make a hole in them.

A wild look sprang into MacIan's eyes and he got up half stupidly, with
a kind of stagger, put his hand out and caught one of the swords. "Let
us fight at once," he cried, "it is the end of the world."

"You're overdone, MacIan," said Turnbull, putting him on one side. "It's
only someone playing the goat. Let me open the door."

But he also picked up a sword as he stepped to open it.

He paused one moment with his hand on the handle and then flung the door
open. Almost as he did so the ferrule of an ordinary bamboo cane came at
his eyes, so that he had actually to parry it with the naked weapon in
his hands. As the two touched, the point of the stick was dropped very
abruptly, and the man with the stick stepped hurriedly back.

Against the heraldic background of sprawling crimson and gold offered
him by the expiring sunset, the figure of the man with the stick showed
at first merely black and fantastic. He was a small man with two wisps
of long hair that curled up on each side, and seen in silhouette, looked
like horns. He had a bow tie so big that the two ends showed on each
side of his neck like unnatural stunted wings. He had his long black
cane still tilted in his hand like a fencing foil and half presented
at the open door. His large straw hat had fallen behind him as he leapt
backwards.

"With reference to your suggestion, MacIan," said Turnbull, placidly, "I
think it looks more like the Devil."

"Who on earth are you?" cried the stranger in a high shrill voice,
brandishing his cane defensively.

"Let me see," said Turnbull, looking round to MacIan with the same
blandness. "Who are we?"

"Come out," screamed the little man with the stick.

"Certainly," said Turnbull, and went outside with the sword, MacIan
following.

Seen more fully, with the evening light on his face, the strange man
looked a little less like a goblin. He wore a square pale-grey jacket
suit, on which the grey butterfly tie was the only indisputable touch
of affectation. Against the great sunset his figure had looked merely
small: seen in a more equal light it looked tolerably compact and
shapely. His reddish-brown hair, combed into two great curls, looked
like the long, slow curling hair of the women in some pre-Raphaelite
pictures. But within this feminine frame of hair his face was
unexpectedly impudent, like a monkey's.

"What are you doing here?" he said, in a sharp small voice.

"Well," said MacIan, in his grave childish way, "what are _you_ doing
here?"

"I," said the man, indignantly, "I'm in my own garden."

"Oh," said MacIan, simply, "I apologize."

Turnbull was coolly curling his red moustache, and the stranger stared
from one to the other, temporarily stunned by their innocent assurance.

"But, may I ask," he said at last, "what the devil you are doing in my
summer-house?"

"Certainly," said MacIan. "We were just going to fight."

"To fight!" repeated the man.

"We had better tell this gentleman the whole business," broke in
Turnbull. Then turning to the stranger he said firmly, "I am sorry, sir,
but we have something to do that must be done. And I may as well tell
you at the beginning and to avoid waste of time or language, that we
cannot admit any interference."

"We were just going to take some slight refreshment when you interrupted
us..."

The little man had a dawning expression of understanding and stooped and
picked up the unused bottle of wine, eyeing it curiously.

Turnbull continued:

"But that refreshment was preparatory to something which I fear you will
find less comprehensible, but on which our minds are entirely fixed,
sir. We are forced to fight a duel. We are forced by honour and an
internal intellectual need. Do not, for your own sake, attempt to stop
us. I know all the excellent and ethical things that you will want to
say to us. I know all about the essential requirements of civil order:
I have written leading articles about them all my life. I know all about
the sacredness of human life; I have bored all my friends with it. Try
and understand our position. This man and I are alone in the modern
world in that we think that God is essentially important. I think He
does not exist; that is where the importance comes in for me. But this
man thinks that He does exist, and thinking that very properly thinks
Him more important than anything else. Now we wish to make a great
demonstration and assertion--something that will set the world on fire
like the first Christian persecutions. If you like, we are attempting
a mutual martyrdom. The papers have posted up every town against us.
Scotland Yard has fortified every police station with our enemies; we
are driven therefore to the edge of a lonely lane, and indirectly to
taking liberties with your summer-house in order to arrange our..."

"Stop!" roared the little man in the butterfly necktie. "Put me out of
my intellectual misery. Are you really the two tomfools I have read of
in all the papers? Are you the two people who wanted to spit each other
in the Police Court? Are you? Are you?"

"Yes," said MacIan, "it began in a Police Court."

The little man slung the bottle of wine twenty yards away like a stone.

"Come up to my place," he said. "I've got better stuff than that. I've
got the best Beaune within fifty miles of here. Come up. You're the very
men I wanted to see."

Even Turnbull, with his typical invulnerability, was a little taken
aback by this boisterous and almost brutal hospitality.

"Why...sir..." he began.

"Come up! Come in!" howled the little man, dancing with delight. "I'll
give you a dinner. I'll give you a bed! I'll give you a green smooth
lawn and your choice of swords and pistols. Why, you fools, I adore
fighting! It's the only good thing in God's world! I've walked about
these damned fields and longed to see somebody cut up and killed and the
blood running. Ha! Ha!"

And he made sudden lunges with his stick at the trunk of a neighbouring
tree so that the ferrule made fierce prints and punctures in the bark.

"Excuse me," said MacIan suddenly with the wide-eyed curiosity of a
child, "excuse me, but..."

"Well?" said the small fighter, brandishing his wooden weapon.

"Excuse me," repeated MacIan, "but was that what you were doing at the
door?"

The little man stared an instant and then said: "Yes," and Turnbull
broke into a guffaw.

"Come on!" cried the little man, tucking his stick under his arm and
taking quite suddenly to his heels. "Come on! Confound me, I'll see both
of you eat and then I'll see one of you die. Lord bless me, the gods
must exist after all--they have sent me one of my day-dreams! Lord! A
duel!"

He had gone flying along a winding path between the borders of the
kitchen garden, and in the increasing twilight he was as hard to follow
as a flying hare. But at length the path after many twists betrayed its
purpose and led abruptly up two or three steps to the door of a tiny but
very clean cottage. There was nothing about the outside to distinguish
it from other cottages, except indeed its ominous cleanliness and one
thing that was out of all the custom and tradition of all cottages
under the sun. In the middle of the little garden among the stocks and
marigolds there surged up in shapeless stone a South Sea Island idol.
There was something gross and even evil in that eyeless and alien god
among the most innocent of the English flowers.

"Come in!" cried the creature again. "Come in! it's better inside!"

Whether or no it was better inside it was at least a surprise. The
moment the two duellists had pushed open the door of that inoffensive,
whitewashed cottage they found that its interior was lined with fiery
gold. It was like stepping into a chamber in the Arabian Nights. The
door that closed behind them shut out England and all the energies of
the West. The ornaments that shone and shimmered on every side of them
were subtly mixed from many periods and lands, but were all oriental.
Cruel Assyrian bas-reliefs ran along the sides of the passage; cruel
Turkish swords and daggers glinted above and below them; the two
were separated by ages and fallen civilizations. Yet they seemed to
sympathize since they were both harmonious and both merciless. The house
seemed to consist of chamber within chamber and created that impression
as of a dream which belongs also to the Arabian Nights themselves. The
innermost room of all was like the inside of a jewel. The little man who
owned it all threw himself on a heap of scarlet and golden cushions and
struck his hands together. A negro in a white robe and turban appeared
suddenly and silently behind them.

"Selim," said the host, "these two gentlemen are staying with me
tonight. Send up the very best wine and dinner at once. And Selim,
one of these gentlemen will probably die tomorrow. Make arrangements,
please."

The negro bowed and withdrew.

Evan MacIan came out the next morning into the little garden to a fresh
silver day, his long face looking more austere than ever in that
cold light, his eyelids a little heavy. He carried one of the swords.
Turnbull was in the little house behind him, demolishing the end of
an early breakfast and humming a tune to himself, which could be heard
through the open window. A moment or two later he leapt to his feet and
came out into the sunlight, still munching toast, his own sword stuck
under his arm like a walking-stick.

Their eccentric host had vanished from sight, with a polite gesture,
some twenty minutes before. They imagined him to be occupied on
some concerns in the interior of the house, and they waited for his
emergence, stamping the garden in silence--the garden of tall, fresh
country flowers, in the midst of which the monstrous South Sea idol
lifted itself as abruptly as the prow of a ship riding on a sea of red
and white and gold.

It was with a start, therefore, that they came upon the man himself
already in the garden. They were all the more startled because of the
still posture in which they found him. He was on his knees in front
of the stone idol, rigid and motionless, like a saint in a trance or
ecstasy. Yet when Turnbull's tread broke a twig, he was on his feet in a
flash.

"Excuse me," he said with an irradiation of smiles, but yet with a kind
of bewilderment. "So sorry...family prayers...old fashioned...mother's
knee. Let us go on to the lawn behind."

And he ducked rapidly round the statue to an open space of grass on the
other side of it.

"This will do us best, Mr. MacIan," said he. Then he made a gesture
towards the heavy stone figure on the pedestal which had now its blank
and shapeless back turned towards them. "Don't you be afraid," he added,
"he can still see us."

MacIan turned his blue, blinking eyes, which seemed still misty with
sleep (or sleeplessness) towards the idol, but his brows drew together.

The little man with the long hair also had his eyes on the back view
of the god. His eyes were at once liquid and burning, and he rubbed his
hands slowly against each other.

"Do you know," he said, "I think he can see us better this way. I often
think that this blank thing is his real face, watching, though it cannot
be watched. He! he! Yes, I think he looks nice from behind. He looks
more cruel from behind, don't you think?"

"What the devil is the thing?" asked Turnbull gruffly.

"It is the only Thing there is," answered the other. "It is Force."

"Oh!" said Turnbull shortly.

"Yes, my friends," said the little man, with an animated countenance,
fluttering his fingers in the air, "it was no chance that led you to
this garden; surely it was the caprice of some old god, some happy,
pitiless god. Perhaps it was his will, for he loves blood; and on that
stone in front of him men have been butchered by hundreds in the fierce,
feasting islands of the South. In this cursed, craven place I have
not been permitted to kill men on his altar. Only rabbits and cats,
sometimes."

In the stillness MacIan made a sudden movement, unmeaning apparently,
and then remained rigid.

"But today, today," continued the small man in a shrill voice. "Today
his hour is come. Today his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Men, men, men will bleed before him today." And he bit his forefinger in
a kind of fever.

Still, the two duellists stood with their swords as heavily as statues,
and the silence seemed to cool the eccentric and call him back to more
rational speech.

"Perhaps I express myself a little too lyrically," he said with an
amicable abruptness. "My philosophy has its higher ecstasies, but
perhaps you are hardly worked up to them yet. Let us confine ourselves
to the unquestioned. You have found your way, gentlemen, by a beautiful
accident, to the house of the only man in England (probably) who will
favour and encourage your most reasonable project. From Cornwall to Cape
Wrath this county is one horrible, solid block of humanitarianism. You
will find men who will defend this or that war in a distant continent.
They will defend it on the contemptible ground of commerce or the more
contemptible ground of social good. But do not fancy that you will find
one other person who will comprehend a strong man taking the sword in
his hand and wiping out his enemy. My name is Wimpey, Morrice Wimpey. I
had a Fellowship at Magdalen. But I assure you I had to drop it, owing
to my having said something in a public lecture infringing the popular
prejudice against those great gentlemen, the assassins of the Italian
Renaissance. They let me say it at dinner and so on, and seemed to like
it. But in a public lecture...so inconsistent. Well, as I say, here is
your only refuge and temple of honour. Here you can fall back on that
naked and awful arbitration which is the only thing that balances the
stars--a still, continuous violence. _Vae Victis!_ Down, down, down
with the defeated! Victory is the only ultimate fact. Carthage _was_
destroyed, the Red Indians are being exterminated: that is the single
certainty. In an hour from now that sun will still be shining and that
grass growing, and one of you will be conquered; one of you will be the
conqueror. When it has been done, nothing will alter it. Heroes, I give
you the hospitality fit for heroes. And I salute the survivor. Fall on!"

The two men took their swords. Then MacIan said steadily: "Mr. Turnbull,
lend me your sword a moment."

Turnbull, with a questioning glance, handed him the weapon. MacIan took
the second sword in his left hand and, with a violent gesture, hurled it
at the feet of little Mr. Wimpey.

"Fight!" he said in a loud, harsh voice. "Fight me now!"

Wimpey took a step backward, and bewildered words bubbled on his lips.

"Pick up that sword and fight me," repeated MacIan, with brows as black
as thunder.

The little man turned to Turnbull with a gesture, demanding judgement or
protection.

"Really, sir," he began, "this gentleman confuses..."

"You stinking little coward," roared Turnbull, suddenly releasing his
wrath. "Fight, if you're so fond of fighting! Fight, if you're so fond
of all that filthy philosophy! If winning is everything, go in and win!
If the weak must go to the wall, go to the wall! Fight, you rat! Fight,
or if you won't fight--run!"

And he ran at Wimpey, with blazing eyes.

Wimpey staggered back a few paces like a man struggling with his own
limbs. Then he felt the furious Scotchman coming at him like an express
train, doubling his size every second, with eyes as big as windows and
a sword as bright as the sun. Something broke inside him, and he found
himself running away, tumbling over his own feet in terror, and crying
out as he ran.

"Chase him!" shouted Turnbull as MacIan snatched up the sword and joined
in the scamper. "Chase him over a county! Chase him into the sea! Shoo!
Shoo! Shoo!"

The little man plunged like a rabbit among the tall flowers, the two
duellists after him. Turnbull kept at his tail with savage ecstasy,
still shooing him like a cat. But MacIan, as he ran past the South Sea
idol, paused an instant to spring upon its pedestal. For five seconds
he strained against the inert mass. Then it stirred; and he sent it over
with a great crash among the flowers, that engulfed it altogether. Then
he went bounding after the runaway.

In the energy of his alarm the ex-Fellow of Magdalen managed to leap
the paling of his garden. The two pursuers went over it after him like
flying birds. He fled frantically down a long lane with his two terrors
on his trail till he came to a gap in the hedge and went across a steep
meadow like the wind. The two Scotchmen, as they ran, kept up a cheery
bellowing and waved their swords. Up three slanting meadows, down four
slanting meadows on the other side, across another road, across a heath
of snapping bracken, through a wood, across another road, and to the
brink of a big pool, they pursued the flying philosopher. But when he
came to the pool his pace was so precipitate that he could not stop
it, and with a kind of lurching stagger, he fell splash into the greasy
water. Getting dripping to his feet, with the water up to his knees, the
worshipper of force and victory waded disconsolately to the other side
and drew himself on to the bank. And Turnbull sat down on the grass and
went off into reverberations of laughter. A second afterwards the most
extraordinary grimaces were seen to distort the stiff face of MacIan,
and unholy sounds came from within. He had never practised laughing, and
it hurt him very much.




VII. THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE

At about half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out
of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still
intermittent laughter ended in a kind of yawn.

"I'm hungry," he said shortly. "Are you?"

"I have not noticed," answered MacIan. "What are you going to do?"

"There's a village down the road, past the pool," answered Turnbull. "I
can see it from here. I can see the whitewashed walls of some cottages
and a kind of corner of the church. How jolly it all looks. It looks
so--I don't know what the word is--so sensible. Don't fancy I'm under
any illusions about Arcadian virtue and the innocent villagers. Men make
beasts of themselves there with drink, but they don't deliberately make
devils of themselves with mere talking. They kill wild animals in
the wild woods, but they don't kill cats to the God of Victory. They
don't----" He broke off and suddenly spat on the ground.

"Excuse me," he said; "it was ceremonial. One has to get the taste out
of one's mouth."

"The taste of what?" asked MacIan.

"I don't know the exact name for it," replied Turnbull. "Perhaps it is
the South Sea Islands, or it may be Magdalen College."

There was a long pause, and MacIan also lifted his large limbs off the
ground--his eyes particularly dreamy.

"I know what you mean, Turnbull," he said, "but... I always thought you
people agreed with all that."

"With all that about doing as one likes, and the individual, and Nature
loving the strongest, and all the things which that cockroach talked
about."

Turnbull's big blue-grey eyes stood open with a grave astonishment.

"Do you really mean to say, MacIan," he said, "that you fancied that we,
the Free-thinkers, that Bradlaugh, or Holyoake, or Ingersoll, believe
all that dirty, immoral mysticism about Nature? Damn Nature!"

"I supposed you did," said MacIan calmly. "It seems to me your most
conclusive position."

"And you mean to tell me," rejoined the other, "that you broke my
window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman up with
ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five meadows--all under the
impression that I am such an illiterate idiot as to believe in Nature!"

"I supposed you did," repeated MacIan with his usual mildness; "but I
admit that I know little of the details of your belief--or disbelief."

Turnbull swung round quite suddenly, and set off towards the village.

"Come along," he cried. "Come down to the village. Come down to the
nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer."

"I do not quite follow you," said the Highlander.

"Yes, you do," answered Turnbull. "You follow me slap into the
inn-parlour. I repeat, this is a case for beer. We must have the whole
of this matter out thoroughly before we go a step farther. Do you know
that an idea has just struck me of great simplicity and of some
cogency. Do not by any means let us drop our intentions of settling our
differences with two steel swords. But do you not think that with two
pewter pots we might do what we really have never thought of doing
yet--discover what our difference is?"

"It never occurred to me before," answered MacIan with tranquillity. "It
is a good suggestion."

And they set out at an easy swing down the steep road to the village of
Grassley-in-the-Hole.

Grassley-in-the-Hole was a rude parallelogram of buildings, with two
thoroughfares which might have been called two high streets if it had
been possible to call them streets. One of these ways was higher on the
slope than the other, the whole parallelogram lying aslant, so to speak,
on the side of the hill. The upper of these two roads was decorated with
a big public house, a butcher's shop, a small public house, a sweetstuff
shop, a very small public house, and an illegible signpost. The lower of
the two roads boasted a horse-pond, a post office, a gentleman's garden
with very high hedges, a microscopically small public house, and two
cottages. Where all the people lived who supported all the public houses
was in this, as in many other English villages, a silent and smiling
mystery. The church lay a little above and beyond the village, with a
square grey tower dominating it decisively.

But even the church was scarcely so central and solemn an institution
as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some
splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied
by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable
sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn,
the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal
antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some
solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought to
be. Into the principal parlour of this place entered two strangers, who
found themselves, as is always the case in such hostels, the object,
not of fluttered curiosity or pert inquiry, but of steady, ceaseless,
devouring ocular study. They had long coats down to their heels, and
carried under each coat something that looked like a stick. One was
tall and dark, the other short and red-haired. They ordered a pot of ale
each.

"MacIan," said Turnbull, lifting his tankard, "the fool who wanted us to
be friends made us want to go on fighting. It is only natural that
the fool who wanted us to fight should make us friendly. MacIan, your
health!"

Dusk was already dropping, the rustics in the tavern were already
lurching and lumbering out of it by twos and threes, crying clamorous
good nights to a solitary old toper that remained, before MacIan and
Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion.

MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him. "I
am to understand, then," he said, "that you don't believe in nature."

"You may say so in a very special and emphatic sense," said Turnbull.
"I do not believe in nature, just as I do not believe in Odin. She is a
myth. It is not merely that I do not believe that nature can guide us.
It is that I do not believe that nature exists."

"Exists?" said MacIan in his monotonous way, settling his pewter pot on
the table.

"Yes, in a real sense nature does not exist. I mean that nobody can
discover what the original nature of things would have been if things
had not interfered with it. The first blade of grass began to tear up
the earth and eat it; it was interfering with nature, if there is any
nature. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass and eat it; he
was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. In the same way,"
continued Turnbull, "the human when it asserts its dominance over nature
is just as natural as the thing which it destroys."

"And in the same way," said MacIan almost dreamily, "the superhuman, the
supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it destroys."

Turnbull took his head out of his pewter pot in some anger.

"The supernatural, of course," he said, "is quite another thing; the
case of the supernatural is simple. The supernatural does not exist."

"Quite so," said MacIan in a rather dull voice; "you said the same about
the natural. If the natural does not exist the supernatural obviously
can't." And he yawned a little over his ale.

Turnbull turned for some reason a little red and remarked quickly, "That
may be jolly clever, for all I know. But everyone does know that there
is a division between the things that as a matter of fact do commonly
happen and the things that don't. Things that break the evident laws of
nature----"

"Which does not exist," put in MacIan sleepily. Turnbull struck the
table with a sudden hand.

"Good Lord in heaven!" he cried----

"Who does not exist," murmured MacIan.

"Good Lord in heaven!" thundered Turnbull, without regarding the
interruption. "Do you really mean to sit there and say that you, like
anybody else, would not recognize the difference between a natural
occurrence and a supernatural one--if there could be such a thing? If I
flew up to the ceiling----"

"You would bump your head badly," cried MacIan, suddenly starting up.
"One can't talk of this kind of thing under a ceiling at all. Come
outside! Come outside and ascend into heaven!"

He burst the door open on a blue abyss of evening and they stepped out
into it: it was suddenly and strangely cool.

"Turnbull," said MacIan, "you have said some things so true and some
so false that I want to talk; and I will try to talk so that you
understand. For at present you do not understand at all. We don't seem
to mean the same things by the same words."

He stood silent for a second or two and then resumed.

"A minute or two ago I caught you out in a real contradiction. At that
moment logically I was right. And at that moment I knew I was
wrong. Yes, there is a real difference between the natural and the
supernatural: if you flew up into that blue sky this instant, I should
think that you were moved by God--or the devil. But if you want to know
what I really think...I must explain."

He stopped again, abstractedly boring the point of his sword into the
earth, and went on:

"I was born and bred and taught in a complete universe. The supernatural
was not natural, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nay, the supernatural
to me is more reasonable than the natural; for the supernatural is a
direct message from God, who is reason. I was taught that some things
are natural and some things divine. I mean that some things are
mechanical and some things divine. But there is the great difficulty,
Turnbull. The great difficulty is that, according to my teaching, you
are divine."

"Me! Divine?" said Turnbull truculently. "What do you mean?"

"That is just the difficulty," continued MacIan thoughtfully. "I was
told that there was a difference between the grass and a man's will;
and the difference was that a man's will was special and divine. A man's
free will, I heard, was supernatural."

"Rubbish!" said Turnbull.

"Oh," said MacIan patiently, "then if a man's free will isn't
supernatural, why do your materialists deny that it exists?"

Turnbull was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but MacIan
continued with the same steady voice and sad eyes:

"So what I feel is this: Here is the great divine creation I was
taught to believe in. I can understand your disbelieving in it, but
why disbelieve in a part of it? It was all one thing to me. God had
authority because he was God. Man had authority because he was man. You
cannot prove that God is better than a man; nor can you prove that a man
is better than a horse. Why permit any ordinary thing? Why do you let a
horse be saddled?"

"Some modern thinkers disapprove of it," said Turnbull a little
doubtfully.

"I know," said MacIan grimly; "that man who talked about love, for
instance."

Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he said: "We seem to be talking
in a kind of shorthand; but I won't pretend not to understand you. What
you mean is this: that you learnt about all your saints and angels at
the same time as you learnt about common morality, from the same people,
in the same way. And you mean to say that if one may be disputed, so
may the other. Well, let that pass for the moment. But let me ask you
a question in turn. Did not this system of yours, which you swallowed
whole, contain all sorts of things that were merely local, the respect
for the chief of your clan, or such things; the village ghost, the
family feud, or what not? Did you not take in those things, too, along
with your theology?"

MacIan stared along the dim village road, down which the last straggler
from the inn was trailing his way.

"What you say is not unreasonable," he said. "But it is not quite true.
The distinction between the chief and us did exist; but it was never
anything like the distinction between the human and the divine, or
the human and the animal. It was more like the distinction between one
animal and another. But----"

"Well?" said Turnbull.

MacIan was silent.

"Go on," repeated Turnbull; "what's the matter with you? What are you
staring at?"

"I am staring," said MacIan at last, "at that which shall judge us
both."

"Oh, yes," said Turnbull in a tired way, "I suppose you mean God."

"No, I don't," said MacIan, shaking his head. "I mean him."

And he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing down the road.

"What do you mean?" asked the atheist.

"I mean him," repeated MacIan with emphasis. "He goes out in the early
dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. Then he comes back and drinks ale,
and then he sings a song. All your philosophies and political systems
are young compared to him. All your hoary cathedrals, yes, even the
Eternal Church on earth is new compared to him. The most mouldering gods
in the British Museum are new facts beside him. It is he who in the end
shall judge us all."

And MacIan rose to his feet with a vague excitement.

"What are you going to do?"

"I am going to ask him," cried MacIan, "which of us is right."

Turnbull broke into a kind of laugh. "Ask that intoxicated
turnip-eater----" he began.

"Yes--which of us is right," cried MacIan violently. "Oh, you have long
words and I have long words; and I talk of every man being the image of
God; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to
govern. But if every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an
enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man
one meets is always man. Let us catch him up."

And in gigantic strides the long, lean Highlander whirled away into the
grey twilight, Turnbull following with a good-humoured oath.

The track of the rustic was easy to follow, even in the faltering
dark; for he was enlivening his wavering walk with song. It was an
interminable poem, beginning with some unspecified King William, who (it
appeared) lived in London town and who after the second rise vanished
rather abruptly from the train of thought. The rest was almost entirely
about beer and was thick with local topography of a quite unrecognizable
kind. The singer's step was neither very rapid, nor, indeed,
exceptionally secure; so the song grew louder and louder and the two
soon overtook him.

He was a man elderly or rather of any age, with lean grey hair and a
lean red face, but with that remarkable rustic physiognomy in which it
seems that all the features stand out independently from the face; the
rugged red nose going out like a limb; the bleared blue eyes standing
out like signals.

He gave them greeting with the elaborate urbanity of the slightly
intoxicated. MacIan, who was vibrating with one of his silent,
violent decisions, opened the question without delay. He explained the
philosophic position in words as short and simple as possible. But
the singular old man with the lank red face seemed to think uncommonly
little of the short words. He fixed with a fierce affection upon one or
two of the long ones.

"Atheists!" he repeated with luxurious scorn. "Atheists! I know their
sort, master. Atheists! Don't talk to me about 'un. Atheists!"

The grounds of his disdain seemed a little dark and confused; but they
were evidently sufficient. MacIan resumed in some encouragement:

"You think as I do, I hope; you think that a man should be connected
with the Church; with the common Christian----"

The old man extended a quivering stick in the direction of a distant
hill.

"There's the church," he said thickly. "Grassley old church that is.
Pulled down it was, in the old squire's time, and----"

"I mean," explained MacIan elaborately, "that you think that there
should be someone typifying religion, a priest----"

"Priests!" said the old man with sudden passion. "Priests! I know
'un. What they want in England? That's what I say. What they want in
England?"

"They want you," said MacIan.

"Quite so," said Turnbull, "and me; but they won't get us. MacIan, your
attempt on the primitive innocence does not seem very successful. Let
me try. What you want, my friend, is your rights. You don't want any
priests or churches. A vote, a right to speak is what you----"

"Who says I a'n't got a right to speak?" said the old man, facing round
in an irrational frenzy. "I got a right to speak. I'm a man, I am. I
don't want no votin' nor priests. I say a man's a man; that's what I
say. If a man a'n't a man, what is he? That's what I say, if a man a'n't
a man, what is he? When I sees a man, I sez 'e's a man."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, "a citizen."

"I say he's a man," said the rustic furiously, stopping and striking his
stick on the ground. "Not a city or owt else. He's a man."

"You're perfectly right," said the sudden voice of MacIan, falling like
a sword. "And you have kept close to something the whole world of today
tries to forget."

"Good night."

And the old man went on wildly singing into the night.

"A jolly old creature," said Turnbull; "he didn't seem able to get much
beyond that fact that a man is a man."

"Has anybody got beyond it?" asked MacIan.

Turnbull looked at him curiously. "Are you turning an agnostic?" he
asked.

"Oh, you do not understand!" cried out MacIan. "We Catholics are all
agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realizing
that man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and
your Tolstoys have not even got so far."




VIII. AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT

Morning broke in bitter silver along the grey and level plain; and
almost as it did so Turnbull and MacIan came out of a low, scrubby wood
on to the empty and desolate flats. They had walked all night.

They had walked all night and talked all night also, and if the subject
had been capable of being exhausted they would have exhausted it.
Their long and changing argument had taken them through districts and
landscapes equally changing. They had discussed Haeckel upon hills so
high and steep that in spite of the coldness of the night it seemed as
if the stars might burn them. They had explained and re-explained
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in little white lanes walled in with
standing corn as with walls of gold. They had talked about Mr. Kensit
in dim and twinkling pine woods, amid the bewildering monotony of
the pines. And it was with the end of a long speech from MacIan,
passionately defending the practical achievements and the solid
prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that they came out upon the open
land.

MacIan had learnt much and thought more since he came out of the
cloudy hills of Arisaig. He had met many typical modern figures under
circumstances which were sharply symbolic; and, moreover, he had
absorbed the main modern atmosphere from the mere presence and chance
phrases of Turnbull, as such atmospheres can always be absorbed from the
presence and the phrases of any man of great mental vitality. He had at
last begun thoroughly to understand what are the grounds upon which the
mass of the modern world solidly disapprove of her creed; and he threw
himself into replying to them with a hot intellectual enjoyment.

"I begin to understand one or two of your dogmas, Mr. Turnbull," he had
said emphatically as they ploughed heavily up a wooded hill. "And every
one that I understand I deny. Take any one of them you like. You hold
that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed
on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history
than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own
which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly
what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we know
for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught
something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came
before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic
who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past
and find any habitation for yourself at all. I defy you to read
Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the
nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering
that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You
are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that
I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century
sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and
benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of
the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will
find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a
materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and
you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker,
with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy
Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before.
Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as
much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and
variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any
possibility--Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be
progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins
every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a
different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along
different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who
can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was
pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is
steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both
accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and
down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they
have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily
advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things,
it seems, that ever _can_ progress. The first is strictly physical
science. The second is the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically;
"and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable,"
answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical
generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be
surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of
science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all
surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and
discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them
had been made by monks. But the matter is irrelevant to my meaning. I
say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in
the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by
continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I
say that there _is_ only one example of it. And that is Us."

"With this enormous difference," said Turnbull, "that however elaborate
be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested.
Granted that it took millions of books I never read and millions of men
I never heard of to discover the electric light. Still I can see the
electric light. But I cannot see the supreme virtue which is the result
of all your theologies and sacraments."

"Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal," answered
MacIan. "Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always
sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art
the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the
Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us
with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it
was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The
Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the
times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer.
It keeps the key of a permanent virtue."

"Oh, I have heard all that!" said Turnbull with genial contempt. "I have
heard that Christianity keeps the key of virtue, and that if you read
Tom Paine you will cut your throat at Monte Carlo. It is such rubbish
that I am not even angry at it. You say that Christianity is the prop
of morals; but what more do you do? When a doctor attends you and could
poison you with a pinch of salt, do you ask whether he is a Christian?
You ask whether he is a gentleman, whether he is an M.D.--anything but
that. When a soldier enlists to die for his country or disgrace it, do
you ask whether he is a Christian? You are more likely to ask whether
he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. If you think your creed
essential to morals why do you not make it a test for these things?"

"We once did make it a test for these things," said MacIan smiling, "and
then you told us that we were imposing by force a faith unsupported
by argument. It seems rather hard that having first been told that our
creed must be false because we did use tests, we should now be told that
it must be false because we don't. But I notice that most anti-Christian
arguments are in the same inconsistent style."

"That is all very well as a debating-club answer," replied Turnbull
good-humouredly, "but the question still remains: Why don't you confine
yourself more to Christians if Christians are the only really good men?"

"Who talked of such folly?" asked MacIan disdainfully. "Do you suppose
that the Catholic Church ever held that Christians were the only good
men? Why, the Catholics of the Catholic Middle Ages talked about the
virtues of all the virtuous Pagans until humanity was sick of the
subject. No, if you really want to know what we mean when we say that
Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church
is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make
it something more than a fashion. The thing is so plain and historical
that I hardly think you will ever deny it. You cannot deny that it is
perfectly possible that tomorrow morning, in Ireland or in Italy, there
might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way
as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well, now take the other types of human
virtue; many of them splendid. The English gentleman of Elizabeth was
chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still here in this meadow
and _be_ an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of
the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life,
was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an
austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of
revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon.
And so it is and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down
Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire
the London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the
British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of
his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other;
perhaps merely that he is a gentleman when he obviously is not. Those
names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last?
Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last
for ever. What will remain? I will tell you. The Catholic Saint will
remain."

"And suppose I don't like him?" said Turnbull.

"On my theory the question is rather whether he will like you: or
more probably whether he will ever have heard of you. But I grant the
reasonableness of your query. You have a right, if you speak as the
ordinary man, to ask if you will like the saint. But as the ordinary man
you do like him. You revel in him. If you dislike him it is not because
you are a nice ordinary man, but because you are (if you will excuse me)
a sophisticated prig of a Fleet Street editor. That is just the funny
part of it. The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues,
however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired
most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You
complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did
nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity;
the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of
virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your
quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has
_achieved_ an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece
of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,
running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal
itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name
means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the
virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the
lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and
who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from the
most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who wrote the
_Virgin Martyr_, from Shakespeare, who wrote _Measure for Measure_--if
you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience, does it never
strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?"

"No," answered Turnbull; "I trust that I am sufficiently fair-minded to
canvass and consider the idea; but having considered it, I think Fleet
Street is right, yes--even if the Parthenon is wrong. I think that as
the world goes on new psychological atmospheres are generated, and in
these atmospheres it is possible to find delicacies and combinations
which in other times would have to be represented by some ruder symbol.
Every man feels the need of some element of purity in sex; perhaps
they can only typify purity as the absence of sex. You will laugh if I
suggest that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which
a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir
Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such
atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation
of children."

"Quite so," replied MacIan with a singular smile. "It has been very well
put by one of the brightest of your young authors, who said: 'Unless
you become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of
heaven.' But you are quite right; there is a modern worship of children.
And what, I ask you, is this modern worship of children? What, in the
name of all the angels and devils, is it except a worship of virginity?
Why should anyone worship a thing merely because it is small or
immature? No; you have tried to escape from this thing, and the very
thing you point to as the goal of your escape is only the thing again.
Am I wrong in saying that these things seem to be eternal?"

And it was with these words that they came in sight of the great
plains. They went a little way in silence, and then James Turnbull said
suddenly, "But I _cannot_ believe in the thing." MacIan answered nothing
to the speech; perhaps it is unanswerable. And indeed they scarcely
spoke another word to each other all that day.




IX. THE STRANGE LADY

Moonrise with a great and growing moon opened over all those flats,
making them seem flatter and larger than they were, turning them to a
lake of blue light. The two companions trudged across the moonlit plain
for half an hour in full silence. Then MacIan stopped suddenly and
planted his sword-point in the ground like one who plants his tent-pole
for the night. Leaving it standing there, he clutched his black-haired
skull with his great claws of hands, as was his custom when forcing the
pace of his brain. Then his hands dropped again and he spoke.

"I'm sure you're thinking the same as I am," he said; "how long are we
to be on this damned seesaw?"

The other did not answer, but his silence seemed somehow solid as
assent; and MacIan went on conversationally. Neither noticed that both
had instinctively stood still before the sign of the fixed and standing
sword.

"It is hard to guess what God means in this business. But he means
something--or the other thing, or both. Whenever we have tried to
fight each other something has stopped us. Whenever we have tried to be
reconciled to each other, something has stopped us again. By the run
of our luck we have never had time to be either friends or enemies.
Something always jumped out of the bushes."

Turnbull nodded gravely and glanced round at the huge and hedgeless
meadow which fell away towards the horizon into a glimmering high road.

"Nothing will jump out of bushes here anyhow," he said.

"That is what I meant," said MacIan, and stared steadily at the heavy
hilt of his standing sword, which in the slight wind swayed on its
tempered steel like some huge thistle on its stalk.

"That is what I meant; we are quite alone here. I have not heard a
horse-hoof or a footstep or the hoot of a train for miles. So I think we
might stop here and ask for a miracle."

"Oh! might we?" said the atheistic editor with a sort of gusto of
disgust.

"I beg your pardon," said MacIan, meekly. "I forgot your prejudices."
He eyed the wind-swung sword-hilt in sad meditation and resumed: "What
I mean is, we might find out in this quiet place whether there really is
any fate or any commandment against our enterprise. I will engage on my
side, like Elijah, to accept a test from heaven. Turnbull, let us draw
swords here in this moonlight and this monstrous solitude. And if here
in this moonlight and solitude there happens anything to interrupt
us--if it be lightning striking our sword-blades or a rabbit running
under our legs--I will take it as a sign from God and we will shake
hands for ever."

Turnbull's mouth twitched in angry humour under his red moustache. He
said: "I will wait for signs from God until I have any signs of His
existence; but God--or Fate--forbid that a man of scientific culture
should refuse any kind of experiment."

"Very well, then," said MacIan, shortly. "We are more quiet here than
anywhere else; let us engage." And he plucked his sword-point out of the
turf.

Turnbull regarded him for a second and a half with a baffling visage
almost black against the moonrise; then his hand made a sharp movement
to his hip and his sword shone in the moon.

As old chess-players open every game with established gambits, they
opened with a thrust and parry, orthodox and even frankly ineffectual.
But in MacIan's soul more formless storms were gathering, and he made
a lunge or two so savage as first to surprise and then to enrage his
opponent. Turnbull ground his teeth, kept his temper, and waiting for
the third lunge, and the worst, had almost spitted the lunger when a
shrill, small cry came from behind him, a cry such as is not made by any
of the beasts that perish.

Turnbull must have been more superstitious than he knew, for he stopped
in the act of going forward. MacIan was brazenly superstitious, and he
dropped his sword. After all, he had challenged the universe to send
an interruption; and this was an interruption, whatever else it was. An
instant afterwards the sharp, weak cry was repeated. This time it was
certain that it was human and that it was female.

MacIan stood rolling those great blue Gaelic eyes that contrasted with
his dark hair. "It is the voice of God," he said again and again.

"God hasn't got much of a voice," said Turnbull, who snatched at every
chance of cheap profanity. "As a matter of fact, MacIan, it isn't the
voice of God, but it's something a jolly sight more important--it is the
voice of man--or rather of woman. So I think we'd better scoot in its
direction."

MacIan snatched up his fallen weapon without a word, and the two raced
away towards that part of the distant road from which the cry was now
constantly renewed.

They had to run over a curve of country that looked smooth but was very
rough; a neglected field which they soon found to be full of the tallest
grasses and the deepest rabbit-holes. Moreover, that great curve of the
countryside which looked so slow and gentle when you glanced over it,
proved to be highly precipitous when you scampered over it; and Turnbull
was twice nearly flung on his face. MacIan, though much heavier, avoided
such an overthrow only by having the quick and incalculable feet of the
mountaineer; but both of them may be said to have leapt off a low cliff
when they leapt into the road.

The moonlight lay on the white road with a more naked and electric glare
than on the grey-green upland, and though the scene which it revealed
was complicated, it was not difficult to get its first features at a
glance.

A small but very neat black-and-yellow motor-car was standing stolidly,
slightly to the left of the road. A somewhat larger light-green
motor-car was tipped half-way into a ditch on the same side, and four
flushed and staggering men in evening dress were tipped out of it. Three
of them were standing about the road, giving their opinions to the
moon with vague but echoing violence. The fourth, however, had
already advanced on the chauffeur of the black-and-yellow car, and was
threatening him with a stick. The chauffeur had risen to defend himself.
By his side sat a young lady.

She was sitting bolt upright, a slender and rigid figure gripping the
sides of her seat, and her first few cries had ceased. She was clad in
close-fitting dark costume, a mass of warm brown hair went out in two
wings or waves on each side of her forehead; and even at that distance
it could be seen that her profile was of the aquiline and eager sort,
like a young falcon hardly free of the nest.

Turnbull had concealed in him somewhere a fund of common sense and
knowledge of the world of which he himself and his best friends were
hardly aware. He was one of those who take in much of the shows of
things absent-mindedly, and in an irrelevant reverie. As he stood at
the door of his editorial shop on Ludgate Hill and meditated on the
non-existence of God, he silently absorbed a good deal of varied
knowledge about the existence of men. He had come to know types by
instinct and dilemmas with a glance; he saw the crux of the situation in
the road, and what he saw made him redouble his pace.

He knew that the men were rich; he knew that they were drunk; and he
knew, what was worst of all, that they were fundamentally frightened.
And he knew this also, that no common ruffian (such as attacks ladies
in novels) is ever so savage and ruthless as a coarse kind of gentleman
when he is really alarmed. The reason is not recondite; it is simply
because the police-court is not such a menacing novelty to the poor
ruffian as it is to the rich. When they came within hail and heard the
voices, they confirmed all Turnbull's anticipations. The man in the
middle of the road was shouting in a hoarse and groggy voice that the
chauffeur had smashed their car on purpose; that they must get to the
Cri that evening, and that he would jolly well have to take them there.
The chauffeur had mildly objected that he was driving a lady. "Oh! we'll
take care of the lady," said the red-faced young man, and went off into
gurgling and almost senile laughter.

By the time the two champions came up, things had grown more serious.
The intoxication of the man talking to the chauffeur had taken one of
its perverse and catlike jumps into mere screaming spite and rage. He
lifted his stick and struck at the chauffeur, who caught hold of it, and
the drunkard fell backwards, dragging him out of his seat on the car.
Another of the rowdies rushed forward booing in idiot excitement, fell
over the chauffeur, and, either by accident or design, kicked him as he
lay. The drunkard got to his feet again; but the chauffeur did not.

The man who had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or
cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and murmuring
words of inconsequent self-justification, making gestures with his hands
as if he were arguing with somebody. But the other three, with a mere
whoop and howl of victory, were boarding the car on three sides at once.
It was exactly at this moment that Turnbull fell among them like one
fallen from the sky. He tore one of the climbers backward by the collar,
and with a hearty push sent him staggering over into the ditch upon his
nose. One of the remaining two, who was too far gone to notice anything,
continued to clamber ineffectually over the high back of the car,
kicking and pouring forth a rivulet of soliloquy. But the other dropped
at the interruption, turned upon Turnbull and began a battering bout
of fisticuffs. At the same moment the man crawled out of the ditch in a
masquerade of mud and rushed at his old enemy from behind. The whole
had not taken a second; and an instant after MacIan was in the midst of
them.

Turnbull had tossed away his sheathed sword, greatly preferring his
hands, except in the avowed etiquette of the duel; for he had learnt to
use his hands in the old street-battles of Bradlaugh. But to MacIan the
sword even sheathed was a more natural weapon, and he laid about him
on all sides with it as with a stick. The man who had the walking-stick
found his blows parried with promptitude; and a second after, to his
great astonishment, found his own stick fly up in the air as by a
conjuring trick, with a turn of the swordsman's wrist. Another of the
revellers picked the stick out of the ditch and ran in upon MacIan,
calling to his companion to assist him.

"I haven't got a stick," grumbled the disarmed man, and looked vaguely
about the ditch.

"Perhaps," said MacIan, politely, "you would like this one." With the
word the drunkard found his hand that had grasped the stick suddenly
twisted and empty; and the stick lay at the feet of his companion on the
other side of the road. MacIan felt a faint stir behind him; the girl
had risen to her feet and was leaning forward to stare at the fighters.
Turnbull was still engaged in countering and pommelling with the third
young man. The fourth young man was still engaged with himself, kicking
his legs in helpless rotation on the back of the car and talking with
melodious rationality.

At length Turnbull's opponent began to back before the battery of his
heavy hands, still fighting, for he was the soberest and boldest of the
four. If these are annals of military glory, it is due to him to say
that he need not have abandoned the conflict; only that as he backed
to the edge of the ditch his foot caught in a loop of grass and he
went over in a flat and comfortable position from which it took him a
considerable time to rise. By the time he had risen, Turnbull had come
to the rescue of MacIan, who was at bay but belabouring his two enemies
handsomely. The sight of the liberated reserve was to them like that
of Blucher at Waterloo; the two set off at a sullen trot down the road,
leaving even the walking-stick lying behind them in the moonlight.
MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car
like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon. Then he
approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner
and pulled off his cap.

For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and
MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a
wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet staringly
significant, like a picture. The white moonlight on the road, when he
was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with
snow. The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude
impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen. And
he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the
eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an
overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so
long been out of the picture.

In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot.
He had never really looked at a human being before in his life. He saw
her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves; then that
there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair. He might, perhaps,
be excused for this hungry attention. He had prayed that some sign might
come from heaven; and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the
conclusion that his one did. The lady's instantaneous arrest of speech
might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned with
the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she who remembered
herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror:

"Oh, that poor, poor man!"

They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull, with his recovered
sword under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into
the car. He was only stunned and was slowly awakening, feebly waving his
left arm.

The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly
towards them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many of his
school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the
world. "He's all right," said he; "he's quite safe. But I'm afraid he
won't be able to drive the car for half an hour or so."

"I can drive the car," said the young woman in the fur cap with stony
practicability.

"Oh, in that case," began MacIan, uneasily; and that paralysing shyness
which is a part of romance induced him to make a backward movement as
if leaving her to herself. But Turnbull was more rational than he, being
more indifferent.

"I don't think you ought to drive home alone, ma'am," he said, gruffly.
"There seem to be a lot of rowdy parties along this road, and the man
will be no use for an hour. If you will tell us where you are going, we
will see you safely there and say good night."

The young lady exhibited all the abrupt disturbance of a person who is
not commonly disturbed. She said almost sharply and yet with evident
sincerity: "Of course I am awfully grateful to you for all you've
done--and there's plenty of room if you'll come in."

Turnbull, with the complete innocence of an absolutely sound motive,
immediately jumped into the car; but the girl cast an eye at MacIan, who
stood in the road for an instant as if rooted like a tree. Then he also
tumbled his long legs into the tonneau, having that sense of degradedly
diving into heaven which so many have known in so many human houses when
they consented to stop to tea or were allowed to stop to supper. The
slowly reviving chauffeur was set in the back seat; Turnbull and MacIan
had fallen into the middle one; the lady with a steely coolness had
taken the driver's seat and all the handles of that headlong machine. A
moment afterwards the engine started, with a throb and leap unfamiliar
to Turnbull, who had only once been in a motor during a general
election, and utterly unknown to MacIan, who in his present mood thought
it was the end of the world. Almost at the same instant that the car
plucked itself out of the mud and whipped away up the road, the man who
had been flung into the ditch rose waveringly to his feet. When he saw
the car escaping he ran after it and shouted something which, owing
to the increasing distance, could not be heard. It is awful to reflect
that, if his remark was valuable, it is quite lost to the world.

The car shot on up and down the shining moonlit lanes, and there was no
sound in it except the occasional click or catch of its machinery; for
through some cause or other no soul inside it could think of a word to
say. The lady symbolized her feelings, whatever they were, by urging the
machine faster and faster until scattered woodlands went by them in
one black blotch and heavy hills and valleys seemed to ripple under the
wheels like mere waves. A little while afterwards this mood seemed to
slacken and she fell into a more ordinary pace; but still she did not
speak. Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case
than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight; but something
indescribable made him also relapse into silence.

All this time MacIan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some
fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference between this
experience and common experiences was analogous to that between waking
life and a dream. Yet he did not feel in the least as if he were
dreaming; rather the other way; as waking was more actual than dreaming,
so this seemed by another degree more actual than waking itself. But it
was another life altogether, like a cosmos with a new dimension.

He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation: into the midst
of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering responsibilities and
almost tragic joys which he had as yet had no time to examine. Heaven
had not merely sent him a message; Heaven itself had opened around him
and given him an hour of its own ancient and star-shattering energy.
He had never felt so much alive before; and yet he was like a man in a
trance. And if you had asked him on what his throbbing happiness hung,
he could only have told you that it hung on four or five visible facts,
as a curtain hangs on four of five fixed nails. The fact that the lady
had a little fur at her throat; the fact that the curve of her cheek
was a low and lean curve and that the moonlight caught the height of
her cheek-bone; the fact that her hands were small but heavily gloved as
they gripped the steering-wheel; the fact that a white witch light was
on the road; the fact that the brisk breeze of their passage stirred and
fluttered a little not only the brown hair of her head but the black
fur on her cap. All these facts were to him certain and incredible, like
sacraments.

When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung across
the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car critically but
let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a piece or two of pewter
ornament on his blue uniform; and as they went by they knew it was a
sergeant of police. Three hundred yards farther on another policeman
stepped out into the road as if to stop them, then seemed to doubt his
own authority and stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the
rich; and this police suspicion (under which all the poor live day and
night) stung her for the first time into speech.

"What can they mean?" she cried out in a kind of temper; "this car's
going like a snail."

There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said: "It is certainly very
odd, you are driving quietly enough."

"You are driving nobly," said MacIan, and his words (which had no
meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears.

They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet among the
many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager
policemen standing at a cross-road. As they passed, one of the policemen
shouted something to the others; but nothing else happened. Eight
hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car.

"My God, MacIan!" he called out, showing his first emotion of that
night. "I don't believe it's the pace; it couldn't be the pace. I
believe it's us."

MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his
companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.

"You may be right," he said at last; "if you are, I must tell her."

"I will tell the lady if you like," said Turnbull, with his unconquered
good temper.

"You!" said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment.
"Why should you--no, I must tell her, of course----"

And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.

"I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble," he
said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said
to this particular person in the long gloves. "The fact is," he resumed,
desperately, "the fact is, we are being chased by the police." Then
the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan's embarrassment; for the
fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of
the compass.

"We are chased by the police," repeated MacIan, vigorously; then he
added, as if beginning an explanation, "You see, I am a Catholic."

The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to necessitate a
new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheek-bone; but the
head did not turn.

"You see," began MacIan, again blunderingly, "this gentleman wrote in
his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we
agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a little time ago--but that
was before we saw you."

The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen; and
it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him. Her Norman
nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stalk of her neck and
body.

When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly
against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected
the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so
much as this.

"You see," said the stumbling spokesman, "I was angry with him when he
insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but
the police are all trying to stop it."

Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile; and
it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: "I thought people in
our time were supposed to respect each other's religion."

Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall back on
the obvious answer: "But what about a man's irreligion?" The face only
answered: "Well, you ought to be more broadminded."

If anyone else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have
snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he seemed
knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were
rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything
that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and
virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was
at present soaked in ethics. He could have applied moral terms to the
material objects of her environment. If someone had spoken of
"her generous ribbon" or "her chivalrous gloves" or "her merciful
shoe-buckle," it would not have seemed to him nonsense.

He was silent, and the girl went on in a lower key as if she were
momentarily softened and a little saddened also. "It won't do, you
know," she said; "you can't find out the truth in that way. There are
such heaps of churches and people thinking different things nowadays,
and they all think they are right. My uncle was a Swedenborgian."

MacIan sat with bowed head, listening hungrily to her voice but hardly
to her words, and seeing his great world drama grow smaller and smaller
before his eyes till it was no bigger than a child's toy theatre.

"The time's gone by for all that," she went on; "you can't find out the
real thing like that--if there is really anything to find----" and
she sighed rather drearily; for, like many of the women of our wealthy
class, she was old and broken in thought, though young and clean enough
in her emotions.

"Our object," said Turnbull, shortly, "is to make an effective
demonstration"; and after that word, MacIan looked at his vision again
and found it smaller than ever.

"It would be in the newspapers, of course," said the girl. "People read
the newspapers, but they don't believe them, or anything else, I think."
And she sighed again.

She drove in silence a third of a mile before she added, as if
completing the sentence: "Anyhow, the whole thing's quite absurd."

"I don't think," began Turnbull, "that you quite realize----Hullo!
hullo--hullo--what's this?"

The amateur chauffeur had been forced to bring the car to a staggering
stoppage, for a file of fat, blue policemen made a wall across the way.
A sergeant came to the side and touched his peaked cap to the lady.

"Beg your pardon, miss," he said with some embarrassment, for he knew
her for a daughter of a dominant house, "but we have reason to believe
that the gentlemen in your car are----" and he hesitated for a polite
phrase.

"I am Evan MacIan," said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of
gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy.

"Yes, we will get out, sergeant," said Turnbull, more easily; "my name
is James Turnbull. We must not incommode the lady."

"What are you taking them up for?" asked the young woman, looking
straight in front of her along the road.

"It's under the new act," said the sergeant, almost apologetically.
"Incurable disturbers of the peace."

"What will happen to them?" she asked, with the same frigid clearness.

"Westgate Adult Reformatory," he replied, briefly.

"Until when?"

"Until they are cured," said the official.

"Very well, sergeant," said the young lady, with a sort of tired common
sense. "I am sure I don't want to protect criminals or go against
the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a
considerable service; you won't mind drawing your men a little farther
off while I say good night to them. Men like that always misunderstand."

The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere
idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to refuse one
of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage. The police fell back
to a few yards behind the car. Turnbull took up the two swords that were
their only luggage; the swords that, after so many half duels, they were
now to surrender at last. MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain
at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the
handle and flung open the door to get out.

But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is dangerous to
jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going
at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or
so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the
machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape
like a greyhound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped
so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they
could see the sergeant furiously making notes.

The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite
crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another. Nor did
MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have
stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black dot in the distance
sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again
at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt
upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind. Avenues of
poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures
in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through
sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their
sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an
outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them
a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them
with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on
the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still
MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had
flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of
dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and
gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred
an inch.

After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over
and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his
throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver
sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down, and the whole
darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of
beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as
if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess--a mere
alteration in everything. They looked at the sky and it seemed as dark
as ever; then they saw the black shape of a tower or tree against it and
knew that it was already grey. Save that they were driving southward and
had certainly passed the longitude of London, they knew nothing of their
direction; but Turnbull, who had spent a year on the Hampshire coast in
his youth, began to recognize the unmistakable but quite indescribable
villages of the English south. Then a white witch fire began to burn
between the black stems of the fir-trees; and, like so many things in
nature, though not in books on evolution, the daybreak, when it did
come, came much quicker than one would think. The gloomy heavens were
ripped up and rolled away like a scroll, revealing splendours, as the
car went roaring up the curve of a great hill; and above them and black
against the broadening light, there stood one of those crouching and
fantastic trees that are first signals of the sea.




X. THE SWORDS REJOINED

As they came over the hill and down on the other side of it, it is not
too much to say that the whole universe of God opened over them and
under them, like a thing unfolding to five times its size. Almost under
their feet opened the enormous sea, at the bottom of a steep valley
which fell down into a bay; and the sea under their feet blazed at them
almost as lustrous and almost as empty as the sky. The sunrise opened
above them like some cosmic explosion, shining and shattering and yet
silent; as if the world were blown to pieces without a sound. Round
the rays of the victorious sun swept a sort of rainbow of confused and
conquered colours--brown and blue and green and flaming rose-colour;
as though gold were driving before it all the colours of the world. The
lines of the landscape down which they sped, were the simple, strict,
yet swerving, lines of a rushing river; so that it was almost as if they
were being sucked down in a huge still whirlpool. Turnbull had some such
feeling, for he spoke for the first time for many hours.

"If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff," he said.

"How glorious!" said MacIan.

When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of that
landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side of
the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yet
astonishingly, stopped. A belated light was burning in the broad morning
in the window of a sort of lodge- or gate-keepers' cottage; and the girl
stood up in the car and turned her splendid face to the sun.

Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born amid
sound and speed. He wavered on his long legs as he stood up; he pulled
himself together, and the only consequence was that he trembled from
head to foot. Turnbull had already opened the door on his side and
jumped out.

The moment he had done so the strange young woman had one more mad
movement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther. Then she
got out with an almost cruel coolness and began pulling off her long
gloves and almost whistling.

"You can leave me here," she said, quite casually, as if they had met
five minutes before. "That is the lodge of my father's place. Please
come in, if you like--but I understood that you had some business."

Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely; he was far
too much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigue
and that its austerity was agony. He was even fool enough to ask it a
question. "Why did you save us?" he said, quite humbly.

The girl tore off one of her gloves, as if she were tearing off her
hand. "Oh, I don't know," she said, bitterly. "Now I come to think of
it, I can't imagine."

Evan's thoughts, that had been piled up to the morning star, abruptly
let him down with a crash into the very cellars of the emotional
universe. He remained in a stunned silence for a long time; and that, if
he had only known, was the wisest thing that he could possibly do at the
moment.

Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for when
the extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more friendly and
apologetic. "I'm not really ungrateful," she said; "it was very good of
you to save me from those men."

"But why?" repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, "why did you save us
from the other men? I mean the policemen?"

The girl's great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at once
final desperation and the loosening of some private and passionate
reserve.

"Oh, God knows!" she cried. "God knows that if there is a God He has
turned His big back on everything. God knows I have had no pleasure in
my life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money.
And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do
them and it's all drivel. They want you to do work among the poor; which
means reading Ruskin and feeling self-righteous in the best room in
a poor tenement. Or to help some cause or other, which always means
bundling people out of crooked houses, in which they've always lived,
into straight houses, in which they often die. And all the time you have
inside only the horrid irony of your own empty head and empty heart. I
am to give to the unfortunate, when my whole misfortune is that I have
nothing to give. I am to teach, when I believe nothing at all that I was
taught. I am to save the children from death, and I am not even certain
that I should not be better dead. I suppose if I actually saw a child
drowning I should save it. But that would be from the same motive from
which I have saved you, or destroyed you, whichever it is that I have
done."

"What was the motive?" asked Evan, in a low voice.

"My motive is too big for my mind," answered the girl.

Then, after a pause, as she stared with a rising colour at the
glittering sea, she said: "It can't be described, and yet I am trying to
describe it. It seems to me not only that I am unhappy, but that there
is no way of being happy. Father is not happy, though he is a Member of
Parliament----" She paused a moment and added with a ghost of a smile:
"Nor Aunt Mabel, though a man from India has told her the secret of all
creeds. But I may be wrong; there may be a way out. And for one stark,
insane second, I felt that, after all, you had got the way out and that
was why the world hated you. You see, if there were a way out, it would
be sure to be something that looked very queer."

Evan put his hand to his forehead and began stumblingly: "Yes, I suppose
we do seem----"

"Oh, yes, you look queer enough," she said, with ringing sincerity.
"You'll be all the better for a wash and brush up."

"You forget our business, madam," said Evan, in a shaking voice; "we
have no concern but to kill each other."

"Well, I shouldn't be killed looking like that if I were you," she
replied, with inhuman honesty.

Evan stood and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came
the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an
instant and said in a low tone on which he lived for days and nights:

"Don't you understand that I did not dare to stop you? What you are
doing is so mad that it may be quite true. Somehow one can never really
manage to be an atheist."

Turnbull stood staring at the sea; but his shoulders showed that he
heard, and after one minute he turned his head. But the girl had only
brushed Evan's hand with hers and had fled up the dark alley by the
lodge gate.

Evan stood rooted upon the road, literally like some heavy statue hewn
there in the age of the Druids. It seemed impossible that he should
ever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last,
after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped him
impatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away from
him with a repulsion which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor the
dread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation from
something from which he was now sundered as by the sword of God. He did
not hate the atheist; it is possible that he loved him. But Turnbull
was now something more dreadful than an enemy: he was a thing sealed
and devoted--a thing now hopelessly doomed to be either a corpse or an
executioner.

"What is the matter with you?" asked Turnbull, with his hearty hand
still in the air; and yet he knew more about it than his innocent action
would allow.

"James," said Evan, speaking like one under strong bodily pain, "I asked
for God's answer and I have got it--got it in my vitals. He knows how
weak I am, and that I might forget the peril of the faith, forget the
face of Our Lady--yes, even with your blow upon her cheek. But the
honour of this earth has just this about it, that it can make a man's
heart like iron. I am from the Lords of the Isles and I dare not be a
mere deserter. Therefore, God has tied me by the chain of my worldly
place and word, and there is nothing but fighting now."

"I think I understand you," said Turnbull, "but you say everything tail
foremost."

"She wants us to do it," said Evan, in a voice crushed with passion.
"She has hurt herself so that we might do it. She has left her good
name and her good sleep and all her habits and dignity flung away on the
other side of England in the hope that she may hear of us and that we
have broken some hole into heaven."

"I thought I knew what you mean," said Turnbull, biting his beard; "it
does seem as if we ought to do something after all she has done this
night."

"I never liked you so much before," said MacIan, in bitter sorrow.

As he spoke, three solemn footmen came out of the lodge gate and
assembled to assist the chauffeur to his room. The mere sight of them
made the two wanderers flee as from a too frightful incongruity, and
before they knew where they were, they were well upon the grassy ledge
of England that overlooks the Channel. Evan said suddenly: "Will they
let me see her in heaven once in a thousand ages?" and addressed the
remark to the editor of _The Atheist_, as on which he would be likely or
qualified to answer. But no answer came; a silence sank between the two.

Turnbull strode sturdily to the edge of the cliff and looked out, his
companion following, somewhat more shaken by his recent agitation.

"If that's the view you take," said Turnbull, "and I don't say you are
wrong, I think I know where we shall be best off for the business. As it
happens, I know this part of the south coast pretty well. And unless I
am mistaken there's a way down the cliff just here which will land us on
a stretch of firm sand where no one is likely to follow us."

The Highlander made a gesture of assent and came also almost to the edge
of the precipice. The sunrise, which was broadening over sea and shore,
was one of those rare and splendid ones in which there seems to be no
mist or doubt, and nothing but a universal clarification more and more
complete. All the colours were transparent. It seemed like a triumphant
prophecy of some perfect world where everything being innocent will be
intelligible; a world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of
burning glass. Such a world is faintly though fiercely figured in the
coloured windows of Christian architecture. The sea that lay before
them was like a pavement of emerald, bright and almost brittle; the
sky against which its strict horizon hung was almost absolutely white,
except that close to the sky line, like scarlet braids on the hem of a
garment, lay strings of flaky cloud of so gleaming and gorgeous a red
that they seemed cut out of some strange blood-red celestial metal, of
which the mere gold of this earth is but a drab yellow imitation.

"The hand of Heaven is still pointing," muttered the man of superstition
to himself. "And now it is a blood-red hand."

The cool voice of his companion cut in upon his monologue, calling to
him from a little farther along the cliff, to tell him that he had found
the ladder of descent. It began as a steep and somewhat greasy path,
which then tumbled down twenty or thirty feet in the form of a fall of
rough stone steps. After that, there was a rather awkward drop on to
a ledge of stone and then the journey was undertaken easily and even
elegantly by the remains of an ornamental staircase, such as might have
belonged to some long-disused watering-place. All the time that the
two travellers sank from stage to stage of this downward journey, there
closed over their heads living bridges and caverns of the most varied
foliage, all of which grew greener, redder, or more golden, in the
growing sunlight of the morning. Life, too, of the more moving sort rose
at the sun on every side of them. Birds whirred and fluttered in the
undergrowth, as if imprisoned in green cages. Other birds were shaken
up in great clouds from the tree-tops, as if they were blossoms detached
and scattered up to heaven. Animals which Turnbull was too much of a
Londoner and MacIan too much of a Northerner to know, slipped by among
the tangle or ran pattering up the tree-trunks. Both the men, according
to their several creeds, felt the full thunder of the psalm of life as
they had never heard it before; MacIan felt God the Father, benignant
in all His energies, and Turnbull that ultimate anonymous energy, that
_Natura Naturans_, which is the whole theme of Lucretius. It was down
this clamorous ladder of life that they went down to die.

They broke out upon a brown semicircle of sand, so free from human
imprint as to justify Turnbull's profession. They strode out upon
it, stuck their swords in the sand, and had a pause too important
for speech. Turnbull eyed the coast curiously for a moment, like one
awakening memories of childhood; then he said abruptly, like a man
remembering somebody's name: "But, of course, we shall be better off
still round the corner of Cragness Point; nobody ever comes there at
all." And picking up his sword again, he began striding towards a big
bluff of the rocks which stood out upon their left. MacIan followed him
round the corner and found himself in what was certainly an even finer
fencing court, of flat, firm sand, enclosed on three sides by white
walls of rock, and on the fourth by the green wall of the advancing sea.

"We are quite safe here," said Turnbull, and, to the other's surprise,
flung himself down, sitting on the brown beach.

"You see, I was brought up near here," he explained. "I was sent from
Scotland to stop with my aunt. It is highly probable that I may die
here. Do you mind if I light a pipe?"

"Of course, do whatever you like," said MacIan, with a choking voice,
and he went and walked alone by himself along the wet, glistening sands.

Ten minutes afterwards he came back again, white with his own whirlwind
of emotions; Turnbull was quite cheerful and was knocking out the end of
his pipe.

"You see, we have to do it," said MacIan. "She tied us to it."

"Of course, my dear fellow," said the other, and leapt up as lightly as
a monkey.

They took their places gravely in the very centre of the great square of
sand, as if they had thousands of spectators. Before saluting, MacIan,
who, being a mystic, was one inch nearer to Nature, cast his eye round
the huge framework of their heroic folly. The three walls of rock all
leant a little outward, though at various angles; but this impression
was exaggerated in the direction of the incredible by the heavy load of
living trees and thickets which each wall wore on its top like a
huge shock of hair. On all that luxurious crest of life the risen and
victorious sun was beating, burnishing it all like gold, and every bird
that rose with that sunrise caught a light like a star upon it like the
dove of the Holy Spirit. Imaginative life had never so much crowded upon
MacIan. He felt that he could write whole books about the feelings of a
single bird. He felt that for two centuries he would not tire of being
a rabbit. He was in the Palace of Life, of which the very tapestries
and curtains were alive. Then he recovered himself, and remembered his
affairs. Both men saluted, and iron rang upon iron. It was exactly
at the same moment that he realized that his enemy's left ankle was
encircled with a ring of salt water that had crept up to his feet.

"What is the matter?" said Turnbull, stopping an instant, for he had
grown used to every movement of his extraordinary fellow-traveller's
face.

MacIan glanced again at that silver anklet of sea-water and then looked
beyond at the next promontory round which a deep sea was boiling and
leaping. Then he turned and looked back and saw heavy foam being shaken
up to heaven about the base of Cragness Point.

"The sea has cut us off," he said, curtly.

"I have noticed it," said Turnbull with equal sobriety. "What view do
you take of the development?"

Evan threw away his weapon, and, as his custom was, imprisoned his big
head in his hands. Then he let them fall and said: "Yes, I know what it
means; and I think it is the fairest thing. It is the finger of God--red
as blood--still pointing. But now it points to two graves."

There was a space filled with the sound of the sea, and then MacIan
spoke again in a voice pathetically reasonable: "You see, we both saved
her--and she told us both to fight--and it would not be just that either
should fail and fall alone, while the other----"

"You mean," said Turnbull, in a voice surprisingly soft and gentle,
"that there is something fine about fighting in a place where even the
conqueror must die?"

"Oh, you have got it right, you have got it right!" cried out Evan, in
an extraordinary childish ecstasy. "Oh, I'm sure that you really believe
in God!"

Turnbull answered not a word, but only took up his fallen sword.

For the third time Evan MacIan looked at those three sides of English
cliff hung with their noisy load of life. He had been at a loss to
understand the almost ironical magnificence of all those teeming
creatures and tropical colours and smells that smoked happily to heaven.
But now he knew that he was in the closed court of death and that all
the gates were sealed.

He drank in the last green and the last red and the last gold, those
unique and indescribable things of God, as a man drains good wine at the
bottom of his glass. Then he turned and saluted his enemy once more, and
the two stood up and fought till the foam flowed over their knees.

Then MacIan stepped backward suddenly with a splash and held up his
hand. "Turnbull!" he cried; "I can't help it--fair fighting is more even
than promises. And this is not fair fighting."

"What the deuce do you mean?" asked the other, staring.

"I've only just thought of it," cried Evan, brokenly. "We're very well
matched--it may go on a good time--the tide is coming up fast--and I'm
a foot and a half taller. You'll be washed away like seaweed before it's
above my breeches. I'll not fight foul for all the girls and angels in
the universe."

"Will you oblige me," said Turnbull, with staring grey eyes and a voice
of distinct and violent politeness; "will you oblige me by jolly well
minding your own business? Just you stand up and fight, and we'll see
who will be washed away like seaweed. You wanted to finish this fight
and you shall finish it, or I'll denounce you as a coward to the whole
of that assembled company."

Evan looked very doubtful and offered a somewhat wavering weapon; but
he was quickly brought back to his senses by his opponent's sword-point,
which shot past him, shaving his shoulder by a hair. By this time the
waves were well up Turnbull's thigh, and what was worse, they were
beginning to roll and break heavily around them.

MacIan parried this first lunge perfectly, the next less perfectly; the
third in all human probability he would not have parried at all; the
Christian champion would have been pinned like a butterfly, and the
atheistic champion left to drown like a rat, with such consolation as
his view of the cosmos afforded him. But just as Turnbull launched his
heaviest stroke, the sea, in which he stood up to his hips, launched
a yet heavier one. A wave breaking beyond the others smote him heavily
like a hammer of water. One leg gave way, he was swung round and sucked
into the retreating sea, still gripping his sword.

MacIan put his sword between his teeth and plunged after his
disappearing enemy. He had the sense of having the whole universe on top
of him as crest after crest struck him down. It seemed to him quite a
cosmic collapse, as if all the seven heavens were falling on him one
after the other. But he got hold of the atheist's left leg and he did
not let it go.

After some ten minutes of foam and frenzy, in which all the senses at
once seemed blasted by the sea, Evan found himself laboriously swimming
on a low, green swell, with the sword still in his teeth and the editor
of _The Atheist_ still under his arm. What he was going to do he had
not even the most glimmering idea; so he merely kept his grip and swam
somehow with one hand.

He ducked instinctively as there bulked above him a big, black wave,
much higher than any that he had seen. Then he saw that it was hardly
the shape of any possible wave. Then he saw that it was a fisherman's
boat, and, leaping upward, caught hold of the bow. The boat pitched
forward with its stern in the air for just as much time as was needed
to see that there was nobody in it. After a moment or two of desperate
clambering, however, there were two people in it, Mr. Evan MacIan,
panting and sweating, and Mr. James Turnbull, uncommonly close to being
drowned. After ten minutes' aimless tossing in the empty fishing-boat he
recovered, however, stirred, stretched himself, and looked round on
the rolling waters. Then, while taking no notice of the streams of salt
water that were pouring from his hair, beard, coat, boots, and trousers,
he carefully wiped the wet off his sword-blade to preserve it from the
possibilities of rust.

MacIan found two oars in the bottom of the deserted boat and began
somewhat drearily to row.

           *                    *                   *

A rainy twilight was clearing to cold silver over the moaning sea,
when the battered boat that had rolled and drifted almost aimlessly all
night, came within sight of land, though of land which looked almost
as lost and savage as the waves. All night there had been but little
lifting in the leaden sea, only now and then the boat had been heaved
up, as on a huge shoulder which slipped from under it; such occasional
sea-quakes came probably from the swell of some steamer that had passed
it in the dark; otherwise the waves were harmless though restless. But
it was piercingly cold, and there was, from time to time, a splutter of
rain like the splutter of the spray, which seemed almost to freeze as
it fell. MacIan, more at home than his companion in this quite barbarous
and elemental sort of adventure, had rowed toilsomely with the heavy
oars whenever he saw anything that looked like land; but for the most
part had trusted with grim transcendentalism to wind and tide. Among the
implements of their first outfit the brandy alone had remained to him,
and he gave it to his freezing companion in quantities which greatly
alarmed that temperate Londoner; but MacIan came from the cold seas and
mists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whisky in a boat without it
making him wink.

When the Highlander began to pull really hard upon the oars, Turnbull
craned his dripping red head out of the boat to see the goal of his
exertions. It was a sufficiently uninviting one; nothing so far as could
be seen but a steep and shelving bank of shingle, made of loose little
pebbles such as children like, but slanting up higher than a house. On
the top of the mound, against the sky line, stood up the brown skeleton
of some broken fence or breakwater. With the grey and watery dawn
crawling up behind it, the fence really seemed to say to our philosophic
adventurers that they had come at last to the other end of nowhere.

Bent by necessity to his labour, MacIan managed the heavy boat with real
power and skill, and when at length he ran it up on a smoother part of
the slope it caught and held so that they could clamber out, not sinking
farther than their knees into the water and the shingle. A foot or
two farther up their feet found the beach firmer, and a few moments
afterwards they were leaning on the ragged breakwater and looking back
at the sea they had escaped.

They had a dreary walk across wastes of grey shingle in the grey dawn
before they began to come within hail of human fields or roads; nor had
they any notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots were
beginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely,
so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were the
staves of pilgrims. MacIan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own
country which describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full
of sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities upon earth.

        If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon
            Every night and all,
        Sit thee down and put them on,
            And Christ receive thy soul.

Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even worse
temper.

At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of rough
and almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope there stood
grey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside crucifixes which are
seldom seen except in Catholic countries.

MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there.
Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix--a glance at once sympathetic
and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of Swinburne's poem on
the same occasion.

        O hidden face of man, whereover
            The years have woven a viewless veil,
        If thou wert verily man's lover
            What did thy love or blood avail?
        Thy blood the priests mix poison of,
        And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to look
right and left very sharply, like one looking for something. Suddenly,
with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward. A few yards from them
along the road a lean and starved sort of hedge came pitifully to an
end. Caught upon its prickly angle, however, there was a very small and
very dirty scrap of paper that might have hung there for months, since
it escaped from someone tearing up a letter or making a spill out of
a newspaper. Turnbull snatched at it and found it was the corner of a
printed page, very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just
large enough to contain the words: "_et c'est elle qui_----"

"Hurrah!" cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; "we are safe at last.
We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden or
Paradise. MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!"

"Where do you say?" said the other, looking at him heavily and with
knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of desolate
twilight and drifting sea.

"We are in France!" cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet, "in the
land where things really happen--_Tout arrive en France_. We arrive
in France. Look at this little message," and he held out the scrap of
paper. "There's an omen for you superstitious hill folk. _C'est elle
qui--Mais oui, mais oui, c'est elle qui sauvera encore le monde_."

"France!" repeated MacIan, and his eyes awoke again in his head like
large lamps lighted.

"Yes, France!" said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to
the top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has always
been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always
assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of
Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure
of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day
those splendid unanswerable words"--with a superb gesture--"'we have
extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.'"

"No," said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled passion. "But
France, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to war by Joan of
Arc. France that made the crusades. France that saved the Church and
scattered the heresies by the mouths of Bossuet and Massillon. France,
which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after
brain surrenders to it, Brunetière, Coppée, Hauptmann, Barrès, Bourget,
Lemaître."

"France!" asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration,
very unusual with him, "France, which is one torrent of splendid
scepticism from Abelard to Anatole France."

"France," said MacIan, "which is one cataract of clear faith from St.
Louis to Our Lady of Lourdes."

"France at least," cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in schoolboy
triumph, "in which these things are thought about and fought about.
France, where reason and religion clash in one continual tournament.
France, above all, where men understand the pride and passion which have
plucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not be
chased and spied on by sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because we
wish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come to
the country of honour."

MacIan did not even notice the incongruous phrase "my friend", but
nodding again and again, drew his sword and flung the scabbard far
behind him in the road.

"Yes," he cried, in a voice of thunder, "we will fight here and _He_
shall look on at it."

Turnbull glanced at the crucifix with a sort of scowling good-humour and
then said: "He may look and see His cross defeated."

"The cross cannot be defeated," said MacIan, "for it is Defeat."

A second afterwards the two bright, blood-thirsty weapons made the sign
of the cross in horrible parody upon each other.

They had not touched each other twice, however, when upon the hill,
above the crucifix, there appeared another horrible parody of its shape;
the figure of a man who appeared for an instant waving his outspread
arms. He had vanished in an instant; but MacIan, whose fighting face was
set that way, had seen the shape momentarily but quite photographically.
And while it was like a comic repetition of the cross, it was also,
in that place and hour, something more incredible. It had been only
instantaneously on the retina of his eye; but unless his eye and mind
were going mad together, the figure was that of an ordinary London
policeman.

He tried to concentrate his senses on the sword-play; but one half of
his brain was wrestling with the puzzle; the apocalyptic and almost
seraphic apparition of a stout constable out of Clapham on top of a
dreary and deserted hill in France. He did not, however, have to puzzle
long. Before the duellists had exchanged half a dozen passes, the big,
blue policeman appeared once more on the top of the hill, a palpable
monstrosity in the eye of heaven. He was waving only one arm now and
seemed to be shouting directions. At the same moment a mass of blue
blocked the corner of the road behind the small, smart figure of
Turnbull, and a small company of policemen in the English uniform came
up at a kind of half-military double.

Turnbull saw the stare of consternation in his enemy's face and swung
round to share its cause. When he saw it, cool as he was, he staggered
back.

"What the devil are you doing here?" he called out in a high, shrill
voice of authority, like one who finds a tramp in his own larder.

"Well, sir," said the sergeant in command, with that sort of heavy
civility shown only to the evidently guilty, "seems to me we might ask
what are you doing here?"

"We are having an affair of honour," said Turnbull, as if it were
the most rational thing in the world. "If the French police like to
interfere, let them interfere. But why the blue blazes should you
interfere, you great blue blundering sausages?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the sergeant with restraint, "I'm afraid I don't
quite follow you."

"I mean, why don't the French police take this up if it's got to be
taken up? I always heard that they were spry enough in their own way."

"Well, sir," said the sergeant reflectively, "you see, sir, the French
police don't take this up--well, because you see, sir, this ain't
France. This is His Majesty's dominions, same as 'Ampstead 'eath."

"Not France?" repeated Turnbull, with a sort of dull incredulity.

"No, sir," said the sergeant; "though most of the people talk French.
This is the island called St. Loup, sir, an island in the Channel.
We've been sent down specially from London, as you were such specially
distinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say so. Which reminds
me to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at your
trial."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, and lurched suddenly against the sergeant,
so as to tip him over the edge of the road with a crash into the shingle
below. Then leaving MacIan and the policemen equally and instantaneously
nailed to the road, he ran a little way along it, leapt off on to a part
of the beach, which he had found in his journey to be firmer, and
went across it with a clatter of pebbles. His sudden calculation was
successful; the police, unacquainted with the various levels of
the loose beach, tried to overtake him by the shorter cut and found
themselves, being heavy men, almost up to their knees in shoals of
slippery shingle. Two who had been slower with their bodies were quicker
with their minds, and seeing Turnbull's trick, ran along the edge of the
road after him. Then MacIan finally awoke, and leaving half his
sleeve in the grip of the only man who tried to hold him, took the two
policemen in the small of their backs with the impetus of a cannon-ball
and, sending them also flat among the stones, went tearing after his
twin defier of the law.

As they were both good runners, the start they had gained was decisive.
They dropped over a high breakwater farther on upon the beach, turned
sharply, and scrambled up a line of ribbed rocks, crowned with a
thicket, crawled through it, scratching their hands and faces, and
dropped into another road; and there found that they could slacken their
speed into a steady trot. In all this desperate dart and scramble,
they still kept hold of their drawn swords, which now, indeed, in the
vigorous phrase of Bunyan, seemed almost to grow out of their hands.

They had run another half mile or so when it became apparent that
they were entering a sort of scattered village. One or two whitewashed
cottages and even a shop had appeared along the side of the road. Then,
for the first time, Turnbull twisted round his red bear to get a glimpse
of his companion, who was a foot or two behind, and remarked abruptly:
"Mr. MacIan, we've been going the wrong way to work all along. We're
traced everywhere, because everybody knows about us. It's as if one went
about with Kruger's beard on Mafeking Night."

"What do you mean?" said MacIan, innocently.

"I mean," said Turnbull, with steady conviction, "that what we want is a
little diplomacy, and I am going to buy some in a shop."




XI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE

In the little hamlet of Haroc, in the Isle of St. Loup, there lived a
man who--though living under the English flag--was absolutely untypical
of the French tradition. He was quite unnoticeable, but that was exactly
where he was quite himself. He was not even extraordinarily French; but
then it is against the French tradition to be extraordinarily French.
Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned;
imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John
Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; and
he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He
was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by
politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic,
had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly
returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can
even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for
saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or rather
what we in England would call the conventional thing. For it was not
convention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention implies
cant or affectation, and he had not the faintest smell of either. He was
simply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views; and if you had told him
so he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had asked
him about women, he would have said that one must preserve their
domesticity and decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but he
would have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked him
about government, he would have said that all citizens were free and
equal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him about
education, he would have said that the young must be trained up in
habits of industry and of respect for their parents. Still he would
have set them the example of industry, and he would have been one of the
parents whom they could respect. A state of mind so hopelessly central
is depressing to the English instinct. But then in England a man
announcing these platitudes is generally a fool and a frightened fool,
announcing them out of mere social servility. But Durand was anything
but a fool; he had read all the eighteenth century, and could have
defended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-century
argument. And certainly he was anything but a coward: swollen and
sedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched him with
the instant violence of an automatic machine; and dying in a uniform
would have seemed to him only the sort of thing that sometimes
happens. I am afraid it is impossible to explain this monster amid the
exaggerative sects and the eccentric clubs of my country. He was merely
a man.

He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with comfortable
chairs and tables and highly uncomfortable classical pictures and
medallions. The art in his home contained nothing between the two
extremes of hard, meagre designs of Greek heads and Roman togas, and on
the other side a few very vulgar Catholic images in the crudest colours;
these were mostly in his daughter's room. He had recently lost his wife,
whom he had loved heartily and rather heavily in complete silence,
and upon whose grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideous
little wreaths, made out of a sort of black-and-white beads. To his only
daughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good deal
under a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence; an alarm which was
peculiarly unnecessary, first, because she was an exceptionally reticent
and religious girl, and secondly, because there was hardly anybody else
in the place.

Madeleine Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might easily
have been supposed to be morally a lazy one. It is, however, certain
that the work of her house was done somehow, and it is even more rapidly
ascertainable that nobody else did it. The logician is, therefore,
driven back upon the assumption that she did it; and that lends a sort
of mysterious interest to her personality at the beginning. She had very
broad, low, and level brows, which seemed even lower because her warm
yellow hair clustered down to her eyebrows; and she had a face just
plump enough not to look as powerful as it was. Anything that was heavy
in all this was abruptly lightened by two large, light china-blue eyes,
lightened all of a sudden as if it had been lifted into the air by two
big blue butterflies. The rest of her was less than middle-sized, and
was of a casual and comfortable sort; and she had this difference from
such girls as the girl in the motor-car, that one did not incline to
take in her figure at all, but only her broad and leonine and innocent
head.

Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would normally
have avoided all observation; that is, all observation in that
extraordinary modern world which calls out everything except strength.
Both of them had strength below the surface; they were like quiet
peasants owning enormous and unquarried mines. The father with his
square face and grey side whiskers, the daughter with her square face
and golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they know; stronger
than anyone knew. The father believed in civilization, in the storied
tower we have erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed in
Man. The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger. They neither
of them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.

The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people the
impression--the somewhat irritating impression--produced by such a
person; it can only be described as the sense of strong water being
perpetually poured into some abyss. She did her housework easily; she
achieved her social relations sweetly; she was never neglectful and
never unkind. This accounted for all that was soft in her, but not for
all that was hard. She trod firmly as if going somewhere; she flung her
face back as if defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yet
there was often battle in her eyes. The modern man asked doubtfully
where all this silent energy went to. He would have stared still more
doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.

The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a compromise
or confusion between those of France and England; and it was vaguely
possible for a respectable young lady to have half-attached lovers, in a
way that would be impossible to the _bourgeoisie_ of France. One man in
particular had made himself an unmistakable figure in the track of this
girl as she went to church. He was a short, prosperous-looking man,
whose long, bushy black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem
both shorter and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, and
step that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.

His name was Camille Bert, and he was a commercial traveller who had
only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the
tracks of Madeleine Durand. Since everyone knows everyone in so small
a place, Madeleine certainly knew him to speak to; but it is not very
evident that she ever spoke. He haunted her, however; especially at
church, which was, indeed, one of the few certain places for finding
her. In her home she had a habit of being invisible, sometimes through
insatiable domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiable
solitude. M. Bert did not give the impression of a pious man, though he
did give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one. But
he went to Mass with a simple exactitude that could not be mistaken for
a pose, or even for a vulgar fascination. It was perhaps this religious
regularity which eventually drew Madeleine into recognition of him. At
least it is certain that she twice spoke to him with her square and open
smile in the porch of the church; and there was human nature enough in
the hamlet to turn even that into gossip.

But the real interest arose suddenly as a squall arises with the
extraordinary affair that occurred about five days after. There was
about a third of a mile beyond the village of Haroc a large but lonely
hotel upon the London or Paris model, but commonly almost entirely
empty. Among the accidental group of guests who had come to it at this
season was a man whose nationality no one could fix and who bore the
non-committal name of Count Gregory. He treated everybody with complete
civility and almost in complete silence. On the few occasions when he
spoke, he spoke either French, English, or once (to the priest) Latin;
and the general opinion was that he spoke them all wrong. He was a
large, lean man, with the stoop of an aged eagle, and even the eagle's
nose to complete it; he had old-fashioned military whiskers and
moustache dyed with a garish and highly incredible yellow. He had the
dress of a showy gentleman and the manners of a decayed gentleman; he
seemed (as with a sort of simplicity) to be trying to be a dandy when he
was too old even to know that he was old. Ye he was decidedly a handsome
figure with his curled yellow hair and lean fastidious face; and he wore
a peculiar frock-coat of bright turquoise blue, with an unknown order
pinned to it, and he carried a huge and heavy cane. Despite his silence
and his dandified dress and whiskers, the island might never have heard
of him but for the extraordinary event of which I have spoken, which
fell about in the following way:

In such casual atmospheres only the enthusiastic go to Benediction; and
as the warm blue twilight closed over the little candle-lit church and
village, the line of worshippers who went home from the former to the
latter thinned out until it broke. On one such evening at least no one
was in church except the quiet, unconquerable Madeleine, four old women,
one fisherman, and, of course, the irrepressible M. Camille Bert. The
others seemed to melt away afterwards into the peacock colours of the
dim green grass and the dark blue sky. Even Durand was invisible instead
of being merely reverentially remote; and Madeleine set forth through
the patch of black forest alone. She was not in the least afraid of
loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were
afraid of her.

In a clearing of the wood, however, which was lit up with a last patch
of the perishing sunlight, there advanced upon her suddenly one who was
more startling than a devil. The incomprehensible Count Gregory, with
his yellow hair like flame and his face like the white ashes of the
flame, was advancing bareheaded towards her, flinging out his arms and
his long fingers with a frantic gesture.

"We are alone here," he cried, "and you would be at my mercy, only that
I am at yours."

Then his frantic hands fell by his sides and he looked up under his
brows with an expression that went well with his hard breathing.
Madeleine Durand had come to a halt at first in childish wonder, and
now, with more than masculine self-control, "I fancy I know your face,
sir," she said, as if to gain time.

"I know I shall not forget yours," said the other, and extended once
more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden there
came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. "It is as well
that you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows no
limit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of
sinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions
stretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of Denmark, and there
is no nook of all of them in which I have not done a sin. But when I
bear you away I shall be doing my first sacrilege, and also my first act
of virtue." He seized her suddenly by the elbow; and she did not scream
but only pulled and tugged. Yet though she had not screamed, someone
astray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle. A short but
nimble figure came along the woodland path like a humming bullet and
had caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own could
be recognized. When it was recognized it was that of Camille, with the
black elderly beard and the young ardent eyes.

Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeleine had
entertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman. Now she was
startled with a new sanity; for the tall man in the yellow whiskers and
yellow moustache first returned the blow of Bert, as if it were a sort
of duty, and then stepped back with a slight bow and an easy smile.

"This need go no further here, M. Bert," he said. "I need not remind you
how far it should go elsewhere."

"Certainly, you need remind me of nothing," answered Camille, stolidly.
"I am glad that you are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentleman
to fight."

"We are detaining the lady," said Count Gregory, with politeness; and,
making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his hat if
he had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and eventually
disappeared. He was so complete an aristocrat that he could offer his
back to them all the way up that avenue; and his back never once looked
uncomfortable.

"You must allow me to see you home," said Bert to the girl, in a gruff
and almost stifled voice; "I think we have only a little way to go."

"Only a little way," she said, and smiled once more that night, in
spite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the devil. The
glowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by the
opaque and slatelike blue of night, when he handed her into the lamp-lit
interior of her home. He went out himself into the darkness, walking
sturdily, but tearing at his black beard.

All the French or semi-French gentry of the district considered this a
case in which a duel was natural and inevitable, and neither party had
any difficulty in finding seconds, strangers as they were in the place.
Two small landowners, who were careful, practising Catholics, willingly
undertook to represent that strict church-goer Camille Burt; while the
profligate but apparently powerful Count Gregory found friends in
an energetic local doctor who was ready for social promotion and
an accidental Californian tourist who was ready for anything. As no
particular purpose could be served by delay, it was arranged that the
affair should fall out three days afterwards. And when this was settled
the whole community, as it were, turned over again in bed and thought
no more about the matter. At least there was only one member of it who
seemed to be restless, and that was she who was commonly most restful.
On the next night Madeleine Durand went to church as usual; and as usual
the stricken Camille was there also. What was not so usual was that when
they were a bow-shot from the church Madeleine turned round and walked
back to him. "Sir," she began, "it is not wrong of me to speak to you,"
and the very words gave him a jar of unexpected truth; for in all the
novels he had ever read she would have begun: "It is wrong of me to
speak to you." She went on with wide and serious eyes like an animal's:
"It is not wrong of me to speak to you, because your soul, or anybody's
soul, matters so much more than what the world says about anybody. I
want to talk to you about what you are going to do."

Bert saw in front of him the inevitable heroine of the novels trying to
prevent bloodshed; and his pale firm face became implacable.

"I would do anything but that for you," he said; "but no man can be
called less than a man."

She looked at him for a moment with a face openly puzzled, and then
broke into an odd and beautiful half-smile.

"Oh, I don't mean that," she said; "I don't talk about what I don't
understand. No one has ever hit me; and if they had I should not feel
as a man may. I am sure it is not the best thing to fight. It would be
better to forgive--if one could really forgive. But when people dine
with my father and say that fighting a duel is mere murder--of course
I can see that is not just. It's all so different--having a reason--and
letting the other man know--and using the same guns and things--and
doing it in front of your friends. I'm awfully stupid, but I know that
men like you aren't murderers. But it wasn't that that I meant."

"What did you mean?" asked the other, looking broodingly at the earth.

"Don't you know," she said, "there is only one more celebration? I
thought that as you always go to church--I thought you would communicate
this morning."

Bert stepped backward with a sort of action she had never seen in him
before. It seemed to alter his whole body.

"You may be right or wrong to risk dying," said the girl, simply; "the
poor women in our village risk it whenever they have a baby. You men are
the other half of the world. I know nothing about when you ought to die.
But surely if you are daring to try and find God beyond the grave and
appeal to Him--you ought to let Him find you when He comes and stands
there every morning in our little church."

And placid as she was, she made a little gesture of argument, of which
the pathos wrung the heart.

M. Camille Bert was by no means placid. Before that incomplete gesture
and frankly pleading face he retreated as if from the jaws of a dragon.
His dark black hair and beard looked utterly unnatural against the
startling pallor of his face. When at last he said something it was:
"O God! I can't stand this!" He did not say it in French. Nor did he,
strictly speaking, say it in English. The truth (interesting only to
anthropologists) is that he said it in Scotch.

"There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours," said Madeleine,
with a sort of business eagerness and energy, "and you can do it then
before the fighting. You must forgive me, but I was so frightened that
you would not do it at all."

Bert seemed to crush his teeth together until they broke, and managed to
say between them: "And why should you suppose that I shouldn't do as you
say--I mean not to do it at all?"

"You always go to Mass," answered the girl, opening her wide blue eyes,
"and the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God."

Then it was that Bert exploded with a brutality which might have come
from Count Gregory, his criminal opponent. He advanced upon Madeleine
with flaming eyes, and almost took her by the two shoulders. "I do not
love God," he cried, speaking French with the broadest Scotch accent; "I
do not want to find Him; I do not think He is there to be found. I must
burst up the show; I must and will say everything. You are the happiest
and honestest thing I ever saw in this godless universe. And I am the
dirtiest and most dishonest."

Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said with a
sudden simplicity and cheerfulness: "Oh, but if you are really sorry it
is all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have
only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his
own hands."

"I hate your priest and I deny your God!" cried the man, "and I tell you
God is a lie and a fable and a mask. And for the first time in my life I
do not feel superior to God."

"What can it all mean?" said Madeleine, in massive wonder.

"Because I am a fable also and a mask," said the man. He had been
plucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time; now he
suddenly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers in the
mire. This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight the same face,
but a much younger head--a head with close chestnut curls and a short
chestnut beard.

"Now you know the truth," he answered, with hard eyes. "I am a cad who
has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a
private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any
other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It's
just like my damned luck. The plain truth is," and here when he came to
the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it
to the girl in the motor-car.

"The plain truth is," he said at last, "that I am James Turnbull the
atheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to
fight for it."

"I saw something about you in a newspaper," said the girl, with a
simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.

"Evan MacIan said there was a God," went on the other, stubbornly, "and
I say there isn't. And I have come to fight for the fact that there
is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your
blessed face."

"You want me really to believe," said Madeleine, with parted lips, "that
you think----"

"I want you to hate me!" cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to be
sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."

"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air
of one telling children about an elephant. "Why, I touched His body only
this morning."

"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. "Oh, I
will say anything that can madden you!"

"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lips
tightened ever so little.

"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.

She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eat
it?" she said.

James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time in
his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts that
were not his own.

"Why, how silly of them," cried out Madeleine, with quite a schoolgirl
gaiety, "why, how silly of them to call _you_ a blasphemer! Why,
you have wrecked your whole business because you would not commit
blasphemy."

The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment,
with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich and
fictitious garments of Camille Bert. But the startled pain of his face
was strong enough to obliterate the oddity.

"You come down here," continued the lady, with that female emphasis
which is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at a public
meeting, "you and your MacIan come down here and put on false beards
or noses in order to fight. You pretend to be a Catholic commercial
traveller from France. Poor Mr. MacIan has to pretend to be a dissolute
nobleman from nowhere. Your scheme succeeds; you pick a quite convincing
quarrel; you arrange a quite respectable duel; the duel you have planned
so long will come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety. And
then you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over
your colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a bit of
bread. And _then_ you dare to tell me that you are sure there is nothing
watching us. Then you say you know there is nothing on the very altar
you run away from. You know----"

"I only know," said Turnbull, "that I must run away from you. This has
got beyond any talking." And he plunged along into the village, leaving
his black wig and beard lying behind him on the road.

As the market-place opened before him he saw Count Gregory, that
distinguished foreigner, standing and smoking in elegant meditation
at the corner of the local café. He immediately made his way rapidly
towards him, considering that a consultation was urgent. But he had
hardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle when a window burst open
above him and a head was thrust out, shouting. The man was in his
woollen undershirt, but Turnbull knew the energetic, apologetic head of
the sergeant of police. He pointed furiously at Turnbull and shouted
his name. A policeman ran excitedly from under an archway and tried to
collar him. Two men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joined
in the chase. Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men into
his own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign Count,
called to him clamorously: "Come on, MacIan, the hunt is up again."

The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large yellow
whiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of considerable
relief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so,
with one wrench of his powerful hands rent and split the strange, thick
stick that he carried. Inside it was a naked old-fashioned rapier. The
two got a good start up the road before the whole town was awakened
behind them; and half-way up it a similar transformation was seen to
take place in Mr. Turnbull's singular umbrella.

The two had a long race for the harbour; but the English police were
heavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent. In any case, they got
used to the notion of the road being clear; and just as they had come
to the cliffs MacIan banged into another gentleman with unmistakable
surprise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging into
him, must remain a mystery. MacIan was a very poor and very sober
Scotch gentleman. The other was a very drunk and very wealthy English
gentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openly
embarrassed apologies that made them understand each other as readily
and as quickly and as much as two men talking French in the middle of
China. The nearest expression of the type is that it either hits or
apologizes; and in this case both apologized.

"You seem to be in a hurry," said the unknown Englishman, falling back
a step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. "What's
it all about, eh?" Then before MacIan could get past his sprawling and
staggering figure he ran forward again and said with a sort of shouting
and ear-shattering whisper: "I say, my name is Wilkinson. _You_
know--Wilkinson's Entire was my grandfather. Can't drink beer myself.
Liver." And he shook his head with extraordinary sagacity.

"We really are in a hurry, as you say," said MacIan, summoning a
sufficiently pleasant smile, "so if you will let us pass----"

"I'll tell you what, you fellows," said the sprawling gentleman,
confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the first
paces of the pursuit, "if you really are, as you say, in a hurry, I know
what it is to be in a hurry--Lord, what a hurry I was in when we all
came out of Cartwright's rooms--if you really are in a hurry"--and he
seemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity--"if you are in a
hurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry."

"No doubt you're right," said MacIan, and dashed past him in despair.
The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of the
hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicated
gentleman's elbow and fled far in front.

"No, but look here," said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running after
MacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. "If you want to hurry
you should take a yacht, and if"--he said, with a burst of rationality,
like one leaping to a further point in logic--"if you want a yacht--you
can have mine."

Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. "We are really in the
devil of a hurry," he said, "and if you really have a yacht, the truth
is that we would give our ears for it."

"You'll find it in harbour," said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech.
"Left side of harbour--called _Gibson Girl_--can't think why, old
fellow, I never lent it you before."

With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in
the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying
companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went
through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he
decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess
no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the
tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into
the yacht called the _Gibson Girl_ and had somehow pushed off from the
Isle of St. Loup.




XII. THE DESERT ISLAND

Those who happen to hold the view (and Mr. Evan MacIan, now alive and
comfortable, is among the number) that something supernatural, some
eccentric kindness from god or fairy had guided our adventurers through
all their absurd perils, might have found his strongest argument perhaps
in their management or mismanagement of Mr. Wilkinson's yacht. Neither
of them had the smallest qualification for managing such a vessel; but
MacIan had a practical knowledge of the sea in much smaller and quite
different boats, while Turnbull had an abstract knowledge of science and
some of its applications to navigation, which was worse. The presence
of the god or fairy can only be deduced from the fact that they never
definitely ran into anything, either a boat, a rock, a quicksand, or a
man-of-war. Apart from this negative description, their voyage would be
difficult to describe. It took at least a fortnight, and MacIan, who
was certainly the shrewder sailor of the two, realized that they were
sailing west into the Atlantic and were probably by this time past the
Scilly Isles. How much farther they stood out into the western sea it
was impossible to conjecture. But they felt certain, at least, that they
were far enough into that awful gulf between us and America to make
it unlikely that they would soon see land again. It was therefore with
legitimate excitement that one rainy morning after daybreak they
saw that distinct shape of a solitary island standing up against the
encircling strip of silver which ran round the skyline and separated
the grey and green of the billows from the grey and mauve of the morning
clouds.

"What can it be?" cried MacIan, in a dry-throated excitement. "I didn't
know there were any Atlantic islands so far beyond the Scillies--Good
Lord, it can't be Madeira, yet?"

"I thought you were fond of legends and lies and fables," said Turnbull,
grimly. "Perhaps it's Atlantis."

"Of course, it might be," answered the other, quite innocently and
gravely; "but I never thought the story about Atlantis was very solidly
established."

"Whatever it is, we are running on to it," said Turnbull, equably, "and
we shall be shipwrecked twice, at any rate."

The naked-looking nose of land projecting from the unknown island was,
indeed, growing larger and larger, like the trunk of some terrible and
advancing elephant. There seemed to be nothing in particular, at least
on this side of the island, except shoals of shellfish lying so thick as
almost to make it look like one of those toy grottos that the children
make. In one place, however, the coast offered a soft, smooth bay of
sand, and even the rudimentary ingenuity of the two amateur mariners
managed to run up the little ship with her prow well on shore and her
bowsprit pointing upward, as in a sort of idiotic triumph.

They tumbled on shore and began to unload the vessel, setting the
stores out in rows upon the sand with something of the solemnity of
boys playing at pirates. There were Mr. Wilkinson's cigar-boxes and Mr.
Wilkinson's dozen of champagne and Mr. Wilkinson's tinned salmon and Mr.
Wilkinson's tinned tongue and Mr. Wilkinson's tinned sardines, and every
sort of preserved thing that could be seen at the Army and Navy stores.
Then MacIan stopped with a jar of pickles in his hand and said abruptly:

"I don't know why we're doing all this; I suppose we ought really to
fall to and get it over."

Then he added more thoughtfully: "Of course this island seems rather
bare and the survivor----"

"The question is," said Turnbull, with cheerful speculation, "whether
the survivor will be in a proper frame of mind for potted prawns."

MacIan looked down at the rows of tins and bottles, and the cloud of
doubt still lowered upon his face.

"You will permit me two liberties, my dear sir," said Turnbull at last:
"The first is to break open this box and light one of Mr. Wilkinson's
excellent cigars, which will, I am sure, assist my meditations; the
second is to offer a penny for your thoughts; or rather to convulse the
already complex finances of this island by betting a penny that I know
them."

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked MacIan, listlessly, in the
manner of an inattentive child.

"I know what you are really thinking, MacIan," repeated Turnbull,
laughing. "I know what I am thinking, anyhow. And I rather fancy it's
the same."

"What are you thinking?" asked Evan.

"I am thinking and you are thinking," said Turnbull, "that it is damned
silly to waste all that champagne."

Something like the spectre of a smile appeared on the unsmiling visage
of the Gael; and he made at least no movement of dissent.

"We could drink all the wine and smoke all the cigars easily in a week,"
said Turnbull; "and that would be to die feasting like heroes."

"Yes, and there is something else," said MacIan, with slight hesitation.
"You see, we are on an almost unknown rock, lost in the Atlantic. The
police will never catch us; but then neither may the public ever hear of
us; and that was one of the things we wanted." Then, after a pause, he
said, drawing in the sand with his sword-point: "She may never hear of
it at all."

"Well?" inquired the other, puffing at his cigar.

"Well," said MacIan, "we might occupy a day or two in drawing up a
thorough and complete statement of what we did and why we did it, and
all about both our points of view. Then we could leave one copy on the
island whatever happens to us and put another in an empty bottle and
send it out to sea, as they do in the books."

"A good idea," said Turnbull, "and now let us finish unpacking."

As MacIan, a tall, almost ghostly figure, paced along the edge of sand
that ran round the islet, the purple but cloudy poetry which was his
native element was piled up at its thickest upon his soul. The unique
island and the endless sea emphasized the thing solely as an epic. There
were no ladies or policemen here to give him a hint either of its farce
or its tragedy.

"Perhaps when the morning stars were made," he said to himself, "God
built this island up from the bottom of the world to be a tower and a
theatre for the fight between yea and nay."

Then he wandered up to the highest level of the rock, where there was a
roof or plateau of level stone. Half an hour afterwards, Turnbull found
him clearing away the loose sand from this table-land and making it
smooth and even.

"We will fight up here, Turnbull," said MacIan, "when the time comes.
And till the time comes this place shall be sacred."

"I thought of having lunch up here," said Turnbull, who had a bottle of
champagne in his hand.

"No, no--not up here," said MacIan, and came down from the height quite
hastily. Before he descended, however, he fixed the two swords upright,
one at each end of the platform, as if they were human sentinels to
guard it under the stars.

Then they came down and lunched plentifully in a nest of loose rocks. In
the same place that night they supped more plentifully still. The smoke
of Mr. Wilkinson's cigars went up ceaseless and strong smelling, like a
pagan sacrifice; the golden glories of Mr. Wilkinson's champagne rose
to their heads and poured out of them in fancies and philosophies. And
occasionally they would look up at the starlight and the rock and see
the space guarded by the two cross-hilted swords, which looked like two
black crosses at either end of a grave.

In this primitive and Homeric truce the week passed by; it consisted
almost entirely of eating, drinking, smoking, talking, and occasionally
singing. They wrote their records and cast loose their bottle. They
never ascended to the ominous plateau; they had never stood there save
for that single embarrassed minute when they had had no time to take
stock of the seascape or the shape of the land. They did not even
explore the island; for MacIan was partly concerned in prayer and
Turnbull entirely concerned with tobacco; and both these forms of
inspiration can be enjoyed by the secluded and even the sedentary. It
was on a golden afternoon, the sun sinking over the sea, rayed like the
very head of Apollo, when Turnbull tossed off the last half-pint from
the emptied Wilkinsonian bottle, hurled the bottle into the sea with
objectless energy, and went up to where his sword stood waiting for him
on the hill. MacIan was already standing heavily by his with bent head
and eyes reading the ground. He had not even troubled to throw a glance
round the island or the horizon. But Turnbull being of a more active
and birdlike type of mind did throw a glance round the scene. The
consequence of which was that he nearly fell off the rock.

On three sides of this shelly and sandy islet the sea stretched blue and
infinite without a speck of land or sail; the same as Turnbull had first
seen it, except that the tide being out it showed a few yards more of
slanting sand under the roots of the rocks. But on the fourth side the
island exhibited a more extraordinary feature. In fact, it exhibited
the extraordinary feature of not being an island at all. A long, curving
neck of sand, as smooth and wet as the neck of the sea serpent, ran
out into the sea and joined their rock to a line of low, billowing, and
glistening sand-hills, which the sinking sea had just bared to the sun.
Whether they were firm sand or quicksand it was difficult to guess; but
there was at least no doubt that they lay on the edge of some larger
land; for colourless hills appeared faintly behind them and no sea could
be seen beyond.

"Sakes alive!" cried Turnbull, with rolling eyes; "this ain't an island
in the Atlantic. We've butted the bally continent of America."

MacIan turned his head, and his face, already pale, grew a shade paler.
He was by this time walking in a world of omens and hieroglyphics, and
he could not read anything but what was baffling or menacing in this
brown gigantic arm of the earth stretched out into the sea to seize him.

"MacIan," said Turnbull, in his temperate way, "whatever our eternal
interrupted tete-a-tetes have taught us or not taught us, at least we
need not fear the charge of fear. If it is essential to your emotions,
I will cheerfully finish the fight here and now; but I must confess that
if you kill me here I shall die with my curiosity highly excited and
unsatisfied upon a minor point of geography."

"I do not want to stop now," said the other, in his elephantine
simplicity, "but we must stop for a moment, because it is a
sign--perhaps it is a miracle. We must see what is at the end of the
road of sand; it may be a bridge built across the gulf by God."

"So long as you gratify my query," said Turnbull, laughing and letting
back his blade into the sheath, "I do not care for what reason you
choose to stop."

They clambered down the rocky peninsula and trudged along the sandy
isthmus with the plodding resolution of men who seemed almost to have
made up their minds to be wanderers on the face of the earth. Despite
Turnbull's air of scientific eagerness, he was really the less impatient
of the two; and the Highlander went on well ahead of him with passionate
strides. By the time they had walked for about half an hour in the
ups and downs of those dreary sands, the distance between the two had
lengthened and MacIan was only a tall figure silhouetted for an instant
upon the crest of some sand-dune and then disappearing behind it. This
rather increased the Robinson Crusoe feeling in Mr. Turnbull, and he
looked about almost disconsolately for some sign of life. What sort of
life he expected it to be if it appeared, he did not very clearly know.
He has since confessed that he thinks that in his subconsciousness he
expected an alligator.

The first sign of life that he did see, however, was something more
extraordinary than the largest alligator. It was nothing less than the
notorious Mr. Evan MacIan coming bounding back across the sand-heaps
breathless, without his cap and keeping the sword in his hand only by a
habit now quite hardened.

"Take care, Turnbull," he cried out from a good distance as he ran,
"I've seen a native."

"A native?" repeated his companion, whose scenery had of late been
chiefly of shellfish, "what the deuce! Do you mean an oyster?"

"No," said MacIan, stopping and breathing hard, "I mean a savage. A
black man."

"Why, where did you see him?" asked the staring editor.

"Over there--behind that hill," said the gasping MacIan. "He put up his
black head and grinned at me."

Turnbull thrust his hands through his red hair like one who gives up the
world as a bad riddle. "Lord love a duck," said he, "can it be Jamaica?"

Then glancing at his companion with a small frown, as of one slightly
suspicious, he said: "I say, don't think me rude--but you're a visionary
kind of fellow--and then we drank a great deal. Do you mind waiting here
while I go and see for myself?"

"Shout if you get into trouble," said the Celt, with composure; "you
will find it as I say."

Turnbull ran off ahead with a rapidity now far greater than his rival's,
and soon vanished over the disputed sand-hill. Then five minutes passed,
and then seven minutes; and MacIan bit his lip and swung his sword, and
the other did not reappear. Finally, with a Gaelic oath, Evan started
forward to the rescue, and almost at the same moment the small figure of
the missing man appeared on the ridge against the sky.

Even at that distance, however, there was something odd about his
attitude; so odd that MacIan continued to make his way in that
direction. It looked as if he were wounded; or, still more, as if he
were ill. He wavered as he came down the slope and seemed flinging
himself into peculiar postures. But it was only when he came within
three feet of MacIan's face, that that observer of mankind fully
realized that Mr. James Turnbull was roaring with laughter.

"You are quit right," sobbed that wholly demoralized journalist. "He's
black, oh, there's no doubt the black's all right--as far as it goes."
And he went off again into convulsions of his humorous ailment.

"What ever is the matter with you?" asked MacIan, with stern impatience.
"Did you see the nigger----"

"I saw the nigger," gasped Turnbull. "I saw the splendid barbarian
Chief. I saw the Emperor of Ethiopia--oh, I saw him all right. The
nigger's hands and face are a lovely colour--and the nigger----" And he
was overtaken once more.

"Well, well, well," said Evan, stamping each monosyllable on the sand,
"what about the nigger?"

"Well, the truth is," said Turnbull, suddenly and startlingly, becoming
quite grave and precise, "the truth is, the nigger is a Margate nigger,
and we are now on the edge of the Isle of Thanet, a few miles from
Margate."

Then he had a momentary return of his hysteria and said: "I say,
old boy, I should like to see a chart of our fortnight's cruise in
Wilkinson's yacht."

MacIan had no smile in answer, but his eager lips opened as if parched
for the truth. "You mean to say," he began----

"Yes, I mean to say," said Turnbull, "and I mean to say something
funnier still. I have learnt everything I wanted to know from the
partially black musician over there, who has taken a run in his
war-paint to meet a friend in a quiet pub along the coast--the noble
savage has told me all about it. The bottle containing our declaration,
doctrines, and dying sentiments was washed up on Margate beach yesterday
in the presence of one alderman, two bathing-machine men, three
policemen, seven doctors, and a hundred and thirteen London clerks on a
holiday, to all of whom, whether directly or indirectly, our composition
gave enormous literary pleasure. Buck up, old man, this story of ours is
a switchback. I have begun to understand the pulse and the time of it;
now we are up in a cathedral and then we are down in a theatre, where
they only play farces. Come, I am quite reconciled--let us enjoy the
farce."

But MacIan said nothing, and an instant afterwards Turnbull himself
called out in an entirely changed voice: "Oh, this is damnable! This is
not to be borne!"

MacIan followed his eye along the sand-hills. He saw what looked like
the momentary and waving figure of the nigger minstrel, and then he saw
a heavy running policeman take the turn of the sand-hill with the smooth
solemnity of a railway train.




XIII. THE GARDEN OF PEACE

Up to this instant Evan MacIan had really understood nothing; but when
he saw the policeman he saw everything. He saw his enemies, all the
powers and princes of the earth. He suddenly altered from a staring
statue to a leaping man of the mountains.

"We must break away from him here," he cried, briefly, and went like
a whirlwind over the sand ridge in a straight line and at a particular
angle. When the policeman had finished his admirable railway curve, he
found a wall of failing sand between him and the pursued. By the time
he had scaled it thrice, slid down twice, and crested it in the third
effort, the two flying figures were far in front. They found the sand
harder farther on; it began to be crusted with scraps of turf and in
a few moments they were flying easily over an open common of rank
sea-grass. They had no easy business, however; for the bottle which they
had so innocently sent into the chief gate of Thanet had called to life
the police of half a county on their trail. From every side across the
grey-green common figures could be seen running and closing in; and it
was only when MacIan with his big body broke down the tangled barrier of
a little wood, as men break down a door with the shoulder; it was only
when they vanished crashing into the underworld of the black wood, that
their hunters were even instantaneously thrown off the scent.

At the risk of struggling a little longer like flies in that black web
of twigs and trunks, Evan (who had an instinct of the hunter or the
hunted) took an incalculable course through the forest, which let them
out at last by a forest opening--quite forgotten by the leaders of the
chase. They ran a mile or two farther along the edge of the wood until
they reached another and somewhat similar opening. Then MacIan stood
utterly still and listened, as animals listen, for every sound in the
universe. Then he said: "We are quit of them." And Turnbull said: "Where
shall we go now?"

MacIan looked at the silver sunset that was closing in, barred by plumy
lines of purple cloud; he looked at the high tree-tops that caught the
last light and at the birds going heavily homeward, just as if all these
things were bits of written advice that he could read.

Then he said: "The best place we can go to is to bed. If we can get some
sleep in this wood, now everyone has cleared out of it, it will be worth
a handicap of two hundred yards tomorrow."

Turnbull, who was exceptionally lively and laughing in his demeanour,
kicked his legs about like a schoolboy and said he did not want to go
to sleep. He walked incessantly and talked very brilliantly. And when
at last he lay down on the hard earth, sleep struck him senseless like a
hammer.

Indeed, he needed the strongest sleep he could get; for the earth
was still full of darkness and a kind of morning fog when his
fellow-fugitive shook him awake.

"No more sleep, I'm afraid," said Evan, in a heavy, almost submissive,
voice of apology. "They've gone on past us right enough for a good
thirty miles; but now they've found out their mistake, and they're
coming back."

"Are you sure?" said Turnbull, sitting up and rubbing his red eyebrows
with his hand.

The next moment, however, he had jumped up alive and leaping like a
man struck with a shock of cold water, and he was plunging after MacIan
along the woodland path. The shape of their old friend the constable had
appeared against the pearl and pink of the sunrise. Somehow, it always
looked a very funny shape when seen against the sunrise.

           *                    *                   *

A wash of weary daylight was breaking over the country-side, and the
fields and roads were full of white mist--the kind of white mist that
clings in corners like cotton wool. The empty road, along which the
chase had taken its turn, was overshadowed on one side by a very
high discoloured wall, stained, and streaked green, as with
seaweed--evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some great
gentleman's estate. A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it a
linked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a kind of cloister along
the side of the road. It was under this branching colonnade that the two
fugitives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight,
the mist and the leaping zoetrope of shadows. Their feet, though beating
the ground furiously, made but a faint noise; for they had kicked away
their boots in the wood; their long, antiquated weapons made no jingle
or clatter, for they had strapped them across their backs like guitars.
They had all the advantages that invisibility and silence can add to
speed.

A hundred and fifty yards behind them down the centre of the empty
road the first of their pursuers came pounding and panting--a fat but
powerful policeman who had distanced all the rest. He came on at a
splendid pace for so portly a figure; but, like all heavy bodies in
motion, he gave the impression that it would be easier for him to
increase his pace than to slacken it suddenly. Nothing short of a
brick wall could have abruptly brought him up. Turnbull turned his head
slightly and found breath to say something to MacIan. MacIan nodded.

Pursuer and pursued were fixed in their distance as they fled, for some
quarter of a mile, when they came to a place where two or three of the
trees grew twistedly together, making a special obscurity. Past
this place the pursuing policeman went thundering without thought or
hesitation. But he was pursuing his shadow or the wind; for Turnbull had
put one foot in a crack of the tree and gone up it as quickly and softly
as a cat. Somewhat more laboriously but in equal silence the long legs
of the Highlander had followed; and crouching in crucial silence in the
cloud of leaves, they saw the whole posse of their pursuers go by and
die into the dust and mists of the distance.

The white vapour lay, as it often does, in lean and palpable layers;
and even the head of the tree was above it in the half-daylight, like
a green ship swinging on a sea of foam. But higher yet behind them, and
readier to catch the first coming of the sun, ran the rampart of the
top of the wall, which in their excitement of escape looked at once
indispensable and unattainable, like the wall of heaven. Here,
however, it was MacIan's turn to have the advantage; for, though less
light-limbed and feline, he was longer and stronger in the arms. In two
seconds he had tugged up his chin over the wall like a horizontal
bar; the next he sat astride of it, like a horse of stone. With his
assistance Turnbull vaulted to the same perch, and the two began
cautiously to shift along the wall in the direction by which they had
come, doubling on their tracks to throw off the last pursuit. MacIan
could not rid himself of the fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, grey
coping of the wall shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck of
some nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and Turnbull
were two knights on one steed on the old shield of the Templars.

The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog, which
seemed thicker inside the wall than outside. They could make nothing of
the enclosure upon which they were partial trespassers, except that the
green and crooked branches of a big apple-tree came crawling at them out
of the mist, like the tentacles of some green cuttlefish. Anything would
serve, however, that was likely to confuse their trail, so they both
decided without need of words to use this tree also as a ladder--a
ladder of descent. When they dropped from the lowest branch to the
ground their stockinged feet felt hard gravel beneath them.

They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and the
clearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn.
Though the white vapour was still a veil, it was like the gauzy veil
of a transformation scene in a pantomime; for through it there glowed
shapeless masses of colour, masses which might be clouds of sunrise
or mosaics of gold and crimson, or ladies robed in ruby and emerald
draperies. As it thinned yet farther they saw that it was only flowers;
but flowers in such insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen
out of the tropics. Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly,
like rampant heraldic animals against their burning background of
laburnum gold. The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to speak,
blue hot. And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed the most
violent colour of all. As the golden sunlight gradually conquered the
mists, it had really something of the sensational sweetness of the slow
opening of the gates of Eden. MacIan, whose mind was always haunted
with such seraphic or titanic parallels, made some such remark to his
companion. But Turnbull only cursed and said that it was the back garden
of some damnable rich man.

When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open lawns,
and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without an abrupt
re-examination of their position, that they were not alone in the
garden.

Down the centre of the central garden path, preceded by a blue cloud
from a cigarette, was walking a gentleman who evidently understood all
the relish of a garden in the very early morning. He was a slim yet
satisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-grey tweed, so subdued that
the pattern was imperceptible--a costume that was casual but not by
any means careless. His face, which was reflective and somewhat
over-refined, was the face of a quite elderly man, though his stringy
hair and moustache were still quite yellow. A double eye-glass, with a
broad, black ribbon, drooped from his aquiline nose, and he smiled, as
he communed with himself, with a self-content which was rare and almost
irritating. The straw panama on his head was many shades shabbier than
his clothes, as if he had caught it up by accident.

It needed the full shock of the huge shadow of MacIan, falling across
his sunlit path, to rouse him from his smiling reverie. When this had
fallen on him he lifted his head a little and blinked at the intruders
with short-sighted benevolence, but with far less surprise than might
have been expected. He was a gentleman; that is, he had social presence
of mind, whether for kindness or for insolence.

"Can I do anything for you?" he said, at last.

MacIan bowed. "You can extend to us your pardon," he said, for he also
came of a whole race of gentlemen--of gentlemen without shirts to their
backs. "I am afraid we are trespassing. We have just come over the
wall."

"Over the wall?" repeated the smiling old gentleman, still without
letting his surprise come uppermost.

"I suppose I am not wrong, sir," continued MacIan, "in supposing that
these grounds inside the wall belong to you?"

The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked thoughtfully for a
few moments, after which he said, with a sort of matured conviction:

"Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, and
the grounds outside the wall, too."

"A large proprietor, I imagine," said Turnbull, with a truculent eye.

"Yes," answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady smile.
"A large proprietor."

Turnbull's eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his red
beard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he could deal
and continued quite easily:

"I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one sees
and does a good many things that do not get into the newspapers. Things
which, on the whole, had better not get into the newspapers."

The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under
his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increased
confidence:

"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police won't
allow it in the streets--and then there's the County Council--and in the
fields even nothing's allowed but posters of pills. But in a gentleman's
garden, now----"

The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do you want
to fight? What do you want to fight about?"

MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct
common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided
him. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good
clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has
an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of
the police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from
understanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might
comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards
or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful
whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake
instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia. Even
MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt
the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last he
said, and even then with hesitation:

"We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that."

The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose,
and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck
seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.

"About God?" he queried, in a key completely new.

"Look here!" cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, "I'll tell you
what it's all about. I think that there's no God. I take it that it's
nobody's business but mine--or God's, if there is one. This young
gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it's his business. In
consequence, he first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then he
takes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturally
object. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks.
He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both have
steel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness)
will not accept either of our proposals; the result is that we run
about dodging the police and have jumped over our garden wall into your
magnificent garden to throw ourselves on your magnificent hospitality."

The face of the old gentleman had grown redder and redder during this
address, but it was still smiling; and when he broke out it was with a
kind of guffaw.

"So you really want to fight with drawn swords in my garden," he asked,
"about whether there is really a God?"

"Why not?" said MacIan, with his simple monstrosity of speech; "all
man's worship began when the Garden of Eden was founded."

"Yes, by----!" said Turnbull, with an oath, "and ended when the
Zoological Gardens were founded."

"In this garden! In my presence!" cried the stranger, stamping up and
down the gravel and choking with laughter, "whether there is a God!"
And he went stamping up and down the garden, making it echo with his
unintelligible laughter. Then he came back to them more composed and
wiping his eyes.

"Why, how small the world is!" he cried at last. "I can settle the whole
matter. Why, I am God!"

And he suddenly began to kick and wave his well-clad legs about the
lawn.

"You are what?" repeated Turnbull, in a tone which is beyond
description.

"Why, God, of course!" answered the other, thoroughly amused. "How
funny it is to think that you have tumbled over a garden wall and fallen
exactly on the right person! You might have gone floundering about in
all sorts of churches and chapels and colleges and schools of philosophy
looking for some evidence of the existence of God. Why, there is no
evidence, except seeing him. And now you've seen him. You've seen him
dance!"

And the obliging old gentleman instantly stood on one leg without
relaxing at all the grave and cultured benignity of his expression.

"I understood that this garden----" began the bewildered MacIan.

"Quite so! Quite so!" said the man on one leg, nodding gravely. "I said
this garden belonged to me and the land outside it. So they do. So does
the country beyond that and the sea beyond that and all the rest of the
earth. So does the moon. So do the sun and stars." And he added, with a
smile of apology: "You see, I'm God."

Turnbull and MacIan looked at him for one moment with a sort of notion
that perhaps he was not too old to be merely playing the fool. But
after staring steadily for an instant Turnbull saw the hard and horrible
earnestness in the man's eyes behind all his empty animation. Then
Turnbull looked very gravely at the strict gravel walls and the gay
flower-beds and the long rectangular red-brick building, which the mist
had left evident beyond them. Then he looked at MacIan.

Almost at the same moment another man came walking quickly round the
regal clump of rhododendrons. He had the look of a prosperous banker,
wore a good tall silk hat, was almost stout enough to burst the buttons
of a fine frock-coat; but he was talking to himself, and one of his
elbows had a singular outward jerk as he went by.




XIV. A MUSEUM OF SOULS

The man with the good hat and the jumping elbow went by very quickly;
yet the man with the bad hat, who thought he was God, overtook him. He
ran after him and jumped over a bed of geraniums to catch him.

"I beg your Majesty's pardon," he said, with mock humility, "but here is
a quarrel which you ought really to judge."

Then as he led the heavy, silk-hatted man back towards the group, he
caught MacIan's ear in order to whisper: "This poor gentleman is mad;
he thinks he is Edward VII." At this the self-appointed Creator slightly
winked. "Of course you won't trust him much; come to me for everything.
But in my position one has to meet so many people. One has to be
broadminded."

The big banker in the black frock-coat and hat was standing quite grave
and dignified on the lawn, save for his slight twitch of one limb,
and he did not seem by any means unworthy of the part which the other
promptly forced upon him.

"My dear fellow," said the man in the straw hat, "these two gentlemen
are going to fight a duel of the utmost importance. Your own royal
position and my much humbler one surely indicate us as the proper
seconds. Seconds--yes, seconds----" and here the speaker was once more
shaken with his old malady of laughter.

"Yes, you and I are both seconds--and these two gentlemen can obviously
fight in front of us. You, he-he, are the king. I am God; really, they
could hardly have better supporters. They have come to the right place."

Then Turnbull, who had been staring with a frown at the fresh turf,
burst out with a rather bitter laugh and cried, throwing his red head in
the air:

"Yes, by God, MacIan, I think we have come to the right place!" And
MacIan answered, with an adamantine stupidity:

"Any place is the right place where they will let us do it."

There was a long stillness, and their eyes involuntarily took in the
landscape, as they had taken in all the landscapes of their everlasting
combat; the bright, square garden behind the shop; the whole lift
and leaning of the side of Hampstead Heath; the little garden of the
decadent choked with flowers; the square of sand beside the sea
at sunrise. They both felt at the same moment all the breadth and
blossoming beauty of that paradise, the coloured trees, the natural and
restful nooks and also the great wall of stone--more awful than the wall
of China--from which no flesh could flee.

Turnbull was moodily balancing his sword in his hand as the other spoke;
then he started, for a mouth whispered quite close to his ear. With a
softness incredible in any cat, the huge, heavy man in the black hat and
frock-coat had crept across the lawn from his own side and was saying
in his ear: "Don't trust that second of yours. He's mad and not so mad,
either; for he frightfully cunning and sharp. Don't believe the story he
tells you about why I hate him. I know the story he'll tell; I overheard
it when the housekeeper was talking to the postman. It's too long to
talk about now, and I expect we're watched, but----"

Something in Turnbull made him want suddenly to be sick on the grass;
the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhumane
hatred of the inhuman state of madness. He seemed to hear all round him
the hateful whispers of that place, innumerable as leaves whispering
in the wind, and each of them telling eagerly some evil that had not
happened or some terrific secret which was not true. All the rationalist
and plain man revolted within him against bowing down for a moment in
that forest of deception and egotistical darkness. He wanted to blow up
that palace of delusions with dynamite; and in some wild way, which I
will not defend, he tried to do it.

He looked across at MacIan and said: "Oh, I can't stand this!"

"Can't stand what?" asked his opponent, eyeing him doubtfully.

"Shall we say the atmosphere?" replied Turnbull; "one can't use uncivil
expressions even to a--deity. The fact is, I don't like having God for
my second."

"Sir!" said that being in a state of great offence, "in my position I am
not used to having my favours refused. Do you know who I am?"

The editor of _The Atheist_ turned upon him like one who has lost
all patience, and exploded: "Yes, you are God, aren't you?" he said,
abruptly, "why do we have two sets of teeth?"

"Teeth?" spluttered the genteel lunatic; "teeth?"

"Yes," cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animated
gestures, "why does teething hurt? Why do growing pains hurt? Why are
measles catching? Why does a rose have thorns? Why do rhinoceroses have
horns? Why is the horn on the top of the nose? Why haven't I a horn on
the top of my nose, eh?" And he struck the bridge of his nose smartly
with his forefinger to indicate the place of the omission and then
wagged the finger menacingly at the Creator.

"I've often wanted to meet you," he resumed, sternly, after a pause, "to
hold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of this muddled and
meaningless world of yours. You make a hundred seeds and only one bears
fruit. You make a million worlds and only one seems inhabited. What do
you mean by it, eh? What do you mean by it?"

The unhappy lunatic had fallen back before this quite novel form of
attack, and lifted his burnt-out cigarette almost like one warding off a
blow. Turnbull went on like a torrent.

"A man died yesterday in Ealing. You murdered him. A girl had the
toothache in Croydon. You gave it her. Fifty sailors were drowned off
Selsey Bill. You scuttled their ship. What have you got to say for
yourself, eh?"

The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most of these
things to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his wrinkling brow and
said in a voice much saner than any he had yet used:

"Well, if you dislike my assistance, of course--perhaps the other
gentleman----"

"The other gentleman," cried Turnbull, scornfully, "is a submissive
and loyal and obedient gentleman. He likes the people who wear crowns,
whether of diamonds or of stars. He believes in the divine right of
kings, and it is appropriate enough that he should have the king for his
second. But it is not appropriate to me that I should have God for my
second. God is not good enough. I dislike and I deny the divine right of
kings. But I dislike more and I deny more the divine right of divinity."

Then after a pause in which he swallowed his passion, he said to MacIan:
"You have got the right second, anyhow."

The Highlander did not answer, but stood as if thunderstruck with one
long and heavy thought. Then at last he turned abruptly to his second in
the silk hat and said: "Who are you?"

The man in the silk hat blinked and bridled in affected surprise, like
one who was in truth accustomed to be doubted.

"I am King Edward VII," he said, with shaky arrogance. "Do you doubt my
word?"

"I do not doubt it in the least," answered MacIan.

"Then, why," said the large man in the silk hat, trembling from head to
foot, "why do you wear your hat before the king?"

"Why should I take it off," retorted MacIan, with equal heat, "before a
usurper?"

Turnbull swung round on his heel. "Well, really," he said, "I thought at
least you were a loyal subject."

"I am the only loyal subject," answered the Gael. "For nearly thirty
years I have walked these islands and have not found another."

"You are always hard to follow," remarked Turnbull, genially, "and
sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following."

"I alone am loyal," insisted MacIan; "for I alone am in rebellion. I am
ready at any instant to restore the Stuarts. I am ready at any instant
to defy the Hanoverian brood--and I defy it now even when face to face
with the actual ruler of the enormous British Empire!"

And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face,
he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and the
eccentric elbow.

"What right had you stunted German squires," he cried, "to interfere in
a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen? Who made you,
whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall,
who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchy
of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should
have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of
Jimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the blood
of Lochiel?" MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed
finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of that
Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back a few paces in
considerable confusion.

"What good have you ever done to us?" he continued in harsher and
harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds. "What
good have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarian
etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy! Gas of northern
metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons. Bad pictures
and bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial. Go back to
Hanover, you humbug? Go to----"

Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had entirely
given way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling away down the
path. MacIan strode after him still preaching and flourishing his large,
lean hands. The other two remained in the centre of the lawn--Turnbull
in convulsions of laughter, the lunatic in convulsions of disgust.
Almost at the same moment a third figure came stepping swiftly across
the lawn.

The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet somehow flung his
forked and narrow beard forward. That carefully cut and pointed yellow
beard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about him. When he clasped
his hands behind him, under the tails of his coat, he would wag his
beard at a man like a big forefinger. It performed almost all his
gestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses through
which he looked or the beautiful bleating voice in which he spoke. His
face and neck were of a lusty red, but lean and stringy; he always wore
his expensive gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon his aquiline
nose; and he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under his moustache,
in a smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a sneer. But for
the crooked glasses his dress was always exquisite; and but for the
smile he was perfectly and perennially depressed.

"Don't you think," said the new-comer, with a sort of supercilious
entreaty, "that we had better all come into breakfast? It is such a
mistake to wait for breakfast. It spoils one's temper so much."

"Quite so," replied Turnbull, seriously.

"There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here," said the
man with the goatish beard.

"It is rather a long story," said Turnbull, smiling. "Originally, it
might be called a phase in the quarrel between science and religion."

The new-comer started slightly, and Turnbull replied to the question on
his face.

"Oh, yes," he said, "I am science!"

"I congratulate you heartily," answered the other, "I am Doctor Quayle."

Turnbull's eyes did not move, but he realized that the man in the panama
hat had lost all his ease of a landed proprietor and had withdrawn to
a distance of thirty yards, where he stood glaring with all the
contraction of fear and hatred that can stiffen a cat.

           *                    *                   *

MacIan was sitting somewhat disconsolately on a stump of tree, his large
black head half buried in his large brown hands, when Turnbull strode
up to him chewing a cigarette. He did not look up, but his comrade and
enemy addressed him like one who must free himself of his feelings.

"Well, I hope, at any rate," he said, "that you like your precious
religion now. I hope you like the society of this poor devil whom your
damned tracts and hymns and priests have driven out of his wits. Five
men in this place, they tell me, five men in this place who might have
been fathers of families, and every one of them thinks he is God the
Father. Oh! you may talk about the ugliness of science, but there is no
one here who thinks he is Protoplasm."

"They naturally prefer a bright part," said MacIan, wearily. "Protoplasm
is not worth going mad about."

"At least," said Turnbull, savagely, "it was your Jesus Christ who
started all this bosh about being God."

For one instant MacIan opened the eyes of battle; then his tightened
lips took a crooked smile and he said, quite calmly:

"No, the idea is older; it was Satan who first said that he was God."

"Then, what," asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower,
"what is the difference between Christ and Satan?"

"It is quite simple," replied the Highlander. "Christ descended into
hell; Satan fell into it."

"Does it make much odds?" asked the free-thinker.

"It makes all the odds," said the other. "One of them wanted to go up
and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can be
humble, a devil can only be humbled."

"Why are you always wanting to humble a man?" asked Turnbull, knitting
his brows. "It affects me as ungenerous."

"Why were you wanting to humble a god when you found him in this
garden?" asked MacIan.

"That was an extreme case of impudence," said Turnbull.

"Granting the man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest,"
said MacIan. "It is we who are arrogant, who know we are only men. The
ordinary man in the street is more of a monster than that poor fellow;
for the man in the street treats himself as God Almighty when he knows
he isn't. He expects the universe to turn round him, though he knows he
isn't the centre."

"Well," said Turnbull, sitting down on the grass, "this is a digression,
anyhow. What I want to point out is, that your faith does end in asylums
and my science doesn't."

"Doesn't it, by George!" cried MacIan, scornfully. "There are a few men
here who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the Bible. But I bet
there are many more who are simply mad on madness."

"Do you really believe it?" asked the other.

"Scores of them, I should say," answered MacIan. "Fellows who have
read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had something
hereditary in their heads--the whole air they breathe is mad."

"All the same," said Turnbull, shrewdly, "I bet you haven't found a
madman of that sort."

"I bet I have!" cried Evan, with unusual animation. "I've been walking
about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He's simply
been broken down and driven raving by your damned science. Talk about
believing one is God--why, it's quite an old, comfortable, fireside
fancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes. He believes
that there is a God, but that he is better than God. He says God will be
afraid to face him. He says one is always progressing beyond the best.
He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were the
apocalypse: 'Never trust a God that you can't improve on.'"

"What can he have meant?" said the atheist, with all his logic awake.
"Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."

"It is the way he talks," said MacIan, almost indifferently; "but he
says rummier things than that. He says that a man's doctor ought to
decide what woman he marries; and he says that children ought not to
be brought up by their parents, because a physical partiality will then
distort the judgement of the educator."

"Oh, dear!" said Turnbull, laughing, "you have certainly come across a
pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own. I suppose some men do
lose their wits through science as through love and other good things."

"And he says," went on MacIan, monotonously, "that he cannot see why
anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided figure. He says
that on some higher plane----"

Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock. "I never could have
believed," he cried, "that you had humour enough to tell a lie. You've
gone a bit too far, old man, with your little joke. Even in a lunatic
asylum there can't be anybody who, having thought about the matter,
thinks that a triangle has not got three sides. If he exists he must be
a new era in human psychology. But he doesn't exist."

"I will go and fetch him," said MacIan, calmly; "I left the poor fellow
wandering about by the nasturtium bed."

MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him his
own discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a fixed smile
and an unfixed and rolling head. He had a goatlike beard just long
enough to be shaken in a strong wind. Turnbull sprang to his feet
and was like one who is speechless through choking a sudden shout of
laughter.

"Why, you great donkey," he shouted, in an ear-shattering whisper,
"that's not one of the patients at all. That's one of the doctors."

Evan looked back at the leering head with the long-pointed beard and
repeated the word inquiringly: "One of the doctors?"

"Oh, you know what I mean," said Turnbull, impatiently. "The medical
authorities of the place."

Evan was still staring back curiously at the beaming and bearded
creature behind him.

"The mad doctors," said Turnbull, shortly.

"Quite so," said MacIan.

After a rather restless silence Turnbull plucked MacIan by the elbow and
pulled him aside.

"For goodness sake," he said, "don't offend this fellow; he may be as
mad as ten hatters, if you like, but he has us between his finger
and thumb. This is the very time he appointed to talk with us about
our--well, our exeat."

"But what can it matter?" asked the wondering MacIan. "He can't keep us
in the asylum. We're not mad."

"Jackass!" said Turnbull, heartily, "of course we're not mad. Of course,
if we are medically examined and the thing is thrashed out, they will
find we are not mad. But don't you see that if the thing is thrashed out
it will mean letters to this reference and telegrams to that; and at the
first word of who we are, we shall be taken out of a madhouse, where
we may smoke, to a jail, where we mayn't. No, if we manage this very
quietly, he may merely let us out at the front door as stray revellers.
If there's half an hour of inquiry, we are cooked."

MacIan looked at the grass frowningly for a few seconds, and then said
in a new, small and childish voice: "I am awfully stupid, Mr. Turnbull;
you must be patient with me."

Turnbull caught Evan's elbow again with quite another gesture. "Come,"
he cried, with the harsh voice of one who hides emotion, "come and let
us be tactful in chorus."

The doctor with the pointed beard was already slanting it forward at a
more than usually acute angle, with the smile that expressed expectancy.

"I hope I do not hurry you, gentlemen," he said, with the faintest
suggestion of a sneer at their hurried consultation, "but I believe you
wanted to see me at half past eleven."

"I am most awfully sorry, Doctor," said Turnbull, with ready amiability;
"I never meant to keep you waiting; but the silly accident that has
landed us in your garden may have some rather serious consequences to
our friends elsewhere, and my friend here was just drawing my attention
to some of them."

"Quite so! Quite so!" said the doctor, hurriedly. "If you really want
to put anything before me, I can give you a few moments in my
consulting-room."

He led them rapidly into a small but imposing apartment, which seemed
to be built and furnished entirely in red-varnished wood. There was one
desk occupied with carefully docketed papers; and there were several
chairs of the red-varnished wood--though of different shape. All along
the wall ran something that might have been a bookcase, only that it was
not filled with books, but with flat, oblong slabs or cases of the same
polished dark-red consistency. What those flat wooden cases were they
could form no conception.

The doctor sat down with a polite impatience on his professional perch;
MacIan remained standing, but Turnbull threw himself almost with luxury
into a hard wooden arm-chair.

"This is a most absurd business, Doctor," he said, "and I am ashamed to
take up the time of busy professional men with such pranks from outside.
The plain fact is, that he and I and a pack of silly men and girls have
organized a game across this part of the country--a sort of combination
of hare and hounds and hide and seek--I dare say you've heard of it. We
are the hares, and, seeing your high wall look so inviting, we tumbled
over it, and naturally were a little startled with what we found on the
other side."

"Quite so!" said the doctor, mildly. "I can understand that you were
startled."

Turnbull had expected him to ask what place was the headquarters of the
new exhilarating game, and who were the male and female enthusiasts who
had brought it to such perfection; in fact, Turnbull was busy making up
these personal and topographical particulars. As the doctor did not ask
the question, he grew slightly uneasy, and risked the question: "I hope
you will accept my assurance that the thing was an accident and that no
intrusion was meant."

"Oh, yes, sir," replied the doctor, smiling, "I accept everything that
you say."

"In that case," said Turnbull, rising genially, "we must not further
interrupt your important duties. I suppose there will be someone to let
us out?"

"No," said the doctor, still smiling steadily and pleasantly, "there
will be no one to let you out."

"Can we let ourselves out, then?" asked Turnbull, in some surprise.

"Why, of course not," said the beaming scientist; "think how dangerous
that would be in a place like this."

"Then, how the devil are we to get out?" cried Turnbull, losing his
manners for the first time.

"It is a question of time, of receptivity, and treatment," said the
doctor, arching his eyebrows indifferently. "I do not regard either of
your cases as incurable."

And with that the man of the world was struck dumb, and, as in all
intolerable moments, the word was with the unworldly.

MacIan took one stride to the table, leant across it, and said: "We
can't stop here, we're not mad people!"

"We don't use the crude phrase," said the doctor, smiling at his
patent-leather boots.

"But you _can't_ think us mad," thundered MacIan. "You never saw us
before. You know nothing about us. You haven't even examined us."

The doctor threw back his head and beard. "Oh, yes," he said, "very
thoroughly."

"But you can't shut a man up on your mere impressions without documents
or certificates or anything?"

The doctor got languidly to his feet. "Quite so," he said. "You
certainly ought to see the documents."

He went across to the curious mock book-shelves and took down one of
the flat mahogany cases. This he opened with a curious key at his
watch-chain, and laying back a flap revealed a quire of foolscap covered
with close but quite clear writing. The first three words were in such
large copy-book hand that they caught the eye even at a distance. They
were: "MacIan, Evan Stuart."

Evan bent his angry eagle face over it; yet something blurred it and
he could never swear he saw it distinctly. He saw something that began:
"Prenatal influences predisposing to mania. Grandfather believed in
return of the Stuarts. Mother carried bone of St. Eulalia with which she
touched children in sickness. Marked religious mania at early age----"

Evan fell back and fought for his speech. "Oh!" he burst out at last.
"Oh! if all this world I have walked in had been as sane as my mother
was."

Then he compressed his temples with his hands, as if to crush them. And
then lifted suddenly a face that looked fresh and young, as if he had
dipped and washed it in some holy well.

"Very well," he cried; "I will take the sour with the sweet. I will pay
the penalty of having enjoyed God in this monstrous modern earth that
cannot enjoy man or beast. I will die happy in your madhouse, only
because I know what I know. Let it be granted, then--MacIan is a mystic;
MacIan is a maniac. But this honest shopkeeper and editor whom I have
dragged on my inhuman escapades, you cannot keep him. He will go free,
thank God, he is not down in any damned document. His ancestor, I am
certain, did not die at Culloden. His mother, I swear, had no relics.
Let my friend out of your front door, and as for me----"

The doctor had already gone across to the laden shelves, and after a few
minutes' short-sighted peering, had pulled down another parallelogram of
dark-red wood.

This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerring
egotistic eye on of the company saw the words, written in large letters:
"Turnbull, James."

Hitherto Turnbull himself had somewhat scornfully surrendered his part
in the whole business; but he was too honest and unaffected not to
start at his own name. After the name, the inscription appeared to run:
"Unique case of Eleutheromania. Parentage, as so often in such cases,
prosaic and healthy. Eleutheromaniac signs occurred early, however,
leading him to attach himself to the individualist Bradlaugh. Recent
outbreak of pure anarchy----"

Turnbull slammed the case to, almost smashing it, and said with a burst
of savage laughter: "Oh! come along, MacIan; I don't care so much, even
about getting out of the madhouse, if only we get out of this room. You
were right enough, MacIan, when you spoke about--about mad doctors."

Somehow they found themselves outside in the cool, green garden, and
then, after a stunned silence, Turnbull said: "There is one thing that
was puzzling me all the time, and I understand it now."

"What do you mean?" asked Evan.

"No man by will or wit," answered Turnbull, "can get out of this garden;
and yet we got into it merely by jumping over a garden wall. The whole
thing explains itself easily enough. That undefended wall was an open
trap. It was a trap laid for two celebrated lunatics. They saw us get in
right enough. And they will see that we do not get out."

Evan gazed at the garden wall, gravely for more than a minute, and then
he nodded without a word.




XV. THE DREAM OF MACIAN

The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that
in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense of almost complete
solitude. They could stray up so near to the wall in an apparently
unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump over it. They would only
have found the error of their calculations if they had tried to jump.

Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan MacIan
was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark--especially
upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive
magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster
attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it
is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the
word. It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is
in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our
bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler
thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite
solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial
snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which
led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out
as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night, when
the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the garden until
almost the strongest tints to be seen were the strong soft blue of the
sky and the large lemon moon. He was walking with his face turned up to
it in that rather half-witted fashion which might have excused the error
of his keepers; and as he gazed he became aware of something little and
lustrous flying close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked
off the moon. At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction
in his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes. Then he thought
it was a falling star; only it did not fall. It jerked awkwardly up and
down in a way unknown among meteors and strangely reminiscent of the
works of man. The next moment the thing drove right across the moon,
and from being silver upon blue, suddenly became black upon silver;
then although it passed the field of light in a flash its outline was
unmistakable though eccentric. It was a flying ship.

The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came
nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend. It
was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of
Sir Galahad. The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as
it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only
figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with
snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction. The
figure stood so still that he could easily have supposed it to be a
statue. Indeed, he thought it was until it spoke.

"Evan," said the voice, and it spoke with the simple authority of some
forgotten father revisiting his children, "you have remained here long
enough, and your sword is wanted elsewhere."

"Wanted for what?" asked the young man, accepting the monstrous event
with a queer and clumsy naturalness; "what is my sword wanted for?"

"For all that you hold dear," said the man standing in the moonlight;
"for the thrones of authority and for all ancient loyalty to law."

Evan looked up at the lunar orb again as if in irrational appeal--a moon
calf bleating to his mother the moon. But the face of Luna seemed as
witless as his own; there is no help in nature against the supernatural;
and he looked again at the tall marble figure that might have been made
out of solid moonlight.

Then he said in a loud voice: "Who are you?" and the next moment was
seized by a sort of choking terror lest his question should be answered.
But the unknown preserved an impenetrable silence for a long space and
then only answered: "I must not say who I am until the end of the world;
but I may say what I am. I am the law."

And he lifted his head so that the moon smote full upon his beautiful
and ancient face.

The face was the face of a Greek god grown old, but not grown either
weak or ugly; there was nothing to break its regularity except a rather
long chin with a cleft in it, and this rather added distinction than
lessened beauty. His strong, well-opened eyes were very brilliant but
quite colourless like steel.

MacIan was one of those to whom a reverence and self-submission in
ritual come quite easy, and are ordinary things. It was not artificial
in him to bend slightly to this solemn apparition or to lower his voice
when he said: "Do you bring me some message?"

"I do bring you a message," answered the man of moon and marble. "The
king has returned."

Evan did not ask for or require any explanation. "I suppose you can take
me to the war," he said, and the silent silver figure only bowed its
head again. MacIan clambered into the silver boat, and it rose upward to
the stars.

To say that it rose to the stars is no mere metaphor, for the sky had
cleared to that occasional and astonishing transparency in which one can
see plainly both stars and moon.

As the white-robed figure went upward in his white chariot, he said
quite quietly to Evan: "There is an answer to all the folly talked about
equality. Some stars are big and some small; some stand still and some
circle around them as they stand. They can be orderly, but they cannot
be equal."

"They are all very beautiful," said Evan, as if in doubt.

"They are all beautiful," answered the other, "because each is in his
place and owns his superior. And now England will be beautiful after the
same fashion. The earth will be as beautiful as the heavens, because our
kings have come back to us."

"The Stuart----" began Evan, earnestly.

"Yes," answered the old man, "that which has returned is Stuart and yet
older than Stuart. It is Capet and Plantagenet and Pendragon. It is all
that good old time of which proverbs tell, that golden reign of Saturn
against which gods and men were rebels. It is all that was ever lost
by insolence and overwhelmed in rebellion. It is your own forefather,
MacIan with the broken sword, bleeding without hope at Culloden. It is
Charles refusing to answer the questions of the rebel court. It is Mary
of the magic face confronting the gloomy and grasping peers and the
boorish moralities of Knox. It is Richard, the last Plantagenet,
giving his crown to Bolingbroke as to a common brigand. It is Arthur,
overwhelmed in Lyonesse by heathen armies and dying in the mist,
doubtful if ever he shall return."

"But now----" said Evan, in a low voice.

"But now!" said the old man; "he has returned."

"Is the war still raging?" asked MacIan.

"It rages like the pit itself beyond the sea whither I am taking you,"
answered the other. "But in England the king enjoys his own again.
The people are once more taught and ruled as is best; they are happy
knights, happy squires, happy servants, happy serfs, if you will; but
free at last of that load of vexation and lonely vanity which was called
being a citizen."

"Is England, indeed, so secure?" asked Evan.

"Look out and see," said the guide. "I fancy you have seen this place
before."

They were driving through the air towards one region of the sky where
the hollow of night seemed darkest and which was quite without stars.
But against this black background there sprang up, picked out in
glittering silver, a dome and a cross. It seemed that it was really
newly covered with silver, which in the strong moonlight was like
white flame. But, however, covered or painted, Evan had no difficult
in knowing the place again. He saw the great thoroughfare that sloped
upward to the base of its huge pedestal of steps. And he wondered
whether the little shop was still by the side of it and whether its
window had been mended.

As the flying ship swept round the dome he observed other alterations.
The dome had been redecorated so as to give it a more solemn and
somewhat more ecclesiastical note; the ball was draped or destroyed,
and round the gallery, under the cross, ran what looked like a ring of
silver statues, like the little leaden images that stood round the hat
of Louis XI. Round the second gallery, at the base of the dome, ran a
second rank of such images, and Evan thought there was another round
the steps below. When they came closer he saw that they were figures
in complete armour of steel or silver, each with a naked sword, point
upward; and then he saw one of the swords move. These were not statues
but an armed order of chivalry thrown in three circles round the cross.
MacIan drew in his breath, as children do at anything they think utterly
beautiful. For he could imagine nothing that so echoed his own visions
of pontifical or chivalric art as this white dome sitting like a vast
silver tiara over London, ringed with a triple crown of swords.

As they went sailing down Ludgate Hill, Evan saw that the state of the
streets fully answered his companion's claim about the reintroduction
of order. All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity
and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but
picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large
numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in
order. The mounted men were not common policemen, but knights with spurs
and plume whose smooth and splendid armour glittered like diamond rather
than steel. Only in one place--at the corner of Bouverie Street--did
there appear to be a moment's confusion, and that was due to hurry
rather than resistance. But one old grumbling man did not get out of
the way quick enough, and the man on horseback struck him, not severely,
across the shoulders with the flat of his sword.

"The soldier had no business to do that," said MacIan, sharply. "The old
man was moving as quickly as he could."

"We attach great importance to discipline in the streets," said the man
in white, with a slight smile.

"Discipline is not so important as justice," said MacIan.

The other did not answer.

Then after a swift silence that took them out across St. James's Park,
he said: "The people must be taught to obey; they must learn their own
ignorance. And I am not sure," he continued, turning his back on Evan
and looking out of the prow of the ship into the darkness, "I am not
sure that I agree with your little maxim about justice. Discipline
for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an
individual."

Evan, who was also leaning over the edge, swung round with startling
suddenness and stared at the other's back.

"Discipline for society----" he repeated, very staccato, "more
important--justice to individual?"

Then after a long silence he called out: "Who and what are you?"

"I am an angel," said the white-robed figure, without turning round.

"You are not a Catholic," said MacIan.

The other seemed to take no notice, but reverted to the main topic.

"In our armies up in heaven we learn to put a wholesome fear into
subordinates."

MacIan sat craning his neck forward with an extraordinary and
unaccountable eagerness.

"Go on!" he cried, twisting and untwisting his long, bony fingers, "go
on!"

"Besides," continued he, in the prow, "you must allow for a certain high
spirit and haughtiness in the superior type."

"Go on!" said Evan, with burning eyes.

"Just as the sight of sin offends God," said the unknown, "so does the
sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of
necessity, be impatient with the squalid and----"

"Why, you great fool!" cried MacIan, rising to the top of his tremendous
stature, "did you think I would have doubted only for that rap with a
sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights, that good knights have
bad tempers, that the Church has rough priests and coarse cardinals;
I have known it ever since I was born. You fool! you had only to say,
'Yes, it is rather a shame,' and I should have forgotten the affair. But
I saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry; I knew that
something was wrong with you and your cathedrals. Something is wrong;
everything is wrong. You are not an angel. That is not a church. It is
not the rightful king who has come home."

"That is unfortunate," said the other, in a quiet but hard voice,
"because you are going to see his Majesty."

"No," said MacIan, "I am going to jump over the side."

"Do you desire death?"

"No," said Evan, quite composedly, "I desire a miracle."

"From whom do you ask it? To whom do you appeal?" said his companion,
sternly. "You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross on the
cathedral, and insulted an archangel."

"I appeal to God," said Evan, and sprang up and stood upon the edge of
the swaying ship.

The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked at Evan with eyes
which were like two suns, and put his hand to his mouth just too late to
hide an awful smile.

"And how do you know," he said, "how do you know that I am not God?"

MacIan screamed. "Ah!" he cried. "Now I know who you really are. You are
not God. You are not one of God's angels. But you were once."

The being's hand dropped from his mouth and Evan dropped out of the car.




XVI. THE DREAM OF TURNBULL

Turnbull was walking rather rampantly up and down the garden on a gusty
evening chewing his cigar and in that mood when every man suppresses
an instinct to spit. He was not, as a rule, a man much acquainted with
moods; and the storms and sunbursts of MacIan's soul passed before him
as an impressive but unmeaning panorama, like the anarchy of Highland
scenery. Turnbull was one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and
industry of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady.
His heart was in the right place; but he was quite content to leave it
there. It was his head that was his hobby. His mornings and evenings
were marked not by impulses or thirsty desires, not by hope or by
heart-break; they were filled with the fallacies he had detected, the
problems he had made plain, the adverse theories he had wrestled with
and thrown, the grand generalizations he had justified. But even the
cheerful inner life of a logician may be upset by a lunatic asylum, to
say nothing of whiffs of memory from a lady in Jersey, and the little
red-bearded man on this windy evening was in a dangerous frame of mind.

Plain and positive as he was, the influence of earth and sky may have
been greater on him than he imagined; and the weather that walked the
world at that moment was as red and angry as Turnbull. Long strips and
swirls of tattered and tawny cloud were dragged downward to the west
exactly as torn red raiment would be dragged. And so strong and pitiless
was the wind that it whipped away fragments of red-flowering bushes or
of copper beech, and drove them also across the garden, a drift of red
leaves, like the leaves of autumn, as in parody of the red and driven
rags of cloud.

There was a sense in earth and heaven as of everything breaking up, and
all the revolutionist in Turnbull rejoiced that it was breaking up.
The trees were breaking up under the wind, even in the tall strength
of their bloom: the clouds were breaking up and losing even their large
heraldic shapes. Shards and shreds of copper cloud split off continually
and floated by themselves, and for some reason the truculent eye of
Turnbull was attracted to one of these careering cloudlets, which seemed
to him to career in an exaggerated manner. Also it kept its shape, which
is unusual with clouds shaken off; also its shape was of an odd sort.

Turnbull continued to stare at it, and in a little time occurred that
crucial instant when a thing, however incredible, is accepted as a fact.
The copper cloud was tumbling down towards the earth, like some gigantic
leaf from the copper beeches. And as it came nearer it was evident,
first, that it was not a cloud, and, second, that it was not itself
of the colour of copper; only, being burnished like a mirror, it had
reflected the red-brown colours of the burning clouds. As the thing
whirled like a windswept leaf down towards the wall of the garden it was
clear that it was some sort of air-ship made of metal, and slapping
the air with big broad fins of steel. When it came about a hundred feet
above the garden, a shaggy, lean figure leapt up in it, almost black
against the bronze and scarlet of the west, and, flinging out a kind of
hook or anchor, caught on to the green apple-tree just under the wall;
and from that fixed holding ground the ship swung in the red tempest
like a captive balloon.

While our friend stood frozen for an instant by his astonishment, the
queer figure in the airy car tipped the vehicle almost upside down by
leaping over the side of it, seemed to slide or drop down the rope like
a monkey, and alighted (with impossible precision and placidity) seated
on the edge of the wall, over which he kicked and dangled his legs as he
grinned at Turnbull. The wind roared in the trees yet more ruinous and
desolate, the red tails of the sunset were dragged downward like red
dragons sucked down to death, and still on the top of the asylum wall
sat the sinister figure with the grimace, swinging his feet in tune with
the tempest; while above him, at the end of its tossing or tightened
cord, the enormous iron air-ship floated as light and as little noticed
as a baby's balloon upon its string.

Turnbull's first movement after sixty motionless seconds was to turn
round and look at the large, luxuriant parallelogram of the garden and
the long, low rectangular building beyond. There was not a soul or a
stir of life within sight. And he had a quite meaningless sensation, as
if there never really had been any one else there except he since the
foundation of the world.

Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the
atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the man at
a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see his face and
figure quite plain. Two facts about him stood out in the picked colours
of some piratical schoolboy's story. The first was that his lean brown
body was bare to the belt of his loose white trousers; the other that
through hygiene, affectation, or whatever other cause, he had a scarlet
handkerchief tied tightly but somewhat aslant across his brow. After
these two facts had become emphatic, others appeared sufficiently
important. One was that under the scarlet rag the hair was plentiful,
but white as with the last snows of mortality. Another was that under
the mop of white and senile hair the face was strong, handsome, and
smiling, with a well-cut profile and a long cloven chin. The length of
this lower part of the face and the strange cleft in it (which gave the
man, in quite another sense from the common one, a double chin) faintly
spoilt the claim of the face to absolute regularity, but it greatly
assisted it in wearing the expression of half-smiling and half-sneering
arrogance with which it was staring at all the stones, all the flowers,
but especially at the solitary man.

"What do you want?" shouted Turnbull.

"I want you, Jimmy," said the eccentric man on the wall, and with the
very word he had let himself down with a leap on to the centre of the
lawn, where he bounded once literally like an India-rubber ball and then
stood grinning with his legs astride. The only three facts that Turnbull
could now add to his inventory were that the man had an ugly-looking
knife swinging at his trousers belt, that his brown feet were as bare
as his bronzed trunk and arms, and that his eyes had a singular bleak
brilliancy which was of no particular colour.

"Excuse my not being in evening dress," said the newcomer with an
urbane smile. "We scientific men, you know--I have to work my own
engines--electrical engineer--very hot work."

"Look here," said Turnbull, sturdily clenching his fists in his trousers
pockets, "I am bound to expect lunatics inside these four walls; but I
do bar their coming from outside, bang out of the sunset clouds."

"And yet you came from the outside, too, Jim," said the stranger in a
voice almost affectionate.

"What do you want?" asked Turnbull, with an explosion of temper as
sudden as a pistol shot.

"I have already told you," said the man, lowering his voice and speaking
with evident sincerity; "I want you."

"What do you want with me?"

"I want exactly what you want," said the new-comer with a new gravity.
"I want the Revolution."

Turnbull looked at the fire-swept sky and the wind-stricken woodlands,
and kept on repeating the word voicelessly to himself--the word that did
indeed so thoroughly express his mood of rage as it had been among those
red clouds and rocking tree-tops. "Revolution!" he said to himself. "The
Revolution--yes, that is what I want right enough--anything, so long as
it is a Revolution."

To some cause he could never explain he found himself completing the
sentence on the top of the wall, having automatically followed the
stranger so far. But when the stranger silently indicated the rope that
led to the machine, he found himself pausing and saying: "I can't leave
MacIan behind in this den."

"We are going to destroy the Pope and all the kings," said the
new-comer. "Would it be wiser to take him with us?"

Somehow the muttering Turnbull found himself in the flying ship also,
and it swung up into the sunset.

"All the great rebels have been very little rebels," said the man with
the red scarf. "They have been like fourth-form boys who sometimes
venture to hit a fifth-form boy. That was all the worth of their
French Revolution and regicide. The boys never really dared to defy the
schoolmaster."

"Whom do you mean by the schoolmaster?" asked Turnbull.

"You know whom I mean," answered the strange man, as he lay back on
cushions and looked up into the angry sky.

They seemed rising into stronger and stronger sunlight, as if it were
sunrise rather than sunset. But when they looked down at the earth
they saw it growing darker and darker. The lunatic asylum in its large
rectangular grounds spread below them in a foreshortened and infantile
plan, and looked for the first time the grotesque thing that it was.
But the clear colours of the plan were growing darker every moment. The
masses of rose or rhododendron deepened from crimson to violet. The maze
of gravel pathways faded from gold to brown. By the time they had
risen a few hundred feet higher nothing could be seen of that darkening
landscape except the lines of lighted windows, each one of which, at
least, was the light of one lost intelligence. But on them as they swept
upward better and braver winds seemed to blow, and on them the ruby
light of evening seemed struck, and splashed like red spurts from the
grapes of Dionysus. Below them the fallen lights were literally the
fallen stars of servitude. And above them all the red and raging clouds
were like the leaping flags of liberty.

The man with the cloven chin seemed to have a singular power of
understanding thoughts; for, as Turnbull felt the whole universe tilt
and turn over his head, the stranger said exactly the right thing.

"Doesn't it seem as if everything were being upset?" said he; "and if
once everything is upset, He will be upset on top of it."

Then, as Turnbull made no answer, his host continued:

"That is the really fine thing about space. It is topsy-turvy. You have
only to climb far enough towards the morning star to feel that you are
coming down to it. You have only to dive deep enough into the abyss to
feel that you are rising. That is the only glory of this universe--it is
a giddy universe."

Then, as Turnbull was still silent, he added:

"The heavens are full of revolution--of the real sort of revolution. All
the high things are sinking low and all the big things looking small.
All the people who think they are aspiring find they are falling head
foremost. And all the people who think they are condescending find they
are climbing up a precipice. That is the intoxication of space. That is
the only joy of eternity--doubt. There is only one pleasure the angels
can possibly have in flying, and that is, that they do not know whether
they are on their head or their heels."

Then, finding his companion still mute, he fell himself into a smiling
and motionless meditation, at the end of which he said suddenly:

"So MacIan converted you?"

Turnbull sprang up as if spurning the steel car from under his feet.
"Converted me!" he cried. "What the devil do you mean? I have known him
for a month, and I have not retracted a single----"

"This Catholicism is a curious thing," said the man of the cloven chin
in uninterrupted reflectiveness, leaning his elegant elbows over the
edge of the vessel; "it soaks and weakens men without their knowing it,
just as I fear it has soaked and weakened you."

Turnbull stood in an attitude which might well have meant pitching the
other man out of the flying ship.

"I am an atheist," he said, in a stifled voice. "I have always been an
atheist. I am still an atheist." Then, addressing the other's indolent
and indifferent back, he cried: "In God's name what do you mean?"

And the other answered without turning round:

"I mean nothing in God's name."

Turnbull spat over the edge of the car and fell back furiously into his
seat.

The other continued still unruffled, and staring over the edge idly as
an angler stares down at a stream.

"The truth is that we never thought that you could have been caught,"
he said; "we counted on you as the one red-hot revolutionary left in
the world. But, of course, these men like MacIan are awfully clever,
especially when they pretend to be stupid."

Turnbull leapt up again in a living fury and cried: "What have I got to
do with MacIan? I believe all I ever believed, and disbelieve all I
ever disbelieved. What does all this mean, and what do you want with me
here?"

Then for the first time the other lifted himself from the edge of the
car and faced him.

"I have brought you here," he answered, "to take part in the last war of
the world."

"The last war!" repeated Turnbull, even in his dazed state a little
touchy about such a dogma; "how do you know it will be the last?"

The man laid himself back in his reposeful attitude, and said:

"It is the last war, because if it does not cure the world for ever, it
will destroy it."

"What do you mean?"

"I only mean what you mean," answered the unknown in a temperate voice.
"What was it that you always meant on those million and one nights when
you walked outside your Ludgate Hill shop and shook your hand in the
air?"

"Still I do not see," said Turnbull, stubbornly.

"You will soon," said the other, and abruptly bent downward one iron
handle of his huge machine. The engine stopped, stooped, and dived
almost as deliberately as a man bathing; in their downward rush they
swept within fifty yards of a big bulk of stone that Turnbull knew only
too well. The last red anger of the sunset was ended; the dome of heaven
was dark; the lanes of flaring light in the streets below hardly lit up
the base of the building. But he saw that it was St. Paul's Cathedral,
and he saw that on the top of it the ball was still standing erect, but
the cross was stricken and had fallen sideways. Then only he cared to
look down into the streets, and saw that they were inflamed with uproar
and tossing passions.

"We arrive at a happy moment," said the man steering the ship. "The
insurgents are bombarding the city, and a cannon-ball has just hit the
cross. Many of the insurgents are simple people, and they naturally
regard it as a happy omen."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, in a rather colourless voice.

"Yes," replied the other. "I thought you would be glad to see your
prayer answered. Of course I apologize for the word prayer."

"Don't mention it," said Turnbull.

The flying ship had come down upon a sort of curve, and was now rising
again. The higher and higher it rose the broader and broader became the
scenes of flame and desolation underneath.

Ludgate Hill indeed had been an uncaptured and comparatively quiet
height, altered only by the startling coincidence of the cross fallen
awry. All the other thoroughfares on all sides of that hill were full
of the pulsation and the pain of battle, full of shaking torches and
shouting faces. When at length they had risen high enough to have a
bird's-eye view of the whole campaign, Turnbull was already intoxicated.
He had smelt gunpowder, which was the incense of his own revolutionary
religion.

"Have the people really risen?" he asked, breathlessly. "What are they
fighting about?"

"The programme is rather elaborate," said his entertainer with some
indifference. "I think Dr. Hertz drew it up."

Turnbull wrinkled his forehead. "Are all the poor people with the
Revolution?" he asked.

The other shrugged his shoulders. "All the instructed and
class-conscious part of them without exception," he replied. "There
were certainly a few districts; in fact, we are passing over them just
now----"

Turnbull looked down and saw that the polished car was literally lit
up from underneath by the far-flung fires from below. Underneath whole
squares and solid districts were in flames, like prairies or forests on
fire.

"Dr. Hertz has convinced everybody," said Turnbull's cicerone in a
smooth voice, "that nothing can really be done with the real slums. His
celebrated maxim has been quite adopted. I mean the three celebrated
sentences: 'No man should be unemployed. Employ the employables. Destroy
the unemployables.'"

There was a silence, and then Turnbull said in a rather strained voice:
"And do I understand that this good work is going on under here?"

"Going on splendidly," replied his companion in the heartiest voice.
"You see, these people were much too tired and weak even to join the
social war. They were a definite hindrance to it."

"And so you are simply burning them out?"

"It _does_ seem absurdly simple," said the man, with a beaming smile,
"when one thinks of all the worry and talk about helping a hopeless
slave population, when the future obviously was only crying to be rid of
them. There are happy babes unborn ready to burst the doors when these
drivellers are swept away."

"Will you permit me to say," said Turnbull, after reflection, "that I
don't like all this?"

"And will you permit me to say," said the other, with a snap, "that I
don't like Mr. Evan MacIan?"

Somewhat to the speaker's surprise this did not inflame the sensitive
sceptic; he had the air of thinking thoroughly, and then he said: "No, I
don't think it's my friend MacIan that taught me that. I think I should
always have said that I don't like this. These people have rights."

"Rights!" repeated the unknown in a tone quite indescribable. Then he
added with a more open sneer: "Perhaps they also have souls."

"They have lives!" said Turnbull, sternly; "that is quite enough for me.
I understood you to say that you thought life sacred."

"Yes, indeed!" cried his mentor with a sort of idealistic animation.
"Yes, indeed! Life is sacred--but lives are not sacred. We are improving
Life by removing lives. Can you, as a free-thinker, find any fault in
that?"

"Yes," said Turnbull with brevity.

"Yet you applaud tyrannicide," said the stranger with rationalistic
gaiety. "How inconsistent! It really comes to this: You approve of
taking away life from those to whom it is a triumph and a pleasure.
But you will not take away life from those to whom it is a burden and a
toil."

Turnbull rose to his feet in the car with considerable deliberation, but
his face seemed oddly pale. The other went on with enthusiasm.

"Life, yes, Life is indeed sacred!" he cried; "but new lives for old!
Good lives for bad! On that very place where now there sprawls one
drunken wastrel of a pavement artist more or less wishing he were
dead--on that very spot there shall in the future be living pictures;
there shall be golden girls and boys leaping in the sun."

Turnbull, still standing up, opened his lips. "Will you put me down,
please?" he said, quite calmly, like on stopping an omnibus.

"Put you down--what do you mean?" cried his leader. "I am taking you to
the front of the revolutionary war, where you will be one of the first
of the revolutionary leaders."

"Thank you," replied Turnbull with the same painful constraint. "I have
heard about your revolutionary war, and I think on the whole that I
would rather be anywhere else."

"Do you want to be taken to a monastery," snarled the other, "with
MacIan and his winking Madonnas."

"I want to be taken to a madhouse," said Turnbull distinctly, giving the
direction with a sort of precision. "I want to go back to exactly the
same lunatic asylum from which I came."

"Why?" asked the unknown.

"Because I want a little sane and wholesome society," answered Turnbull.

There was a long and peculiar silence, and then the man driving the
flying machine said quite coolly: "I won't take you back."

And then Turnbull said equally coolly: "Then I'll jump out of the car."

The unknown rose to his full height, and the expression in his eyes
seemed to be made of ironies behind ironies, as two mirrors infinitely
reflect each other. At last he said, very gravely: "Do you think I am
the devil?"

"Yes," said Turnbull, violently. "For I think the devil is a dream,
and so are you. I don't believe in you or your flying ship or your last
fight of the world. It is all a nightmare. I say as a fact of dogma and
faith that it is all a nightmare. And I will be a martyr for my faith as
much as St. Catherine, for I will jump out of this ship and risk waking
up safe in bed."

After swaying twice with the swaying vessel he dived over the side as
one dives into the sea. For some incredible moments stars and space and
planets seemed to shoot up past him as the sparks fly upward; and yet in
that sickening descent he was full of some unnatural happiness. He could
connect it with no idea except one that half escaped him--what Evan had
said of the difference between Christ and Satan; that it was by Christ's
own choice that He descended into hell.

When he again realized anything, he was lying on his elbow on the
lawn of the lunatic asylum, and the last red of the sunset had not yet
disappeared.




XVII. THE IDIOT

Evan MacIan was standing a few yards off looking at him in absolute
silence.

He had not the moral courage to ask MacIan if there had been anything
astounding in the manner of his coming there, nor did MacIan seem to
have any question to ask, or perhaps any need to ask it. The two men
came slowly towards each other, and found the same expression on each
other's faces. Then, for the first time in all their acquaintance, they
shook hands.

Almost as if this were a kind of unconscious signal, it brought Dr.
Quayle bounding out of a door and running across the lawn.

"Oh, there you are!" he exclaimed with a relieved giggle. "Will you come
inside, please? I want to speak to you both."

They followed him into his shiny wooden office where their damning
record was kept. Dr. Quayle sat down on a swivel chair and swung round
to face them. His carved smile had suddenly disappeared.

"I will be plain with you gentlemen," he said, abruptly; "you know
quite well we do our best for everybody here. Your cases have been under
special consideration, and the Master himself has decided that you ought
to be treated specially and--er--under somewhat simpler conditions."

"You mean treated worse, I suppose," said Turnbull, gruffly.

The doctor did not reply, and MacIan said: "I expected this." His eyes
had begun to glow.

The doctor answered, looking at his desk and playing with a key: "Well,
in certain cases that give anxiety--it is often better----"

"Give anxiety," said Turnbull, fiercely. "Confound your impudence! What
do you mean? You imprison two perfectly sane men in a madhouse because
you have made up a long word. They take it in good temper, walk and talk
in your garden like monks who have found a vocation, are civil even to
you, you damned druggists' hack! Behave not only more sanely than any of
your patients, but more sanely than half the sane men outside, and you
have the soul-stifling cheek to say that they give anxiety."

"The head of the asylum has settled it all," said Dr. Quayle, still
looking down.

MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the doctor
with flaming eyes.

"If the head has settled it let the head announce it," he said. "I won't
take it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering degenerate. Let
us see the head of the asylum."

"See the head of the asylum," repeated Dr. Quayle. "Certainly not."

The tall Highlander, bending over him, put one hand on his shoulder with
fatherly interest.

"You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my position as
a lunatic," he said. "I could kill you with my left hand before such a
rat as you could so much as squeak. And I wouldn't be hanged for it."

"I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan," said Turnbull with sobriety and
perfect respectfulness, "that you had better let us see the head of the
institution."

Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and clumsy
presence of mind.

"Oh, certainly," he said with a weak laugh. "You can see the head of the
asylum if you particularly want to." He almost ran out of the room,
and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails. He knocked at an
ordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a voice said, "Come in,"
MacIan's breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest.
Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened the door.

It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a medical
library. At the other end of it was a ponderous and polished desk with
an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which was just sufficient
to show a slender, well-bred figure in an ordinary medical black
frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered with age, was bent over neat
piles of notes. This gentleman looked up for an instant as they
entered, and the lamplight fell on his glittering spectacles and
long, clean-shaven face--a face which would have been simply like an
aristocrat's but that a certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in
the chin made it look more like a very handsome actor's. It was only for
a flash that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head over
his notes once more, and said, without looking up again:

"I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and C."

Turnbull and MacIan looked at each other, and said more than they could
ever say with tongues or swords. Among other things they said that
to that particular Head of the institution it was a waste of time to
appeal, and they followed Dr. Quayle out of the room.

The instant they stepped out into the corridor four sturdy figures
stepped from four sides, pinioned them, and ran them along the
galleries. They might very likely have thrown their captors right and
left had they been inclined to resist, but for some nameless reason
they were more inclined to laugh. A mixture of mad irony with childish
curiosity made them feel quite inclined to see what next twist would
be taken by their imbecile luck. They were dragged down countless cold
avenues lined with glazed tiles, different only in being of different
lengths and set at different angles. They were so many and so monotonous
that to escape back by them would have been far harder than fleeing from
the Hampton Court maze. Only the fact that windows grew fewer, coming
at longer intervals, and the fact that when the windows did come they
seemed shadowed and let in less light, showed that they were winding
into the core or belly of some enormous building. After a little time
the glazed corridors began to be lit by electricity.

At last, when they had walked nearly a mile in those white and polished
tunnels, they came with quite a shock to the futile finality of a
cul-de-sac. All that white and weary journey ended suddenly in an oblong
space and a blank white wall. But in the white wall there were two iron
doors painted white on which were written, respectively, in neat black
capitals B and C.

"You go in here, sir," said the leader of the officials, quite
respectfully, "and you in here."

But before the doors had clanged upon their dazed victims, MacIan had
been able to say to Turnbull with a strange drawl of significance: "I
wonder who A is."

Turnbull made an automatic struggle before he allowed himself to be
thrown into the cell. Hence it happened that he was the last to enter,
and was still full of the exhilaration of the adventures for at least
five minutes after the echo of the clanging door had died away.

Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and a half
hours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end of his life. He
was hidden and sealed up in this little crack of stone until the flesh
should fall off his bones. He was dead, and the world had won.

His cell was of an oblong shape, but very long in comparison with its
width. It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully extended
with the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left wall, very dusty. It
was, however, long enough for a man to walk one thirty-fifth part of a
mile if he traversed it entirely. On the same principle a row of fixed
holes, quite close together, let in to the cells by pipes what was
alleged to be the freshest air. For these great scientific organizers
insisted that a man should be healthy even if he was miserable. They
provided a walk long enough to give him exercise and holes large enough
to give him oxygen. There their interest in human nature suddenly
ceased. It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefit
of exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty. They had not
entertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of the
advantages of the open sky. They administered air in secret, but in
sufficient doses, as if it were a medicine. They suggested walking,
as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk. Above all, the asylum
authorities insisted on their own extraordinary cleanliness. Every
morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep on his iron bedstead
which was lifted half-way up the wall and clamped to it with iron, four
sluices or metal mouths opened above him at the four corners of the
chamber and washed it white of any defilement. Turnbull's solitary soul
surged up against this sickening daily solemnity.

"I am buried alive!" he cried, bitterly; "they have hidden me under
mountains. I shall be here till I rot. Why the blazes should it matter
to them whether I am dirty or clean."

Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong cell,
and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of perfectly cooked
lentils and a big bowl of cocoa. He was not underfed any more than he
was underexercised or asphyxiated. He had ample walking space, ample
air, ample and even filling food. The only objection was that he had
nothing to walk towards, nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever
for drawing the breath of life.

Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him. It was a long,
narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and ought to
have had a flat wall at the other; but that end was broken by a wedge or
angle of space, like the prow of a ship. After three days of silence and
cocoa, this angle at the end began to infuriate Turnbull. It maddened
him to think that two lines came together and pointed at nothing. After
the fifth day he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner. After
twenty-five days he almost broke his head against it. Then he became
quite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like a sort of
Robinson Crusoe.

Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and he
found himself paying particular attention to the row of holes which let
in the air into his last house of life. He soon discovered that these
air-holes were all the ends and mouths of long leaden tubes which
doubtless carried air from some remote watering-place near Margate.
One evening while he was engaged in the fifth investigation he noticed
something like twilight in one of these dumb mouths, as compared with
the darkness of the others. Thrusting his finger in as far as it would
go, he found a hole and flapping edge in the tube. This he rent open and
instantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had struck
some other cell.

It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient", which means
mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely
wrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more
living organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a
wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian
monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army
merely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent
possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies
than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it
is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means
concentrated poison--an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a
spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the
swiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowest
thing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier to
get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic
machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic
machine would be much less likely to run after you.

Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with the
cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum. He had been shaken
by many spiritual states since the instant when he was pitched head
foremost into that private cell which was to be his private room till
death. He had felt a high fit of pride and poetry, which had ebbed
away and left him deadly cold. He had known a period of mere scientific
curiosity, in the course of which he examined all the tiles of his cell,
with the gratifying conclusion that they were all the same shape and
size; but was greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end,
and also about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a period of
mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but only by those few
dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal huntsman to hunt down and
humiliate human nature. This also passed, but left behind it a feverish
distaste for many of the mere objects around him. Long after he had
returned to sanity and such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on
a desert island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above all, he
had a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for the objectless
iron peg in the wall.

But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he
never really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and as
hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos of
his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of
our scientific civilization. He no more expected rescue from a medical
certificate than rescue from the solar system. In many of his Robinson
Crusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome
school-fellow who had long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cell
when he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to
write them down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled
to discover how much they had changed. Then he remembered the Beauchamp
Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the wall, and
discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing could be either
drawn or carved. Then for an instant there hung and broke above him like
a high wave the whole horror of scientific imprisonment, which manages
to deny a man not only liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.
In the old filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in
the rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing
witness. The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a beetle
strayed out of a hole. Here the unpierceable walls were washed every
morning by an automatic sluice. There was no natural corruption and
no merciful decay by which a living thing could enter in. Then James
Turnbull looked up and saw the high invincible hatefulness of the
society in which he lived, and saw the hatefulness of something else
also, which he told himself again and again was not the cosmos in which
he believed. But all the time he had never once doubted that the five
sides of his cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and
it gave him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through
the aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had forgotten how close
efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily, therefore, a
pipe here or there may leak.

Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managed
to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came up
from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall
from some hole or window higher up. As he was screwing his eye to peer
at this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another human
finger very long and lean come down from above towards the broken pipe
and hook it up to something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly
blackened and blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something
human spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.

"Who is that?" asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet wary and
quite resolved not to spoil any chance.

After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong
Argyllshire accent:

"I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?"

Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him for a
space just long enough to be painful. Then he said with his old gaiety:
"I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to murder the first man I
have met for ten million years."

"I know what you mean," answered the other. "It has been awful. For a
mortal month I have been alone with God."

Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer: "Alone
with God! Then you do not know what loneliness is."

But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: "Alone with
God, were you? And I suppose you found his Majesty's society rather
monotonous?"

"Oh, no," said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; "it was a great deal too
exciting."

After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: "What do you really
hate most in your place?"

"You'd think I was really mad if I told you," answered Turnbull,
bitterly.

"Then I expect it's the same as mine," said the other voice.

"I am sure it's not the same as anybody's," said Turnbull, "for it has
no rhyme or reason. Perhaps my brain really has gone, but I detest
that iron spike in the left wall more than the damned desolation or the
damned cocoa. Have you got one in your cell?"

"Not now," replied MacIan with serenity. "I've pulled it out."

His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.

"I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head," continued the
tranquil Highland voice. "It looked so unnecessary."

"You must be ghastly strong," said Turnbull.

"One is, when one is mad," was the careless reply, "and it had worn a
little loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I can't discover
what it was for. But I've found out something a long sight funnier."

"What do you mean?" asked Turnbull.

"I have found out where A is," said the other.

Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up communications
which made his meaning plain. By that time the two captives had fully
discovered and demonstrated that weakness in the very nature of modern
machinery to which we have already referred. The very fact that they
were isolated from all companions meant that they were free from all
spies, and as there were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to
be baffled. Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells;
that machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual suggestion,
opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to let in a small
man, in the exact place where there had been before the tiny ventilation
holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into MacIan's apartment, and his first
glance found out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket,
and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind.
But for this MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long
oblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that short
oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That individual looked at
it with a puzzled face.

"What is in there?" he asked.

MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."

"But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even more
puzzled; "the doors of our cells are at the other end."

"It has no door," said Evan.

In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling
crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion of
the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity
which one has when something horrible is half understood.

"James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these people
hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man
feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in order
to capture us and wipe us out--in order to kill us. And they have killed
us, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins. But though this
hatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and
more plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet
it is not we whom the people of this place hate most."

A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's spine;
he had never felt so near to superstition and supernaturalism, and it
was not a pretty sort of superstition either.

"There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan, in his
low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how
they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered
through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate
have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. He is there.
I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him
long, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move."

Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet in
rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.

It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it was
doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large black
A like the B and C outside their own doors. The letter in this case was
not painted outside, because this prison had no outside.

On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares had
maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which was
startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous head
was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was draped, both
insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of a
brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floor
beside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particular
angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom and
mystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.

After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but called
out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The thing got
up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round offered the
spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge grey-and-white beard not unlike
the plumage of an owl. This extraordinary beard covered him literally to
his feet (not that that was very far), and perhaps it was as well
that it did, for portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off
whenever he moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but
this old man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and complex that
one could see five or ten different faces besides the real one, as one
can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And yet while his face seemed
like a scripture older than the gods, his eyes were quite bright, blue,
and startled like those of a baby. They looked as if they had only an
instant before been fitted into his head.

Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster spoke
that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had spoken. He
said something or nothing. And then he waited for this dwarfish voice
that had been hidden under the mountains of the world. At last it did
speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign accent that was neither
Latin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched out a long and very dirty
forefinger, and cried in a voice of clear recognition, like a child's:
"That's a hole."

He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger, and then
he cried, with a crow of laughter: "And that's a head come through it."

The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another sick
turn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling madmen who
trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens. But there was
something new and subversive of the universe in the combination of so
much cheerful decision with a body without a brain.

"Why did they put you in such a place?" he asked at last with
embarrassment.

"Good place. Yes," said the old man, nodding a great many times and
beaming like a flattered landlord. "Good shape. Long and narrow, with a
point. Like this," and he made lovingly with his hands a map of the room
in the air.

"But that's not the best," he added, confidentially. "Squares very
good; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them. But that's not the
best."

"What is the best?" asked Turnbull in great distress.

"Spike is the best," said the old man, opening his blue eyes blazing;
"it sticks out."

The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity. "Can't we do
anything for you?" he said.

"I am very happy," said the other, alphabetically. "You are a good man.
Can I help you?"

"No, I don't think you can, sir," said Turnbull with rough pathos; "I am
glad you are contented at least."

The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed Turnbull with
a stare extraordinarily severe. "You are quite sure," he said, "I cannot
help you?"

"Quite sure, thank you," said Turnbull with broken brevity. "Good day."

Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and whose
face, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that Evan had heard
the whole of the strange dialogue.

"Curse those cruel beasts!" cried Turnbull. "They've turned him to an
imbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a pin-point now."

"You are sure he is a lunatic?" said Evan, slowly.

"Not a lunatic," said Turnbull, "an idiot. He just points to things and
says that they stick out."

"He had a notion that he could help us," said MacIan moodily, and began
to pace towards the other end of his cell.

"Yes, it was a bit pathetic," assented Turnbull; "such a Thing offering
help, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?"

"God Almighty guide us all!" said MacIan.

He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and staring
quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them up from the
sun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at the door likewise,
and then he also uttered an exclamation. The iron door was standing
about an inch and a half open.

"He said----" began Evan, in a trembling voice--"he offered----"

"Come along, you fool!" shouted Turnbull with a sudden and furious
energy. "I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of luck in the
world. You pulled out that iron handle that had screwed up his cell, and
it somehow altered the machinery and opened all the doors."

Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the open
corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a half-darkened
window.

"All the same," said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary
conversation, "he did ask you whether he could help you."

All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the heart
of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour before the
fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world. They did not even
know what hour of the day it was; and when, turning a corner, they saw
the bare tunnel of the corridor end abruptly in a shining square of
garden, the grass burning in that strong evening sunshine which makes
it burnished gold rather than green, the abrupt opening on to the earth
seemed like a hole knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twice
in life is it permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from
outside, and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet
begun. As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth
they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn, of
being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth. They were
looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.

Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an earth-spurning
leap like that of one who could really spread his wings and fly. MacIan,
who came an instant after, was less full of mere animal gusto and fuller
of a more fearful and quivering pleasure in the clear and innocent
flower colours and the high and holy trees. With one bound they were in
that cool and cleared landscape, and they found just outside the door
the black-clad gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them;
and his chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.




XVIII. A RIDDLE OF FACES

Just behind him stood two other doctors: one, the familiar Dr. Quayle,
of the blinking eyes and bleating voice; the other, a more commonplace
but much more forcible figure, a stout young doctor with short,
well-brushed hair and a round but resolute face. At the sight of the
escape these two subordinates uttered a cry and sprang forward, but
their superior remained motionless and smiling, and somehow the lack
of his support seemed to arrest and freeze them in the very gesture of
pursuit.

"Let them be," he cried in a voice that cut like a blade of ice; and not
only of ice, but of some awful primordial ice that had never been water.

"I want no devoted champions," said the cutting voice; "even the folly
of one's friends bores one at last. You don't suppose I should have let
these lunatics out of their cells without good reason. I have the best
and fullest reason. They can be let out of their cell today, because
today the whole world has become their cell. I will have no more
medieval mummery of chains and doors. Let them wander about the earth as
they wandered about this garden, and I shall still be their easy master.
Let them take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts
of the sea--I am there. Whither shall they go from my presence and
whither shall they flee from my spirit? Courage, Dr. Quayle, and do
not be downhearted; the real days of tyranny are only beginning on this
earth."

And with that the Master laughed and swung away from them, almost as if
his laugh was a bad thing for people to see.

"Might I speak to you a moment?" said Turnbull, stepping forward with
a respectful resolution. But the shoulders of the Master only seemed to
take on a new and unexpected angle of mockery as he strode away.

Turnbull swung round with great abruptness to the other two doctors, and
said, harshly: "What in snakes does he mean--and who are you?"

"My name is Hutton," said the short, stout man, "and I am--well, one of
those whose business it is to uphold this establishment."

"My name is Turnbull," said the other; "I am one of those whose business
it is to tear it to the ground."

The small doctor smiled, and Turnbull's anger seemed suddenly to steady
him.

"But I don't want to talk about that," he said, calmly; "I only want to
know what the Master of this asylum really means."

Dr. Hutton's smile broke into a laugh which, short as it was, had the
suspicion of a shake in it. "I suppose you think that quite a simple
question," he said.

"I think it a plain question," said Turnbull, "and one that deserves
a plain answer. Why did the Master lock us up in a couple of cupboards
like jars of pickles for a mortal month, and why does he now let us walk
free in the garden again?"

"I understand," said Hutton, with arched eyebrows, "that your complaint
is that you are now free to walk in the garden."

"My complaint is," said Turnbull, stubbornly, "that if I am fit to walk
freely now, I have been as fit for the last month. No one has examined
me, no one has come near me. Your chief says that I am only free because
he has made other arrangements. What are those arrangements?"

The young man with the round face looked down for a little while
and smoked reflectively. The other and elder doctor had gone pacing
nervously by himself upon the lawn. At length the round face was lifted
again, and showed two round blue eyes with a certain frankness in them.

"Well, I don't see that it can do any harm to tell you know," he said.
"You were shut up just then because it was just during that month that
the Master was bringing off his big scheme. He was getting his bill
through Parliament, and organizing the new medical police. But of course
you haven't heard of all that; in fact, you weren't meant to."

"Heard of all what?" asked the impatient inquirer.

"There's a new law now, and the asylum powers are greatly extended. Even
if you did escape now, any policeman would take you up in the next town
if you couldn't show a certificate of sanity from us."

"Well," continued Dr. Hutton, "the Master described before both Houses
of Parliament the real scientific objection to all existing legislation
about lunacy. As he very truly said, the mistake was in supposing
insanity to be merely an exception or an extreme. Insanity, like
forgetfulness, is simply a quality which enters more or less into all
human beings; and for practical purposes it is more necessary to know
whose mind is really trustworthy than whose has some accidental taint.
We have therefore reversed the existing method, and people now have to
prove that they are sane. In the first village you entered, the village
constable would notice that you were not wearing on the left lapel of
your coat the small pewter S which is now necessary to any one who walks
about beyond asylum bounds or outside asylum hours."

"You mean to say," said Turnbull, "that this was what the Master of the
asylum urged before the House of Commons?"

Dr. Hutton nodded with gravity.

"And you mean to say," cried Turnbull, with a vibrant snort, "that that
proposal was passed in an assembly that calls itself democratic?"

The doctor showed his whole row of teeth in a smile. "Oh, the assembly
calls itself Socialist now," he said, "But we explained to them that
this was a question for men of science."

Turnbull gave one stamp upon the gravel, then pulled himself together,
and resumed: "But why should your infernal head medicine-man lock us up
in separate cells while he was turning England into a madhouse? I'm not
the Prime Minister; we're not the House of Lords."

"He wasn't afraid of the Prime Minister," replied Dr. Hutton; "he isn't
afraid of the House of Lords. But----"

"Well?" inquired Turnbull, stamping again.

"He is afraid of you," said Hutton, simply. "Why, didn't you know?"

MacIan, who had not spoken yet, made one stride forward and stood with
shaking limbs and shining eyes.

"He was afraid!" began Evan, thickly. "You mean to say that we----"

"I mean to say the plain truth now that the danger is over," said
Hutton, calmly; "most certainly you two were the only people he ever
was afraid of." Then he added in a low but not inaudible voice: "Except
one--whom he feared worse, and has buried deeper."

"Come away," cried MacIan, "this has to be thought about."

Turnbull followed him in silence as he strode away, but just before he
vanished, turned and spoke again to the doctors.

"But what has got hold of people?" he asked, abruptly. "Why should all
England have gone dotty on the mere subject of dottiness?"

Dr. Hutton smiled his open smile once more and bowed slightly. "As to
that also," he replied, "I don't want to make you vain."

Turnbull swung round without a word, and he and his companion were lost
in the lustrous leafage of the garden. They noticed nothing special
about the scene, except that the garden seemed more exquisite than ever
in the deepening sunset, and that there seemed to be many more people,
whether patients or attendants, walking about in it.

From behind the two black-coated doctors as they stood on the lawn
another figure somewhat similarly dressed strode hurriedly past them,
having also grizzled hair and an open flapping frock-coat. Both his
decisive step and dapper black array marked him out as another medical
man, or at least a man in authority, and as he passed Turnbull the
latter was aroused by a strong impression of having seen the man
somewhere before. It was no one that he knew well, yet he was certain
that it was someone at whom he had at sometime or other looked steadily.
It was neither the face of a friend nor of an enemy; it aroused neither
irritation nor tenderness, yet it was a face which had for some reason
been of great importance in his life. Turning and returning, and making
detours about the garden, he managed to study the man's face again and
again--a moustached, somewhat military face with a monocle, the sort of
face that is aristocratic without being distinguished. Turnbull could
not remember any particular doctors in his decidedly healthy existence.
Was the man a long-lost uncle, or was he only somebody who had sat
opposite him regularly in a railway train? At that moment the man
knocked down his own eye-glass with a gesture of annoyance; Turnbull
remembered the gesture, and the truth sprang up solid in front of him.
The man with the moustaches was Cumberland Vane, the London police
magistrate before whom he and MacIan had once stood on their trial. The
magistrate must have been transferred to some other official duties--to
something connected with the inspection of asylums.

Turnbull's heart gave a leap of excitement which was half hope. As a
magistrate Mr. Cumberland Vane had been somewhat careless and shallow,
but certainly kindly, and not inaccessible to common sense so long as
it was put to him in strictly conventional language. He was at least an
authority of a more human and refreshing sort than the crank with the
wagging beard or the fiend with the forked chin.

He went straight up to the magistrate, and said: "Good evening, Mr.
Vane; I doubt if you remember me."

Cumberland Vane screwed the eye-glass into his scowling face for an
instant, and then said curtly but not uncivilly: "Yes, I remember you,
sir; assault or battery, wasn't it?--a fellow broke your window. A tall
fellow--McSomething--case made rather a noise afterwards."

"MacIan is the name, sir," said Turnbull, respectfully; "I have him here
with me."

"Eh!" said Vane very sharply. "Confound him! Has he got anything to do
with this game?"

"Mr. Vane," said Turnbull, pacifically, "I will not pretend that either
he or I acted quite decorously on that occasion. You were very lenient
with us, and did not treat us as criminals when you very well might.
So I am sure you will give us your testimony that, even if we were
criminals, we are not lunatics in any legal or medical sense whatever. I
am sure you will use your influence for us."

"My influence!" repeated the magistrate, with a slight start. "I don't
quite understand you."

"I don't know in what capacity you are here," continued Turnbull,
gravely, "but a legal authority of your distinction must certainly be
here in an important one. Whether you are visiting and inspecting the
place, or attached to it as some kind of permanent legal adviser, your
opinion must still----"

Cumberland Vane exploded with a detonation of oaths; his face was
transfigured with fury and contempt, and yet in some odd way he did not
seem specially angry with Turnbull.

"But Lord bless us and save us!" he gasped, at length; "I'm not here
as an official at all. I'm here as a patient. The cursed pack of
rat-catching chemists all say that I've lost my wits."

"You!" cried Turnbull with terrible emphasis. "You! Lost your wits!"

In the rush of his real astonishment at this towering unreality Turnbull
almost added: "Why, you haven't got any to lose." But he fortunately
remembered the remains of his desperate diplomacy.

"This can't go on," he said, positively. "Men like MacIan and I may
suffer unjustly all our lives, but a man like you must have influence."

"There is only one man who has any influence in England now," said Vane,
and his high voice fell to a sudden and convincing quietude.

"Whom do you mean?" asked Turnbull.

"I mean that cursed fellow with the long split chin," said the other.

"Is it really true," asked Turnbull, "that he has been allowed to buy up
and control such a lot? What put the country into such a state?"

Mr. Cumberland Vane laughed outright. "What put the country into such a
state?" he asked. "Why, you did. When you were fool enough to agree to
fight MacIan, after all, everybody was ready to believe that the Bank of
England might paint itself pink with white spots."

"I don't understand," answered Turnbull. "Why should you be surprised at
my fighting? I hope I have always fought."

"Well," said Cumberland Vane, airily, "you didn't believe in religion,
you see--so we thought you were safe at any rate. You went further in
your language than most of us wanted to go; no good in just hurting
one's mother's feelings, I think. But of course we all knew you were
right, and, really, we relied on you."

"Did you?" said the editor of _The Atheist_ with a bursting heart. "I am
sorry you did not tell me so at the time."

He walked away very rapidly and flung himself on a garden seat, and for
some six minutes his own wrongs hid from him the huge and hilarious fact
that Cumberland Vane had been locked up as a lunatic.

The garden of the madhouse was so perfectly planned, and answered so
exquisitely to every hour of daylight, that one could almost fancy that
the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted trees, as the wise
men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a bush. Or it seemed as if
this ironic paradise still kept its unique dawn or its special sunset
while the rest of the earthly globe rolled through its ordinary hours.
There was one evening, or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan
MacIan will remember in the last moments of death. It was what artists
call a daffodil sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a
daffodil. It was of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of
orange, though it might turn quite unconsciously into green. Against it
the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered trees
were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints the tops of
lavender. A white early moon was hardly traceable upon that delicate
yellow. MacIan, I say, will remember this tender and transparent
evening, partly because of its virgin gold and silver, and partly
because he passed beneath it through the most horrible instant of his
life.

Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden evening
impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might have impressed
the oxen in a field. He was shocked out of his idle mood of awe by
seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes and run across the lawn with
an action he had never seen in the man before, with all his experience
of the eccentric humours of this Celt. MacIan fell on the bench,
shaking it so that it rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in
dreadful pain of body. That particular run and tumble is typical only of
a man who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten
by a viper or condemned to be hanged. Turnbull looked up in the white
face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at what he saw
there. He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the western Highlander
troubled by as many tempests as his own west Highland seas, but there
had always been a fixed star of faith behind the storms. Now the star
had gone out, and there was only misery.

Yet MacIan had the strength to answer the question where Turnbull, taken
by surprise, had not the strength to ask it.

"They are right, they are right!" he cried. "O my God! they are right,
Turnbull. I ought to be here!"

He went on with shapeless fluency as if he no longer had the heart to
choose or check his speech. "I suppose I ought to have guessed long
ago--all my big dreams and schemes--and everyone being against us--but I
was stuck up, you know."

"Do tell me about it, really," cried the atheist, and, faced with the
furnace of the other's pain, he did not notice that he spoke with the
affection of a father.

"I am mad, Turnbull," said Evan, with a dead clearness of speech, and
leant back against the garden seat.

"Nonsense," said the other, clutching at the obvious cue of benevolent
brutality, "this is one of your silly moods."

MacIan shook his head. "I know enough about myself," he said, "to allow
for any mood, though it opened heaven or hell. But to see things--to see
them walking solid in the sun--things that can't be there--real mystics
never do that, Turnbull."

"What things?" asked the other, incredulously.

MacIan lowered his voice. "I saw _her_," he said, "three minutes
ago--walking here in this hell yard."

Between trying to look scornful and really looking startled, Turnbull's
face was confused enough to emit no speech, and Evan went on in
monotonous sincerity:

"I saw her walk behind those blessed trees against that holy sky of gold
as plain as I can see her whenever I shut my eyes. I did shut them,
and opened them again, and she was still there--that is, of course, she
wasn't---- She still had a little fur round her neck, but her dress was
a shade brighter than when I really saw her."

"My dear fellow," cried Turnbull, rallying a hearty laugh, "the fancies
have really got hold of you. You mistook some other poor girl here for
her."

"Mistook some other----" said MacIan, and words failed him altogether.

They sat for some moments in the mellow silence of the evening garden,
a silence that was stifling for the sceptic, but utterly empty and final
for the man of faith. At last he broke out again with the words: "Well,
anyhow, if I'm mad, I'm glad I'm mad on that."

Turnbull murmured some clumsy deprecation, and sat stolidly smoking to
collect his thoughts; the next instant he had all his nerves engaged in
the mere effort to sit still.

Across the clear space of cold silver and a pale lemon sky which was
left by the gap in the ilex-trees there passed a slim, dark figure, a
profile and the poise of a dark head like a bird's, which really pinned
him to his seat with the point of coincidence. With an effort he got
to his feet, and said with a voice of affected insouciance: "By George!
MacIan, she is uncommonly like----"

"What!" cried MacIan, with a leap of eagerness that was heart-breaking,
"do you see her, too?" And the blaze came back into the centre of his
eyes.

Turnbull's tawny eyebrows were pulled together with a peculiar frown of
curiosity, and all at once he walked quickly across the lawn. MacIan sat
rigid, but peered after him with open and parched lips. He saw the sight
which either proved him sane or proved the whole universe half-witted;
he saw the man of flesh approach that beautiful phantom, saw their
gestures of recognition, and saw them against the sunset joining hands.

He could stand it no longer, but ran across to the path, turned the
corner and saw standing quite palpable in the evening sunlight, talking
with a casual grace to Turnbull, the face and figure which had filled
his midnights with frightfully vivid or desperately half-forgotten
features. She advanced quite pleasantly and coolly, and put out her
hand. The moment that he touched it he knew that he was sane even if the
solar system was crazy.

She was entirely elegant and unembarrassed. That is the awful thing
about women--they refuse to be emotional at emotional moments, upon some
such ludicrous pretext as there being someone else there. But MacIan was
in a condition of criticism much less than the average masculine one,
being in fact merely overturned by the rushing riddle of the events.

Evan does not know to this day what particular question he asked, but
he vividly remembers that she answered, and every line or fluctuation of
her face as she said it.

"Oh, don't you know?" she said, smiling, and suddenly lifting her level
brown eyebrows. "Haven't you heard the news? I'm a lunatic."

Then she added after a short pause, and with a sort of pride: "I've got
a certificate."

Her manner, by the matchless social stoicism of her sex, was entirely
suited to a drawing-room, but Evan's reply fell somewhat far short of
such a standard, as he only said: "What the devil in hell does all this
nonsense mean?"

"Really," said the young lady, and laughed.

"I beg your pardon," said the unhappy young man, rather wildly, "but
what I mean is, why are you here in an asylum?"

The young woman broke again into one of the maddening and mysterious
laughs of femininity. Then she composed her features, and replied with
equal dignity: "Well, if it comes to that, why are you?"

The fact that Turnbull had strolled away and was investigating
rhododendrons may have been due to Evan's successful prayers to the
other world, or possibly to his own pretty successful experience of this
one. But though they two were as isolated as a new Adam and Eve in a
pretty ornamental Eden, the lady did not relax by an inch the rigour of
her badinage.

"I am locked up in the madhouse," said Evan, with a sort of stiff pride,
"because I tried to keep my promise to you."

"Quite so," answered the inexplicable lady, nodding with a perfectly
blazing smile, "and I am locked up because it was to me you promised."

"It is outrageous!" cried Evan; "it is impossible!"

"Oh, you can see my certificate if you like," she replied with some
hauteur.

MacIan stared at her and then at his boots, and then at the sky and then
at her again. He was quite sure now that he himself was not mad, and the
fact rather added to his perplexity.

Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice: "Oh,
don't condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me. Are you really
locked up here as a patient--because you helped us to escape?"

"Yes," she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake in it.

Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into tears.

The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great sunset
silently collapsed. The birds settled back into the trees; the moon
began to glow with its own light. Mr. James Turnbull continued his
botanical researches into the structure of the rhododendron. But the
lady did not move an inch until Evan had flung up his face again; and
when he did he saw by the last gleam of sunlight that it was not only
his face that was wet.

Mr. James Turnbull had all his life professed a profound interest in
physical science, and the phenomena of a good garden were really a
pleasure to him; but after three-quarters of an hour or so even the
apostle of science began to find rhododendrus a bore, and was somewhat
relieved when an unexpected development of events obliged him
to transfer his researches to the equally interesting subject of
hollyhocks, which grew some fifty feet farther along the path. The
ostensible cause of his removal was the unexpected reappearance of his
two other acquaintances walking and talking laboriously along the
way, with the black head bent close to the brown one. Even hollyhocks
detained Turnbull but a short time. Having rapidly absorbed all the
important principles affecting the growth of those vegetables, he jumped
over a flower-bed and walked back into the building. The other two came
up along the slow course of the path talking and talking. No one but
God knows what they said (for they certainly have forgotten), and if I
remembered it I would not repeat it. When they parted at the head of the
walk she put out her hand again in the same well-bred way, although it
trembled; he seemed to restrain a gesture as he let it fall.

"If it is really always to be like this," he said, thickly, "it would
not matter if we were here for ever."

"You tried to kill yourself four times for me," she said, unsteadily,
"and I have been chained up as a madwoman for you. I really think that
after that----"

"Yes, I know," said Evan in a low voice, looking down. "After that we
belong to each other. We are sort of sold to each other--until the stars
fall." Then he looked up suddenly, and said: "By the way, what is your
name?"

"My name is Beatrice Drake," she replied with complete gravity. "You can
see it on my certificate of lunacy."




XIX. THE LAST PARLEY

Turnbull walked away, wildly trying to explain to himself the presence
of two personal acquaintances so different as Vane and the girl. As he
skirted a low hedge of laurel, an enormously tall young man leapt over
it, stood in front of him, and almost fell on his neck as if seeking to
embrace him.

"Don't you know me?" almost sobbed the young man, who was in the highest
spirits. "Ain't I written on your heart, old boy? I say, what did you do
with my yacht?"

"Take your arms off my neck," said Turnbull, irritably. "Are you mad?"

The young man sat down on the gravel path and went into ecstasies of
laughter. "No, that's just the fun of it--I'm not mad," he replied.
"They've shut me up in this place, and I'm not mad." And he went off
again into mirth as innocent as wedding-bells.

Turnbull, whose powers of surprise were exhausted, rolled his round grey
eyes and said, "Mr. Wilkinson, I think," because he could not think of
anything else to say.

The tall man sitting on the gravel bowed with urbanity, and said: "Quite
at your service. Not to be confused with the Wilkinsons of Cumberland;
and as I say, old boy, what have you done with my yacht? You see,
they've locked me up here--in this garden--and a yacht would be a sort
of occupation for an unmarried man."

"I am really horribly sorry," began Turnbull, in the last stage of bated
bewilderment and exasperation, "but really----"

"Oh, I can see you can't have it on you at the moment," said Mr.
Wilkinson with much intellectual magnanimity.

"Well, the fact is----" began Turnbull again, and then the phrase was
frozen on his mouth, for round the corner came the goatlike face and
gleaming eye-glasses of Dr. Quayle.

"Ah, my dear Mr. Wilkinson," said the doctor, as if delighted at
a coincidence; "and Mr. Turnbull, too. Why, I want to speak to Mr.
Turnbull."

Mr. Turnbull made some movement rather of surrender than assent, and
the doctor caught it up exquisitely, showing even more of his two front
teeth. "I am sure Mr. Wilkinson will excuse us a moment." And with
flying frock-coat he led Turnbull rapidly round the corner of a path.

"My dear sir," he said, in a quite affectionate manner, "I do not mind
telling you--you are such a very hopeful case--you understand so well
the scientific point of view; and I don't like to see you bothered by
the really hopeless cases. They are monotonous and maddening. The man
you have just been talking to, poor fellow, is one of the strongest
cases of pure _idee fixe_ that we have. It's very sad, and I'm afraid
utterly incurable. He keeps on telling everybody"--and the doctor
lowered his voice confidentially--"he tells everybody that two people
have taken is yacht. His account of how he lost it is quite incoherent."

Turnbull stamped his foot on the gravel path, and called out: "Oh, I
can't stand this. Really----"

"I know, I know," said the psychologist, mournfully; "it is a most
melancholy case, and also fortunately a very rare one. It is so rare, in
fact, that in one classification of these maladies it is entered under
a heading by itself--Perdinavititis, mental inflammation creating the
impression that one has lost a ship. Really," he added, with a kind of
half-embarrassed guilt, "it's rather a feather in my cap. I discovered
the only existing case of perdinavititis."

"But this won't do, doctor," said Turnbull, almost tearing his hair,
"this really won't do. The man really did lose a ship. Indeed, not to
put too fine a point on it, I took his ship."

Dr. Quayle swung round for an instant so that his silk-lined overcoat
rustled, and stared singularly at Turnbull. Then he said with hurried
amiability: "Why, of course you did. Quite so, quite so," and with
courteous gestures went striding up the garden path. Under the first
laburnum-tree he stopped, however, and pulling out his pencil
and notebook wrote down feverishly: "Singular development in the
Elenthero-maniac, Turnbull. Sudden manifestation of Rapinavititis--the
delusion that one has stolen a ship. First case ever recorded."

Turnbull stood for an instant staggered into stillness. Then he ran
raging round the garden to find MacIan, just as a husband, even a bad
husband, will run raging to find his wife if he is full of a furious
query. He found MacIan stalking moodily about the half-lit garden, after
his extraordinary meeting with Beatrice. No one who saw his slouching
stride and sunken head could have known that his soul was in the seventh
heaven of ecstasy. He did not think; he did not even very definitely
desire. He merely wallowed in memories, chiefly in material memories;
words said with a certain cadence or trivial turns of the neck or wrist.
Into the middle of his stationary and senseless enjoyment were thrust
abruptly the projecting elbow and the projecting red beard of Turnbull.
MacIan stepped back a little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly
to its windows. When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point
planted upon his breast he was in far less danger. For three pulsating
seconds after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his
father.

And yet his whole emotional anger fell from him when he saw Turnbull's
face, in which the eyes seemed to be bursting from the head like
bullets. All the fire and fragrance even of young and honourable love
faded for a moment before that stiff agony of interrogation.

"Are you hurt, Turnbull?" he asked, anxiously.

"I am dying," answered the other quite calmly. "I am in the quite
literal sense of the words dying to know something. I want to know what
all this can possibly mean."

MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: "You are still
thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is incredible.
She's not the only person here. I've met the fellow Wilkinson, whose
yacht we lost. I've met the very magistrate you were hauled up to when
you broke my window. What can it mean--meeting all these old people
again? One never meets such old friends again except in a dream."

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: "Are you really
there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply dreaming?"

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word, and now
his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

"No, you good atheist," he cried; "no, you clean, courteous, reverent,
pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming--you are waking up."

"What do you mean?"

"There are two states where one meets so many old friends," said MacIan;
"one is a dream, the other is the end of the world."

"And you say----"

"I say this is not a dream," said Evan in a ringing voice.

"You really mean to suggest----" began Turnbull.

"Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong," said MacIan, breathing hard.
"It's hard to explain, anyhow. An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream.
A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more
actual than the world it ends. I don't say this is really the end of the
world, but it's something like that--it's the end of something. All the
people are crowding into one corner. Everything is coming to a point."

"What is the point?" asked Turnbull.

"I can't see it," said Evan; "it is too large and plain."

Then after a silence he said: "I can't see it--and yet I will try to
describe it. Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly that our duel
was not right after all."

"Three days ago!" repeated Turnbull. "When and why did this illumination
occur?"

"I knew I was not quite right," answered Evan, "the moment I saw the
round eyes of that old man in the cell."

"Old man in the cell!" repeated his wondering companion. "Do you mean
the poor old idiot who likes spikes to stick out?"

"Yes," said MacIan, after a slight pause, "I mean the poor old idiot
who likes spikes to stick out. When I saw his eyes and heard his old
croaking accent, I knew that it would not really have been right to kill
you. It would have been a venial sin."

"I am much obliged," said Turnbull, gruffly.

"You must give me time," said MacIan, quite patiently, "for I am trying
to tell the whole truth. I am trying to tell more of it than I know."

"So you see I confess"--he went on with laborious distinctness--"I
confess that all the people who called our duel mad were right in a way.
I would confess it to old Cumberland Vane and his eye-glass. I would
confess it even to that old ass in brown flannel who talked to us about
Love. Yes, they are right in a way. I am a little mad."

He stopped and wiped his brow as if he were literally doing heavy
labour. Then he went on:

"I am a little mad; but, after all, it is only a little madness. When
hundreds of high-minded men had fought duels about a jostle with the
elbow or the ace of spades, the whole world need not have gone wild over
my one little wildness. Plenty of other people have killed themselves
between then and now. But all England has gone into captivity in order
to take us captive. All England has turned into a lunatic asylum in
order to prove us lunatics. Compared with the general public, I might
positively be called sane."

He stopped again, and went on with the same air of travailing with the
truth:

"When I saw that, I saw everything; I saw the Church and the world. The
Church in its earthly action has really touched morbid things--tortures
and bleeding visions and blasts of extermination. The Church has had her
madnesses, and I am one of them. I am the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
I am the Inquisition of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad,
but I say that we are fit to act as keepers to our enemies. Massacre is
wicked even with a provocation, as in the Bartholomew. But your modern
Nietzsche will tell you that massacre would be glorious without a
provocation. Torture should be violently stopped, though the Church is
doing it. But your modern Tolstoy will tell you that it ought not to be
violently stopped whoever is doing it. In the long run, which is most
mad--the Church or the world? Which is madder, the Spanish priest who
permitted tyranny, or the Prussian sophist who admired it? Which is
madder, the Russian priest who discourages righteous rebellion, or the
Russian novelist who forbids it? That is the final and blasting test.
The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. A few days ago you
and I were the maddest people in England. Now, by God! I believe we are
the sanest. That is the only real question--whether the Church is really
madder than the world. Let the rationalists run their own race, and let
us see where _they_ end. If the world has some healthy balance other
than God, let the world find it. Does the world find it? Cut the world
loose," he cried with a savage gesture. "Does the world stand on its own
end? Does it stand, or does it stagger?"

Turnbull remained silent, and MacIan said to him, looking once more at
the earth: "It staggers, Turnbull. It cannot stand by itself; you know
it cannot. It has been the sorrow of your life. Turnbull, this garden
is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfilment. This garden is the world
gone mad."

Turnbull did not move his head, and he had been listening all the time;
yet, somehow, the other knew that for the first time he was listening
seriously.

"The world has gone mad," said MacIan, "and it has gone mad about Us.
The world takes the trouble to make a big mistake about every little
mistake made by the Church. That is why they have turned ten counties
to a madhouse; that is why crowds of kindly people are poured into this
filthy melting-pot. Now is the judgement of this world. The Prince of
this World is judged, and he is judged exactly because he is judging.
There is at last one simple solution to the quarrel between the ball and
the cross----"

Turnbull for the first time started.

"The ball and----" he repeated.

"What is the matter with you?" asked MacIan.

"I had a dream," said Turnbull, thickly and obscurely, "in which I saw
the cross struck crooked and the ball secure----"

"I had a dream," said MacIan, "in which I saw the cross erect and the
ball invisible. They were both dreams from hell. There must be
some round earth to plant the cross upon. But here is the awful
difference--that the round world will not consent even to continue
round. The astronomers are always telling us that it is shaped like
an orange, or like an egg, or like a German sausage. They beat the
old world about like a bladder and thump it into a thousand shapeless
shapes. Turnbull, we cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we
cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial
globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright."

There was a long silence, and then Turnbull said, hesitatingly: "Has
it occurred to you that since--since those two dreams, or whatever they
were----"

"Well?" murmured MacIan.

"Since then," went on Turnbull, in the same low voice, "since then we
have never even looked for our swords."

"You are right," answered Evan almost inaudibly. "We have found
something which we both hate more than we ever hated each other, and I
think I know its name."

Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment. "It does not much
matter what you call it," he said, "so long as you keep out of its way."

The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very tall
figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a projecting
chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in its shadow upon
the path.

"You see that is not so easy," said MacIan between his teeth.

They looked up into the eyes of the Master, but looked only for a
moment. The eyes were full of a frozen and icy wrath, a kind of utterly
heartless hatred. His voice was for the first time devoid of irony.
There was no more sarcasm in it than there is in an iron club.

"You will be inside the building in three minutes," he said, with
pulverizing precision, "or you will be fired on by the artillery at
all the windows. There is too much talking in this garden; we intend to
close it. You will be accommodated indoors."

"Ah!" said MacIan, with a long and satisfied sigh, "then I was right."

And he turned his back and walked obediently towards the building.
Turnbull seemed to canvass for a few minutes the notion of knocking the
Master down, and then fell under the same almost fairy fatalism as his
companion. In some strange way it did seem that the more smoothly they
yielded, the more swiftly would events sweep on to some great collision.




XX. DIES IRAE

As they advanced towards the asylum they looked up at its rows on rows
of windows, and understood the Master's material threat. By means of
that complex but concealed machinery which ran like a network of nerves
over the whole fabric, there had been shot out under every window-ledge
rows and rows of polished-steel cylinders, the cold miracles of modern
gunnery. They commanded the whole garden and the whole country-side, and
could have blown to pieces an army corps.

This silent declaration of war had evidently had its complete effect. As
MacIan and Turnbull walked steadily but slowly towards the entrance hall
of the institution, they could see that most, or at least many, of the
patients had already gathered there as well as the staff of doctors and
the whole regiment of keepers and assistants. But when they entered the
lamp-lit hall, and the high iron door was clashed to and locked behind
them, yet a new amazement leapt into their eyes, and the stalwart
Turnbull almost fell. For he saw a sight which was indeed, as MacIan had
said--either the Day of Judgement or a dream.

Within a few feet of him at one corner of the square of standing people
stood the girl he had known in Jersey, Madeleine Durand. She looked
straight at him with a steady smile which lit up the scene of darkness
and unreason like the light of some honest fireside. Her square face
and throat were thrown back, as her habit was, and there was something
almost sleepy in the geniality of her eyes. He saw her first, and for
a few seconds saw her only; then the outer edge of his eyesight took in
all the other staring faces, and he saw all the faces he had ever seen
for weeks and months past. There was the Tolstoyan in Jaeger flannel,
with the yellow beard that went backward and the foolish nose and eyes
that went forward, with the curiosity of a crank. He was talking eagerly
to Mr. Gordon, the corpulent Jew shopkeeper whom they had once gagged
in his own shop. There was the tipsy old Hertfordshire rustic; he
was talking energetically to himself. There was not only Mr. Vane the
magistrate, but the clerk of Mr. Vane, the magistrate. There was not
only Miss Drake of the motor-car, but also Miss Drake's chauffeur.
Nothing wild or unfamiliar could have produced upon Turnbull such a
nightmare impression as that ring of familiar faces. Yet he had one
intellectual shock which was greater than all the others. He stepped
impulsively forward towards Madeleine, and then wavered with a kind
of wild humility. As he did so he caught sight of another square face
behind Madeleine's, a face with long grey whiskers and an austere stare.
It was old Durand, the girls' father; and when Turnbull saw him he saw
the last and worst marvel of that monstrous night. He remembered Durand;
he remembered his monotonous, everlasting lucidity, his stupefyingly
sensible views of everything, his colossal contentment with truisms
merely because they were true. "Confound it all!" cried Turnbull to
himself, "if _he_ is in the asylum, there can't be anyone outside."
He drew nearer to Madeleine, but still doubtfully and all the more
so because she still smiled at him. MacIan had already gone across to
Beatrice with an air of fright.

Then all these bewildered but partly amicable recognitions were cloven
by a cruel voice which always made all human blood turn bitter. The
Master was standing in the middle of the room surveying the scene like a
great artist looking at a completed picture. Handsome as he looked, they
had never seen so clearly what was really hateful in his face; and even
then they could only express it by saying that the arched brows and the
long emphatic chin gave it always a look of being lit from below, like
the face of some infernal actor.

"This is indeed a cosy party," he said, with glittering eyes.

The Master evidently meant to say more, but before he could say anything
M. Durand had stepped right up to him and was speaking.

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a
restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity,
but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady,
monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but
merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying
something like this:

"You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome
and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my
daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and
mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid
me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless
to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social
contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures
and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social
contract is annulled."

"It's no good chattering away, Monsieur," said Hutton, for the Master
was silent. "The place is covered with machine-guns. We've got to obey
our orders, and so have you."

"The machinery is of the most perfect," assented Durand, somewhat
irrelevantly; "worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit
that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social
contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory."

"Oh! I dare say," said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

"A cosy party," resumed the Master, scornfully, "and yet I believe some
of you are in doubt about how we all came together. I will explain
it, ladies and gentlemen; I will explain everything. To whom shall I
specially address myself? To Mr. James Turnbull. He has a scientific
mind."

Turnbull seemed to choke with sudden protest. The Master seemed only
to cough out of pure politeness and proceeded: "Mr. Turnbull will agree
with me," he said, "when I say that we long felt in scientific circles
that great harm was done by such a legend as that of the Crucifixion."

Turnbull growled something which was presumably assent.

The Master went on smoothly: "It was in vain for us to urge that the
incident was irrelevant; that there were many such fanatics, many such
executions. We were forced to take the thing thoroughly in hand,
to investigate it in the spirit of scientific history, and with the
assistance of Mr. Turnbull and others we were happy in being able to
announce that this alleged Crucifixion never occurred at all."

MacIan lifted his head and looked at the Master steadily, but Turnbull
did not look up.

"This, we found, was the only way with all superstitions," continued the
speaker; "it was necessary to deny them historically, and we have done
it with great success in the case of miracles and such things. Now
within our own time there arose an unfortunate fuss which threatened (as
Mr. Turnbull would say) to galvanize the corpse of Christianity into a
fictitious life--the alleged case of a Highland eccentric who wanted to
fight for the Virgin."

MacIan, quite white, made a step forward, but the speaker did not alter
his easy attitude or his flow of words. "Again we urged that this duel
was not to be admired, that it was a mere brawl, but the people were
ignorant and romantic. There were signs of treating this alleged
Highlander and his alleged opponent as heroes. We tried all other means
of arresting this reactionary hero worship. Working men who betted on
the duel were imprisoned for gambling. Working men who drank the
health of a duellist were imprisoned for drunkenness. But the popular
excitement about the alleged duel continued, and we had to fall back on
our old historical method. We investigated, on scientific principles,
the story of MacIan's challenge, and we are happy to be able to inform
you that the whole story of the attempted duel is a fable. There
never was any challenge. There never was any man named MacIan. It is a
melodramatic myth, like Calvary."

Not a soul moved save Turnbull, who lifted his head; yet there was the
sense of a silent explosion.

"The whole story of the MacIan challenge," went on the Master, beaming
at them all with a sinister benignity, "has been found to originate in
the obsessions of a few pathological types, who are now all fortunately
in our care. There is, for instance, a person here of the name of
Gordon, formerly the keeper of a curiosity shop. He is a victim of the
disease called Vinculomania--the impression that one has been bound or
tied up. We have also a case of Fugacity (Mr. Whimpey), who imagines
that he was chased by two men."

The indignant faces of the Jew shopkeeper and the Magdalen Don started
out of the crowd in their indignation, but the speaker continued:

"One poor woman we have with us," he said, in a compassionate voice,
"believes she was in a motor-car with two such men; this is the
well-known illusion of speed on which I need not dwell. Another wretched
woman has the simple egotistic mania that she has caused the duel.
Madeleine Durand actually professes to have been the subject of the
fight between MacIan and his enemy, a fight which, if it occurred at
all, certainly began long before. But it never occurred at all. We have
taken in hand every person who professed to have seen such a thing, and
proved them all to be unbalanced. That is why they are here."

The Master looked round the room, just showing his perfect teeth with
the perfection of artistic cruelty, exalted for a moment in the enormous
simplicity of his success, and then walked across the hall and vanished
through an inner door. His two lieutenants, Quayle and Hutton, were left
standing at the head of the great army of servants and keepers.

"I hope we shall have no more trouble," said Dr. Quayle pleasantly
enough, and addressing Turnbull, who was leaning heavily upon the back
of a chair.

Still looking down, Turnbull lifted the chair an inch or two from the
ground. Then he suddenly swung it above his head and sent it at the
inquiring doctor with an awful crash which sent one of its wooden legs
loose along the floor and crammed the doctor gasping into a corner.
MacIan gave a great shout, snatched up the loose chair-leg, and, rushing
on the other doctor, felled him with a blow. Twenty attendants rushed
to capture the rebels; MacIan flung back three of them and Turnbull
went over on top of one, when from behind them all came a shriek as of
something quite fresh and frightful.

Two of the three passages leading out of the hall were choked with blue
smoke. Another instant and the hall was full of the fog of it, and red
sparks began to swarm like scarlet bees.

"The place is on fire!" cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror.
"Oh, who can have done it? How can it have happened?"

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes. "How did the French Revolution
happen?" he asked.

"Oh, how should I know!" wailed the other.

"Then I will tell you," said Turnbull; "it happened because some people
fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked."

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the
smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a
handkerchief. He had set fire to the building in accordance with the
strict principles of the social contract.

But MacIan had taken a stride forward and stood there shaken and
terrible. "Now," he cried, panting, "now is the judgement of the world.
The doctors will leave this place; the keepers will leave this place.
They will leave us in charge of the machinery and the machine-guns at
the windows. But we, the lunatics, will wait to be burned alive if only
we may see them go."

"How do you know we shall go?" asked Hutton, fiercely.

"You believe nothing," said MacIan, simply, "and you are insupportably
afraid of death."

"So this is suicide," sneered the doctor; "a somewhat doubtful sign of
sanity."

"Not at all--this is vengeance," answered Turnbull, quite calmly; "a
thing which is completely healthy."

"You think the doctors will go," said Hutton, savagely.

"The keepers have gone already," said Turnbull.

Even as they spoke the main doors were burst open in mere brutal panic,
and all the officers and subordinates of the asylum rushed away across
the garden pursued by the smoke. But among the ticketed maniacs not a
man or woman moved.

"We hate dying," said Turnbull, with composure, "but we hate you even
more. This is a successful revolution."

In the roof above their heads a panel shot back, showing a strip of
star-lit sky and a huge thing made of white metal, with the shape and
fins of a fish, swinging as if at anchor. At the same moment a steel
ladder slid down from the opening and struck the floor, and the cleft
chin of the mysterious Master was thrust into the opening. "Quayle,
Hutton," he said, "you will escape with me." And they went up the ladder
like automata of lead.

Long after they had clambered into the car, the creature with the cloven
face continued to leer down upon the smoke-stung crowd below. Then at
last he said in a silken voice and with a smile of final satisfaction:

"By the way, I fear I am very absent minded. There is one man specially
whom, somehow, I always forget. I always leave him lying about. Once
I mislaid him on the Cross of St. Paul's. So silly of me; and now I've
forgotten him in one of those little cells where your fire is burning.
Very unfortunate--especially for him." And nodding genially, he climbed
into his flying ship.

MacIan stood motionless for two minutes, and then rushed down one of the
suffocating corridors till he found the flames. Turnbull looked once at
Madeleine, and followed.

           *                    *                   *

MacIan, with singed hair, smoking garments, and smarting hands and face,
had already broken far enough through the first barriers of burning
timber to come within cry of the cells he had once known. It was
impossible, however, to see the spot where the old man lay dead or
alive; not now through darkness, but through scorching and aching light.
The site of the old half-wit's cell was now the heart of a standing
forest of fire--the flames as thick and yellow as a cornfield. Their
incessant shrieking and crackling was like a mob shouting against an
orator. Yet through all that deafening density MacIan thought he heard
a small and separate sound. When he heard it he rushed forward as if to
plunge into that furnace, but Turnbull arrested him by an elbow.

"Let me go!" cried Evan, in agony; "it's the poor old beggar's
voice--he's still alive, and shouting for help."

"Listen!" said Turnbull, and lifted one finger from his clenched hand.

"Or else he is shrieking with pain," protested MacIan. "I will not
endure it."

"Listen!" repeated Turnbull, grimly. "Did you ever hear anyone shout for
help or shriek with pain in that voice?"

The small shrill sounds which came through the crash of the
conflagration were indeed of an odd sort, and MacIan turned a face of
puzzled inquiry to his companion.

"He is singing," said Turnbull, simply.

A remaining rampart fell, crushing the fire, and through the diminished
din of it the voice of the little old lunatic came clearer. In the heart
of that white-hot hell he was singing like a bird. What he was singing
it was not very easy to follow, but it seemed to be something about
playing in the golden hay.

"Good Lord!" cried Turnbull, bitterly, "there seem to be some advantages
in really being an idiot." Then advancing to the fringe of the fire he
called out on chance to the invisible singer: "Can you come out? Are you
cut off?"

"God help us all!" said MacIan, with a shudder; "he's laughing now."

At whatever stage of being burned alive the invisible now found himself,
he was now shaking out peals of silvery and hilarious laughter. As he
listened, MacIan's two eyes began to glow, as if a strange thought had
come into his head.

"Fool, come out and save yourself!" shouted Turnbull.

"No, by Heaven! that is not the way," cried Evan, suddenly. "Father," he
shouted, "come out and save us all!"

The fire, though it had dropped in one or two places, was, upon the
whole, higher and more unconquerable than ever. Separate tall flames
shot up and spread out above them like the fiery cloisters of some
infernal cathedral, or like a grove of red tropical trees in the garden
of the devil. Higher yet in the purple hollow of the night the topmost
flames leapt again and again fruitlessly at the stars, like golden
dragons chained but struggling. The towers and domes of the oppressive
smoke seemed high and far enough to drown distant planets in a London
fog. But if we exhausted all frantic similes for that frantic scene,
the main impression about the fire would still be its ranked upstanding
rigidity and a sort of roaring stillness. It was literally a wall of
fire.

"Father," cried MacIan, once more, "come out of it and save us all!"
Turnbull was staring at him as he cried.

The tall and steady forest of fire must have been already a portent
visible to the whole circle of land and sea. The red flush of it lit up
the long sides of white ships far out in the German Ocean, and picked
out like piercing rubies the windows in the villages on the distant
heights. If any villagers or sailors were looking towards it they must
have seen a strange sight as MacIan cried out for the third time.

That forest of fire wavered, and was cloven in the centre; and then the
whole of one half of it leaned one way as a cornfield leans all one way
under the load of the wind. Indeed, it looked as if a great wind had
sprung up and driven the great fire aslant. Its smoke was no longer sent
up to choke the stars, but was trailed and dragged across county after
county like one dreadful banner of defeat.

But it was not the wind; or, if it was the wind, it was two winds
blowing in opposite directions. For while one half of the huge fire
sloped one way towards the inland heights, the other half, at exactly
the same angle, sloped out eastward towards the sea. So that earth and
ocean could behold, where there had been a mere fiery mass, a thing
divided like a V--a cloven tongue of flame. But if it were a prodigy for
those distant, it was something beyond speech for those quite near. As
the echoes of Evan's last appeal rang and died in the universal uproar,
the fiery vault over his head opened down the middle, and, reeling back
in two great golden billows, hung on each side as huge and harmless as
two sloping hills lie on each side of a valley. Down the centre of this
trough, or chasm, a little path ran, cleared of all but ashes, and down
this little path was walking a little old man singing as if he were
alone in a wood in spring.

When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and seemed to
support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine Durand. Then after a
moment's hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan.
His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many
sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly
rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All
his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that
materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines
precisely in this--that he preferred a fact even to materialism.

As the little singing figure came nearer and nearer, Evan fell on his
knees, and after an instant Beatrice followed; then Madeleine fell on
her knees, and after a longer instant Turnbull followed. Then the little
old man went past them singing down that corridor of flames. They had
not looked at his face.

When he had passed they looked up. While the first light of the fire
had shot east and west, painting the sides of ships with fire-light or
striking red sparks out of windowed houses, it had not hitherto struck
upward, for there was above it the ponderous and rococo cavern of its
own monstrous coloured smoke. But now the fire was turned to left and
right like a woman's hair parted in the middle, and now the shafts of
its light could shoot up into empty heavens and strike anything, either
bird or cloud. But it struck something that was neither cloud nor bird.
Far, far away up in those huge hollows of space something was flying
swiftly and shining brightly, something that shone too bright and flew
too fast to be any of the fowls of the air, though the red light lit it
from underneath like the breast of a bird. Everyone knew it was a flying
ship, and everyone knew whose.

As they stared upward the little speck of light seemed slightly tilted,
and two black dots dropped from the edge of it. All the eager, upturned
faces watched the two dots as they grew bigger and bigger in their
downward rush. Then someone screamed, and no one looked up any more. For
the two bodies, larger every second flying, spread out and sprawling in
the fire-light, were the dead bodies of the two doctors whom Professor
Lucifer had carried with him--the weak and sneering Quayle, the cold and
clumsy Hutton. They went with a crash into the thick of the fire.

"They are gone!" screamed Beatrice, hiding her head. "O God! The are
lost!"

Evan put his arm about her, and remembered his own vision.

"No, they are not lost," he said. "They are saved. He has taken away no
souls with him, after all."

He looked vaguely about at the fire that was already fading, and there
among the ashes lay two shining things that had survived the fire, his
sword and Turnbull's, fallen haphazard in the pattern of a cross.











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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tremendous Trifles, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Tremendous Trifles

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8092]
Release Date: August 10, 2009

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TREMENDOUS TRIFLES ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

By G. K. Chesterton




PREFACE

These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the
Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount
to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary recording one day in
twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--the only kind of diary the
author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep
by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the
topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive.
As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it
probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window
blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at
something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not
write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post
or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The
Bed-Post; Its Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night
Felt as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on. He could
not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even
in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind--Its Analogy to the Curtain
and Veil--Is Modesty Natural?--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun,
etc., etc." None of us think enough of these things on which the eye
rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy?
Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that
run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular
athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured
cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else
may do it better, if anyone else will only try.


     CONTENTS:

           I  Tremendous Trifles
          II  A Piece of Chalk
         III  The Secret of a Train
          IV  The Perfect Game
           V  The Extraordinary Cabman
          VI  An Accident
         VII  The Advantages of Having One Leg
        VIII  The End of the World
          IX  In the Place de la Bastille
           X  On Lying in Bed
          XI  The Twelve Men
         XII  The Wind and the Trees
        XIII  The Dickensian
         XIV  In Topsy-Turvy Land
          XV  What I Found in My Pocket
         XVI  The Dragon's Grandmother
        XVII  The Red Angel
       XVIII  The Tower
         XIX  How I Met the President
          XX  The Giant
         XXI  The Great Man
        XXII  The Orthodox Barber
       XXIII  The Toy Theatre
        XXIV  A Tragedy of Twopence
         XXV  A Cab Ride Across Country
        XXVI  The Two Noises
       XXVII  Some Policemen and a Moral
      XXVIII  The Lion
        XXIX  Humanity: An Interlude
         XXX  The Little Birds Who Won't Sing
        XXXI  The Riddle of the Ivy
       XXXII  The Travellers in State
      XXXIII  The Prehistoric Railway Station
       XXXIV  The Diabolist
        XXXV  A Glimpse of My Country
       XXXVI  A Somewhat Improbable Story
      XXXVII  The Shop of Ghosts
     XXXVIII  The Ballade of a Strange Town
       XXXIX  The Mystery of a Pageant





I. Tremendous Trifles

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the
front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was
about the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips of
gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up
in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning
while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual,
probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in
philosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter,
were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who
was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering
them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And
Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explaining
that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride across
continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoon
dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket,
waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the
model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's
colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to
visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas,
he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork
rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than
the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for
several minutes trying to find something really large and finding
everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five
prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the
hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment
with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the
other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the
book again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil
of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe." So the
backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a
day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end of
him.

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly
enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to
be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became
one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of
an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at
intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic
pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward
the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and
impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked
like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint
horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more
mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever.
He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not
come to the end of it yet.

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit
for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is
not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact
the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that
follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European
literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in
its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls
call telling a story.

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great
literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by
sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it
be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the
two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us
to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The
school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the
man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long
enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a
far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words,
we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually
before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up
their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the
Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may
see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the
giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many
extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur
himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken
the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle
diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking
in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that
these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can
only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that
I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is
so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture
than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not
unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a
pigmy like Peter to discover that.

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting
to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the
most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an
exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth.
But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness,
but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like
insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is
from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have
no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the
hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass
to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an
attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I
will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like
flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never
starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.




II. A Piece of Chalk

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a
walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.
I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),
and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown
paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook
the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She
seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be
wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to
do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental
capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of
toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only
wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in
the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a
question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing
comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I
wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently
supposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper
wrappers from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not
only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper,
just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer,
or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal
twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured
chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and
blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of
divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman;
and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and
possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how
primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's
pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the
infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely
about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and
the age of the great epics is past.

.....

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out
on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that
express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time
soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the
smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree;
it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty
are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The
villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries;
yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous
wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to
sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind
old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in
robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred
or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.
They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much
easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a
mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs
of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly
walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and
silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the
beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the
landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the
best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about
the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but
they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about
Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white
robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had
stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the
purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand
green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The
blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the
Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

.....

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that
a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I
cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise
and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white
is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and
affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so
to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities
of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is
exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality
is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the
avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like
pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or
sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive
thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something
flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but
He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when
He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and
expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that
white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then
white would be used instead of black and grey for the funeral dress of
this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of
spotless silver linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies.
Which is not the case.

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.

.....

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than
Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be
such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd
little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there
were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for
expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and
again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine
a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt
water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense
warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white
chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped
and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not mark so well as the
shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance
of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand
peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more
admirable. It is a piece of chalk.




III. The Secret of a Train

All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a loose
memory. I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you
will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and
no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in
life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if
it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from
there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested
properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the
tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like
ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My
experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not
fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were
of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape, which
were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they
were as I shall now describe.

.....

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outside
the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And
for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the
emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon
me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the
road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know
if other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is always
dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into
life a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want
anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing for
contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome
than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man's
life is a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail man
refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters
of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the
immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that
something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But
this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already--that
the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the
monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous
train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of
Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came
upon me out of the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years
afterwards I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir
George Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless. The
fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; the
tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and as
cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in.
A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance
to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies
seemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merely
sullen became swollen; and then they loosened and let down the dark
curtains of the rain. The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like
blows from an enemy at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over and
bawling in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man, and
in that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met him I asked
him if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up the train for
Paddington. He directed me to a small silent station (I cannot even
remember the name of it) which stood well away from the road and looked
as lonely as a hut on the Andes. I do not think I have ever seen such a
type of time and sadness and scepticism and everything devilish as that
station was: it looked as if it had always been raining there ever since
the creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking wood of
it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome liquid corruption
of the wood itself; as if the solid station were eternally falling to
pieces and pouring away in filth. It took me nearly ten minutes to find
a man in the station. When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him
if there was a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As
far as I understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour.
I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail of the
tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain. It may have
been in half an hour or less, but a train came rather slowly into the
station. It was an unnaturally dark train; I could not see a light
anywhere in the long black body of it; and I could not see any guard
running beside it. I was reduced to walking up to the engine and calling
out to the stoker to ask if the train was going to London. "Well--yes,
sir," he said, with an unaccountable kind of reluctance. "It is going
to London; but----" It was just starting, and I jumped into the first
carriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering, as we
steamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined with desolate
poplars, until we slowed down and stopped, irrationally, in the middle
of a field. I heard a heavy noise as of some one clambering off the
train, and a dark, ragged head suddenly put itself into my window.
"Excuse me, sir," said the stoker, "but I think, perhaps--well, perhaps
you ought to know--there's a dead man in this train."

.....

Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities
and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be finally
overwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have insisted on
getting out and walking. As it was, I regret to say, I expressed myself
politely, but firmly, to the effect that I didn't care particularly if
the train took me to Paddington. But when the train had started with
its unknown burden I did do one thing, and do it quite instinctively,
without stopping to think, or to think more than a flash. I threw
away my cigar. Something that is as old as man and has to do with
all mourning and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something
unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there being
only two men in that train, and one of them dead and the other smoking
a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end of it faded like a
funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic moment of a procession,
I realised how immortal ritual is. I realised (what is the origin and
essence of all ritual) that in the presence of those sacred riddles
about which we can say nothing it is more decent merely to do something.
And I realised that ritual will always mean throwing away something;
DESTROYING our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

When the train panted at last into Paddington Station I sprang out of
it with a suddenly released curiosity. There was a barrier and officials
guarding the rear part of the train; no one was allowed to press towards
it. They were guarding and hiding something; perhaps death in some too
shocking form, perhaps something like the Merstham matter, so mixed up
with human mystery and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of
sanctity; perhaps something worse than either. I went out gladly enough
into the streets and saw the lamps shining on the laughing faces.
Nor have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I
wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark.




IV. The Perfect Game

We have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened to
him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My
own position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a
matter of intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience.
I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability. But it is
entirely a matter of the mere intelligence, not even of the motions;
my nerves and body are altogether of this earth, very earthy. But
upon people of this temperament one weird incident will often leave a
peculiar impression. And the weirdest circumstance that ever occurred
to me occurred a little while ago. It consisted in nothing less than my
playing a game, and playing it quite well for some seventeen consecutive
minutes. The ghost of my grandfather would have astonished me less.

On one of these blue and burning afternoons I found myself, to my
inexpressible astonishment, playing a game called croquet. I had
imagined that it belonged to the epoch of Leach and Anthony Trollope,
and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and luxuriant
side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene. I played
it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom I had a
semi-philosophical argument which lasted through the entire contest. It
is deeply implanted in my mind that I had the best of the argument; but
it is certain and beyond dispute that I had the worst of the game.

"Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!" I cried, patting him affectionately on the
head with a mallet, "how far you really are from the pure love of the
sport--you who can play. It is only we who play badly who love the Game
itself. You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice
of victory; you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until
you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the
occupation in the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art's sake.
If we may see the face of Croquet herself (if I may so express myself)
we are content to see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is
called amateurish; and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs
is but the French for Lovers. We accept all adventures from our Lady,
the most disastrous or the most dreary. We wait outside her iron gates
(I allude to the hoops), vainly essaying to enter. Our devoted balls,
impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within the pedantic
boundaries of the mere croquet ground. Our balls seek honour in the ends
of the earth; they turn up in the flower-beds and the conservatory; they
are to be found in the front garden and the next street. No, Parkinson!
The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The
good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music. With
such a pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game
itself. I love the parallelogram of grass marked out with chalk or tape,
as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred Fatherland, the four
seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets, and the click of
the balls is music. The four colours are to me sacramental and symbolic,
like the red of martyrdom, or the white of Easter Day. You lose all
this, my poor Parkinson. You have to solace yourself for the absence of
this vision by the paltry consolation of being able to go through hoops
and to hit the stick."

And I waved my mallet in the air with a graceful gaiety.

"Don't be too sorry for me," said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm. "I
shall get over it in time. But it seems to me that the more a man likes
a game the better he would want to play it. Granted that the pleasure
in the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure of success come
naturally and inevitably afterwards? Or, take your own simile of the
Knight and his Lady-love. I admit the gentleman does first and foremost
want to be in the lady's presence. But I never yet heard of a gentleman
who wanted to look an utter ass when he was there."

"Perhaps not; though he generally looks it," I replied. "But the truth
is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own. The
happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness, which
can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking,
the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the love
of both lovers, the stronger will be the happiness. But it is not true
that the stronger the play of both croquet players the stronger will
be the game. It is logically possible--(follow me closely here,
Parkinson!)--it is logically possible, to play croquet too well to enjoy
it at all. If you could put this blue ball through that distant hoop as
easily as you could pick it up with your hand, then you would not put it
through that hoop any more than you pick it up with your hand; it would
not be worth doing. If you could play unerringly you would not play at
all. The moment the game is perfect the game disappears."

"I do not think, however," said Parkinson, "that you are in any
immediate danger of effecting that sort of destruction. I do not think
your croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence. You are
safe for the present."

I again caressed him with the mallet, knocked a ball about, wired
myself, and resumed the thread of my discourse.

The long, warm evening had been gradually closing in, and by this
time it was almost twilight. By the time I had delivered four more
fundamental principles, and my companion had gone through five more
hoops, the dusk was verging upon dark.

"We shall have to give this up," said Parkinson, as he missed a ball
almost for the first time, "I can't see a thing."

"Nor can I," I answered, "and it is a comfort to reflect that I could
not hit anything if I saw it."

With that I struck a ball smartly, and sent it away into the darkness
towards where the shadowy figure of Parkinson moved in the hot haze.
Parkinson immediately uttered a loud and dramatic cry. The situation,
indeed, called for it. I had hit the right ball.

Stunned with astonishment, I crossed the gloomy ground, and hit my ball
again. It went through a hoop. I could not see the hoop; but it was the
right hoop. I shuddered from head to foot.

Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after that
impossible ball. Again I hit it away into the night, in what I supposed
was the vague direction of the quite invisible stick. And in the dead
silence I heard the stick rattle as the ball struck it heavily.

I threw down my mallet. "I can't stand this," I said. "My ball has gone
right three times. These things are not of this world."

"Pick your mallet up," said Parkinson, "have another go."

"I tell you I daren't. If I made another hoop like that I should see all
the devils dancing there on the blessed grass."

"Why devils?" asked Parkinson; "they may be only fairies making fun of
you. They are sending you the 'Perfect Game,' which is no game."

I looked about me. The garden was full of a burning darkness, in which
the faint glimmers had the look of fire. I stepped across the grass
as if it burnt me, picked up the mallet, and hit the ball
somewhere--somewhere where another ball might be. I heard the dull click
of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued.




V. The Extraordinary Cabman

From time to time I have introduced into this newspaper column the
narration of incidents that have really occurred. I do not mean to
insinuate that in this respect it stands alone among newspaper columns.
I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better expressed
by some practical parable out of daily life than by any other method;
therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the extraordinary cabman,
which occurred to me only three days ago, and which, slight as it
apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine emotion bordering upon
despair.

On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching in a little
restaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. My
best friends are all either bottomless sceptics or quite uncontrollable
believers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate
and terrible ideas. And the whole argument worked out ultimately to
this: that the question is whether a man can be certain of anything
at all. I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible intellectually
to entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossible
to entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty I
cannot even say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have never
experienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not
green. It may be as green as possible for all I know, if I have really
no experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the
room; because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. And
the difference between us was very deep, because it was a difference as
to the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the opening
of the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the
sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening
infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened
my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing
it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly
silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

.....

Now when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short (for
it will never be over), I went away with one of my companions, who in
the confusion and comparative insanity of a General Election had somehow
become a member of Parliament, and I drove with him in a cab from the
corner of Leicester-square to the members' entrance of the House of
Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance.
Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper is a
discussion between us which still continues.

It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude of
detail. After leaving my friend at the House I took the cab on a few
hundred yards to an office in Victoria-street which I had to visit. I
then got out and offered him more than his fare. He looked at it, but
not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on which is
not unknown among normal cabmen. But this was no normal, perhaps, no
human, cabman. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment,
clearly quite genuine. "Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given
me 1s.8d?" I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now you
know, sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you know
that ain't the fare from Euston." "Euston," I repeated vaguely, for the
phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia. "What on
earth has Euston got to do with it?" "You hailed me just outside Euston
Station," began the man with astonishing precision, "and then you
said----" "What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?" I said
with Christian forbearance; "I took you at the south-west corner of
Leicester-square." "Leicester-square," he exclaimed, loosening a kind of
cataract of scorn, "why we ain't been near Leicester-square to-day. You
hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----" "Are you mad, or am
I?" I asked with scientific calm.

I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cabman would think of
creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie. And this man was
not a dishonest cabman. If ever a human face was heavy and simple and
humble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog's, if ever
(in short) a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and down the
street; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on. And for one
second the old nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. What
was certainty? Was anybody certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the
dull rut of the sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a future
life. The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess a
past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, except
a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. The
cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate details of the gesture, the
words, the complex but consistent course of action which I had adopted
since that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston
Station. How did I know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not
hailed him outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite
equally firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I,
and a member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment the
universe and the stars swung just a hair's breadth from their balance,
and the foundations of the earth were moved. But for the same reason
that I believe in Democracy, for the same reason that I believe in free
will, for the same reason that I believe in fixed character of virtue,
the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not choose
to be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cabman was
wrong, and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner
of Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and ponderous
sincerity, "You hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----"

And at this moment there came over his features a kind of frightful
transfiguration of living astonishment, as if he had been lit up like
a lamp from the inside. "Why, I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "I beg
your pardon. I beg your pardon. You took me from Leicester-square. I
remember now. I beg your pardon." And with that this astonishing man let
out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear,
is strictly true.

.....

I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance and the
mists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying that although his
face had seemed so honest there was something unearthly and demoniac
about him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me
from my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I had defended
earlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that
my sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remained
erect.




VI. An Accident

Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called "The
Extraordinary Cabman." I am now in a position to contribute my
experience of a still more extraordinary cab. The extraordinary thing
about the cab was that it did not like me; it threw me out violently in
the middle of the Strand. If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are
as romantic (and as rich) as I take them to be, I presume that this
experience is not uncommon. I suppose that they are all being thrown out
of cabs, all over London. Still, as there are some people, virginal and
remote from the world, who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I
will give a short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cab
ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.

I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--that
one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged, will
gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that it is
both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern in these two
respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it came to grief.
But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; it belongs to a
beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody is pretending to be
richer than they are, and acting as if they were. It is comfortable, and
yet it is reckless; and that combination is the very soul of England.
But although I had always realised all these good qualities in a hansom
cab, I had not experienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put
it, all the aspects of that vehicle. My enunciation of the merits of a
hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up. Let me,
therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom cab for the
first and, I am happy to believe, the last time. Polycrates threw one
ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates. I have thrown one hansom
cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather violent metaphor) and the
Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated. Though I am told they do not
like to be told so.

I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down one of the
sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own admirable
articles with continual pleasure, and still more continual surprise,
when the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment on the scraping stones,
staggered to his feet again, and went forward. The horses in my cabs
often do this, and I have learnt to enjoy my own articles at any angle
of the vehicle. So I did not see anything at all odd about the way
the horse went on again. But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the
people on the pavement. They were all turned towards me, and they were
all struck with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky. And
one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the elbow as if
warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse. Then I knew that
the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse was like a living
thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly as they seemed to me;
many details I may have missed or mis-stated; many details may have,
so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road. I remember that I
once called one of my experiences narrated in this paper "A Fragment of
Fact." This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact. No fact could possibly
be more fragmentary than the sort of fact that I expected to be at the
bottom of that street.

.....

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that
the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always
urged in this paper that democracy has a deeper meaning than democrats
understand; that is, that common and popular things, proverbs, and
ordinary sayings always have something in them unrealised by most who
repeat them. Here is one. We have all heard about the man who is in
momentary danger, and who sees the whole of his life pass before him
in a moment. In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is
obviously a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident or
a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets he had ever
taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever passed the brown
bread and butter.

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards the traffic
of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth behind this phrase,
as there is behind all popular phrases. I did really have, in that short
and shrieking period, a rapid succession of a number of fundamental
points of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as
many seconds. My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere
men is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a
state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever
been found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be what
some German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) when they talk
about Pessimism. It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that
happens--as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously
enough, came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. It was
a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that life was much
too important ever to be anything but life. I hope that this was
Christianity. At any rate, it occurred at the moment when we went crash
into the omnibus.

It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,
like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawling out from
underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they must have added
enormously to that great cause to which the Anti-Puritan League and I
have recently dedicated ourselves. I mean the cause of the pleasures of
the people. As to my demeanour when I emerged, I have two confessions to
make, and they are both made merely in the interests of mental science.
The first is that whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the
moment before the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got
off with a cut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.
A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can
distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable
spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologise both to
the man and to the paper. I have not the least idea what was the meaning
of this unnatural anger; I mention it as a psychological confession. It
was immediately followed by extreme hilarity, and I made so many silly
jokes to the policeman that he disgraced himself by continual laughter
before all the little boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him
seriously.

.....

There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mention as
a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain. At intervals of
about every three minutes I kept on reminding the policeman that I had
not paid the cabman, and that I hoped he would not lose his money. He
said it would be all right, and the man would appear. But it was not
until about half an hour afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a
shock intolerable that the man might conceivably have lost more
than half a crown; that he had been in danger as well as I. I had
instinctively regarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents,
a god. I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that they
seemed to have been unnecessary.

But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more
delicate charity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin,
and neglect the weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I
was once really tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might
have been dead. Some admirable men in white coats at the Charing Cross
Hospital tied up my small injury, and I went out again into the Strand.
I felt upon me even a kind of unnatural youth; I hungered for something
untried. So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a hansom cab.




VII. The Advantages of Having One Leg

A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and
casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be either
insolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can live through these
great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little
worries." "That's quite right, mum," answered the old woman with
emphasis, "and I ought to know, seeing I've had ten of 'em." It is,
perhaps, in this sense that it is most true that little worries are most
wearing. In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a
truth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error.
People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to say
that they find the small ones the most bitter; and it is undoubtedly
true that the back which is bowed under loads incredible can feel a
faint addition to those loads; a giant holding up the earth and all
its animal creation might still find the grasshopper a burden. But I
am afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is
sometimes used or abused by people, because they have nothing but the
very smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the
crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity she
would wear the crown of thorns--if she had to. The gentleman may permit
himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave much
better if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny that
the grasshopper on man's shoulder is a burden; but we need not pay much
respect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would rather
have an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. We
may concede that a straw may break the camel's back, but we like to know
that it really is the last straw and not the first.

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble,
so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that
if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To
talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest
way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about
little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very
often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very
clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking
that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do no deny that
molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this
evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more
invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No
one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a
hassock. William III. died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose
that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a
mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask
a happy man (not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences,
and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive
poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, finding
unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, finding
punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn
from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence because I have
recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arise
from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only
alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--a stork is a
poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing
itself symbolise something other than isolation. If we wish to see what
a house is it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish
to depict what a man really is we must depict a man alone in a desert or
on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure he means all that
humanity means; so long as he is solitary he means human society; so
long as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship. Add another
figure and the picture is less human--not more so. One is company, two
is none. If you wish to symbolise human building draw one dark tower on
the horizon; if you wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the
sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day
there is but one star in the sky--a large, fierce star which we call the
sun. One sun is splendid; six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of
Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row
of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower;
the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the
single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of
all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and
perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the
tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is
that which stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric
column. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimate
use of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfils its
legitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic
consistency, it may even improve by the process, and during these few
days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation
of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and
classic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr.
George Meredith's novel might pass by at any moment, and seeing me in
the stork-like attitude would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more
literal exactitude, "He has a leg." Notice how this famous literary
phrase supports my contention touching this isolation of any admirable
thing. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect
picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg. She
delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive fact
that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant,
a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had one
good leg he should have another--this would be to use vain repetitions
as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if
he had been a centipede.

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender
of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all
desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it
may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight
sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division
between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to
realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong
and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much
otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly
exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and
beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you
wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a
moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's image
is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of
all visible things--wink the other eye.




VIII. The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town
of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horse-shoe of
river. You may learn from the guide books that it was the birthplace of
Victor Hugo, and that it is a military station with many forts, near the
French frontier. But you will not learn from guide books that the very
tiles on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate colour
than the tiles of all the other towns of the world; that the tiles look
like the little clouds of some strange sunset, or like the lustrous
scales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in this
town the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some way
attractive and even elvish, a carved face at a street corner, a gleam of
green fields through a stunted arch, or some unexpected colour for the
enamel of a spire or dome.

.....

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours so simple
and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together and make a fairy
tale. I sat down for a little outside a café with a row of little toy
trees in front of it, and presently the driver of a fly (as we should
call it) came to the same place. He was one of those very large and dark
Frenchmen, a type not common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian
Frenchman, huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was
a sort of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but
English. And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two
nations. For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets, this
Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--as if pleasure
were a kind of pagan religion. After some talk which was full of the
admirable civility and equality of French civilisation, he suggested
without either eagerness or embarrassment that he should take me in his
fly for an hour's ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was
growing late I consented; for there was one long white road under an
archway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. We
drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans, and I
remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we passed out of
the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinity
of France. They make what some poet calls "a tangled trinity," and I am
not going to disentangle it. Whatever those three things mean, how
or why they co-exist; whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are
reconciled already; the three sounds I heard then by an accident all
at once make up the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino
gardens behind me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some
ramping tune from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on
I heard also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible
loyalties and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

.....

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having left
France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world. And, indeed,
there was something in the landscape wild enough to encourage such
a fancy. I have seen perhaps higher mountains, but I have never
seen higher rocks; I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and
sensational, splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of
churches, cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from
heaven. There was also a quality in the ride which was not only
astonishing, but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have
noticed if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads. I mean
a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole earth turning about one's
head. It is quite inadequate to say that the hills rose and fell like
enormous waves. Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the
enormous sails of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic
wings. As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset
this dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof. I stared
at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a wooded plain. Below
me steeps of green swept down to the river. I stared at them until I
fancied that they swept up to the sky. The purple darkened, night drew
nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer the chasms and draw higher the
spires of that nightmare landscape. Above me in the twilight was
the huge black hulk of the driver, and his broad, blank back was as
mysterious as the back of Death in Watts' picture. I felt that I was
growing too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things. I
called out to the driver in French, "Where are you taking me?" and it
is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same language
without turning around, "To the end of the world."

I did not answer. I let him drag the vehicle up dark, steep ways, until
I saw lights under a low roof of little trees and two children, one
oddly beautiful, playing at ball. Then we found ourselves filling up the
strict main street of a tiny hamlet, and across the wall of its inn was
written in large letters, LE BOUT DU MONDE--the end of the world.

The driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word, as if all
ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place. I ordered
bread for both of us, and red wine, that was good but had no name. On
the other side of the road was a little plain church with a cross on top
of it and a cock on top of the cross. This seemed to me a very good end
of the world; if the story of the world ended here it ended well. Then
I wondered whether I myself should really be content to end here, where
most certainly there were the best things of Christendom--a church and
children's games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.
But as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me, and at
last I started up.

"Are you not satisfied?" asked my companion. "No," I said, "I am not
satisfied even at the end of the world."

Then, after a silence, I said, "Because you see there are two ends of
the world. And this is the wrong end of the world; at least the wrong
one for me. This is the French end of the world. I want the other end of
the world. Drive me to the other end of the world."

"The other end of the world?" he asked. "Where is that?"

"It is in Walham Green," I whispered hoarsely. "You see it on the London
omnibuses. 'World's End and Walham Green.' Oh, I know how good this is;
I love your vineyards and your free peasantry, but I want the English
end of the world. I love you like a brother, but I want an English
cabman, who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is.' Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman. Take, oh, take me
to see a London policeman."

He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset, and I could
not tell whether he understood or not. I got back into his carriage.

"You will understand," I said, "if ever you are an exile even for
pleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country, as a
countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is rather too long
a drive to the English end of the world, we may as well drive back to
Besançon."

Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept for Walham
Green.




IX. In the Place de La Bastille

On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with a
capering figure, which stands in the place where the people destroyed a
prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious example of how symbolic
is the great part of human history. As a matter of mere material fact,
the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly
a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a
sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last
General Election, or for President Kruger's hat in the election before;
their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not
an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly
the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it
is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic
calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine
owner who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea, exactly as the
people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air.
It was the same with Mr. Kruger's hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was
not merely a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the
exact thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the unbeautiful
dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of political morality.
No; the people are sometimes wrong on the practical side of politics;
they are never wrong on the artistic side.

.....

So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It was
an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the
building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they
struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that
immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the
most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident,
in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the
spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could
unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritual
meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious
service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous
enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue for
ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the
root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would
never forget it. It would change the world.

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society,
for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocable
things--marriage, for instance. And architecture approaches nearer than
any other art to being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get
rid of. You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall. You
can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of very sincere emotion
that you tear a town-hall to pieces. A building is akin to dogma; it
is insolent, like a dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims
permanence like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture
of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is
obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that
does not change like the clouds of the sky. But along with this decision
which is involved in creating a building, there goes a quite similar
decision in the more delightful task of smashing one. The two of
necessity go together. In few places have so many fine public buildings
been set up as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been
destroyed. When people have finally got into the horrible habit of
preserving buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few are
pulled down.

.....

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and
Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many
such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of
horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough,
but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their
helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them
by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in
pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round
the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an
invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that
lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into
which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out,
"The French soldiers!" There were the little men with the brown faces
that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as
they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I
saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held
by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a
revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He
said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que le
chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler." I said, "Ni moi non
plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian.
The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for
us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and
dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally
steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity),
the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out
one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking
about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less
harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as
the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak,
through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for
feeling itself on the eve of something--of the Bartholomew or the
Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense of
crisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling down
and building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column
in the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point of
dissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She dies
daily.




X. On Lying in Bed

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if
only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the
premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several
pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping
and masterly way, and laid on the colour in great washes, it might drip
down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled colour like some
strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid
it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of
artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would
be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of
a white ceiling being put to.

But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have
discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in
a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really
allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des géants."
But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms
such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an
endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of
fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them
to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found the
wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing
a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why one
arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious
or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over my
nice walls like a sort of small-pox. The Bible must be referring to
wallpapers, I think, when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the
Gentiles do." I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours,
rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish
Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but I
suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly,
with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountably
been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with
their childish and barbaric designs.

.....

Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this
occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying
on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my
vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition
of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas!
like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable;
it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the
window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom
has been discouraged--never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all
political rights--and even my minor proposal to put the other end of
the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been
conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that
all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces
and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am
sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient
and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the
roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a
divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is
hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to
mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than
the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the
expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties
and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern
weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor
morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad
taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays,
for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an
offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as
he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite
pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic
acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters
as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as
a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be
regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up
early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but
there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

.....

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get
up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its
mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle.
A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible,
creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his
ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly;
but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and
rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes
in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the
top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let
them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of
good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which
mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues
which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of
inspired pity or of inspired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal is made
to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in
the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his
opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little
more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected.
I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an
almost terrible virtue.

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like
journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as,
for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that
the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution
I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it
without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course,
of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it
without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he
does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific
explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.




XI. The Twelve Men

The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I
was, so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people.
The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden and
arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea, and
my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there were also
summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions of
men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began with a
C.

It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping alphabetical
way. At one official blow, so to speak, Battersea is denuded of all its
C's, and left to get on as best it can with the rest of the alphabet. A
Cumberpatch is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--three
Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children are crying out
for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weeping
for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a
rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race,
the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally
inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his
second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly
try the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the
bar, neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet.

.....

Just when I was wondering whether the King and the prisoner were,
perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in some adjoining public
house, the prisoner's head appears above the barrier of the dock; he
is accused of stealing bicycles, and he is the living image of a great
friend of mine. We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles.
We do well and truly try the case between the King and the prisoner in
the affair of the bicycles. And we come to the conclusion, after a brief
but reasonable discussion, that the King is not in any way implicated.
Then we pass on to a woman who neglected her children, and who looks as
if somebody or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who
fancy that something had.

All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain
passed these light criticisms, there was in the heart a barbaric pity
and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, but
which is the power behind half the poems of the world. The mood cannot
even adequately be suggested, except faintly by this statement that
tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human
life. Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away from
pessimism. Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotions
at all, for speech about them is too difficult; but I mention them now
for a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I will
proceed at once. I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of
them there came a curious realisation of a political or social truth. I
saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really
is, and why we must never let it go.

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because
they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained
dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because
they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been applied
to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have
insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed
by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should
be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

.....

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do
not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true
result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is
this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential
that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That
is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming
verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable
platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the
man who least hunts for it. Another is the paradox of courage; the fact
that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful cliff
above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness. Whoever will
lose his life, the same shall save it; an entirely practical and prosaic
statement.

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every
infant prattling at his mother's knee is the following: That the more a
man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns
a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert,
that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted would be
absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied
a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its
significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its
significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we
are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing
less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

.....

Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of
men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to
other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And
the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all
judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not
that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got
used to it.

Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is
the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of
judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct
of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their
judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and
fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court
and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional
criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the
gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a
play hitherto unvisited.

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining
the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to
trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who
know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt
in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system
discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when
it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of
the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember
right, by the Founder of Christianity.




XII. The Wind and the Trees

I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf about
the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks and roars in
something that is at once exultation and agony. I feel, in fact, as if
I were actually sitting at the bottom of the sea among mere anchors and
ropes, while over my head and over the green twilight of water sounded
the everlasting rush of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of
tremendous ships. The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck
them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy, the
trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of
dragons each tied by the tail.

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent
witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind. I remember a little boy of
my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such
torn skies and tossing trees. He did not like the wind at all; it blew
in his face too much; it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his
hat, of which he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, about
four. After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said at
last to his mother, "Well, why don't you take away the trees, and then
it wouldn't wind."

Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake. Any
one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were
indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the
air around them for miles. Nothing, I say, could be more human and
excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind.
Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that it is, as a matter
of fact, the belief of about ninety-nine out of a hundred of the
philosophers, reformers, sociologists, and politicians of the great age
in which we live. My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal
modern thinkers; only much nicer.

.....

In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour of
inventing, the trees stand for all visible things and the wind for the
invisible. The wind is the spirit which bloweth where it listeth; the
trees are the material things of the world which are blown where the
spirit lists. The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees
are cities and civilisations. We only know that there is a wind because
the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad. We only know that there
is a real revolution because all the chimney-pots go mad on the whole
skyline of the city.

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and
rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises
under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No
man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood
pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne,
a prison in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.

You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind. So,
also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that there is a
revolution. And there never has been in the history of the world a real
revolution, brutally active and decisive, which was not preceded by
unrest and new dogma in the reign of invisible things. All revolutions
began by being abstract. Most revolutions began by being quite
pedantically abstract.

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. So
there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the
earth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is
lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore
the kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the
trees. It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it is in
Heaven."

.....

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The great
human heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin to
say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral
circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious
change. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be
certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is
simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--including
that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is
necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing will
ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moral
fact comes first.

For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard in
debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists and
total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty; the former
say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their either of
them being content with such simple physical explanations. Surely it
is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to
poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink; the absence
of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct that resists
degradation.

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has this
quality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth," because under
its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth, instead of
seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose. And a man who
says that the English inequality in land is due only to economic causes,
or that the drunkenness of England is due only to economic causes, is
saying something so absurd that he cannot really have thought what he
was saying.

Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under the
influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the economic
theory of history. We have people who represent that all great historic
motives were economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices
in order to induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The
extreme Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small,
heroic minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according
to their theory, the world always does. The truth is, of course, that
there will be a social revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be
purely economic. You can never have a revolution in order to establish a
democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

.....

I get up from under the trees, for the wind and the slight rain have
ceased. The trees stand up like golden pillars in a clear sunlight.
The tossing of the trees and the blowing of the wind have ceased
simultaneously. So I suppose there are still modern philosophers who
will maintain that the trees make the wind.




XIII. The Dickensian

He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw
hat; with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers, but
with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes. He was gazing with a
rather gloomy interest at the cluster, one might almost say the tangle,
of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled
up into Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour, as every one
knows, does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps
round at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear. The
passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic, and in
consequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed under a timber
ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens like a cathedral,
the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden figurehead carved like a
woman, and said, like one continuing a conversation, "Now, why have they
left off having them. They didn't do any one any harm?"

I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note. There has
been something in our most recent civilisation which is mysteriously
hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.

"They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty," he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts. "I believe they broke up all the jolly old
figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it."

"Like Mr. Quilp," I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral with
the poker."

His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time he stood
erect and stared at me.

"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked.

"For what?"

"For Dickens," he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.

"No," I answered; "I come for fun, though that is much the same thing."

"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat. It isn't
here."

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred to the people
who live there. I myself have never come to the end of the list of
Batterseas. But there are two to the stranger and tourist; the poor
part, which is dignified, and the prosperous part, which is savagely
vulgar. My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost; to the
latter he would only distantly allude.

"The place is very much spoilt now... trippers, you know," he would say,
not at all scornfully, but simply sadly. That was the nearest he would
go to an admission of the monstrous watering place that lay along
the front, outblazing the sun, and more deafening than the sea. But
behind--out of earshot of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that
they seem like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose. There
are squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one of them is
like plunging into a pool. In these places the man and I paced up and
down talking about Dickens, or, rather, doing what all true Dickensians
do, telling each other verbatim long passages which both of us knew
quite well already. We were really in the atmosphere of the older
England. Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters like
Peggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and bought pipe-stoppers
carved into figures from Pickwick. The evening was settling down between
all the buildings with that slow gold that seems to soak everything when
we went into the church.

In the growing darkness of the church, my eye caught the coloured
windows which on that clear golden evening were flaming with all the
passionate heraldry of the most fierce and ecstatic of Christian arts.
At length I said to my companion:

"Do you see that angel over there? I think it must be meant for the
angel at the sepulchre."

He saw that I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.

"I daresay," he said. "What is there odd about that?"

After a pause I said, "Do you remember what the angel at the sepulchre
said?"

"Not particularly," he answered; "but where are you off to in such a
hurry?"

I walked him rapidly out of the still square, past the fishermen's
almshouses, towards the coast, he still inquiring indignantly where I
was going.

"I am going," I said, "to put pennies in automatic machines on the
beach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going to have my
photograph taken. I am going to drink ginger-beer out of its original
bottle. I will buy some picture postcards. I do want a boat. I am ready
to listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my education
should be ready to play it. I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is,
if the donkey is willing. I am willing to be a donkey; for all this was
commanded me by the angel in the stained-glass window."

"I really think," said the Dickensian, "that I had better put you in
charge of your relations."

"Sir," I answered, "there are certain writers to whom humanity owes
much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective a
type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain
perishing associations. It would not be unnatural to look for the spirit
of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, or even for the shade of Thackeray
in Old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for
Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury, but he
would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but it would
be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will not have all
his books bound up under the title of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' Rather
we will have them all bound up under the title of 'Great Expectations.'
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it,
swallow it with a holy cannibalism, and assimilate it with the digestion
of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would have taken them, and
tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember now what
the angel said at the sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here; he is risen.'"

With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands, which
were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite desperate
democracy. And the sunset, which was now in its final glory, flung far
over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic firelight
of Dickens. In that strange evening light every figure looked at once
grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell. I heard a little
girl (who was being throttled by another little girl) say by way of
self-vindication, "My sister-in-law 'as got four rings aside her weddin'
ring!"

I stood and listened for more, but my friend went away.




XIV. In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees and the
secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world moving under
the violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor merely because I
happened to be writing the article in a wood. Nevertheless, now that I
return to Fleet Street (which seems to me, I confess, much better and
more poetical than all the wild woods in the world), I am strangely
haunted by this accidental comparison. The people's figures seem a
forest and their soul a wind. All the human personalities which speak or
signal to me seem to have this fantastic character of the fringe of the
forest against the sky. That man that talks to me, what is he but an
articulate tree? That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me
to tell me to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches
stirred and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I can
continue to contemplate with calm? That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering my
person, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that blast
of human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy? Gradually this
impression of the woods wears off. But this black-and-white contrast
between the visible and invisible, this deep sense that the one
essential belief is belief in the invisible as against the visible,
is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind. Exactly at
the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is, most
bewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet, on
which I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:
"Should Shop Assistants Marry?"

.....

When I saw those words everything might just as well have turned upside
down. The men in Fleet Street might have been walking about on their
hands. The cross of St. Paul's might have been hanging in the air upside
down. For I realise that I have really come into a topsy-turvy country;
I have come into the country where men do definitely believe that the
waving of the trees makes the wind. That is to say, they believe
that the material circumstances, however black and twisted, are more
important than the spiritual realities, however powerful and pure.
"Should Shop Assistants Marry?" I am puzzled to think what some periods
and schools of human history would have made of such a question. The
ascetics of the East or of some periods of the early Church would have
thought that the question meant, "Are not shop assistants too saintly,
too much of another world, even to feel the emotions of the sexes?" But
I suppose that is not what the purple poster means. In some pagan cities
it might have meant, "Shall slaves so vile as shop assistants even be
allowed to propagate their abject race?" But I suppose that is not what
the purple poster meant. We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what
it does mean. It does really mean that a section of the human race
is asking whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are
particularly good for modern shops. The human race is asking whether
Adam and Eve are entirely suitable for Marshall and Snelgrove. If this
is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be. We ask whether
the universal institution will improve our (please God) temporary
institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have
known a man ask seriously, "Does Democracy help the Empire?" Which is
like saying, "Is art favourable to frescoes?"

I say that there are many such questions asked. But if the world
ever runs short of them, I can suggest a large number of questions of
precisely the same kind, based on precisely the same principle.

"Do Feet Improve Boots?"--"Is Bread Better when Eaten?"--"Should
Hats have Heads in them?"--"Do People Spoil a Town?"--"Do Walls
Ruin Wall-papers?"--"Should Neckties enclose Necks?"--"Do Hands Hurt
Walking-sticks?"--"Does Burning Destroy Firewood?"--"Is Cleanliness Good
for Soap?"--"Can Cricket Really Improve Cricket-bats?"--"Shall We Take
Brides with our Wedding Rings?" and a hundred others.

Not one of these questions differs at all in intellectual purport or in
intellectual value from the question which I have quoted from the
purple poster, or from any of the typical questions asked by half of the
earnest economists of our times. All the questions they ask are of this
character; they are all tinged with this same initial absurdity. They do
not ask if the means is suited to the end; they all ask (with profound
and penetrating scepticism) if the end is suited to the means. They do
not ask whether the tail suits the dog. They all ask whether a dog is
(by the highest artistic canons) the most ornamental appendage that can
be put at the end of a tail. In short, instead of asking whether our
modern arrangements, our streets, trades, bargains, laws, and concrete
institutions are suited to the primal and permanent idea of a healthy
human life, they never admit that healthy human life into the discussion
at all, except suddenly and accidentally at odd moments; and then they
only ask whether that healthy human life is suited to our streets and
trades. Perfection may be attainable or unattainable as an end. It may
or may not be possible to talk of imperfection as a means to perfection.
But surely it passes toleration to talk of perfection as a means to
imperfection. The New Jerusalem may be a reality. It may be a dream. But
surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem is a reality
on the road to Birmingham.

.....

This is the most enormous and at the same time the most secret of the
modern tyrannies of materialism. In theory the thing ought to be simple
enough. A really human human being would always put the spiritual
things first. A walking and speaking statue of God finds himself at
one particular moment employed as a shop assistant. He has in himself
a power of terrible love, a promise of paternity, a thirst for some
loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary course of things he
asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions of those assisting in
shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny in the matter of love and
marriage?" But here, as I have said, comes in the quiet and crushing
power of modern materialism. It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he
would otherwise do. By perpetually talking about environment and visible
things, by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity,
painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron machinery
and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of towers of stone, modern
materialism at last produces this tremendous impression in which the
truth is stated upside down. At last the result is achieved. The man
does not say as he ought to have said, "Should married men endure being
modern shop assistants?" The man says, "Should shop assistants marry?"
Triumph has completed the immense illusion of materialism. The
slave does not say, "Are these chains worthy of me?" The slave says
scientifically and contentedly, "Am I even worthy of these chains?"




XV. What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have made
the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat, with an astracan
moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache. Whether he put on the
moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic will enabled him not
only to grow a moustache in the usual place, but also to grow little
moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know. I only remember that he
said to me the following words: "A man can't get on nowadays by hanging
about with his hands in his pockets." I made reply with the quite
obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in other
people's pockets; whereupon he began to argue about Moral Evolution, so
I suppose what I said had some truth in it. But the incident now comes
back to me, and connects itself with another incident--if you can call
it an incident--which happened to me only the other day.

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through
some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some
reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had
at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; I
had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should
find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a
tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my
possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with
them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything
slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.
I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still
there; the same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped
into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless
chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the
last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same
occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of
my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there
is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprised
at finding among them.

.....

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wish
briefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedented
circumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to
turn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a
rather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might have
been anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade
was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet of
quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even a
pencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. There
were no advertisements on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could
have plunged into the study, for any collection of printed words is
quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When
I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can exhaust all the
aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer poetry before I go on to the
less congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or picture
anywhere; there was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank
wet without. Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be,
uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, and
began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood. Just as I had
begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ was a carpenter,
rather than a bricklayer, or a baker, or anything else, I suddenly
started upright, and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about with
me an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensington
collection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. I
began to take the things out.

.....

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Battersea
tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook
down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my
patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided me
with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some
short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill.
Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might
be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my
railway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a
few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the
controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro
and con upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic
quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the cross
of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant all
that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope of
England.

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife, I
need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditations
all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those
practical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our human
civilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and
of the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream.
I saw into the intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among
all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent
battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered
against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.
I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the
swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war. For the knife is
only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened it
and looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade;
and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs
of man. The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing that came
next out of my pocket was a box of matches. Then I saw fire, which is
stronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing, the thing we all
love, but dare not touch.

The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw in it all the art
and all the frescoes of the world. The next was a coin of a very modest
value; and I saw in it not only the image and superscription of our own
Caesar, but all government and order since the world began. But I have
not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession
of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the
things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I
could not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket.




XVI. The Dragon's Grandmother

I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales. I do not
mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated in them--that he
did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into a coach. He did, indeed,
entertain this curious disbelief. And, like all the other people I
have ever met who entertained it, he was wholly unable to give me an
intelligent reason for it. He tried the laws of nature, but he soon
dropped that. Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinary
experience, and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protracted
pumpkinity. But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude we
adopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply the attitude we
adopt towards all unusual occurrences. If we were certain of miracles
we should not count on them. Things that happen very seldom we all leave
out of our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not. I do not
expect a glass of water to be turned into wine; but neither do I expect
a glass of water to be poisoned with prussic acid. I do not in ordinary
business relations act on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; but
neither do I act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lost
heir of the Holy Roman Empire. What we assume in action is not that the
natural order is unalterable, but simply that it is much safer to bet
on uncommon incidents than on common ones. This does not touch the
credibility of any attested tale about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turned
into a coach. If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-car
with my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined to assume
that the same thing would happen again. I should not invest largely in
pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade. Cinderella got a ball dress
from the fairy; but I do not suppose that she looked after her own
clothes any the less after it.

But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened, though crazy,
is common. The man I speak of disbelieved in fairy tales in an even more
amazing and perverted sense. He actually thought that fairy tales
ought not to be told to children. That is (like a belief in slavery
or annexation) one of those intellectual errors which lie very near to
ordinary mortal sins. There are some refusals which, though they may be
done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole
horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only
harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of
milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

.....

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured,
short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too helpless even
to find his way to the Church of England. He had a curious green necktie
and a very long neck; I am always meeting idealists with very long
necks. Perhaps it is that their eternal aspiration slowly lifts their
heads nearer and nearer to the stars. Or perhaps it has something to
do with the fact that so many of them are vegetarians: perhaps they are
slowly evolving the neck of the giraffe so that they can eat all the
tops of the trees in Kensington Gardens. These things are in every sense
above me. Such, anyhow, was the young man who did not believe in fairy
tales; and by a curious coincidence he entered the room when I had just
finished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction, and had begun
to read "Grimm's Fairy tales" as a natural consequence.

The modern novels stood before me, however, in a stack; and you can
imagine their titles for yourself. There was "Suburban Sue: A Tale of
Psychology," and also "Psychological Sue: A Tale of Suburbia"; there was
"Trixy: A Temperament," and "Man-Hate: A Monochrome," and all those nice
things. I read them with real interest, but, curiously enough, I grew
tired of them at last, and when I saw "Grimm's Fairy Tales" lying
accidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy. Here at least,
here at last, one could find a little common sense. I opened the book,
and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying words, "The Dragon's
Grandmother." That at least was reasonable; that at least was true. "The
Dragon's Grandmother!" While I was rolling this first touch of ordinary
human reality upon my tongue, I looked up suddenly and saw this monster
with a green tie standing in the doorway.

.....

I listened to what he said about the society politely enough, I hope;
but when he incidentally mentioned that he did not believe in fairy
tales, I broke out beyond control. "Man," I said, "who are you that you
should not believe in fairy tales? It is much easier to believe in Blue
Beard than to believe in you. A blue beard is a misfortune; but there
are green ties which are sins. It is far easier to believe in a million
fairy tales than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales. I
would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all his stories
as if they were thirty-nine articles than say seriously and out of
my heart that there can be such a man as you; that you are not some
temptation of the devil or some delusion from the void. Look at these
plain, homely, practical words. 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' that is all
right; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was
a dragon, he had a grandmother. But you--you had no grandmother! If you
had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales. You had no
father, you had no mother; no natural causes can explain you. You cannot
be. I believe many things which I have not seen; but of such things
as you it may be said, 'Blessed is he that has seen and yet has
disbelieved.'"

.....

It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy, so I
moderated my tone. "Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their
essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting
fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible?
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild
and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of
routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the
fairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The
problem of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad.
In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and
suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. In the
excellent tale of 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' in all the other tales of
Grimm, it is assumed that the young man setting out on his travels
will have all substantial truths in him; that he will be brave, full
of faith, reasonable, that he will respect his parents, keep his word,
rescue one kind of people, defy another kind, 'parcere subjectis et
debellare,' etc. Then, having assumed this centre of sanity, the writer
entertains himself by fancying what would happen if the whole world went
mad all round it, if the sun turned green and the moon blue, if horses
had six legs and giants had two heads. But your modern literature
takes insanity as its centre. Therefore, it loses the interest even of
insanity. A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quite
serious; that is what makes him a lunatic. A man who thinks he is a
piece of glass is to himself as dull as a piece of glass. A man who
thinks he is a chicken is to himself as common as a chicken. It is only
sanity that can see even a wild poetry in insanity. Therefore, these
wise old tales made the hero ordinary and the tale extraordinary.
But you have made the hero extraordinary and the tale ordinary--so
ordinary--oh, so very ordinary."

I saw him still gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me under the
hypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name of God
and Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother--in the name of all good
things--I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more." Whether
or no it was the result of the exorcism, there is no doubt that he
definitely went away.




XVII. The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad
for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I can
never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest letter
saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if
they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales,
because it frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruel
to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All this
kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is
like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes.
If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them
up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells
than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and
black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and
cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to
begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them
even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in
saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours
when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great
tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from
the universe of the soul.

.....

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are
alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They
dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be
alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics
worship it--because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible
for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy
tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is
in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales
do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the
child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby
has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What
the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series
of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit,
that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that
there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and
stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the
darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant
taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a
Cyclops. But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal
dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar
inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some
bad riddles, and a brave heart. Sometimes the sea at night seemed as
dreadful as any dragon. But then I was acquainted with many youngest
sons and little sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the
sea.

Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery, the
excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you will see what
I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale. I remember specially
a man's legs which fell down the chimney by themselves and walked about
the room, until they were rejoined by the severed head and body which
fell down the chimney after them. That is very good. But the point
of the story and the point of the reader's feelings is not that these
things are frightening, but the far more striking fact that the hero was
not frightened at them. The most fearful of all these fearful wonders
was his own absence of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked
the devils to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled
with some modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his
spirit. If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it; it is
the wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught to shudder
by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him. In that one
sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage than in all the
books about sex that cover Europe and America.

.....

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd
and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making
him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For
the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in the
universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but
the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied. As I told "H.
N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its most superstitious
sense), the one thing modern people really do believe in is damnation.
The greatest of purely modern poets summed up the really modern attitude
in that fine Agnostic line--

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition; and the
new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being
gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits. Now they are
beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.

.....

Some people objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things,
because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or
waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least.
I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they should
make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion. For almost all
the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new, is solemn and sad.
Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian saints were a little
too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism are both lawless and
serious--a disgusting combination. The specially contemporary spirits
are not only devils, they are blue devils. This is, first and last, the
real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it
is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa
Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others
for not doing so. But if there is anyone who does not comprehend the
defect in our world which I am civilising, I should recommend him, for
instance, to read a story by Mr. Henry James, called "The Turn of the
Screw." It is one of the most powerful things ever written, and it is
one of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought ever to
have been written at all. It describes two innocent children gradually
growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of the
foul ghosts of a groom and a governess. As I say, I doubt whether Mr.
Henry James ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent, do not
buy it; it is a spiritual matter), but I think the question so doubtful
that I will give that truly great man a chance. I will approve the thing
as well as admire it if he will write another tale just as powerful
about two children and Santa Claus. If he will not, or cannot, then the
conclusion is clear; we can deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not
with happy mystery; we are not rationalists, but diabolists.

.....

I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire that
stands up in the room like a great red angel. But, perhaps, you have
never heard of a red angel. But you have heard of a blue devil. That is
exactly what I mean.




XVIII. The Tower

I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the great
Belfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought (though
not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies of
architecture. It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve the one
startling effect of height. It is a church on stilts. But this sort of
sublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy and energy
of these Flemish cities. Flanders has the flattest and most prosaic
landscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings. Here
Nature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable. Here the fields
are as flat as a paved square; but, on the other hand, the streets and
roofs are as uproarious as a forest in a great wind. The waters of wood
and meadow slide as smoothly and meekly as if they were in the London
water-pipes. But the parish pump is carved with all the creatures out of
the wilderness. Part of this is true, of course, of all art. We talk of
wild animals, but the wildest animal is man. There are sounds in music
that are more ancient and awful than the cry of the strangest beast
at night. And so also there are buildings that are shapeless in their
strength, seeming to lift themselves slowly like monsters from the
primal mire, and there are spires that seem to fly up suddenly like a
startled bird.

.....

This savagery even in stone is the expression of the special spirit in
humanity. All the beasts of the field are respectable; it is only man
who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man is ever
undomestic. All animals are tame animals; it is only we who are wild.
And doubtless, also, while this queer energy is common to all human art,
it is also generally characteristic of Christian art among the arts
of the world. This is what people really mean when they say that
Christianity is barbaric, and arose in ignorance. As a matter of
historic fact, it didn't; it arose in the most equably civilised period
the world has ever seen.

But it is true that there is something in it that breaks the outline
of perfect and conventional beauty, something that dots with anger the
blind eyes of the Apollo and lashes to a cavalry charge the horses
of the Elgin Marbles. Christianity is savage, in the sense that it is
primeval; there is in it a touch of the nigger hymn. I remember a debate
in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me
if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band.
I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely
approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children
shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in
the name of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stones
would cry out." With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic
creation that has been founded on this creed. With those words He
founded Gothic architecture. For in a town like this, which seems to
have grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves, anywhere and anyhow, any odd
brick or moulding may be carved off into a shouting face. The front of
vast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or
devils defying Him. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to
scream. The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.

But though this furious fancy is certainly a specialty of men among
creatures, and of Christian art among arts, it is still most notable in
the art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant things
in detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design. All Christian
temples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges Belfry is a
gargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like a giraffe. The
same impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind at every corner of
a Flemish town. And if any one asks, "Why did the people of these flat
countries instinctively raise these riotous and towering monuments?" the
only answer one can give is, "Because they were the people of these
flat countries." If any one asks, "Why the men of Bruges sacrificed
architecture and everything to the sense of dizzy and divine heights?"
we can only answer, "Because Nature gave them no encouragement to do
so."

.....

As I stare at the Belfry, I think with a sort of smile of some of my
friends in London who are quite sure of how children will turn out
if you give them what they call "the right environment." It is a
troublesome thing, environment, for it sometimes works positively
and sometimes negatively, and more often between the two. A beautiful
environment may make a child love beauty; it may make him bored with
beauty; most likely the two effects will mix and neutralise each other.
Most likely, that is, the environment will make hardly any difference at
all. In the scientific style of history (which was recently fashionable,
and is still conventional) we always had a list of countries that had
owed their characteristics to their physical conditions.

The Spaniards (it was said) are passionate because their country is
hot; Scandinavians adventurous because their country is cold; Englishmen
naval because they are islanders; Switzers free because they are
mountaineers. It is all very nice in its way. Only unfortunately I am
quite certain that I could make up quite as long a list exactly contrary
in its argument point-blank against the influence of their geographical
environment. Thus Spaniards have discovered more continents than
Scandinavians because their hot climate discouraged them from exertion.
Thus Dutchmen have fought for their freedom quite as bravely as Switzers
because the Dutch have no mountains. Thus Pagan Greece and Rome and many
Mediterranean peoples have specially hated the sea because they had the
nicest sea to deal with, the easiest sea to manage. I could extend the
list for ever. But however long it was, two examples would certainly
stand up in it as pre-eminent and unquestionable. The first is that the
Swiss, who live under staggering precipices and spires of eternal snow,
have produced no art or literature at all, and are by far the most
mundane, sensible, and business-like people in Europe. The other is that
the people of Belgium, who live in a country like a carpet, have, by an
inner energy, desired to exalt their towers till they struck the stars.

As it is therefore quite doubtful whether a person will go specially
with his environment or specially against his environment, I cannot
comfort myself with the thought that the modern discussions about
environment are of much practical value. But I think I will not write
any more about these modern theories, but go on looking at the Belfry
of Bruges. I would give them the greater attention if I were not pretty
well convinced that the theories will have disappeared a long time
before the Belfry.




XIX. How I Met the President

Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africa
and a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popular
and convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making a bright
suggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not, I regret to
say, received with the seriousness it deserved. I suggested that a band
of devoted and noble youths, including ourselves, should express our
sense of the pathos of the President's and the Republic's fate by
growing Kruger beards under our chins. I imagined how abruptly this
decoration would alter the appearance of Mr. John Morley; how startling
it would be as it emerged from under the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. But
the younger men, my own friends, on whom I more particularly urged
it, men whose names are in many cases familiar to the readers of this
paper--Mr. Masterman's for instance, and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt,
being young and beautiful, would do even more justice to the Kruger
beard, and when walking down the street with it could not fail to
attract attention. The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to
the Rhodes hat. An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in
Africa is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat; the
Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing like a beard;
we have shaved it, and it is growing again. The Kruger beard would
represent time and the natural processes. You cannot grow a beard in a
moment of passion.

.....

After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town. I went
down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards an
election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for the Liberal
candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in. I sometimes lie
awake at night and meditate upon that mystery; but it must not detain us
now. The rather singular incident which happened to me then, and which
some recent events have recalled to me, happened while the canvassing
was still going on. It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine,
settling everywhere on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out
into a kind of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if the bushes
and the roads were human, and had kindness like men; as if the tree were
a good giant with one wooden leg; as if the very line of palings were a
row of good-tempered gnomes. On one side of the white, sprawling road a
low hill or down showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the
other the land tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip
hills. The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful and
beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon a low white
building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows, evidently not
inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--a thing more
like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind. Made idle by the heat,
I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk out of my pocket, began
drawing aimlessly on the back door--drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain,
and finally the ideal Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials
did not permit of any delicate rendering of his noble and national
expansion of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for
man, and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy, I was
frozen to the spot with terror. The black door, which I thought no more
of than the lid of an empty box, began slowly to open, impelled from
within by a human hand. And President Kruger himself came out into the
sunlight!

He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled the
Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes, there was
the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger beard which
I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under the features
of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I was too much
emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone lions with him, or
Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark shed I cannot imagine,
but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.

I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger in
Somersetshire during the war. I had no idea that he was in the
neighbourhood. But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me. Mr. Kruger
regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye, and then addressed
me with a strong Somersetshire accent. A curious cold shock went through
me to hear that inappropriate voice coming out of that familiar form.
It was as if you met a Chinaman, with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he
began to talk broad Scotch. But the next moment, of course, I understood
the situation. We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the
Boer education was incomplete. In pursuit of his ruthless plot against
our island home, the terrible President had learnt not only English, but
all the dialects at a moment's notice to win over a Lancashire merchant
or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier. No doubt, if I asked him, this
stout old gentleman could grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk,
and so on, like the tunes in a barrel organ. I could not wonder if
our plain, true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so
penetrated with culture as this.

.....

And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all that this
strange old man gave me. When he asked me, dryly enough, but not without
a certain steady civility that belongs to old-fashioned country people,
what I wanted and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case,
explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualities of the
Liberal candidate. Whereupon, this old man became suddenly transfigured
in the sunlight into a devil of wrath. It was some time before I could
understand a word he said, but the one word that kept on recurring was
the word "Kruger," and it was invariably accompanied with a volley of
violent terms. Was I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and want
him to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed, I was... and here he
became once more obscure. The one thing that he made quite clear was
that he wouldn't do anything for Kruger.

"But you ARE Kruger," burst from my lips, in a natural explosion of
reasonableness. "You ARE Kruger, aren't you?"

After this innocent CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first there would
be a fight, and I remembered with regret that the President in early
life had had a hobby of killing lions. But really I began to think that
I had been mistaken, and that it was not the President after all. There
was a confounding sincerity in the anger with which he declared that he
was Farmer Bowles, and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually
and parted from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me
with a few tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of
his identity. In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an
illustrated paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer
Bowles were as like as two peas. There was a picture also of a group of
Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant, were
perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed to me like
the faces of a distant and hostile people.

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll, when he
drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze with the blue Tory
ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his colours everywhere. It
was evening, and the warm western light was on the grey hair and heavy
massive features of that good old man. I knew as one knows a fact of
sense that if Spanish and German stockbrokers had flooded his farm
or country he would have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an
Irishman, but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the
Boer. I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his cross
against the Conservative name. Then he came out again, having given his
vote and looking more like Kruger than ever. And at the same hour on
the same night thousands upon thousands of English Krugers gave the
same vote. And thus Kruger was pulled down and the dark-faced men in the
photograph reigned in his stead.




XX. The Giant

I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is
great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At
least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work by night
(journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such
mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning) must often have
stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown of battlements
or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at daybreak to discover
that it was only a haberdasher's shop with huge gold letters across the
face of it.

.....

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight. I sat down
on a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a place
that a huge angle and façade of building jutting out from the Strand
sat above me like an incubus. I dare say that if I took the same seat
to-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. In
sunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness
it seemed as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have
I had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. That
pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above and
beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had an
irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fight
it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion but an indolent
journalist with a walking-stick.

Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black, blind
face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge face of a sleeping
giant; the eyes were too close together, and gave it the suggestion of a
bestial sneer. And either by accident of this light or of some other, I
could now read the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything that I
should like to pull down with my hands if I could. Reared by a detected
robber, it is framed to be the fashionable and luxurious home of
undetected robbers. In the house of man are many mansions; but there is
a class of men who feel normal nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or
in Dartmoor Gaol. That big black face, which was staring at me with its
flaming eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer; the hour had
come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again (I had had one wild
impulse to climb up the front of the hotel and fall in at one of the
windows), and I tried to think, as all decent people are thinking, what
one can really do. And all the time that oppressive wall went up in
front of me, and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.

.....

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated
who have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war
were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians; they
ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave of Moslem
power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom,
that wave was broken, and never came on again. The Crusaders had saved
Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same applies to that epic of
Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our
political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came
back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its
last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm.
The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been
able to treat the poor merely as a pavement.

These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the
street; but as stones that may sometimes fly. If it please God, you and
I may see some of the stones flying again before we see death. But here
I only remark the interesting fact that the conquered almost always
conquer. Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds. The
Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it
deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the
unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble on
a railway can stagger the Scotch express. It is enough for the great
martyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprised
for all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened and
set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the hearts
of kings.

.....

When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his experience was
not such as has been generally supposed. If you care to hear it I will
tell you the real story of Jack the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the
most awful thing which Jack first felt about the giant was that he was
not a giant. He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, and
against its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like a
figure in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass.
Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man was
treading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain. The man
came nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger, and at the instant
when he passed the possible stature of humanity Jack almost screamed.
The rest was an intolerable apocalypse.

The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle; the more he became
incredible the more he became solid. The less one could believe in him
the more plainly one could see him. It was unbearable that so much of
the sky should be occupied by one human face. His eyes, which had stood
out like bow windows, became bigger yet, and there was no metaphor that
could contain their bigness; yet still they were human eyes. Jack's
intellect was utterly gone under that huge hypnotism of the face that
filled the sky; his last hope was submerged, his five wits all still
with terror.

But there stood up in him still a kind of cold chivalry, a dignity of
dead honour that would not forget the small and futile sword in his
hand. He rushed at one of the colossal feet of this human tower, and
when he came quite close to it the ankle-bone arched over him like a
cave. Then he planted the point of his sword against the foot and leant
on it with all his weight, till it went up to the hilt and broke the
hilt, and then snapped just under it. And it was plain that the giant
felt a sort of prick, for he snatched up his great foot into his great
hand for an instant; and then, putting it down again, he bent over and
stared at the ground until he had seen his enemy.

Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw him
away; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were flying from
system to system through the universe of stars. But, as the giant had
thrown him away carelessly, he did not strike a stone, but struck soft
mire by the side of a distant river. There he lay insensible for several
hours; but when he awoke again his horrible conqueror was still in
sight. He was striding away across the void and wooded plain towards
where it ended in the sea; and by this time he was only much higher than
any of the hills. He grew less and less indeed; but only as a really
high mountain grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railway
train. Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are the
distant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic. Then
the big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big blue sea, and
even as it did so it altered its attitude. Jack, stunned and bleeding,
lifted himself laboriously upon one elbow to stare. The giant once more
caught hold of his ankle, wavered twice as in a wind, and then went over
into the great sea which washes the whole world, and which, alone of all
things God has made, was big enough to drown him.




XXI. A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always
seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils
from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous
but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for
exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything
so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never
gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million
times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to
meet him in real life. The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of
catching the first fresh fact about a man that dominates all after
impressions. For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that
he spoke with a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of
sentiment; but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other criticisms
put together.

Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out private
personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities on the
surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression of this kind
which we have all felt when we met great poets or politicians, but which
never finds its way into the newspapers. I mean the impression that
they are much older than we thought they were. We connect great men with
their great triumphs, which generally happened some years ago, and many
recruits enthusiastic for the thin Napoleon of Marengo must have found
themselves in the presence of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising
politician confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of
boyhood. It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose: all
this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once met
a great man who was younger than I expected.

.....

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening. It
was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set an instant
after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened and the road
sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents; I felt that the
treetops that closed above me were the fixed and real things, certain as
the level of the sea; but that the solid earth was every instant failing
under my feet. In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in
splashes, like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky. Around
me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every plain or
twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns of every earthly
and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature of the
forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force. For the meaning of
woods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is not
in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy. Unique
shapes that an artist would copy or a philosopher watch for years if he
found them in an open plain are here mingled and confounded; but it is
not a darkness of deformity. It is a darkness of life; a darkness of
perfection. And I began to think how much of the highest human obscurity
is like this, and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell
you, for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it
is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

.....

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening was
so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to
itself. I went along that road according to directions that had been
given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which the
wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy
and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the
valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which
the old English called "faërie"; it is the quality which those can never
understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient
elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw
an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. He
was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like
snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even
fierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and
I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one
great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statue
over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write one
of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had
been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort
of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing up to the
Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying
comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities; how he lost
a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. That is only one
of them; there were ten or twenty more. Another, I dimly remember, was
a version of the fall of Parnell; the idea that a quite honest man might
be secret from a pure love of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went
out of that garden with a blurred sensation of the million possibilities
of creative literature. The feeling increased as my way fell back into
the wood; for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross
each other everywhere. I really had the feeling that I had seen the
creative quality; which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls
the Old Man of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind
my path; I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.




XXII. The Orthodox Barber

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love
of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it
would, if they had it. There is a very real thing which may be called
the love of humanity; in our time it exists almost entirely among what
are called uneducated people; and it does not exist at all among the
people who talk about it.

A positive pleasure in being in the presence of any other human being is
chiefly remarkable, for instance, in the masses on Bank Holiday; that is
why they are so much nearer Heaven (despite appearances) than any other
part of our population.

I remember seeing a crowd of factory girls getting into an empty train
at a wayside country station. There were about twenty of them; they all
got into one carriage; and they left all the rest of the train entirely
empty. That is the real love of humanity. That is the definite pleasure
in the immediate proximity of one's own kind. Only this coarse, rank,
real love of men seems to be entirely lacking in those who propose
the love of humanity as a substitute for all other love; honourable,
rationalistic idealists.

I can well remember the explosion of human joy which marked the sudden
starting of that train; all the factory girls who could not find seats
(and they must have been the majority) relieving their feelings by
jumping up and down. Now I have never seen any rationalistic idealists
do this. I have never seen twenty modern philosophers crowd into one
third-class carriage for the mere pleasure of being together. I have
never seen twenty Mr. McCabes all in one carriage and all jumping up and
down.

Some people express a fear that vulgar trippers will overrun all
beautiful places, such as Hampstead or Burnham Beeches. But their fear
is unreasonable; because trippers always prefer to trip together;
they pack as close as they can; they have a suffocating passion of
philanthropy.

.....

But among the minor and milder aspects of the same principle, I have no
hesitation in placing the problem of the colloquial barber. Before any
modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist
with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber
tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he
is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of
interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his
barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not
seen?

It is urged against the barber that he begins by talking about the
weather; so do all dukes and diplomatists, only that they talk about
it with ostentatious fatigue and indifference, whereas the barber talks
about it with an astonishing, nay incredible, freshness of interest. It
is objected to him that he tells people that they are going bald.
That is to say, his very virtues are cast up against him; he is blamed
because, being a specialist, he is a sincere specialist, and because,
being a tradesman, he is not entirely a slave. But the only proof of
such things is by example; therefore I will prove the excellence of the
conversation of barbers by a specific case. Lest any one should accuse
me of attempting to prove it by fictitious means, I beg to say quite
seriously that though I forget the exact language employed, the
following conversation between me and a human (I trust), living barber
really took place a few days ago.

.....

I had been invited to some At Home to meet the Colonial Premiers, and
lest I should be mistaken for some partly reformed bush-ranger out
of the interior of Australia I went into a shop in the Strand to get
shaved. While I was undergoing the torture the man said to me:

"There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir. It
seems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone or a
pole or a poker" (here I began for the first time to detect a sarcastic
intonation) "or a shovel or a----"

Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about the
matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.

"Or a button-hook," I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or a
piston-rod----"

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod or a
candle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic
duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told
me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before. There is
always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow. But none
of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe myself that
this will."

"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying to
put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case of
you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you, is a trivial
and materialistic thing, and in such things startling inventions are
sometimes made. But what you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy
fashion of something else. I recall it especially when you tell me,
with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not
really new. My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of
making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts
off one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil of
preparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil of
preparing something very curious to put on a man's chin. It would be
nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody. It would be nicer
still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

   "'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
     Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.'

"Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.

"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written that a man
shall not eat his cake and have it; and though all men talked until the
stars were old it would still be true that a man who has lost his razor
could not shave with it. But every now and then men jump up with the new
something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real
difference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference,
they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary
and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail is
a Potential Razor. The superstitious people of the past (they say)
believed that a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles to
one's face was a positive affair. But the higher criticism teaches us
better. Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow where Shaving
should be.

"Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all means something. But a
baby is the Kingdom of God, and if you try to kiss a baby he will know
whether you are shaved or not. Perhaps I am mixing up being shaved and
being saved; my democratic sympathies have always led me to drop my
'h's.' In another moment I may suggest that goats represent the
lost because goats have long beards. This is growing altogether too
allegorical.

"Nevertheless," I added, as I paid the bill, "I have really been
profoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving. Have
you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?"

He smiled and said that he had not.




XXIII. The Toy Theatre

There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so
very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing as children
mean playing is the most serious thing in the world; and as soon as we
have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent
so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength
for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough
strength for play. This is a truth which every one will recognize who,
as a child, has ever played with anything at all; any one who has played
with bricks, any one who has played with dolls, any one who has played
with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not
pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned nothing.

.....

Take the case of bricks. If you publish a book to-morrow in twelve
volumes (it would be just like you) on "The Theory and Practice
of European Architecture," your work may be laborious, but it is
fundamentally frivolous. It is not serious as the work of a child piling
one brick on the other is serious; for the simple reason that if your
book is a bad book no one will ever be able ultimately and entirely to
prove to you that it is a bad book. Whereas if his balance of bricks
is a bad balance of bricks, it will simply tumble down. And if I know
anything of children, he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build it
up again. Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induce
you to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you could
help it.

Take the case of dolls. It is much easier to care for an educational
cause than to care for a doll. It is as easy to write an article on
education as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else.
But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after a
child. The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Battersea
worship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play as
idolatry. In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol has
actually become more important than the human reality which it was, I
suppose, originally meant to symbolize.

I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sister
stuffed into a doll's perambulator. When questioned on this course of
conduct, she replied: "I haven't got a dolly, and Baby is pretending to
be my dolly." Nature was indeed imitating art. First a doll had been a
substitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute for a
doll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such devotion
takes up most of the brain and most of the life; much as if it were
really the thing which it is supposed to symbolize. The point is that
the man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist; the child
playing with a doll is a mother.

Take the case of soldiers. A man writing an article on military strategy
is simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight. But a boy making a
campaign with tin soldiers is like a General making a campaign with live
soldiers. He must to the limit of his juvenile powers think about the
thing; whereas the war correspondent need not think at all. I remember
a war correspondent who remarked after the capture of Methuen: "This
renewed activity on the part of Delarey is probably due to his
being short of stores." The same military critic had mentioned a few
paragraphs before that Delarey was being hard pressed by a column which
was pursuing him under the command of Methuen. Methuen chased Delarey;
and Delarey's activity was due to his being short of stores. Otherwise
he would have stood quite still while he was chased. I run after Jones
with a hatchet, and if he turns round and tries to get rid of me the
only possible explanation is that he has a very small balance at his
bankers. I cannot believe that any boy playing at soldiers would be as
idiotic as this. But then any one playing at anything has to be serious.
Whereas, as I have only too good reason to know, if you are writing an
article you can say anything that comes into your head.

.....

Broadly, then, what keeps adults from joining in children's games is,
generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply
that they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the
expenditure of toil and time and consideration for so grand and grave a
scheme. I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete
a play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre that used to be
called Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured; only that I drew and coloured
the figures and scenes myself. Hence I was free from the degrading
obligation of having to pay either a penny or twopence; I only had to
pay a shilling a sheet for good cardboard and a shilling a box for bad
water colours. The kind of miniature stage I mean is probably familiar
to every one; it is never more than a development of the stage which
Skelt made and Stevenson celebrated.

But though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I ever
worked at any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work seems
too heavy for me. I have to break off and betake myself to lighter
employments; such as the biographies of great men. The play of "St.
George and the Dragon," over which I have burnt the midnight oil (you
must colour the thing by lamplight because that is how it will be seen),
still lacks most conspicuously, alas! two wings of the Sultan's Palace,
and also some comprehensible and workable way of getting up the curtain.

All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality.
In this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly because
pure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbours. But it is
partly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble. If I am
ever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have enough
time to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I shall have
enough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play in them
without a hitch.

.....

Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's
consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn
could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us
of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger
of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of
limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in
expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down
with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the
Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon;
for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least
dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome
to a sheet of the plain cardboard. The most artistic thing about the
theatrical art is the fact that the spectator looks at the whole thing
through a window. This is true even of theatres inferior to my own; even
at the Court Theatre or His Majesty's you are looking through a window;
an unusually large window. But the advantage of the small theatre
exactly is that you are looking through a small window. Has not every
one noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen
through an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off of
everything else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential
of beauty. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale
of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it
could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it
could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is
limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling
stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because
they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood
something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by
small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into
the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the
narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory
and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire.
Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to
act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big
ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the
drama of Athens.




XXIV. A Tragedy of Twopence

My relations with the readers of this page have been long and pleasant,
but--perhaps for that very reason--I feel that the time has come when I
ought to confess the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time
ago; but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to reveal
such dark episodes long after they have occurred. It has nothing to do
with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. That body is so offensively
respectable that a newspaper, in describing it the other day, referred
to my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is not by the
conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of the Rev. James
Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that fine and virile old
ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am driven by
my conscience) to make this declaration. The crime was committed in
solitude and without accomplices. Alone I did it. Let me, with the
characteristic thirst of penitents to get the worst of the confession
over, state it first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he has died
of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper to whom I still
owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant knowing that I owed
him twopence. I carried it away under his nose, despite the fact that
the nose was a decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid him, and it is
highly improbable that I ever shall. How did this villainy come to occur
in a life which has been, generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity
necessary for fraud? The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though
there may not be room for that.

.....

It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that the
easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy. The
most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities. The
reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint. How, for
instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would be called a
"scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle it has been in the
Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle" is used whenever we give
up something to a small Power like Liberals, instead of giving up
everything to a great Power, like Imperialists. What Englishman in
Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans call a glove a
"hand-shoe." Nations name their necessities by nicknames, so to
speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish, and almost
affectionate names, as if they were their own children! But any one can
argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has ever got as
far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can put a
sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract or
philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations. They are
the same, for the simple reason that they all come from the things that
were the roots of our common civilisation. From Christianity, from
the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church, or the French Revolution.
"Nation," "citizen," "religion," "philosophy," "authority," "the
Republic," words like these are nearly the same in all the countries in
which we travel. Restrain, therefore, your exuberant admiration for the
young man who can argue with six French atheists when he first lands at
Dieppe. Even I can do that. But very likely the same young man does not
know the French for a shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there
are three great exceptions. (1) In the case of countries that are not
European at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the old
Latin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for
"citizenship" at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the
Republic" has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of
Germany, where, although the principle does apply to many words such
as "nation" and "philosophy," it does not apply so generally, because
Germany has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the
purely German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not
know any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.

.....

Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed my
crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned were
combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I
knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold
our European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar." As it was a
hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and
ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for
it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing
rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about
ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I
went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the
proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural
things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said
"cigar," and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the
money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that
my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular
cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my
rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular
article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and
rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing
them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the
more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were
brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in
vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already
had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off
and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was
rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he
was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the
money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (in
whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and
firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and
I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I
hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to
that unhappy man.

.....

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the
moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The
idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at
all, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would be
nothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific
sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation is
material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many of
the things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares,
or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face and
your ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.




XXV. A Cab Ride Across Country

Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there lies
a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue, but of
eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present writer
to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.

Now it was very difficult to get down to it at all on Sunday afternoon,
owing to the indescribable state into which our national laws and
customs have fallen in connection with the seventh day. It is not
Puritanism; it is simply anarchy. I should have some sympathy with the
Jewish Sabbath, if it were a Jewish Sabbath, and that for three reasons;
first, that religion is an intrinsically sympathetic thing; second, that
I cannot conceive any religion worth calling a religion without a fixed
and material observance; and third, that the particular observance of
sitting still and doing no work is one that suits my temperament down to
the ground.

But the absurdity of the modern English convention is that it does not
let a man sit still; it only perpetually trips him up when it has forced
him to walk about. Our Sabbatarianism does not forbid us to ask a man
in Battersea to come and talk in Hertfordshire; it only prevents his
getting there. I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with
joys, with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style. I can
understand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows. But I cannot
imagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences. Let the good
Moslem go to Mecca, or let him abide in his tent, according to his
feelings for religious symbols. But surely Allah cannot see anything
particularly dignified in his servant being misled by the time-table,
finding that the old Mecca express is not running, missing his
connection at Bagdad, or having to wait three hours in a small side
station outside Damascus.

So it was with me on this occasion. I found there was no telegraph
service at all to this place; I found there was only one weak thread
of train-service. Now if this had been the authority of real English
religion, I should have submitted to it at once. If I believed that
the telegraph clerk could not send the telegram because he was at that
moment rigid in an ecstasy of prayer, I should think all telegrams
unimportant in comparison. If I could believe that railway porters when
relieved from their duties rushed with passion to the nearest place of
worship, I should say that all lectures and everything else ought to
give way to such a consideration. I should not complain if the national
faith forbade me to make any appointments of labour or self-expression
on the Sabbath. But, as it is, it only tells me that I may very probably
keep the Sabbath by not keeping the appointment.

.....

But I must resume the real details of my tale. I found that there was
only one train in the whole of that Sunday by which I could even get
within several hours or several miles of the time or place. I therefore
went to the telephone, which is one of my favourite toys, and down which
I have shouted many valuable, but prematurely arrested, monologues upon
art and morals. I remember a mild shock of surprise when I discovered
that one could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to be
cut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days, to the
advancement of our national religion. Through this instrument, in fewer
words than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram, I ordered a
taxi-cab to take me to the railway station. I have not a word to say in
general either against telephones or taxi-cabs; they seem to me two
of the purest and most poetic of the creations of modern scientific
civilisation. Unfortunately, when the taxi-cab started, it did exactly
what modern scientific civilisation has done--it broke down. The result
of this was that when I arrived at King's Cross my only train was gone;
there was a Sabbath calm in the station, a calm in the eyes of the
porters, and in my breast, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair.

There was not, however, very much calm of any sort in my breast on first
making the discovery; and it was turned to blinding horror when I learnt
that I could not even send a telegram to the organisers of the meeting.
To leave my entertainers in the lurch was sufficiently exasperating; to
leave them without any intimation was simply low. I reasoned with the
official. I said: "Do you really mean to say that if my brother were
dying and my mother in this place, I could not communicate with her?" He
was a man of literal and laborious mind; he asked me if my brother was
dying. I answered that he was in excellent and even offensive health,
but that I was inquiring upon a question of principle. What would happen
if England were invaded, or if I alone knew how to turn aside a comet or
an earthquake. He waved away these hypotheses in the most irresponsible
spirit, but he was quite certain that telegrams could not reach this
particular village. Then something exploded in me; that element of the
outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang up ungovernable,
and I decided that I would not be a cad merely because some of my remote
ancestors had been Calvinists. I would keep my appointment if I lost all
my money and all my wits. I went out into the quiet London street, where
my quiet London cab was still waiting for its fare in the cold misty
morning. I placed myself comfortably in the London cab and told the
London driver to drive me to the other end of Hertfordshire. And he did.

.....

I shall not forget that drive. It was doubtful weather, even in a
motor-cab, the thing was possible with any consideration for the driver,
not to speak of some slight consideration for the people in the road.
I urged the driver to eat and drink something before he started, but
he said (with I know not what pride of profession or delicate sense of
adventure) that he would rather do it when we arrived--if we ever did. I
was by no means so delicate; I bought a varied selection of pork-pies
at a little shop that was open (why was that shop open?--it is all a
mystery), and ate them as we went along. The beginning was sombre and
irritating. I was annoyed, not with people, but with things, like a
baby; with the motor for breaking down and with Sunday for being Sunday.
And the sight of the northern slums expanded and ennobled, but did
not decrease, my gloom: Whitechapel has an Oriental gaudiness in its
squalor; Battersea and Camberwell have an indescribable bustle of
democracy; but the poor parts of North London... well, perhaps I saw
them wrongly under that ashen morning and on that foolish errand.

It was one of those days which more than once this year broke the
retreat of winter; a winter day that began too late to be spring. We
were already clear of the obstructing crowds and quickening our pace
through a borderland of market gardens and isolated public-houses, when
the grey showed golden patches and a good light began to glitter on
everything. The cab went quicker and quicker. The open land whirled
wider and wider; but I did not lose my sense of being battled with
and thwarted that I had felt in the thronged slums. Rather the feeling
increased, because of the great difficulty of space and time. The faster
went the car, the fiercer and thicker I felt the fight.

The whole landscape seemed charging at me--and just missing me. The
tall, shining grass went by like showers of arrows; the very trees
seemed like lances hurled at my heart, and shaving it by a hair's
breadth. Across some vast, smooth valley I saw a beech-tree by the
white road stand up little and defiant. It grew bigger and bigger with
blinding rapidity. It charged me like a tilting knight, seemed to hack
at my head, and pass by. Sometimes when we went round a curve of road,
the effect was yet more awful. It seemed as if some tree or windmill
swung round to smite like a boomerang. The sun by this time was a
blazing fact; and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant. We
do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort
of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

.....

I gave my address, arriving just when everybody was deciding to leave.
When my cab came reeling into the market-place they decided, with
evident disappointment, to remain. Over the lecture I draw a veil.
When I came back home I was called to the telephone, and a meek voice
expressed regret for the failure of the motor-cab, and even said
something about any reasonable payment. "Whom can I pay for my own
superb experience? What is the usual charge for seeing the clouds
shattered by the sun? What is the market price of a tree blue on the
sky-line and then blinding white in the sun? Mention your price for that
windmill that stood behind the hollyhocks in the garden. Let me pay you
for..." Here it was, I think, that we were cut off.




XXVI. The Two Noises

For three days and three nights the sea had charged England as Napoleon
charged her at Waterloo. The phrase is instinctive, because away to
the last grey line of the sea there was only the look of galloping
squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose. The sea came on like
cavalry, and when it touched the shore it opened the blazing eyes and
deafening tongues of the artillery. I saw the worst assault at night on
a seaside parade where the sea smote on the doors of England with the
hammers of earthquake, and a white smoke went up into the black heavens.
There one could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is.
I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave. But the
horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness. It lifts its load
of water laboriously: in that style at once slow and slippery in which
a Titan might lift a load of rock and then let it slip at last to be
shattered into shock of dust. In front of me that night the waves were
not like water: they were like falling city walls. The breaker rose
first as if it did not wish to attack the earth; it wished only to
attack the stars. For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a
tower; then it went a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that
might some day fall. When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew
up.

.....

I have never seen such a sea. All the time there blew across the land
one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can lean up against
like a wall. One expected anything to be blown out of shape at any
instant; the lamp-post to be snapped like a green stalk, the tree to be
whirled away like a straw. I myself should certainly have been blown out
of shape if I had possessed any shape to be blown out of; for I walked
along the edge of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea
and could not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England.
But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised to find that
as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled with the ceaseless
cannonade of the sea.

Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino or place of
entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing against the cosmic
uproar. I do not know what band it was. Judging from the boisterous
British Imperialism of most of the airs it played, I should think it was
a German band. But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came
quite close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such
things as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia," and
many others of which I do not know the words, but I should think they
would be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack," or that fine though
unwritten poem, "Wait till the Bull Dog gets a bite of you." Now, I
for one detest Imperialism, but I have a great deal of sympathy with
Jingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken and
innocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature that it made, if I
may so put it, two tunes in my mind. It is so obvious and so jolly to
be optimistic about England, especially when you are an optimist--and
an Englishman. But through all that glorious brass came the voice of the
invasion, the undertone of that awful sea. I did a foolish thing. As I
could not express my meaning in an article, I tried to express it in
a poem--a bad one. You can call it what you like. It might be called
"Doubt," or "Brighton." It might be called "The Patriot," or yet again
"The German Band." I would call it "The Two Voices," but that title has
been taken for a grossly inferior poem. This is how it began--

  "They say the sun is on your knees
   A lamp to light your lands from harm,
   They say you turn the seven seas
   To little brooks about your farm.
   I hear the sea and the new song
   that calls you empress all day long.

  "(O fallen and fouled! O you that lie
   Dying in swamps--you shall not die,
   Your rich have secrets, and stronge lust,
   Your poor are chased about like dust,
   Emptied of anger and surprise--
   And God has gone out of their eyes,
   Your cohorts break--your captains lie,
   I say to you, you shall not die.)"

Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there is an English
country that the Imperialists have never found. The British Empire
may annex what it likes, it will never annex England. It has not even
discovered the island, let alone conquered it. I took up the two tunes
again with a greater sympathy for the first--

   "I know the bright baptismal rains,
      I love your tender troubled skies,
    I know your little climbing lanes,
      Are peering into Paradise,
    From open hearth to orchard cool,
    How bountiful and beautiful.

  "(O throttled and without a cry,
   O strangled and stabbed, you shall not die,
   The frightful word is on your walls,
   The east sea to the west sea calls,
   The stars are dying in the sky,
   You shall not die; you shall not die.)"

Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of the
peril of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England. It
is their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely and at
random--

   "I see you how you smile in state
      Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar,
    You need not tell me you are great,
      I know how more than great you are.
    I know what William Shakespeare was,
    I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.

  "(O given to believe a lie,
   O my mad mother, do do not die,
   Whose eyes turn all ways but within,
   Whose sin is innocence of sin,
   Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon,
   Can see the motes upon the moon,
   You shall your lover still pursue.
   To what last madhouse shelters you
   I will uphold you, even I.
   You that are dead.  You shall not die.)"

But the sea would not stop for me any more than for Canute; and as for
the German band, that would not stop for anybody.




XXVII. Some Policemen and a Moral

The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the
keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree,
practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing
by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about
their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me,
I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the
knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade,
religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so
on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to
say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical
importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's
animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished
poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit,
and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two
knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that
I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS (this was the real
stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that
I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping
with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and
well-known in the neighbourhood.

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last
that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And
when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me
pass.

"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of that
Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like knight-errants. You,
the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillness
of the green things, a stillness like the stillness of the cataract, a
headlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creature
tied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with their
Swedish daggers shed the green blood of such a being. But if so, why am
I not in custody; where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your
persons, my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have
just convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist,
that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank of
Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether I have
been guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is none the less damaged
even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it was wounded by a
gentleman connected with the Liberal press. Wounds in the bark do not
more rapidly close up because they are inflicted by people who are
stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley. That tree, the ruin of its former
self, the wreck of what was once a giant of the forest, now splintered
and laid low by the brute superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy,
constable, cannot be wiped out even by stopping for several months more
with some wealthy person. It is incredible that you have no legal claim
to arrest even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge.
For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"

I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, for
the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It is
very possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case the
somewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personal
responsibility would find a bright and elfish explanation; perhaps if I
had lingered in the glade till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny
policemen dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts,
arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass. But taking the
bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen, I find myself in
a certain difficulty. I was certainly accused of something which was
either an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was a
guest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear; either it is
not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else
it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor
person, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer,
tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps,
failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green
gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees and
could give no description of a dwelling-place except that he had been
fired out of the last. As I walked home through a cloudy and purple
twilight I wondered how he would have got on.

Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical; there
is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact
that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag
about their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this to
be said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methods
may become very dangerous if there happens to be some great national
vice or national temptation which many take advantage of the chaos.
Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours; a temperate
man may obey his instincts.

Take some absurd anomaly in the British law--the fact, for instance,
that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the Chiltern
Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep down
some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is. Obviously this kind
of illogicality does not matter very much, for the simple reason that
there is no great temptation to take advantage of it. Men retiring from
Parliament do not have any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills.
But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable
politicians taking leave of public life would desire to do this (if,
for instance, there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went on
saying that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact)
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day and
taking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality would
matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence. It is only
the very good who can live riotous lives.

Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation
such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great
national sin, a far greater sin than drink--the habit of respecting a
gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry. And
snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil, that it is
rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts and houses. But it is
our great English vice; to be watched more fiercely than small-pox. If a
man wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing in England summed up in
casual English words, he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribald
quarrelling. He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working
man, when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman." It never
occurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis," or "a privy
councillor"--that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase
for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration,
must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison our
police methods.

In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watch
upon ourselves. The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest, is
increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, without
this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and
systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers.
But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago,
from mere native good feeling.




XXVIII. The Lion

In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his first
feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town or village;
when he looks again he sees that this comparative absence of the
picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain, precipitous frontage
of the houses standing up hard and flat out of the street like the
cardboard houses in a pantomime--a hard angularity allied perhaps to
the harshness of French logic. When he looks a third time he sees quite
simply that it is all because the houses have no front gardens. The
vague English spirit loves to have the entrance to its house softened by
bushes and broken by steps. It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges
half in the house and half out of it; a green room in a double sense.
The Frenchman desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting
places, for the street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.

.....

The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's front
garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains. The
street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street. It is his
dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his British Museum, for
the statues and monuments in French streets are not, as with us, of the
worst, but of the best, art of the country, and they are often actually
as historical as the Pyramids. The street again is the Frenchman's
Parliament, for France has never taken its Chamber of Deputies so
seriously as we take our House of Commons, and the quibbles of mere
elected nonentities in an official room seem feeble to a people whose
fathers have heard the voice of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open
heaven, or Victor Hugo shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the
second Republic. And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in
the street so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so
that the street can never be commonplace to him.

Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated gentleman
embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship. But in Paris a lamp-post
is a tragic thing. For we think of tyrants hanged on it, and of an
end of the world. There is, or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris
called LA LANTERNE. How funny it would be if there were a Progressive
paper in England called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the
Frenchman is the man in the street; that he can dine in the street, and
die in the street. And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going
to bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the genius
of his civilisation. All that is good and all that is evil in France is
alike connected with this open-air element. French democracy and French
indecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house.

.....

There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through the
mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort. First of all, it
lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany, and boundaries are
the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its
boundaries; thus children will always play on the edge of anything.
They build castles on the edge of the sea, and can only be restrained by
public proclamation and private violence from walking on the edge of the
grass. For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the
beginning of it.

Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very
margin of Germany, and although there were many German touches in
the place--German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical
barmaids dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet
the fixed French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks
of something else. All day long and all night long troops of dusty,
swarthy, scornful little soldiers went plodding through the streets with
an air of stubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised
you, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even
more than you. It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation
which has made it good at war and science and other things in which what
is necessary is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the
civilians alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of
head which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call a
bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call it
a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen have
been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.

.....

But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art of the
French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of the most typical
and powerful of the public monuments of France. From the café table at
which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town on which hangs the high
and flat-faced citadel, pierced with many windows, and warmed in the
evening light. On the steep hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself
as large as a hill. It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic
impression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common
statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the
world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality
of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of
tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed
his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and
in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken by the Germans
through all the terrible year, but only laid down its arms at last at
the command of its own Government. But the spirit of it has been in
this land from the beginning--the spirit of something defiant and almost
defeated.

As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern
battle of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the
last sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at
bay, the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace.




XXIX. Humanity: an Interlude

Except for some fine works of art, which seem to be there by accident,
the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble
cut out, and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris and
its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance
and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but
it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses
is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but
quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they
are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality. For
the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort which
charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts; they are
torturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life with the
same whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence. The enemies
of France can never give an account of her infamy or decay which does
not seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which the
Nationalists of France say about their own nation. They taunt and
torment themselves; sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves.
Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself, it
made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is the
same from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola.
The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The new
realists torture men morally for a physical truth.

Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain. Its
indecencies are not regrettable incidents in an everlasting revolution.
It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris; it has
only the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it. It has
the part which is cosmopolitan--and narrows; not the part which is
Parisian--and universal. You can find there (as commonly happens in
modern centres) the worst things of all nations--the DAILY MAIL from
England, the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels of
France, and the drinks of America. But there is no English broad fun,
no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration, and, above all, no
French tradition of fighting for an idea. Though all the boulevards look
like Parisian boulevards, though all the shops look like Parisian shops,
you cannot look at them steadily for two minutes without feeling the
full distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters like
Clemenceau and Deroulède.

.....

For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels I
began to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again;
and I had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out of
the city. In this tram there were two men talking; one was a little
man with a black French beard; the other was a baldish man with bushy
whiskers, like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce. And
about the time that we reached the suburb of the city, and the traffic
grew thinner, and the noises more few, I began to hear what they were
saying. Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easy
to follow, because they were all long words. Anybody can understand long
words because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin.

The man with the black beard said: "It must that we have the Progress."

The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying: "It must also
that we have the Consolidation International."

This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened with
some care, and I think I picked up the thread of it. One of the Belgians
was a Little Belgian, as we speak of a Little Englander. The other was a
Belgian Imperialist, for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to be
altogether a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire. Being
a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only
means kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers was the Imperialist,
and he was saying: "The science, behold there the new guide of
humanity."

And the man with the beard answered him: "It does not suffice to have
progress in the science; one must have it also in the sentiment of the
human justice."

This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were much
too keen on their argument to hear me. The views I have often heard
in England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast.
Though Belgian by nation they must both have been essentially French.
Whiskers was great on education, which, it seems, is on the march.
All the world goes to make itself instructed. It must that the more
instructed enlighten the less instructed. Eh, well then, the European
must impose upon the savage the science and the light. Also (apparently)
he must impose himself on the savage while he is about it. To-day one
travelled quickly. The science had changed all. For our fathers,
they were religious, and (what was worse) dead. To-day humanity had
electricity to the hand; the machines came from triumphing; all the
lines and limits of the globe effaced themselves. Soon there would not
be but the great Empires and confederations, guided by the science,
always the science.

Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath; and the man with the
sentiment for human justice had "la parole" off him in a flash. Without
doubt Humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments, the
ideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself towards
Humanity. For your wars and empires on behalf of civilisation, what were
they in effect? The war, was it not itself an affair of the barbarism?
The Empires were they not things savage? The Humanity had passed all
that; she was now intellectual. Tolstoy had refined all human souls with
the sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was become a spirit; the
wings pushed....

.....

At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage;
and staring around I found, to my stunned consternation, that it was
almost dark, that I was far away from Brussels, that I could not
dream of getting back to dinner; in short, that through the clinging
fascination of this great controversy on Humanity and its recent
complete alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself Heaven
knows where. I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go on
without me.

I was alone in the flat fields out of sight of the city. On one side
of the road was one of those small, thin woods which are common in all
countries, but of which, by a coincidence, the mystical painters of
Flanders were very fond. The night was closing in with cloudy purple
and grey; there was one ribbon of silver, the last rag of the sunset.
Through the wood went one little path, and somehow it suggested that it
might lead to some sign of life--there was no other sign of life on the
horizon. I went along it, and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilight
of all those tiny trees. There is something subtle and bewildering about
that sort of frail and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seems
like a bodily barrier; but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a
spiritual barrier. It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could
not pass a phantom. When I had well lost the last gleam of the high
road a curious and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenly
felt something much more practical and extraordinary--the absence of
humanity: inhuman loneliness. Of course, there was nothing really lost
in my state; but the mood may hit one anywhere. I wanted men--any men;
and I felt our awful alliance over all the globe. And at last, when I
had walked for what seemed a long time, I saw a light too near the earth
to mean anything except the image of God.

I came out on a clear space and a low, long cottage, the door of which
was open, but was blocked by a big grey horse, who seemed to prefer to
eat with his head inside the sitting-room. I got past him, and found
he was being fed by a young man who was sitting down and drinking beer
inside, and who saluted me with heavy rustic courtesy, but in a strange
tongue. The room was full of staring faces like owls, and these I traced
at length as belonging to about six small children. Their father was
still working in the fields, but their mother rose when I entered. She
smiled, but she and all the rest spoke some rude language, Flamand, I
suppose; so that we had to be kind to each other by signs. She fetched
me beer, and pointed out my way with her finger; and I drew a picture
to please the children; and as it was a picture of two men hitting each
other with swords, it pleased them very much. Then I gave a Belgian
penny to each child, for as I said on chance in French, "It must be that
we have the economic equality." But they had never heard of economic
equality, while all Battersea workmen have heard of economic equality,
though it is true that they haven't got it.

I found my way back to the city, and some time afterwards I actually
saw in the street my two men talking, no doubt still saying, one that
Science had changed all in Humanity, and the other that Humanity was now
pushing the wings of the purely intellectual. But for me Humanity was
hooked on to an accidental picture. I thought of a low and lonely house
in the flats, behind a veil or film of slight trees, a man breaking the
ground as men have broken from the first morning, and a huge grey horse
champing his food within a foot of a child's head, as in the stable
where Christ was born.




XXX. The Little Birds Who Won't Sing

On my last morning on the Flemish coast, when I knew that in a few hours
I should be in England, my eye fell upon one of the details of Gothic
carving of which Flanders is full. I do not know whether the thing is
old, though it was certainly knocked about and indecipherable, but at
least it was certainly in the style and tradition of the early Middle
Ages. It seemed to represent men bending themselves (not to say twisting
themselves) to certain primary employments. Some seemed to be
sailors tugging at ropes; others, I think, were reaping; others were
energetically pouring something into something else. This is entirely
characteristic of the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenth
century, perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history. The great
Greeks preferred to carve their gods and heroes doing nothing. Splendid
and philosophic as their composure is there is always about it something
that marks the master of many slaves. But if there was one thing
the early mediaevals liked it was representing people doing
something--hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes, or
making shoes, or cooking something in a pot. "Quicquid agunt homines,
votum, timor, ira voluptas." (I quote from memory.) The Middle Ages
is full of that spirit in all its monuments and manuscripts. Chaucer
retains it in his jolly insistence on everybody's type of trade and
toil. It was the earliest and youngest resurrection of Europe, the time
when social order was strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive;
the time when religious faiths were strong, but had not yet been
exasperated. For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothic
carving is different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though often
reining their steeds for an instant in the air, seem frozen for ever at
that perfect instant. But a mass of mediaeval carving seems actually
a sort of bustle or hubbub in stone. Sometimes one cannot help feeling
that the groups actually move and mix, and the whole front of a great
cathedral has the hum of a huge hive.

.....

But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity of which I
could not be sure. Those of them that had any heads had very curious
heads, and it seemed to me that they had their mouths open. Whether or
no this really meant anything or was an accident of nascent art I do not
know; but in the course of wondering I recalled to my mind the fact that
singing was connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that there
were songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes. I was
still thinking about this small problem when I walked along the pier
at Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering a measured shout as they
laboured, and I remembered that sailors still sing in chorus while they
work, and even sing different songs according to what part of their work
they are doing. And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey was
over, the sight of men working in the English fields reminded me
again that there are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural
routines. And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be quite
unknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry. How did people
come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering
certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind while
producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never
printed by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever,
sing?

.....

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while
auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the
separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs
for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train
from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a few
songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerks
when casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praise
of Simple Addition.

"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er. Hear the
Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four.' Though the creeds and
realms are reeling, though the sophists roar, Though we weep and pawn
our watches, Two and Two are Four."

"There's a run upon the Bank--Stand away! For the Manager's a crank and
the Secretary drank, and the

   Upper Tooting Bank
         Turns to bay!
   Stand close: there is a run
   On the Bank.
   Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
   That she fired with every gun
         Ere she sank."

.....

And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine who
actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions in rhyme to him
for use among his colleagues. But he was not very hopeful about the
matter. It was not (he assured me) that he underrated the verses, or in
any sense lamented their lack of polish. No; it was rather, he felt, an
indefinable something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we
live that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks. And I think
he must be right; though the matter is very mysterious. I may observe
here that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of the
Socialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, but
to the chaos of private enterprise. Now, banks are private; but
post-offices are Socialistic: therefore I naturally expected that the
post-office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of
my surprise when the lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing)
dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done.
She seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression
than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the verses
themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of the
Post-Office Hymn ran thus:

     "O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
      Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
      The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
      Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

     "Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain it
seemed that the most important and typical modern things could not be
done with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financier
and sing; because the essence of being a great financier is that you
keep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public man
and sing; because in those circles the essence of being a public man is
that you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorus
of money-lenders. Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps of
volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all
said simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence." Men can sing while charging
in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of my
reflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feeling
of my friend the bank-clerk--that there is something spiritually
suffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about our
life. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but
because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards I
passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken
with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY were
singing anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before:
that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find the
human. Human nature is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.




XXXI. The Riddle of the Ivy

More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday, a
friend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded with
half-packed luggage.

"You seem to be off on your travels," he said. "Where are you going?"

With a strap between my teeth I replied, "To Battersea."

"The wit of your remark," he said, "wholly escapes me."

"I am going to Battersea," I repeated, "to Battersea viâ Paris, Belfort,
Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It contained
simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once
more I find Battersea. Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise,
somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little
island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and great
white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotch
travellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumour
that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called
Battersea."

"I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you," said my friend, with an air
of intellectual comparison, "that this is Battersea?"

"It is quite unnecessary," I said, "and it is spiritually untrue. I
cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I
cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep
and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is
to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real
pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see
France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany?
I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am
seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on
foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a
foreign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and
heavy, and that if you utter that word 'paradox' I shall hurl it at your
head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is
not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to
go away from it."

But when, after only a month's travelling, I did come back to England, I
was startled to find that I had told the exact truth. England did break
on me at once beautifully new and beautifully old. To land at Dover is
the right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed are
right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which
are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the
rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with
whom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though for
another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm in that
simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans, who are the most
idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the
idealist can easily become the idolator. And the American has become
so idealistic that he even idealises money. But (to quote a very able
writer of American short stories) that is another story.

"I have never been in England before," said the American lady, "yet
it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it for a long
time."

"So you have," I said; "you have been away for three hundred years."

"What a lot of ivy you have," she said. "It covers the churches and
it buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it grow like
that."

"I am interested to hear it," I replied, "for I am making a little list
of all the things that are really better in England. Even a month on
the Continent, combined with intelligence, will teach you that there are
many things that are better abroad. All the things that the DAILY MAIL
calls English are better abroad. But there are things entirely English
and entirely good. Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front
gardens, and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom
cabs, and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a
German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts
upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and
the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital
letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did write
Shakespeare."

"I cannot look at anything but the ivy," she said, "it looks so
comfortable."

While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many weeks
an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour in which
he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because it
represented something in the nature of permanent public opinion of
England, above the ebb and flow of the parties. Now Mr. Balfour is a
perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his own point of view, thinks
long and seriously about the public needs, and he is, moreover, a man
of entirely exceptionable intellectual power. But alas, in spite of
all this, when I had read that speech I thought with a heavy heart that
there was one more thing that I had to add to the list of the specially
English things, such as kippers and cricket; I had to add the specially
English kind of humbug. In France things are attacked and defended for
what they are. The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic,
and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended because
it is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican. But here is the
ablest of English politicians consoling everybody by telling them that
the House of Lords is not really the House of Lords, but something quite
different, that the foolish accidental peers whom he meets every night
are in some mysterious way experts upon the psychology of the democracy;
that if you want to know what the very poor want you must ask the very
rich, and that if you want the truth about Hoxton, you must ask for it
at Hatfield. If the Conservative defender of the House of Lords were
a logical French politician he would simply be a liar. But being an
English politician he is simply a poet. The English love of believing
that all is as it should be, the English optimism combined with the
strong English imagination, is too much even for the obvious facts. In a
cold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly all the
Lords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery. He knows, and
(as Mr. Belloc excellently said) everybody in Parliament knows the very
names of the peers who have purchased their peerages. But the glamour
of comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself and reassuring others, is
too strong for this original knowledge; at last it fades from him,
and he sincerely and earnestly calls on Englishmen to join with him in
admiring an august and public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgotten
that the Senate really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised;
and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled.

"Your ivy is so beautifully soft and thick," said the American lady, "it
seems to cover almost everything. It must be the most poetical thing in
England."

"It is very beautiful," I said, "and, as you say, it is very English.
Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England, wrote one of
his rare poems about the beauty of ivy. Yes, by all means let us admire
the ivy, so deep, so warm, so full of a genial gloom and a grotesque
tenderness. Let us admire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercy
that it may not kill the tree."




XXXII. The Travellers in State

The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was a
train going into the Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it. And
while I was running along the train (amid general admiration) I noticed
that there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of carriages marked
"Engaged." On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages was pasted the
little notice: at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows were big bland
men staring out in the conscious pride of possession. Their bodies
seemed more than usually impenetrable, their faces more than usual
placid. It could not be the Derby, if only for the minor reasons that
it was the opposite direction and the wrong day. It could hardly be
the King. It could hardly be the French President. For, though these
distinguished persons naturally like to be private for three hours, they
are at least public for three minutes. A crowd can gather to see
them step into the train; and there was no crowd here, or any police
ceremonial.

Who were those awful persons, who occupied more of the train than a
bricklayer's beanfeast, and yet were more fastidious and delicate than
the King's own suite? Who were these that were larger than a mob, yet
more mysterious than a monarch? Was it possible that instead of our
Royal House visiting the Tsar, he was really visiting us? Or does the
House of Lords have a breakfast? I waited and wondered until the train
slowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge. Then
the large, impenetrable men got out, and after them got out the
distinguished holders of the engaged seats. They were all dressed
decorously in one colour; they had neatly cropped hair; and they were
chained together.

I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our eyes
met. He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt, a
native of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there,
such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to make
conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going. His mouth
twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: "I don't
s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little spades
and pails." I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of
literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to
Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and
had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we
had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak,
grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. I
knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all
modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said: "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it."
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of the
English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense of
pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.

.....

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out. For every
practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a
tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it
is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if
possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as
being coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history.
Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for it
means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing
to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote
who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian
ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have
not the cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my
friend in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument
about crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if
one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in
bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For
if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be
virtuous--which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and
more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who
says, with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you
with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--always
supposing the man's hands were tied.

This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and
unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian
and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel.
Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet
anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this
man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually
doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be
"done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it would be if
nothing need be done. But something must be done. "I s'pose we 'ave to
do it." In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is
only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart
and comedy in his head.

.....

Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem of the
proper treatment of criminals is that both parties discuss the matter
without any direct human feeling. The denouncers of wrong are as cold as
the organisers of wrong. Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.

Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging arranged in our
modern prisons is a filthy torture; all its scientific paraphernalia,
the photographing, the medical attendance, prove that it goes to the
last foul limit of the boot and rack. The cat is simply the rack without
any of its intellectual reasons. Holding this view strongly, I open the
ordinary humanitarian books or papers and I find a phrase like this,
"The lash is a relic of barbarism." So is the plough. So is the fishing
net. So is the horn or the staff or the fire lit in winter. What an
inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of
barbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, and
we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is
nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a
relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.

But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is
simply a relic of sin; but in comparative history it may well be called
a relic of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaborate
when everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was
detailed exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeous
sixteenth century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred years
before the Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to this
day. This is, first and last, the frightful thing we must remember.
In so far as we grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense
whatever) naturally moving away from torture. We may be moving towards
torture. We must know what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous
secret cruelty which has crowned every historic civilisation.

The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields. They have
taken the prisoners away, and I do not know what they have done with
them.




XXXIII. The Prehistoric Railway Station

A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not think
so; he did not think so because he himself was even more modern than the
railway station. He did not think so because he was himself feverish,
irritable, and snorting like an engine. He could not value the ancient
silence of the railway station.

"In a railway station," he said, "you are in a hurry, and therefore,
miserable"; but you need not be either unless you are as modern as
Ruskin. The true philosopher does not think of coming just in time for
his train except as a bet or a joke.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be late
for the one before. Do this, and you will find in a railway station
much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of the
characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building; it has vast arches,
void spaces, coloured lights, and, above all, it has recurrence or
ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration of water and fire the two
prime elements of all human ceremonial. Lastly, a station resembles the
old religions rather than the new religions in this point, that people
go there. In connection with this it should also be remembered that all
popular places, all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retain
the best routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or
machines used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly
or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people. Ruskin
could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the Underground
Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations. The great palaces
of pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar
names. Their names are either snobbish, like the Hotel Cecil, or
(worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in a
third-class carriage from the nearest circle station to Battersea to the
nearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names of the stations are
one long litany of solemn and saintly memories. Leaving Victoria I come
to a park belonging especially to St. James the Apostle; thence I go to
Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes to the awful Abbey; Charing
Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom; the next station is called a
Temple; and Blackfriars remembers the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood.

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the
crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer
walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.

I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty railway station,
where I have no business of any kind. I have extracted a vast number of
chocolates from automatic machines; I have obtained cigarettes, toffee,
scent, and other things that I dislike by the same machinery; I have
weighed myself, with sublime results; and this sense, not only of the
healthiness of popular things, but of their essential antiquity and
permanence, is still in possession of my mind. I wander up to the
bookstall, and my faith survives even the wild spectacle of modern
literature and journalism. Even in the crudest and most clamorous
aspects of the newspaper world I still prefer the popular to the proud
and fastidious. If I had to choose between taking in the DAILY MAIL and
taking in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I should
certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL. Even
mere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so irritating as mere
meanness preached in a big and solemn way. People buy the DAILY MAIL,
but they do not believe in it. They do believe in the TIMES, and
(apparently) they do not buy it. But the more the output of paper upon
the modern world is actually studied, the more it will be found to be
in all its essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross.
Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing),
and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur and historic
allusiveness of the Vatican or Bodleian Library. The novelty is all
superficial; the tradition is all interior and profound. The DAILY MAIL
has new editions, but never a new idea. Everything in a newspaper that
is not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human love
of gossip. Modern writers have often made game of the old chronicles
because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies; a church struck
by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem to realise that
this old barbaric history is the same as new democratic journalism. It
is not that the savage chronicle has disappeared. It is merely that the
savage chronicle now appears every morning.

As I moved thus mildly and vaguely in front of the bookstall, my eye
caught a sudden and scarlet title that for the moment staggered me. On
the outside of a book I saw written in large letters, "Get On or Get
Out." The title of the book recalled to me with a sudden revolt and
reaction all that does seem unquestionably new and nasty; it reminded
me that there was in the world of to-day that utterly idiotic thing,
a worship of success; a thing that only means surpassing anybody in
anything; a thing that may mean being the most successful person
in running away from a battle; a thing that may mean being the most
successfully sleepy of the whole row of sleeping men. When I saw those
words the silence and sanctity of the railway station were for the
moment shadowed. Here, I thought, there is at any rate something
anarchic and violent and vile. This title, at any rate, means the most
disgusting individualism of this individualistic world. In the fury of
my bitterness and passion I actually bought the book, thereby ensuring
that my enemy would get some of my money. I opened it prepared to find
some brutality, some blasphemy, which would really be an exception to
the general silence and sanctity of the railway station. I was prepared
to find something in the book that was as infamous as its title.

I was disappointed. There was nothing at all corresponding to the
furious decisiveness of the remarks on the cover. After reading it
carefully I could not discover whether I was really to get on or to
get out; but I had a vague feeling that I should prefer to get out.
A considerable part of the book, particularly towards the end, was
concerned with a detailed description of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Undoubtedly Napoleon got on. He also got out. But I could not discover
in any way how the details of his life given here were supposed to help
a person aiming at success. One anecdote described how Napoleon always
wiped his pen on his knee-breeches. I suppose the moral is: always wipe
your pen on your knee-breeches, and you will win the battle of Wagram.
Another story told that he let loose a gazelle among the ladies of his
Court. Clearly the brutal practical inference is--loose a gazelle among
the ladies of your acquaintance, and you will be Emperor of the French.
Get on with a gazelle or get out. The book entirely reconciled me to
the soft twilight of the station. Then I suddenly saw that there was a
symbolic division which might be paralleled from biology. Brave men are
vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness
in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their
hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside. But the
softness is there; everything in this twilight temple is soft.




XXXIV. The Diabolist

Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of
truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned, such as meeting
President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab. What I have now to relate
really happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics or
of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with
another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible
thing that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long ago
that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue, only of its
main questions and answers; but there is one sentence in it for which I
can answer absolutely and word for word. It was a sentence so awful that
I could not forget it if I would. It was the last sentence spoken; and
it was not spoken to me.

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An art
school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this
respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline,
it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the
idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or
do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the
latter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who were
very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I was
engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting
astonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at
loose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I think
with needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.

I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards. In this connection there are two
very curious things which the critic of human life may observe. The
first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and
women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in
threes. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three young
cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every
day you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for
some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In these small
groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one
man who seems to have condescended to his company; one man who, while he
can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics with
a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.

It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger
still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would
talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the night
he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He
was a man with a long, ironical face, and close and red hair; he was
by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some
reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort
of Super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall
never forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real things
for the first and the last time.

.....

Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part ran
a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to
St. Paul's Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wandering
on these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the
stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and
blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in the
grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like
a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also it was gloom;
but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness, one saw vertical
stripes of grey in the black and then became conscious of the colossal
façade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if
Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.

.....

The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it,
I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knew
it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full that
I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.

"I am becoming orthodox," I said, "because I have come, rightly or
wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief
that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than
a crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than a
pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracy
disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worse
than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his
shortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even in
his longest devotion. I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous."

"You mean dangerous to morality," he said in a voice of wonderful
gentleness. "I expect you are right. But why do you care about
morality?"

I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had a
trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light of the
bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin and
high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so that
he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an
unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused a
burst of red sparks broke past.

"Aren't those sparks splendid?" I said.

"Yes," he replied.

"That is all that I ask you to admit," said I. "Give me those few red
specks and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you,
that one's pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come and
go with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the
fire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But now
I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of
virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits,
which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say 'Thank you'
for a bun are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars
of an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you were
humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now enjoy any
fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red because
you were told about the blood of the martyrs; you only like them
being bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out of
virtues, and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman, and that spark
will be less bright. Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Be
really bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper."

He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of
his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion
produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. He
only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that
for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not the
expanding pleasure of ruin..."

"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting democracy,
some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are."

"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call evil I
call good."

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps
swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the
low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but
the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled: then I heard the voice of
one of the vilest of his associates saying, "Nobody can possibly know."
And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every
syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you I
have done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the difference
between right and wrong." I rushed out without daring to pause; and as
I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love
of God.

I have since heard that he died: it may be said, I think, that he
committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with
tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have never
known, or even dared to think, what was that place at which he stopped
and refrained.




XXXV. A Glimpse of My Country

Whatever is it that we are all looking for? I fancy that it is really
quite close. When I was a boy I had a fancy that Heaven or Fairyland or
whatever I called it, was immediately behind my own back, and that this
was why I could never manage to see it, however often I twisted and
turned to take it by surprise. I had a notion of a man perpetually
spinning round on one foot like a teetotum in the effort to find that
world behind his back which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is
why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look
over its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yet
without which it cannot be itself.

In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive of
that which is the goal of all our endeavours as something which is in
some strange way near. Science boasts of the distance of its stars;
of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak.
But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost
menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always
the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand"; and Looking-glass Land is only
through the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished if
the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in which all
the mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I turned one
corner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp; I should not
be surprised if I turned a third corner and found myself in Elfland.

I should not be surprised at this; but I was surprised the other day at
something more surprising. I took a turn out of Fleet Street and found
myself in England.

.....

The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation. In the
darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there is one thing
that should always be remembered about the very nature of our country.
It may be shortly stated by saying that England is not such a fool as
it looks. The types of England, the externals of England, always
misrepresent the country. England is an oligarchical country, and it
prefers that its oligarchy should be inferior to itself.

The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worse
than the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is, in all or
almost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners. Our
countrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher places of
the national life. It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading
the blind; but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blind
leading the people who can see. And this again is an under-statement
of the case. For the English political aristocrats not only speak worse
than many other people; they speak worse than themselves. The ignorance
of statesmen is like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected
thing. If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you
will be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things. It
makes one nervous at first. And I have never been sufficiently intimate
with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life in Parliament
to appear sillier than he was.

It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself; he
votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought to
vote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A man
ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for
faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his
hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of
it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they
should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is,
the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is
something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a
minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of
the voter votes.

.....

This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men.
Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak I found
this to be so especially of that old intelligent middle class which I
had imagined had almost vanished from the world. It seemed to me that
all the main representatives of the middle class had gone off in one
direction or in the other; they had either set out in pursuit of the
Smart Set or they had set out in pursuit of the Simple Life. I cannot
say which I dislike more myself; the people in question are welcome to
have either of them, or, as is more likely, to have both, in hideous
alternations of disease and cure. But all the prominent men who plainly
represent the middle class have adopted either the single eye-glass of
Mr Chamberlain or the single eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.

The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful;
but it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads. It was
serious about politics; and when it spoke in public it committed the
solecism of trying to speak well. I thought that this old earnest
political England had practically disappeared. And as I say, I took one
turn out of Fleet Street and I found a room full of it.

.....

At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The
club was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the
ne'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might be
merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all the
hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth century.
The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet there was
not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I often have in
listening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion. The Toryism of this
club was like the Toryism of Johnson, a Toryism that could use humour
and appealed to humanity. The democracy of this club was like the
democracy of Wilkes, a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight
duels; a democracy that can face things out and endure slander; the
democracy of Wilkes, or, rather, the democracy of Fox.

One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Each
man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as well as he could
from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our
modern descents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical
as he becomes more sincere. An eighteenth-century speaker, when he got
really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crush
his adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with.
He looks for little facts and little sneers. In a modern speech the
rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening to which nobody
listens. But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate, or one of the harder
kind of Socialists, becomes really sincere, he becomes Cockney. "The
destiny of the Empire," or "The destiny of humanity," do well enough
for mere ornamental preliminaries, but when the man becomes angry and
honest, then it is a snarl, "Where do we come in?" or "It's your money
they want."

The men in this eighteenth-century club were entirely different; they
were quite eighteenth century. Each one rose to his feet quivering with
passion, and tried to destroy his opponent, not with sniggering, but
actually with eloquence. I was arguing with them about Home Rule; at
the end I told them why the English aristocracy really disliked an Irish
Parliament; because it would be like their club.

.....

I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I saw
pasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels and how London was rising
against something that London had hardly heard of. Then I suddenly
saw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world is an immense and
tumultuous ocean, full of monstrous and living things. And I saw that
across the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin, sheet of ice, of
wicked wealth and of lying journalism.

And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I heard
it crack.




XXXVI. A Somewhat Improbable Story

I cannot remember whether this tale is true or not. If I read it through
very carefully I have a suspicion that I should come to the conclusion
that it is not. But, unfortunately, I cannot read it through very
carefully, because, you see, it is not written yet. The image and the
idea of it clung to me through a great part of my boyhood; I may have
dreamt it before I could talk; or told it to myself before I could read;
or read it before I could remember. On the whole, however, I am certain
that I did not read it, for children have very clear memories about
things like that; and of the books which I was really fond I can still
remember, not only the shape and bulk and binding, but even the position
of the printed words on many of the pages. On the whole, I incline to
the opinion that it happened to me before I was born.

.....

At any rate, let us tell the story now with all the advantages of the
atmosphere that has clung to it. You may suppose me, for the sake of
argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch restaurants
in the City where men take their food so fast that it has none of the
quality of food, and take their half-hour's vacation so fast that it has
none of the qualities of leisure; to hurry through one's leisure is the
most unbusiness-like of actions. They all wore tall shiny hats as if
they could not lose an instant even to hang them on a peg, and they all
had one eye a little off, hypnotised by the huge eye of the clock. In
short, they were the slaves of the modern bondage, you could hear their
fetters clanking. Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest
chain ever tied to a man--it is called a watch-chain.

Now, among these there entered and sat down opposite to me a man who
almost immediately opened an uninterrupted monologue. He was like all
the other men in dress, yet he was startlingly opposite to them in all
manner. He wore a high shiny hat and a long frock coat, but he wore them
as such solemn things were meant to be worn; he wore the silk hat as if
it were a mitre, and the frock coat as if it were the ephod of a high
priest. He not only hung his hat up on the peg, but he seemed (such was
his stateliness) almost to ask permission of the hat for doing so, and
to apologise to the peg for making use of it. When he had sat down on
a wooden chair with the air of one considering its feelings and given a
sort of slight stoop or bow to the wooden table itself, as if it were an
altar, I could not help some comment springing to my lips. For the man
was a big, sanguine-faced, prosperous-looking man, and yet he treated
everything with a care that almost amounted to nervousness.

For the sake of saying something to express my interest I said, "This
furniture is fairly solid; but, of course, people do treat it much too
carelessly."

As I looked up doubtfully my eye caught his, and was fixed as his was
fixed in an apocalyptic stare. I had thought him ordinary as he entered,
save for his strange, cautious manner; but if the other people had seen
him then they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see
him, and they went on making a clatter with their forks, and a murmur
with their conversation. But the man's face was the face of a maniac.

"Did you mean anything particular by that remark?" he asked at last, and
the blood crawled back slowly into his face.

"Nothing whatever," I answered. "One does not mean anything here; it
spoils people's digestions."

He limped back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief; and
yet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief.

"I thought perhaps," he said in a low voice, "that another of them had
gone wrong."

"If you mean another digestion gone wrong," I said, "I never heard of
one here that went right. This is the heart of the Empire, and the other
organs are in an equally bad way."

"No, I mean another street gone wrong," and he said heavily and quietly,
"but as I suppose that doesn't explain much to you, I think I shall have
to tell you the story. I do so with all the less responsibility, because
I know you won't believe it. For forty years of my life I invariably
left my office, which is in Leadenhall Street, at half-past five in the
afternoon, taking with me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in the
left hand. For forty years two months and four days I passed out of the
side office door, walked down the street on the left-hand side, took
the first turning to the left and the third to the right, from where I
bought an evening paper, followed the road on the right-hand side round
two obtuse angles, and came out just outside a Metropolitan station,
where I took a train home. For forty years two months and four days I
fulfilled this course by accumulated habit: it was not a long street
that I traversed, and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it.
After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I went out
in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand and my bag in the
left, and I began to notice that walking along the familiar street tired
me somewhat more than usual; and when I turned it I was convinced that I
had turned down the wrong one. For now the street shot up quite a steep
slant, such as one only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in this
part there were no hills at all. Yet it was not the wrong street; the
name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were the same; the
lamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective was the same; only
it was tilted upwards like a lid. Forgetting any trouble about
breathlessness or fatigue I ran furiously forward, and reached the
second of my accustomed turnings, which ought to bring me almost within
sight of the station. And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the
pavement. For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a
steep staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not for miles round
that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill. And this was
a slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itself
like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same,
and I saw in the high distance, as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked
out in pink letters the name over my paper shop.

"I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a part
of the road where there was a long grey row of private houses. I had,
I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long iron bridge in
empty space. An impulse seized me, and I pulled up the iron trap of a
coal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty space and the stairs.

"When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, having
apparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings and
gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was in
shadow; his dress was dark and ordinary; but when I saw him standing so
perfectly still I knew somehow that he was not of this world. And the
stars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought to be endured
by the eyes of men.

"'If you are a kind angel,' I said, 'or a wise devil, or have anything
in common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed of
devils.'

"After a long silence he said, 'What do you say that it is?'

"'It is Bumpton Street, of course,' I snapped. 'It goes to Oldgate
Station.'

"'Yes,' he admitted gravely; 'it goes there sometimes. Just now,
however, it is going to heaven.'

"'To heaven?' I said. 'Why?'

"'It is going to heaven for justice,' he replied. 'You must have treated
it badly. Remember always that there is one thing that cannot be endured
by anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworked
and also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women--everybody
does. But you can't neglect women--I defy you to. At the same time, you
can neglect tramps and gypsies and all the apparent refuse of the State
so long as you do not overwork it. But no beast of the field, no horse,
no dog can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and yet have
less than his honour. It is the same with streets. You have worked this
street to death, and yet you have never remembered its existence. If
you had a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would have hung this
street with garlands and given it the name of a god. Then it would have
gone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired of your tireless
insolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to heaven. Have you
never sat on a bucking horse?'

"I looked at the long grey street, and for a moment it seemed to me to
be exactly like the long grey neck of a horse flung up to heaven. But
in a moment my sanity returned, and I said, 'But this is all nonsense.
Streets go to the place they have to go. A street must always go to its
end.'

"'Why do you think so of a street?' he asked, standing very still.

"'Because I have always seen it do the same thing,' I replied, in
reasonable anger. 'Day after day, year after year, it has always gone to
Oldgate Station; day after...'

"I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury of the road in
revolt.

"'And you?' he cried terribly. 'What do you think the road thinks of
you? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive? Day after day,
year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station....' Since then I have
respected the things called inanimate."

And bowing slightly to the mustard-pot, the man in the restaurant
withdrew.




XXXVII. The Shop Of Ghosts

Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get
for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon,
the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get
them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing, which I am
not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which the lowest price is a
penny halfpenny. But the general principle will be at once apparent.
In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on an
electric tram for a halfpenny. To be on an electric tram is to be on
a flying castle in a fairy tale. You can get quite a large number of
brightly coloured sweets for a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of
reading this article for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and
irrelevant matter.

But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuable
things you can get at a halfpenny each you should do as I was doing last
night. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small and
dimly lit toy shop in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets
of Battersea. But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a
child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made. Those toys of
the poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; but
they were all bright. For my part, I think brightness more important
than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the
body. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in
the modern world.

.....

As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses,
at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red Noah's
arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance. That lit
shop-window became like the brilliantly lit stage when one is watching
some highly coloured comedy. I forgot the grey houses and the grimy
people behind me as one forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds
at a theatre. It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were
small, not because they were toys, but because they were objects far
away. The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater
omnibus, passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to
Bayswater. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was
blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and
only man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous ship
of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the first
morning of hope.

Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction, such
brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the face
of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles or
moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness of
their growth and the suddenness of their termination. The return to real
thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man. Very often indeed
(in my case) it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening is
always emphatic and, generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in
this case, I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop; but
in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. There
was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I had
strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some odd
thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as
if I had at any rate, stepped across some border in the soul.

To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop and
tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old and
broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face,
hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet though
he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering in his
eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a not
unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down the
money he did not at first seem to see it; then he blinked at it feebly,
and then he pushed it feebly away.

"No, no," he said vaguely. "I never have. I never have. We are rather
old-fashioned here."

"Not taking money," I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly new
fashion than an old one."

"I never have," said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose; "I've
always given presents. I'm too old to stop."

"Good heavens!" I said. "What can you mean? Why, you might be Father
Christmas."

"I am Father Christmas," he said apologetically, and blew his nose
again.

The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside. At
any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining
shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street; I
might have strayed into some new and sunless world. But something had
cut the chords of common sense, and I could not feel even surprise
except sleepily. Something made me say, "You look ill, Father
Christmas."

"I am dying," he said.

I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again.

"All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem
to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds,
these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give people
superstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give people
sausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are too
heavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don't know what
they want, I'm sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly
things too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly? I don't
understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people
are living and I am dead."

"You may be dead," I replied. "You ought to know. But as for what they
are doing, do not call it living."

.....

A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected to be
unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few seconds when, in the
utter stillness, I distinctly heard a very rapid step coming nearer and
nearer along the street. The next moment a figure flung itself into the
shop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted
back as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons,
a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. He
had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor; he
had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the shop
and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and uttered the
exclamation of a man utterly staggered.

"Good lord!" he cried out; "it can't be you! It isn't you! I came to ask
where your grave was."

"I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens," said the old gentleman, with a feeble
smile; "but I'm dying," he hastened to add reassuringly.

"But, dash it all, you were dying in my time," said Mr. Charles Dickens
with animation; "and you don't look a day older."

"I've felt like this for a long time," said Father Christmas.

Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door into the
darkness.

"Dick," he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive."

.....

Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carried
his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a look
of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which were
literally as humble as a dog's. His sword made a great clatter, as if
the shop were too small for it.

"Indeed," said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and his
Christmas Day."

My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to be
filled with newcomers.

"It hath ever been understood," said a burly man, who carried his head
humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think he was Ben
Jonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo, under our King
James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were
fallen sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey beard most
surely was no lustier when I knew him than now."

And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood, say in
some mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying."

"I have felt like this a long time," said Father Christmas, in his
feeble way again.

Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.

"Since when?" he asked. "Since you were born?"

"Yes," said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair. "I have been
always dying."

Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling a mob to
rise.

"I understand it now," he cried, "you will never die."




XXXVIII. The Ballade of a Strange Town

My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed affection
for the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there was so restful that
we almost felt it as a home, and hardly strayed out of it.

We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees growing
in wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines of the
Cathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent, in the poem,
heard the bell which told them they were not too late. But we took as
much pleasure in the people, in the little boys with open, flat
Flemish faces and fur collars round their necks, making them look
like burgomasters; or the women, whose prim, oval faces, hair strained
tightly off the temples, and mouths at once hard, meek, and humorous,
exactly reproduced the late mediaeval faces in Memling and Van Eyck.

But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose from under his little
tree, and pointing to a sort of toy train that was puffing smoke in one
corner of the clear square, suggested that we should go by it. We got
into the little train, which was meant really to take the peasants and
their vegetables to and fro from their fields beyond the town, and
the official came round to give us tickets. We asked him what place
we should get to if we paid fivepence. The Belgians are not a romantic
people, and he asked us (with a lamentable mixture of Flemish coarseness
and French rationalism) where we wanted to go.

We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and the only question
was whether we could get there for fivepence. At last, after a great
deal of international misunderstanding (for he spoke French in the
Flemish and we in the English manner), he told us that fivepence would
take us to a place which I have never seen written down, but which when
spoken sounded like the word "Waterloo" pronounced by an intoxicated
patriot; I think it was Waerlowe.

We clasped our hands and said it was the place we had been seeking from
boyhood, and when we had got there we descended with promptitude.

For a moment I had a horrible fear that it really was the field of
Waterloo; but I was comforted by remembering that it was in quite a
different part of Belgium. It was a cross-roads, with one cottage at the
corner, a perspective of tall trees like Hobbema's "Avenue," and beyond
only the infinite flat chess-board of the little fields. It was the
scene of peace and prosperity; but I must confess that my friend's first
action was to ask the man when there would be another train back to
Mechlin. The man stated that there would be a train back in exactly one
hour. We walked up the avenue, and when we were nearly half an hour's
walk away it began to rain.

.....

We arrived back at the cross-roads sodden and dripping, and, finding
the train waiting, climbed into it with some relief. The officer on
this train could speak nothing but Flemish, but he understood the name
Mechlin, and indicated that when we came to Mechlin Station he would put
us down, which, after the right interval of time, he did.

We got down, under a steady downpour, evidently on the edge of Mechlin,
though the features could not easily be recognised through the grey
screen of the rain. I do not generally agree with those who find rain
depressing. A shower-bath is not depressing; it is rather startling. And
if it is exciting when a man throws a pail of water over you, why should
it not also be exciting when the gods throw many pails? But on this
soaking afternoon, whether it was the dull sky-line of the Netherlands
or the fact that we were returning home without any adventure, I really
did think things a trifle dreary. As soon as we could creep under the
shelter of a street we turned into a little café, kept by one woman. She
was incredibly old, and she spoke no French. There we drank black coffee
and what was called "cognac fine." "Cognac fine" were the only two
French words used in the establishment, and they were not true. At
least, the fineness (perhaps by its very ethereal delicacy) escaped me.
After a little my friend, who was more restless than I, got up and went
out, to see if the rain had stopped and if we could at once stroll back
to our hotel by the station. I sat finishing my coffee in a colourless
mood, and listening to the unremitting rain.

.....

Suddenly the door burst open, and my friend appeared, transfigured and
frantic.

"Get up!" he cried, waving his hands wildly. "Get up! We're in the wrong
town! We're not in Mechlin at all. Mechlin is ten miles, twenty miles
off--God knows what! We're somewhere near Antwerp."

"What!" I cried, leaping from my seat, and sending the furniture flying.
"Then all is well, after all! Poetry only hid her face for an instant
behind a cloud. Positively for a moment I was feeling depressed because
we were in the right town. But if we are in the wrong town--why, we
have our adventure after all! If we are in the wrong town, we are in the
right place."

I rushed out into the rain, and my friend followed me somewhat more
grimly. We discovered we were in a town called Lierre, which seemed to
consist chiefly of bankrupt pastry cooks, who sold lemonade.

"This is the peak of our whole poetic progress!" I cried
enthusiastically. "We must do something, something sacramental and
commemorative! We cannot sacrifice an ox, and it would be a bore to
build a temple. Let us write a poem."

With but slight encouragement, I took out an old envelope and one of
those pencils that turn bright violet in water. There was plenty of
water about, and the violet ran down the paper, symbolising the rich
purple of that romantic hour. I began, choosing the form of an old
French ballade; it is the easiest because it is the most restricted--

   "Can Man to Mount Olympus rise,
      And fancy Primrose Hill the scene?
    Can a man walk in Paradise
      And think he is in Turnham Green?
    And could I take you for Malines,
      Not knowing the nobler thing you were?
    O Pearl of all the plain, and queen,
    The lovely city of Lierre.

   "Through memory's mist in glimmering guise
      Shall shine your streets of sloppy sheen.
    And wet shall grow my dreaming eyes,
      To think how wet my boots have been
    Now if I die or shoot a Dean----"

Here I broke off to ask my friend whether he thought it expressed a more
wild calamity to shoot a Dean or to be a Dean. But he only turned up his
coat collar, and I felt that for him the muse had folded her wings. I
rewrote--

   "Now if I die a Rural Dean,
     Or rob a bank I do not care,
    Or turn a Tory.  I have seen
     The lovely city of Lierre."

"The next line," I resumed, warming to it; but my friend interrupted me.

"The next line," he said somewhat harshly, "will be a railway line.
We can get back to Mechlin from here, I find, though we have to change
twice. I dare say I should think this jolly romantic but for the
weather. Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne
and my adventures dry. Here is the station."

.....

We did not speak again until we had left Lierre, in its sacred cloud of
rain, and were coming to Mechlin, under a clearer sky, that even made
one think of stars. Then I leant forward and said to my friend in a low
voice--"I have found out everything. We have come to the wrong star."

He stared his query, and I went on eagerly: "That is what makes life
at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I
thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong,
I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us
because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that
we don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way."

He silently nodded, staring out of the window, but whether I had
impressed or only fatigued him I could not tell. "This," I added, "is
suggested in the last verse of a fine poem you have grossly neglected--

  "'Happy is he and more than wise
      Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
    The world through all the grey disguise
      Of sleep and custom in between.
    Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
      But shall we know when we are there?
    Who know not what these dead stones mean,
      The lovely city of Lierre.'"

Here the train stopped abruptly. And from Mechlin church steeple we
heard the half-chime: and Joris broke silence with "No bally HORS
D'OEUVRES for me: I shall get on to something solid at once."

                L'Envoy

   Prince, wide your Empire spreads, I ween,
     Yet happier is that moistened Mayor,
   Who drinks her cognac far from fine,
     The lovely city of Lierre.




XXXIX. The Mystery of a Pageant

Once upon a time, it seems centuries ago, I was prevailed on to take
a small part in one of those historical processions or pageants which
happened to be fashionable in or about the year 1909. And since I tend,
like all who are growing old, to re-enter the remote past as a paradise
or playground, I disinter a memory which may serve to stand among those
memories of small but strange incidents with which I have sometimes
filled this column. The thing has really some of the dark qualities of
a detective-story; though I suppose that Sherlock Holmes himself could
hardly unravel it now, when the scent is so old and cold and most of the
actors, doubtless, long dead.

This old pageant included a series of figures from the eighteenth
century, and I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson. Seeing that
Dr. Johnson was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all over
gravy, snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest man
in London, I mention this identification as a fact and not as a vaunt. I
had nothing to do with the arrangement; and such fleeting suggestions as
I made were not taken so seriously as they might have been. I requested
that a row of posts be erected across the lawn, so that I might touch
all of them but one, and then go back and touch that. Failing this, I
felt that the least they could do was to have twenty-five cups of tea
stationed at regular intervals along the course, each held by a Mrs.
Thrale in full costume. My best constructive suggestion was the most
harshly rejected of all. In front of me in the procession walked the
great Bishop Berkeley, the man who turned the tables on the early
materialists by maintaining that matter itself possibly does not exist.
Dr. Johnson, you will remember, did not like such bottomless fancies as
Berkeley's, and kicked a stone with his foot, saying, "I refute him so!"
Now (as I pointed out) kicking a stone would not make the metaphysical
quarrel quite clear; besides, it would hurt. But how picturesque
and perfect it would be if I moved across the ground in the symbolic
attitude of kicking Bishop Berkeley! How complete an allegoric group;
the great transcendentalist walking with his head among the stars, but
behind him the avenging realist pede claudo, with uplifted foot. But I
must not take up space with these forgotten frivolities; we old men grow
too garrulous in talking of the distant past.

This story scarcely concerns me either in my real or my assumed
character. Suffice it to say that the procession took place at night
in a large garden and by torchlight (so remote is the date), that the
garden was crowded with Puritans, monks, and men-at-arms, and especially
with early Celtic saints smoking pipes, and with elegant Renaissance
gentlemen talking Cockney. Suffice it to say, or rather it is needless
to say, that I got lost. I wandered away into some dim corner of that
dim shrubbery, where there was nothing to do except tumbling over tent
ropes, and I began almost to feel like my prototype, and to share his
horror of solitude and hatred of a country life.

In this detachment and dilemma I saw another man in a white wig
advancing across this forsaken stretch of lawn; a tall, lean man, who
stooped in his long black robes like a stooping eagle. When I thought
he would pass me, he stopped before my face, and said, "Dr. Johnson, I
think. I am Paley."

"Sir," I said, "you used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity.
If you can guide me now to wherever this infernal thing begins you will
perform a yet higher and harder function."

His costume and style were so perfect that for the instant I really
thought he was a ghost. He took no notice of my flippancy, but, turning
his black-robed back on me, led me through verdurous glooms and winding
mossy ways, until we came out into the glare of gaslight and laughing
men in masquerade, and I could easily laugh at myself.

And there, you will say, was an end of the matter. I am (you will say)
naturally obtuse, cowardly, and mentally deficient. I was, moreover,
unused to pageants; I felt frightened in the dark and took a man for a
spectre whom, in the light, I could recognise as a modern gentleman in
a masquerade dress. No; far from it. That spectral person was my first
introduction to a special incident which has never been explained and
which still lays its finger on my nerve.

I mixed with the men of the eighteenth century; and we fooled as one
does at a fancy-dress ball. There was Burke as large as life and a great
deal better looking. There was Cowper much larger than life; he ought
to have been a little man in a night-cap, with a cat under one arm and
a spaniel under the other. As it was, he was a magnificent person, and
looked more like the Master of Ballantrae than Cowper. I persuaded him
at last to the night-cap, but never, alas, to the cat and dog. When I
came the next night Burke was still the same beautiful improvement upon
himself; Cowper was still weeping for his dog and cat and would not
be comforted; Bishop Berkeley was still waiting to be kicked in the
interests of philosophy. In short, I met all my old friends but one.
Where was Paley? I had been mystically moved by the man's presence; I
was moved more by his absence. At last I saw advancing towards us
across the twilight garden a little man with a large book and a bright
attractive face. When he came near enough he said, in a small, clear
voice, "I'm Paley." The thing was quite natural, of course; the man was
ill and had sent a substitute. Yet somehow the contrast was a shock.

By the next night I had grown quite friendly with my four or five
colleagues; I had discovered what is called a mutual friend with
Berkeley and several points of difference with Burke. Cowper, I think
it was, who introduced me to a friend of his, a fresh face, square
and sturdy, framed in a white wig. "This," he explained, "is my friend
So-and-So. He's Paley." I looked round at all the faces by this time
fixed and familiar; I studied them; I counted them; then I bowed to the
third Paley as one bows to necessity. So far the thing was all within
the limits of coincidence. It certainly seemed odd that this one
particular cleric should be so varying and elusive. It was singular
that Paley, alone among men, should swell and shrink and alter like a
phantom, while all else remained solid. But the thing was explicable;
two men had been ill and there was an end of it; only I went again
the next night, and a clear-coloured elegant youth with powdered hair
bounded up to me, and told me with boyish excitement that he was Paley.

For the next twenty-four hours I remained in the mental condition of
the modern world. I mean the condition in which all natural explanations
have broken down and no supernatural explanation has been established.
My bewilderment had reached to boredom when I found myself once more in
the colour and clatter of the pageant, and I was all the more pleased
because I met an old school-fellow, and we mutually recognised each
other under our heavy clothes and hoary wigs. We talked about all those
great things for which literature is too small and only life large
enough; red-hot memories and those gigantic details which make up the
characters of men. I heard all about the friends he had lost sight of
and those he had kept in sight; I heard about his profession, and asked
at last how he came into the pageant.

"The fact is," he said, "a friend of mine asked me, just for to-night,
to act a chap called Paley; I don't know who he was...."

"No, by thunder!" I said, "nor does anyone."

This was the last blow, and the next night passed like a dream. I
scarcely noticed the slender, sprightly, and entirely new figure which
fell into the ranks in the place of Paley, so many times deceased. What
could it mean? Why was the giddy Paley unfaithful among the faithful
found? Did these perpetual changes prove the popularity or the
unpopularity of being Paley? Was it that no human being could support
being Paley for one night and live till morning? Or was it that the
gates were crowded with eager throngs of the British public thirsting
to be Paley, who could only be let in one at a time? Or is there some
ancient vendetta against Paley? Does some secret society of Deists still
assassinate any one who adopts the name?

I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery; and that
for two reasons. First, the story is so true that I have had to put a
lie into it. Every word of this narrative is veracious, except the one
word Paley. And second, because I have got to go into the next room and
dress up as Dr. Johnson.






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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Alarms and Discursions, by G. K. Chesterton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Alarms and Discursions

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: January, 2006  [EBook #9656]
Posting Date: June 16, 2009

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS ***




Produced by Georges Allaire and Martin Ward





ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS

By G. K. Chesterton



CONTENTS

 1: INTRODUCTORY:  ON GARGOYLES

 2: THE SURRENDER OF A COCKNEY

 3: THE NIGHTMARE

 4: THE TELEGRAPH POLES

 5: A DRAMA OF DOLLS

 6: THE MAN AND HIS NEWSPAPER

 7: THE APPETITE OF EARTH

 8: SIMMONS AND THE SOCIAL TIE

 9: CHEESE

10: THE RED TOWN

11: THE FURROWS

12: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING

13: A CRIMINAL HEAD

14: THE WRATH OF THE ROSES

15: THE GOLD OF GLASTONBURY

16: THE FUTURISTS

17: DUKES

18: THE GLORY OF GREY

19: THE ANARCHIST

20: HOW I FOUND THE SUPERMAN

21: THE NEW HOUSE

22: THE WINGS OF STONE

23: THE THREE KINDS OF MEN

24: THE STEWARD OF THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS

25: THE FIELD OF BLOOD

26: THE STRANGENESS OF LUXURY

27: THE TRIUMPH OF THE DONKEY

28: THE WHEEL

29: FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE

30: ETHANDUNE

31: THE FLAT FREAK

32: THE GARDEN OF THE SEA

33: THE SENTIMENTALIST

34: THE WHITE HORSES

35: THE LONG BOW

36: THE MODERN SCROOGE

37: THE HIGH PLAINS

38: THE CHORUS

39: A ROMANCE OF THE MARSHES




Introductory: On Gargoyles

Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found
half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those
graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals
of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by
recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain
by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of
the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great
stages of art.





I

Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people,
mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans, like
all primitive and simple souls; they talked over their affairs under a
tree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler was a
sort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them. They
worshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the god
whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun.

Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointing
to the sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long and
heavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to use
nothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself;
he would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain can wash
the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown of
God. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure; he would not have even
anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all the
arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built the temple
in three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite in
substance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of white
lilies, ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen;
and the wall within that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a
million stars. And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, was
a tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain; and upon
the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazing
diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a child
catches a ball.

"Now," said the priest, "I have made a tower which is a little worthy of
the sun."




II

But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates; and the
shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and at
first they were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the pirates
might have taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount.
And then, after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little
and began to conquer because they did not mind defeat. And the pride of
the pirates went sick within them after a few unexpected foils; and at
last the invasion rolled back into the empty seas and the island was
delivered. And for some reason after this men began to talk quite
differently about the temple and the sun. Some, indeed, said, "You must
not touch the temple; it is classical; it is perfect, since it admits
no imperfections." But the others answered, "In that it differs from
the sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters
everywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds
and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun dies
daily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire." Now the priest
had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white,
but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they are
right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those
earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the
exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us
point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails so
long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much
as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is
staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching
towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear--let him hear."

And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the
Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and
all the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they
all appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved like the
necks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highest
pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at the
sun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in one
living and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in prayer.




III

But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought
up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone,
and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls
and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous
by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite
proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was
romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance of
Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it all,
the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside
down.

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the
thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and
he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the
universe which he had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot why
he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object.
He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when he had
done it all the rich and influential went into a passion of applause and
cried, "This is real art! This is Realism! This is things as they really
are!"

That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply
Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense
of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason
for existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their
god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs,
dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all
these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for
them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn.
Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of
ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern
art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being
unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption
and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendid
houses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles
and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could
go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the
temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a
lost donkey going nowhere.

The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which are here
collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a
heap round my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that grey
and gaping head of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. Yet I
will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that
I am a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of
why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not
the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the
connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be
stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now
set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out
capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are
meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the
gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the
angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of
the architecture, and of the consecration of the church.




The Surrender of a Cockney

Evert man, though he were born in the very belfry of Bow and spent his
infancy climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a country
house which he has never seen; but which was built for him in the very
shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep in
orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln; and when the man sees
it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I have been
forced to confess this at last, who am a Cockney, if ever there was one,
a Cockney not only on principle, but with savage pride. I have always
maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not in the wind or thunder
of the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street.
I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous
than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be
perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or
cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted
himself to a greengrocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would have
been a better moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead of
worshipping the sea. I prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to
the philosophy of turnips. To call a man a turnip may be playful, but is
seldom respectful. But when we wish to pay emphatic honour to a man, to
praise the firmness of his nature, the squareness of his conduct, the
strong humility with which he is interlocked with his equals in silent
mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney metaphor, and call him
a brick.

But, despite all these theories, I have surrendered; I have struck my
colours at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I
shall come down to living in the country, like any common Socialist or
Simple Lifer. I shall end my days in a village, in the character of
the Village Idiot, and be a spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have
already learnt the rustic manner of leaning upon a gate; and I was thus
gymnastically occupied at the moment when my eye caught the house that
was made for me. It stood well back from the road, and was built of a
good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like the tower of some
Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters,
"1908." That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian
sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of
ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked me
with some curiosity what I was doing.

"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to
forty-three hansom cabmen."

"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside
the radius."

"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they
only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into
Cockney.

  "'My heart leaps up when I behold
  A sky-sign in the sky,'

"as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the
older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The
Classics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.

  "'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'

"or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning

  "'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.';

"I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never
realized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why?
It is because I have left it for ever."

"If you will take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly endeavour
not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every
literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and
the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London;
Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite
enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you,
why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed
it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the
streets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some
miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane you
would utter a yell of joy."

Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible
sternness.

"Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the
true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic
does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real
rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few
moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like
an ancient tree; I have been here for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the
real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold;
and I mean to see it before I die."

The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that
lane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my
Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its
yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: "To cut it short,
then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won't like
it. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?"

"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my Country
Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for
your other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country,
but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly
suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be
the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I
am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to
London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants
to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am
that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics
love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of The
Golden Treasury)--

  "'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves,
  Forbode not any severing of our loves.
  I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
  To hold you dear in a more distant way.
  I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet,
  Even more than when I lightly tripped as they.
  The grimy colour of the London clay
  Is lovely yet,'

"because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and
quiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man
that it is."




The Nightmare

A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces in
the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and
heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon
flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper
like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was
trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of
the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt,
about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces.

  "Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued
  the Hebrews and was splashed
  With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green
  beryls for her eyes?"

I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; still
it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere,
a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from the
Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not much in common
(thank God) between my garden with the grey-green English sky-line
beyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces huge, headless
idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (as
I confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such
smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of
their ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black
flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters
to another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it
was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings
of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the
wings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit here
and write some very creditable creepy tale, about how I went up the
crooked road beyond the church and met Something--say a dog, a dog with
one eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider,
the horse also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be
broken; I should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask
me the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the
ground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or I
might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They are
so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the
angels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angels
of death.

Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in the
least. That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was
only created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I
should not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest;
the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall
discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the
Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you
know it is a nightmare.

That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all
artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally
frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be
allowed to play with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in
the garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and
violent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amid
their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, these
high cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed to
be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and
Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the
Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him
take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the
old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his
true possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child
would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of
wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things of
poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or
that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.

In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous
remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood
by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was
heaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober
truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse.
It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused.
Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and
more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of
eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like
them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in
deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and
there is (literally) the devil to pay--to pay in dancing girls or human
sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the
throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the
appearance of a man.

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror
and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly
believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by
writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and
straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils
may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative
literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and
the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if
he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that
they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained
to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the
brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you
look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she
whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will
catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike
tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly
with us over the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was the
Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up
nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the
call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall
not ride on me.




The Telegraph Poles

My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood which
make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe; which have
the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so one may lose
one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all around
us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a
truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often
shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in
this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a
single shape until the shape shall turn terrible.

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as
"dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like
"snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by
repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable
as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.

It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be for
this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps
they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are
repeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps
a man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air
with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through
thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a pine
tree. However this may be, there is something singularly thrilling, even
something urgent and intolerant, about the endless forest repetitions;
there is the hint of something like madness in that musical monotony of
the pines.

I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonic
truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post."

My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions,
especially upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one
of its paths which happened to follow the wires of the provincial
telegraphy; and though the poles occurred at long intervals they made a
difference when they came. The instant we came to the straight pole we
could see that the pines were not really straight. It was like a hundred
straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all brought to judgment
suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the amateur lines
seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have sworn
they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and waver
everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraph
post the pines were crooked--and alive. That lonely vertical rod at once
deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet
made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly.

"Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't know
what a wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees
are straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual
civilization builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."

We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than we
intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out into
a yellow evening when we came out of the forest on to the hills above
a strange town or village, of which the lights had already begun to
glitter in the darkening valley. The change had already happened which
is the test and definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed
still as bright, the earth was growing blacker against it, especially
at the edges, the hills and the pine-tops. This brought out yet more
clearly the owlish secrecy of pine-woods; and my friend cast a regretful
glance at them as he came out under the sky. Then he turned to the view
in front; and, as it happened, one of the telegraph posts stood up in
front of him in the last sunlight. It was no longer crossed and softened
by the more delicate lines of pine wood; it stood up ugly, arbitrary,
and angular as any crude figure in geometry. My friend stopped, pointing
his stick at it, and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.

"Demon," he said to me briefly, "behold your work. That palace of
proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men,
Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your
dreary rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest,
tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch. And the
upshot of that dumb battle is inequality--and beauty. Now lift up your
eyes and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the white
buttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if you
dare."

"Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?" I asked. "I
fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends,
about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the
telegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to doctrine
but rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine about a
telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modern
things are ugly, because modern men are careless, not because they are
careful."

"No," answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid and
sprawling sunset, "there is something intrinsically deadening about
the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is
always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because
they are carrying across the world the real message of democracy."

"At this moment," I answered, "they are probably carrying across the
world the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt
communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His
children with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph
poles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent. But their
baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That black stick
with white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a multitude. It is
the mad creation of the souls of two millionaires."

"At least you have to explain," answered my friend gravely, "how it is
that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have
appeared together; you have... But bless my soul, we must be getting
home. I had no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is our
way through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph post for
entirely different reasons and get home before it is dark."

We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another we had
underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night,
especially in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after the
first five minutes' march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes
after, had stuck nearly to the knees in mire, we began to have some
suspicion of our direction. At last my friend said, in a low, husky
voice:

"I'm afraid we're on the wrong path. It's pitch dark."

"I thought we went the right way," I said, tentatively.

"Well," he said; and then, after a long pause, "I can't see any
telegraph poles. I've been looking for them."

"So have I," I said. "They're so straight."

We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of the
fringe of trees which seemed to dance round us in derision. Here and
there, however, it was possible to trace the outline of something just
too erect and rigid to be a pine tree. By these we finally felt our way
home, arriving in a cold green twilight before dawn.




A Drama of Dolls

In a small grey town of stone in one of the great Yorkshire dales, which
is full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old puppet-play
exactly as our fathers saw it five hundred years ago. It was admirably
translated from the old German, and was the original tale of Faust. The
dolls were at once comic and convincing; but if you cannot at once laugh
at a thing and believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages.
Or in the world, for that matter.

The puppet-play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth
century; and indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of
that grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate that
we so often know a thing that is past only by its tail end. We remember
yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances. One is
Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling Europe with
a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery would say,
was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but one. During the
strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him
immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either,
bullet-headed and ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and
honestly enthusiastic for a cause, the cause of French justice and
equality.

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember only by the
odour of their ultimate decay. We think of the life of the Middle Ages
as a dance of death, full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burning
heretics. But this was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the death
of the Middle Ages. It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of
Louis IX and Edward I.

This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to
the mere arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it is
not a fair sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. The
heart of the true Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance,
in the noble tale of Tannhauser, in which the dead staff broke into leaf
and flower to rebuke the pontiff who had declared even one human being
beyond the strength of sorrow and pardon.

But there were in the play two great human ideas which the mediaeval
mind never lost its grip on, through the heaviest nightmares of its
dissolution. They were the two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they are
the two eternal jokes of mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist
there is a little health and hope; wherever they are absent, pride and
insanity are present. The first is the idea that the poor man ought to
get the better of the rich man. The other is the idea that the husband
is afraid of the wife.

I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck,
should produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad.
I am sure that there are some such places in the soul. When the human
spirit does not jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the
human spirit must be struck with incurable paralysis. There is hope
for people who have gone down into the hells of greed and economic
oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are such a people
ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult in the
abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for
the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and the
men that beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boast
that their wives bully them.

The first idea, the idea about the man at the bottom coming out on top,
is expressed in this puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus' servant,
Caspar. Sentimental old Tones, regretting the feudal times, sometimes
complain that in these days Jack is as good as his master. But most of
the actual tales of the feudal times turn on the idea that Jack is much
better than his master, and certainly it is so in the case of Caspar and
Faust. The play ends with the damnation of the learned and illustrious
doctor, followed by a cheerful and animated dance by Caspar, who has
been made watchman of the city.

But there was a much keener stroke of mediaeval irony earlier in the
play. The learned doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of the
earth to find a certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which he
can control the infernal deities. At last he procures the one precious
volume, opens it at the proper page, and leaves it on the table while
he seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comes
in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of
the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and
dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at
high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their
own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue.
There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great
levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour defying and
dominating hell.

One of the best points in the play as performed in this Yorkshire town
was that the servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire, instead of the
German rustic dialect which he talked in the original. That also smacks
of the good air of that epoch. In those old pictures and poems they
always made things living by making them local. Thus, queerly enough,
the one touch that was not in the old mediaeval version was the most
mediaeval touch of all.

That other ancient and Christian jest, that a wife is a holy terror,
occurs in the last scene, where the doctor (who wears a fur coat
throughout, to make him seem more offensively rich and refined) is
attempting to escape from the avenging demons, and meets his old servant
in the street. The servant obligingly points out a house with a blue
door, and strongly recommends Dr. Faustus to take refuge in it. "My old
woman lives there," he says, "and the devils are more afraid of her
than you are of them." Faustus does not take this advice, but goes on
meditating and reflecting (which had been his mistake all along) until
the clock strikes twelve, and dreadful voices talk Latin in heaven.
So Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little black imps; and
serve him right for being an Intellectual.




The Man and His Newspaper

At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between
Oxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route
in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour.
I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous
specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate automatic
machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corresponding
chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining copies of a
cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It does not
matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same thing.

Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I
strolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with the
striking phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class. It
went on to remark that nothing had contributed more to make our Empire
happy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you can
supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great cities,
our populous and growing villages, the success of our rule in Ireland,
etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in the
State "to work heartily hand-in-hand." It was this alone, the paper
assured me, that had saved us from the horrors of the French Revolution.
"It is easy for the Radicals," it went on very solemnly, "to make jokes
about the dukes. Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given
to the poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and
truly Christian patience that are given to them by the great landlords
of this country. We are very sure that the English people, with their
sturdy common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen
rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers."

Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man. Despite the
populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared to be the only man
for miles, but the road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed with
equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he
was leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready for
society, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the Daily
Wire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck of
respectable clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement which one
sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt and
tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that he
symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed
look in his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping body
and soul together have difficulties not only with the body, but also
with the soul.

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of those
streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life
in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs of it in that
formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their great
neighbours. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like charms or
spells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In particular
the name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the
omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner
of the district; and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to
form a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He was
spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child might
speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, but
by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bed
and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that, with a
caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that
Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word." He was not
so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. The
particular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble," and that
Sir Joseph had been "pretty hard on him."

And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those
frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale
which, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.

He had slowly built up in the village a small business as a
photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges, whom he
loved with passion. "I'm the sort that 'ad better marry," he said;
and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph,
and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want a photographer in
the village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they disliked this
particular photographer. He worked and worked until he had just enough
to marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his wedding the lease
expired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused to
renew the lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was
ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was barred against him. In all
that country he could not find a shed to which to bring home his bride.
The man appealed and explained; but he was disliked as a demagogue, as
well as a photographer. Then it was as if a black cloud came across the
winter sky; for I knew what was coming. I forget even in what words
he told of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a
photograph, the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tight
ropes, as if all Nature were on the rack.

"She 'ad to go away," he said.

"Wouldn't her parents," I began, and hesitated on the word "forgive."

"Oh, her people forgave her," he said. "But Her Ladyship..."

"Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars," I said, impatiently. "So
of course she can come between a mother and the child of her body."

"Well, it does seem a bit 'ard..." he began with a break in his voice.

"But, good Lord, man," I cried, "it isn't a matter of hardness! It's a
matter of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph knew
the passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong for which in many
Christian countries he would have a knife in him."

The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown. He
certainly told his tale with real resentment, whether it was true or
false, or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen and injured; but he
did not seem to think of any avenue of escape. At last he said:

"Well, it's a bad world; let's 'ope there's a better one."

"Amen," I said. "But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand how men
have hoped there was a worse one."

Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day
crawling up, and at last I said, abruptly:

"The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard."

He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from head to foot
like a man coming out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a totally
new voice, louder but much more careless, "Ah yes, sir,... this 'ere
Budget... the Radicals are doing a lot of 'arm."

I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of careful
precision, "Settin' class against class; that's what I call it. Why,
what's made our Empire except the readiness of all classes to work
'eartily 'and-in-'and."

He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold.
Then he said, "What I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors of the
French Revolution?"

My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase that
came next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kind
and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you,
sir," he said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching a
paradox. "The English people 'ave some common sense, and they'd rather
be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of Socialist
thieves."

I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were a
public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul between his
experience and his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers a
quarter of England. As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking
out of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of
catchwords, and went stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smaller
and smaller in the great green landscape; even as the Free Man has grown
smaller and smaller in the English countryside.




The Appetite of Earth

I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has
somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it.
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that
I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean
that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful.
The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much
subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing
of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for
ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful
as an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful
as the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I
suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it
contains things to eat.

The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it
can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower,
which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat
wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be
uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a
turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round
a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has
loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the
firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things
to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white
firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but
there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were
stronger.

Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared
that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously
accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon
is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of
every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of
it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually
contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon
were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if
it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to
be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more
common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other
sort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a
cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above
a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese,
rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur.
I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an
ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked
and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere
cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as
if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly
cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I
incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like
everything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and in the last
days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, and
leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.

But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic
actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the
phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this
imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy
is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread and cheese," which I have
cited elsewhere in this connection; and in that noble nightmare of a
Scandinavian legend, in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out
of a horn. In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to
be read before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will
concede that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is
to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is a
hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory when
there is no evidence for it so far.

But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gone
mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees;
or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisite
outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidity
by the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a
paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of religion.
If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test for
separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the
spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to
express concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls wine
alcohol; it calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test of
true religion is that its energy drives exactly the other way; it is
always trying to make men feel truths as facts; always trying to make
abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things; always trying to
make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear,
and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the
invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their
phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna
and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has
despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for some
one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it; the grass that
grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but, doubtless, with an
uproarious appetite.




Simmons and the Social Tie

It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need to
have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is
equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality with which to test
ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as
the touchstone of all modern theories about the mass of women. Her name
is not Buttons; she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a
comic figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face, a
little like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course. The courage
with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has something quite
creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive; her practical
charity very large; and she is wholly unaware of the philosophical use
to which I put her.

But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I
simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on
the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to
be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic
ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other form," "Let
Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of
social art, etc." It is extraordinary what a difference the substitution
seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes say
in their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet
call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp
the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"--in
order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended
form: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and
Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of
empire and the firebrand of speculative thought." Somehow it sounds
quite different. And yet when you say Woman I suppose you mean the
average woman; and if most women are as capable and critical and morally
sound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a great deal
more than we deserve.

But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require many
studies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle, the
principle of keeping in the mind an actual personality when we are
talking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, for
example, the question of the education of boys. Almost every post
brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme of
education; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are to
be taught together; there should be no prizes; there should be no
punishments; the master should lift the boys to his level; the master
should descend to their level; we should encourage the heartiest
comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest spiritual intimacy with
masters; toil must be pleasant and holidays must be instructive; with
all these things I am daily impressed and somewhat bewildered. But on
the great Buttons' principle I keep in my mind and apply to all these
ideals one still vivid fact; the face and character of a particular
schoolboy whom I once knew. I am not taking a mere individual oddity, as
you will hear. He was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric;
he was (in a quite sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionally
average. He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit
which is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became so
obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was, in his
way, a tragedy.

I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a
little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight
swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets.
His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one
saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form
might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak,
and was certainly worried. It was a hesitating face, which seemed to
blink doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the look of one who has
received a buffet that he cannot return. In all occupations he was the
average boy; just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad at
work to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing,
for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure,
without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy should be
noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys; for him,
to be distinguished was to be disgraced.

Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved
by anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make the
mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and
ceremonial, having reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to an
affectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is
not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the
ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more
masculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves are very
sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your
feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product
of sentimentalism; and schoolboys are sentimental individually, but
stoical collectively.

For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself
who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have
induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry
with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have
been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off." I myself remember
running to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internal
ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion
or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same lines in
class with the colourless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be
invisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.

But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or
if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in a
perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any
petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. He
hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want to
hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of us
have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had when some one
betrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face; he used
to put up the lid of his desk to hide his blushes for human dignity,
and from behind this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse
emphasis of pain. "O, shut up, I say... O, I say, shut up.... O, shut
it, can't you?" Once when a little boy admitted that he had heard of the
Highland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside his desk and
dropped the lid upon it in desperation; and when I was for a moment
transferred from the bottom of the form for knowing the name of Cardinal
Newman, I thought he would have rushed from the room.

His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call that an
eccentricity which was a wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grew
so sensitive that he could not even bear any question answered correctly
without grief. He felt there was a touch of disloyalty, of unfraternal
individualism, even about knowing the right answer to a sum. If asked
the date of the battle of Hastings, he considered it due to social tact
and general good feeling to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration
led to bad feeling between him and the school authority, which ended
in a rupture unexpectedly violent in the case of so good-humoured a
creature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquiry
that he had fled from his home also.

I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two or three
odd coincidences of my life that I did see him. At some public sports or
recreation ground I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whom
was wearing the dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that
uniform was the tall figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons.
He had gone to the one place where every one is dressed alike--a
regiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he was killed in Africa. But when
England was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody was talking
manly trash about the whelps of the lion and the brave boys in red, I
often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns of my memory, "Shut
up... O, shut up... O, I say, shut it."




Cheese

My forthcoming work in five volumes, "The Neglect of Cheese in European
Literature" is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it
is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such
a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these
pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets
have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I
remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman
restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet
I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the
point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: "If all
the trees were bread and cheese"--which is, indeed a rich and gigantic
vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese
there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where
I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me
as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous
rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality
which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it
rhymes to "breeze" and "seas" (an essential point); that it is emphatic
in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For
their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often
say, "Cheese it!" or even "Quite the cheese." The substance itself is
imaginative. It is ancient--sometimes in the individual case, always
in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk,
which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with
soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought
of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale.
Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song.
Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an
eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even
illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive
days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they
had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should
want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn
the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble
Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so
on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that
paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Bad
customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs
are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both
the good and bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect us
from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us
freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A
bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an
umbrella--artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but
uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and
the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom
of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese.
Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if, let us
say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior substance), we
shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith's Soap or
Brown's Soap, sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians
have soap it is Smith's Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown's
soap. There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly
Tibetan, about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he
is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having
some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned
foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not
produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead
identity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists in
things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine,
or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every
outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad. But
you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of
Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in
one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I
reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, with
great rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and elaborate
restaurant, where I knew I could get many other things besides bread and
cheese. I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to get
it; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and left
England behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up
into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that, instead
of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits. Biscuits--to one who had
eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits--to one who had
proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between
cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I
asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had
joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but
yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding
substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off
slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious
as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand
that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore
resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern
Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.




The Red Town

When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid,
there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most
obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the
nose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical) about this course,
you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this case has all the savage
solidity of a blow with the fist. It is stupid to say that "most people"
are stupid. It is like saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious
that "tall" can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to
denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.

Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic,
and should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him by the
hand (himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret meadow
and ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers. They were
ordinary people, so far as any one knows, who gave to one flower the
name of the Star of Bethlehem and to another and much commoner flower
the tremendous title of the Eye of Day. If you cling to the snobbish
notion that common people are prosaic, ask any common person for the
local names of the flowers, names which vary not only from county to
county, but even from dale to dale.

But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this. It will be
said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and that
the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it. For some
extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London slang is
full of witty things said by nobody in particular. True, the creed
of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed of the old
countryside; but the people are just as clever in giving names to their
sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness.
One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling a small white
insignificant flower "The Star of Bethlehem." But then, again, one could
not better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism than in the one
verbal picture of "having your monkey up."

Who first invented these violent felicities of language? Who first spoke
of a man "being off his head"? The obvious comment on a lunatic is that
his head is off him; yet the other phrase is far more fantastically
exact. There is about every madman a singular sensation that his body
has walked off and left the important part of him behind.

But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even stronger
when they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagination there
is for instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight
flitting as "shooting the moon"? It expresses everything about the run
away: his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive
air as of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.

No; the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things; for
instance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt that democracy
is wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the cultured
class has produced of late have been such good literature as the
expression "painting the town red."

Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram clings to my memory. For as I
was walking a little while ago round a corner near Victoria I realized
for the first time that a familiar lamp-post was painted all over with
a bright vermilion just as if it were trying (in spite of the obvious
bodily disqualification) to pretend that it was a pillar-box. I have
since heard official explanations of these startling and scarlet
objects. But my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman on his
way home at four o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint the town
red and got only as far as one lamp-post.

I began to make a fairy tale about the man; and, indeed, this phrase
contains both a fairy tale and a philosophy; it really states almost the
whole truth about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment to which all
healthy men have often been tempted. It expresses the desire to have
levity on a large scale which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdy
young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green: he would like
to paint the whole city scarlet. The word which to us best recalls
such gigantesque idiocy is the word "mafficking." The slaves of that
saturnalia were not only painting the town red; they thought that they
were painting the map red--that they were painting the world red. But,
indeed, this Imperial debauch has in it something worse than the
mere larkiness which is my present topic; it has an element of real
self-flattery and of sin. The Jingo who wants to admire himself is
worse than the blackguard who only wants to enjoy himself. In a very old
ninth-century illumination which I have seen, depicting the war of the
rebel angels in heaven, Satan is represented as distributing to his
followers peacock feathers--the symbols of an evil pride. Satan also
distributed peacock feathers to his followers on Mafeking Night...

But taking the case of ordinary pagan recklessness and pleasure seeking,
it is, as we have said, well expressed in this image. First, because
it conveys this notion of filling the world with one private folly; and
secondly, because of the profound idea involved in the choice of colour.
Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it
is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where
the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns
through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which
destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our
religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in
first love.

Now, the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of conscious
joy over everything; to have excitement at every moment; to paint
everything red. He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to incarnadine the
streets; and sometimes (in his last madness) he will butcher beasts
and men to dip his gigantic brushes in their blood. For it marks
the sacredness of red in nature, that it is secret even when it is
ubiquitous, like blood in the human body, which is omnipresent, yet
invisible. As long as blood lives it is hidden; it is only dead blood
that we see. But the earlier parts of the rake's progress are very
natural and amusing. Painting the town red is a delightful thing until
it is done. It would be splendid to see the cross of St. Paul's as red
as the cross of St. George, and the gallons of red paint running down
the dome or dripping from the Nelson Column. But when it is done, when
you have painted the town red, an extraordinary thing happens. You
cannot see any red at all.

I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful artist standing in the
midst of that frightful city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of his
shame. And then, when everything is red, he will long for a red rose
in a green hedge and long in vain; he will dream of a red leaf and be
unable even to imagine it. He has desecrated the divine colour, and he
can no longer see it, though it is all around. I see him, a single black
figure against the red-hot hell that he has kindled, where spires and
turrets stand up like immobile flames: he is stiffened in a sort of
agony of prayer. Then the mercy of Heaven is loosened, and I see one or
two flakes of snow very slowly begin to fall.




The Furrows

As I see the corn grow green all about my neighbourhood, there rushes on
me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say "rushes,"
for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the ploughed
fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour,
I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like
arrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals;
they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are
like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadrons
and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs
sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a
watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they
shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the
valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous
and rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines
drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men. The
men that ploughed tried to plough straight; they had no notion of giving
great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth;
they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I
had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people
who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other and
even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they do
understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and I could always enjoy
things when I understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy the
orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the
orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well.

But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave things
they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows
gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows arc beautiful when
they bend only because they try to remain rigid; and sword-blades
can curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain to spring
straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of the
tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is hardly
any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yielding
a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the
earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape.
Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.

The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful about
beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong
doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts: but that is
no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be
an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can
be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend,
any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will
bend you.

Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think
that otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision
of the ploughed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest
architecture of man: the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest
botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.

But when I looked at those torrents of ploughed parallels, that great
rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of
democracy, Here was mere equality: but equality seen in bulk is more
superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing
over hill and dale, equality charging the world--that was the meaning
of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in their
energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because
they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines of
landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only
nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has
created the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill,
covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could have been so
sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like
aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and
towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the
down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit.

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a
landscape and give it all its mould and meaning. It is just because the
lines of the furrow arc ugly and even that the landscape is living and
superb. As I think I have remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded on
the plough.




The Philosophy of Sight-seeing

It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent
person--by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence--can and
does dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-a-banc full of
tourists going to see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of
Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite
easily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does not
arise from--at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are,
of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that
it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet
from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one
thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it
is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured
procession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its many
chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt
for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the
Cockneys on Margate sands. The man who notices nothing about the clerk
except his Cockney accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de
Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having
dropped an "h" might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm.
Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easy
to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibe
at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic
and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and
tombs, it is certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly
either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence those great men who
had the courage to die; I reverence also these little men who have the
courage to live.

Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made. It may be said
that antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed good things, like
violets and geraniums; but they do not go together. A billycock is a
beautiful object (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the same
style of architecture as Ely Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococo
dome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed arches
that assault heaven like spears. A char-a-banc is lovely (it may be
said) if placed upon a pedestal and worshipped for its own sweet
sake; but it does not harmonize with the curve and outline of the old
three-decker on which Nelson died; its beauty is quite of another sort.
Therefore (we will suppose our sage to argue) antiquity and democracy
should be kept separate, as inconsistent things. Things may be
inconsistent in time and space which are by no means inconsistent in
essential value and idea. Thus the Catholic Church has water for the
new-born and oil for the dying: but she never mixes oil and water.

This explanation is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The first
objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the
case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to "beauty spots," even
by persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy.
Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being
as vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire standing on the
top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx,
one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge, is just as comic
as one millionaire is anywhere else; and that is saying a good deal. On
the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally into
Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objecting
to the billycock--so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head.
But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the two
incompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity. For the truth
is that it has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normally
interested the populace; and it has been almost entirely the populace
who have systematically preserved the antiquities. The Oldest Inhabitant
has always been a clodhopper; I have never heard of his being a
gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites
of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far
as any one remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of
saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the
supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says
that "where there is no vision the people perish." But it is equally
true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.

The idea must be abandoned, then, that this feeling of faint dislike
towards popular sight-seeing is due to any inherent incompatibility
between the idea of special shrines and trophies and the idea of large
masses of ordinary men. On the contrary, these two elements of sanctity
and democracy have been specially connected and allied throughout
history. The shrines and trophies were often put up by ordinary men.
They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever things the
fastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of specialist
judgment, and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find it
difficult really to apply it to such historic and monumental art.
Obviously, a public building is meant to impress the public. The most
aristocratic tomb is a democratic tomb, because it exists to be seen;
the only aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse, not the undecaying
marble; and if the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, he should
be buried in his own back-garden. The chapel of the most narrow and
exclusive sect is universal outside, even if it is limited inside, its
walls and windows confront all points of the compass and all quarters of
the cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is universal
as a monument; if its sectarians had really wished to be private they
should have met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect a
national or municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the
crowd like a demagogue.

The statue of every statesman offers itself for election as much as the
statesman himself. Every epitaph on a church slab is put up for the mob
as much as a placard in a General Election. And if we follow this track
of reflection we shall, I think, really find why it is that modern
sight-seeing jars on something in us, something that is not a caddish
contempt for graves nor an equally caddish contempt for cads. For, after
all, there is many a--churchyard which consists mostly of dead cads; but
that does not make it less sacred or less sad.

The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and
columns of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and
self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and
more casual. Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were so
placed and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate men
going about their daily business; and when they are so seen they
are never forgotten. The true way of reviving the magic of our great
minsters and historic sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was always
recommending. It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay,
it is rather to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone to
visit an aunt in Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was
built to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest way between
Croydon and Hampstead, and the Nelson Column will (for the first time in
your life) remind you of Nelson. You will appreciate Hereford Cathedral
if you have come for cider, not if you have come for architecture. You
will really see the Place Vendome if you have come on business, not
if you have come for art. For it was for the simple and laborious
generations of men, practical, troubled about many things, that our
fathers reared those portents. There is, indeed, another element, not
unimportant: the fact that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. But
in discussing modern artistic cathedral-lovers, we need not consider
this.




A Criminal Head

When men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science) speak
of studying history or human society scientifically they always forget
that there are two quite distinct questions involved. It may be that
certain facts of the body go with certain facts of the soul, but it
by no means follows that a grasp of such facts of the body goes with
a grasp of the things of the soul. A man may show very learnedly that
certain mixtures of race make a happy community, but he may be quite
wrong (he generally is) about what communities are happy. A man may
explain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a really bad
man, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man
is really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands
only one half of the equation.

The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, "Celts are
unsuccessful; look at Irishmen, for instance." To which I should reply,
"You may know all about Celts; but it is obvious that you know nothing
about Irishmen. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful, unless it
is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great part of
the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too." A man with
a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year greeting), "Fools have
microcephalous skulls," or what not. To which I shall reply, "In order
to be certain of that, you must be a good judge both of the physical
and of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know a
microcephalous skull when you see it. It is also necessary that you
should know a fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you
do not know a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and
intimate of all forms of acquaintanceship."

The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that while
their knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle, their
knowledge of man and society, to which these are to be applied, is quite
exceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything about biology,
but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history, for instance,
are simply cheap and uneducated. Thus some famous and foolish professor
measured the skull of Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type;
he had not historical knowledge enough to know that if there is any
"criminal type," certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I
believe, afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all; but
that is another story. The point is that the poor old man was trying to
match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without knowing anything
whatever about her mind.

But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.

In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about
criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads
were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too
rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves
me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the
portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples;
most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line
of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of
ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because
they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely;
sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the
unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the
abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back
of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor,
the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive
classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists in
being poor.

But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the final
shock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of the
fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals.
Among the starved and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, neat
but old-fashioned, with the powder of the 18th century and a certain
almost pert primness in the dress which marked the conventions of the
upper middle-class about 1790. The face was lean and lifted stiffly up,
the eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm
with a heroic firmness; all the more pathetic because of a certain
delicacy and deficiency of male force, Without knowing who it was, one
could have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's
Brutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government
as a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of
inconsistency and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable
life. I say I should have known this almost from the face alone, even if
I had not known who it was.

But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath the
portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written these
remarkable words: "Deficiency of ethical instincts," followed by
something to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is certainly
untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead, a peculiarity
which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people of his time and
ours.

Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the
knowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology
might be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance of that
human material of which it is supposed to be speaking. The man who could
say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterly
to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might as well say
that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts. You may say that
Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say the same of
Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced they were morbid
and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling too
little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort
of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of
keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and
wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel
by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the
greatest that was ever given to men to do except that which Christianity
did in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the Dark
Ages. But they did it, and no one else could have done it.

Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe on a
point of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful class
as mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter the great
estates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves in an
awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all things seem
intelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth. We are not strong
enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong enough to be as weak
as Robespierre. There is only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Like
a mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient battlefield;
we can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of
that unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each other childishly and
innocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.
I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are
imbecile.




The Wrath of the Roses

The position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog among
animals. It is so much that both are domesticated as that have some dim
feeling that they were always domesticated. There are wild roses and
there are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs; wild roses are very
nice. But nobody ever thinks of either of them if the name is abruptly
mentioned in a gossip or a poem. On the other hand, there are tame
tigers and tame cobras, but if one says, "I have a cobra in my pocket,"
or "There is a tiger in the music-room," the adjective "tame" has to be
somewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of wild
beasts; if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers.

But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into the
wheel of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancient
emotions and images, that the artificial product seems more natural
than the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history, but of
human history; and the real rose grows in a garden. All must regard the
elephant as something tremendous, but tamed; and many, especially in our
great cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably a mad bull.
In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce
creatures of the forest or morass taught at last to endure the curb.

But with the dog and the rose this instinctive principle is reversed.
With them we think of the artificial as the archetype; the earth-born as
the erratic exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had run
away, like the stray cat. And we cannot help fancying that the wonderful
wild rose of our hedges has escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps
they fled together, the dog and the rose: a singular and (on the whole)
an imprudent elopement. Perhaps the treacherous dog crept from the
kennel, and the rebellious rose from the flower-bed, and they fought
their way out in company, one with teeth and the other with thorns.
Possibly this is why my dog becomes a wild dog when he sees roses, and
kicks them anywhere. Possibly this is why the wild rose is called a
dog-rose. Possibly not.

But there is this degree of dim barbaric truth in the quaint old-world
legend that I have just invented. That in these two cases the civilized
product is felt to be the fiercer, nay, even the wilder. Nobody seems to
be afraid of a wild dog: he is classed among the jackals and the servile
beasts. The terrible cave canem is written over man's creation. When we
read "Beware of the Dog," it means beware of the tame dog: for it is the
tame dog that is terrible. He is terrible in proportion as he is tame:
it is his loyalty and his virtues that are awful to the stranger, even
the stranger within your gates; still more to the stranger halfway over
your gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and furious docility; he
flees from that great monster of mildness.

Well, I have much the same feeling when I look at the roses ranked red
and thick and resolute round a garden; they seem to me bold and even
blustering. I hasten to say that I know even less about my own garden
than about anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses, not even
their names. I know only the name Rose; and Rose is (in every sense
of the word) a Christian name. It is Christian in the one absolute
and primordial sense of Christian--that it comes down from the age
of pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt, in Greek, Latin,
Provencal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word
Rose, which (like wine and other noble words) is the same in all the
tongues of white men, I know literally nothing. I have heard the more
evident and advertised names. I know there is a flower which calls
itself the Glory of Dijon--which I had supposed to be its cathedral. In
any case, to have produced a rose and a cathedral is to have produced
not only two very glorious and humane things, but also (as I maintain)
two very soldierly and defiant things. I also know there is a rose
called Marechal Niel--note once more the military ring.

And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke to my
gardener (an enterprise of no little valour) and asked him the name of
a strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almost
as if it reminded me of some turbid element in history and the soul. Its
red was not only swarthy, but smoky; there was something congested and
wrathful about its colour. It was at once theatrical and sulky. The
gardener told me it was called Victor Hugo.

Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power about
them; even their names may mean something in connexion with themselves,
in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men. But the rose
itself is royal and dangerous; long as it has remained in the rich house
of civilization, it has never laid off its armour. A rose always looks
like a mediaeval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak of crimson and a
sword: for the thorn is the sword of the rose.

And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have to remember
that civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps to grow more
fighting--but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable and
reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more vivid should be our
ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence. And when I walk
round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad lords at
the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed, caught at
roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For to me any
such garden is full of the wars of the roses.




The Gold of Glastonbury

One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury; and
saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open air
as casually as any bush in my garden.

In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of the
strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs St.
Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks of the
first century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond the
Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale that
Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But
it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many
modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite
comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago,
or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as
little, localized and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk,
astricti globis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast
routes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recent
and scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it
is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists
tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan
civilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite as
incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ had not
many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some.
And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a
yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with
the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;
which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few
Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone.
I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely
appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to
prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians;
it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of
people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some
great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself
might be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modern
world would be surprised if one of his closest followers were a
Professor from Heidelberg or an M.A. from Oxford.

All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale of
the thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth. It is
urged with the much more important object of pointing out the proper
attitude towards such myths.. The proper attitude is one of doubt
and hope and of a kind of light mystery. The tale is certainly not
impossible; as it is certainly not certain. And through all the ages
since the Roman Empire men have fed their healthy fancies and their
historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales.
But to-day real agnosticism has declined along with real theology.
People cannot leave a creed alone; though it is the essence of a creed
to be clear. But neither can they leave a legend alone; though it is
the essence of a legend to be vague. That sane half scepticism which was
found in all rustics, in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be
a lost secret. Modern people must make scientifically certain that St.
Joseph did or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is
now quite impossible to find out; and that it does not, in a religious
sense, very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may have
gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications branching and
blossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. Taken
thus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale, the thing
does lead one along the road of very strange realities, and the thorn is
found growing in the heart of a very secret maze of the soul. Something
is really present in the place; some closer contact with the thing which
covers Europe but is still a secret. Somehow the grey town and the green
bush touch across the world the strange small country of the garden and
the grave; there is verily some communion between the thorn tree and the
crown of thorns.

A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral and
impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a common
panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers of the
cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. But down in
a hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation, a
magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe (whom I believe to have been St.
Joseph of Arimathea) showed me a fragment of the old vaulted roof which
he had found in the earth; and on the whitish grey stone there was just
a faint brush of gold. There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, an
unexpected fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare
survival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. To the
strong shapes of the Roman and the Gothic I had grown accustomed; but
that weak touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender, like some
popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were men like me;
for the columns and arches were grave, and told of the gravity of the
builders; but here was one touch of their gaiety. I almost expected it
to fade from the stone as I stared. It was as if men had been able to
preserve a fragment of a sunset.

And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised the
grave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and abbey
towers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins in the
sombre tones of dim grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered how they
hated almost all primary things, but especially primary colours. I knew
they were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I the sublime
skeleton and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury. But I stood
for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay with gold and
coloured like the toy-book of a child.




The Futurists

It was a warm golden evening, fit for October, and I was watching (with
regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden, when
the postman handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtless
masked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what
Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem a
little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out.
But if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer eagerly; for I
can tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an Italian
named Marinetti, in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed
"Declaration of Futurism" in enormous letters; it is divided off with
little numbers; and it starts straight away like this: "1. We intend to
glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strengt of daring.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and
revolt. 3. Literature having up to now glorified thoughtful immobility,
ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the
feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow."
While I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it scarcely
seems such an entirely new subject for literature as the Futurists
imagine. It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills the
Siege of Troy, the Song of Roland, and the Orlando Furioso, and in spite
of the thoughtful immobility which marks "Pantagruel," "Henry V," and
the Ballad of Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an admiration
for courage, a readiness to glorify the love of danger, and even the
"strengt of daring," I seem to remember, slightly differently spelt,
somewhere in literature.

The distinction, however, seems to be that the warriors of the past went
in for tournaments, which were at least dangerous for themselves, while
the Futurists go in for motor-cars, which are mainly alarming for
other people. It is the Futurist in his motor who does the "aggressive
movement," but it is the pedestrians who go in for the "running" and the
"perilous leap." Section No. 4 says, "We declare that the splendour of
the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of
speed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents
with explosive breath.... A race-automobile which seems to rush over
exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." It
is also much easier, if you have the money. It is quite clear, however,
that you cannot be a Futurist at all unless you are frightfully rich.
Then follows this lucid and soul-stirring sentence: "5. We will sing
the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering-post
traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own
orbit." What a jolly song it would be--so hearty, and with such a simple
swing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in a tavern
trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain;
shouting over their swaying flagons some such words as these:

  A notion came into my head as new as it was bright
  That poems might be written on the subject of a fight;
  No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett,
  But we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal
steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of
its own orbit.

Then lest it should be supposed that Futurism would be so weak as to
permit any democratic restraints upon the violence and levity of the
luxurious classes, there would be a special verse in honour of the
motors also:

  My fathers scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far,
  But I feel full of energy while sitting in a car;
  And petrol is the perfect wine, I lick it and absorb it,
  So we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal
steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of
its own orbit.

Yes, it would be a rollicking catch. I wish there were space to finish
the song, or to detail all the other sections in the Declaration.
Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of
Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because, however
unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled, they are
always united in the feeble hatred of such silly megalomaniacs as these.
They will "glorify war--the only true hygiene of the world--militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas
which kill, and the scorn of woman." They will "destroy museums,
libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian
cowardice." The proclamation ends with an extraordinary passage which I
cannot understand at all, all about something that is going to happen to
Mr. Marinetti when he is forty. As far as I can make out he will then be
killed by other poets, who will be overwhelmed with love and admiration
for him. "They will come against us from far away, from everywhere,
leaping on the cadence of their first poems, clawing the air with
crooked fingers and scenting at the Academy gates the good smell of our
decaying minds." Well, it is satisfactory to be told, however obscurely,
that this sort of thing is coming to an end some day, to be replaced by
some other tomfoolery. And though I commonly refrain from clawing the
air with crooked fingers, I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this omission
does not disqualify me, and that I scent the good smell of his decaying
mind all right.

I think the only other point of Futurism is contained in this sentence:
"It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory
Declaration, with which to-day we found Futurism, for we will free Italy
from her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries."
I think that rather sums it up. The best way, one would think, of
freeing oneself from a museum would be not to go there. Mr. Marinetti's
fathers and grandfathers freed Italy from prisons and torture chambers,
places where people were held by force. They, being in the bondage of
"moralism," attacked Governments as unjust, real Governments, with
real guns. Such was their utilitarian cowardice that they would die
in hundreds upon the bayonets of Austria. I can well imagine why Mr.
Marinetti in his motor-car does not wish to look back at the past. If
there was one thing that could make him look smaller even than before it
is that roll of dead men's drums and that dream of Garibaldi going by.
The old Radical ghosts go by, more real than the living men, to assault
I know not what ramparted city in hell. And meanwhile the Futurist
stands outside a museum in a warlike attitude, and defiantly tells the
official at the turnstile that he will never, never come in.

There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rush
in where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devils
intend to do. Some perversion of folly will float about nameless
and pervade a whole society; then some lunatic gives it a name, and
henceforth it is harmless. With all really evil things, when the
danger has appeared the danger is over. Now it may be hoped that the
self-indulgent sprawlers of Poesia have put a name once and for all to
their philosophy. In the case of their philosophy, to put a name to it
is to put an end to it. Yet their philosophy has been very widespread in
our time; it could hardly have been pointed and finished except by this
perfect folly. The creed of which (please God) this is the flower
and finish consists ultimately in this statement: that it is bold
and spirited to appeal to the future. Now, it is entirely weak and
half-witted to appeal to the future. A brave man ought to ask for what
he wants, not for what he expects to get. A brave man who wants Atheism
in the future calls himself an Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism,
a Socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, a Catholic. But a
weak-minded man who does not know what he wants in the future calls
himself a Futurist.

They have driven all the pigs away. Oh that they had driven away the
prigs, and left the pigs! The sky begins to droop with darkness and all
birds and blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy underworld
where things slumber and grow. There was just one true phrase of Mr.
Marinetti's about himself: "the feverish insomnia." The whole universe
is pouring headlong to the happiness of the night. It is only the madman
who has not the courage to sleep.




Dukes

The Duc de Chambertin-Pommard was a small but lively relic of a really
aristocratic family, the members of which were nearly all Atheists up to
the time of the French Revolution, but since that event (beneficial
in such various ways) had been very devout. He was a Royalist, a
Nationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot in that particular style
which consists of ceaselessly asserting that one's country is not so
much in danger as already destroyed. He wrote cheery little articles for
the Royalist Press entitled "The End of France" or "The Last Cry,"
or what not, and he gave the final touches to a picture of the Kaiser
riding across a pavement of prostrate Parisians with a glow of patriotic
exultation. He was quite poor, and even his relations had no money. He
walked briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe, and he looked
just like everybody else.

Living in a country where aristocracy does not exist, he had a high
opinion of it. He would yearn for the swords and the stately manners of
the Pommards before the Revolution--most of whom had been (in theory)
Republicans. But he turned with a more practical eagerness to the one
country in Europe where the tricolour has never flown and men have never
been roughly equalized before the State. The beacon and comfort of
his life was England, which all Europe sees clearly as the one pure
aristocracy that remains. He had, moreover, a mild taste for sport and
kept an English bulldog, and he believed the English to be a race of
bulldogs, of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he read
all this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted little
Levantine clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part in the
French Conservative papers (though he knew English well), and it was in
these that he first heard of the horrible Budget. There he read of the
confiscatory revolution planned by the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer,
the sinister Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur
Balfour of Burleigh had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen the
Lord Chamberlain and the gay and witty Walter Lang. And being a brisk
partisan and a capable journalist, he decided to pay England a special
visit and report to his paper upon the struggle.

He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods, with a
letter of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was to introduce
him to another duke. The endless and numberless avenues of bewildering
pine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving through the
countless corridors of a dream. Yet the vast silence and freshness
healed his irritation at modern ugliness and unrest. It seemed a
background fit for the return of chivalry. In such a forest a king and
all his court might lose themselves hunting or a knight errant might
perish with no companion but God. The castle itself when he reached it
was somewhat smaller than he had expected, but he was delighted with
its romantic and castellated outline. He was just about to alight when
somebody opened two enormous gates at the side and the vehicle drove
briskly through.

"That is not the house?" he inquired politely of the driver.

"No, sir," said the driver, controlling the corners of his mouth. "The
lodge, sir."

"Indeed," said the Duc de Chambertin-Pommard, "that is where the Duke's
land begins?"

"Oh no, sir," said the man, quite in distress. "We've been in his
Grace's land all day."

The Frenchman thanked him and leant back in the carriage, feeling as if
everything were incredibly huge and vast, like Gulliver in the country
of the Brobdingnags.

He got out in front of a long facade of a somewhat severe building, and
a little careless man in a shooting jacket and knickerbockers ran down
the steps. He had a weak, fair moustache and dull, blue, babyish eyes;
his features were insignificant, but his manner extremely pleasant
and hospitable, This was the Duke of Aylesbury, perhaps the largest
landowner in Europe, and known only as a horsebreeder until he began
to write abrupt little letters about the Budget. He led the French Duke
upstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way, and there presented
him to another and more important English oligarch, who got up from a
writing-desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald head
and glasses; the lower part of his face was masked with a short,
dark beard, which did not conceal a beaming smile, not unmixed with
sharpness. He stooped a little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerk
or cashier; and even without the cheque-book and papers on his desk
would have given the impression of a merchant or man of business. He was
dressed in a light grey check jacket. He was the Duke of Windsor, the
great Unionist statesman. Between these two loose, amiable men, the
little Gaul stood erect in his black frock coat, with the monstrous
gravity of French ceremonial good manners. This stiffness led the Duke
of Windsor to put him at his ease (like a tenant), and he said, rubbing
his hands:

"I was delighted with your letter... delighted. I shall be very pleased
if I can give you--er--any details."

"My visit," said the Frenchman, "scarcely suffices for the scientific
exhaustion of detail. I seek only the idea. The idea, that is always the
immediate thing."

"Quite so," said the other rapidly; "quite so... the idea."

Feeling somehow that it was his turn (the English Duke having done all
that could be required of him) Pommard had to say: "I mean the idea
of aristocracy. I regard this as the last great battle for the idea.
Aristocracy, like any other thing, must justify itself to mankind.
Aristocracy is good because it preserves a picture of human dignity in
a world where that dignity is often obscured by servile necessities.
Aristocracy alone can keep a certain high reticence of soul and body, a
certain noble distance between the sexes."

The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded recollection of having squirted
soda-water down the neck of a Countess on the previous evening, looked
somewhat gloomy, as if lamenting the theoretic spirit of the Latin race.
The elder Duke laughed heartily, and said: "Well, well, you know; we
English are horribly practical. With us the great question is the land.
Out here in the country ... do you know this part?"

"Yes, yes," cried the Frenchmen eagerly. "I See what you mean. The
country! the old rustic life of humanity! A holy war upon the bloated
and filthy towns. What right have these anarchists to attack your
busy and prosperous countrysides? Have they not thriven under your
management? Are not the English villages always growing larger and gayer
under the enthusiastic leadership of their encouraging squires? Have you
not the Maypole? Have you not Merry England?"

The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his throat, and then said very
indistinctly: "They all go to London."

"All go to London?" repeated Pommard, with a blank stare. "Why?"

This time nobody answered, and Pommard had to attack again.

"The spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed of the
industrial cities. Yet in France there are actually one or two nobles so
vile as to drive coal and gas trades, and drive them hard." The Duke of
Windsor looked at the carpet. The Duke of Aylesbury went and looked
out of the window. At length the latter said: "That's rather stiff, you
know. One has to look after one's own business in town as well."

"Do not say it," cried the little Frenchman, starting up. "I tell you
all Europe is one fight between business and honour. If we do not fight
for honour, who will? What other right have we poor two-legged sinners
to titles and quartered shields except that we staggeringly support some
idea of giving things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things which
cannot be punished? Our only claim is to be a wall across Christendom
against the Jew pedlars and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and
the--"

The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets.

"Oh, I say," he said, "you've been readin' Lloyd George. Nobody but
dirty Radicals can say a word against Goldstein."

"I certainly cannot permit," said the elder Duke, rising rather shakily,
"the respected name of Lord Goldstein--"

He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman's
eye that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel which
is the mind of France.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I think I have all the details now. You have
ruled England for four hundred years. By your own account you have not
made the countryside endurable to men. By your own account you have
helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke. And by your own account you
are hand and glove with those very money-grubbers and adventurers whom
gentlemen have no other business but to keep at bay. I do not know what
your people will do; but my people would kill you."

Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke's house, and some hours
afterwards the Duke's estate.




The Glory of Grey

I suppose that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not call it
an appropriate time for praising the English climate. But for my part I
will praise the English climate till I die--even if I die of the English
climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real
sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you
have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds;
in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America
you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes
varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal
scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair. Only in our own
romantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called Weather;
beautiful and changing as a woman. The great English landscape painters
(neglected now like everything that is English) have this salient
distinction: that the Weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures;
it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the
Weather. The Weather sat to Constable. The Weather posed for Turner, and
a deuce of a pose it was. This cannot truly be said of the greatest of
their continental models or rivals. Poussin and Claude painted objects,
ancient cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium
of the climate. But in the English painters Weather is the hero; with
Turner an Adelphi hero, taunting, flashing and fighting, melodramatic
but really magnificent. The English climate, a tall and terrible
protagonist, robed in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight, fills the
whole canvas and the whole foreground. I admit the superiority of many
other French things besides French art. But I will not yield an inch on
the superiority of English weather and weather-painting. Why, the French
have not even got a word for Weather: and you must ask for the weather
in French as if you were asking for the time in English.

Then, again, variety of climate should always go with stability of
abode. The weather in the desert is monotonous; and as a natural
consequence the Arabs wander about, hoping it may be different
somewhere. But an Englishman's house is not only his castle; it is
his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are
perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to
ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which
is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five
days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a
faint and fiery evening cloud. The same principle (by the way) applies
to the difficult problem of wives. Variability is one of the virtues
of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you
have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of
calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a
very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of
speech about "one grey day just like another" You might as well talk
about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a
canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that.
But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and
shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and
another grey like dove's plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly
frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. No
things could seem further apart than the doubt of grey and the decision
of scarlet. Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morning
clouds: and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the
little towns in the west country. In those towns even the houses that
are wholly grey have a glow in them; as if their secret firesides were
such furnaces of hospitality as faintly to transfuse the walls like
walls of cloud. And wandering in those westland parts I did once really
find a sign-post pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that was
called Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that either the town
would not be good enough for the name, or I should not be good enough
for the town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone have
a geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the
suburbs; as if it were better to warm one's hands at the ashes of
Glastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon.

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men)
are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in grey
weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of
heaven and earth. Here again there are two words to be said; and it is
essential to distinguish. It is true that sun is needed to burnish and
bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat,
pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey and
blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock,
chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades of
these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often
clings to them. But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if you
choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house
sky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a
crimson frock-coat, you will not only be visible on the greyest day,
but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certain
singular effect. You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look
more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre
background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against
a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange
about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the
phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the
high light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blue
flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the
red daisies are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is
the vice-regent of the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless;
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of
existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and
promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to
some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or
bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the
indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather
in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind
us of the morning.




The Anarchist

I have now lived for about two months in the country, and have gathered
the last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desire
to see London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously of
the rolling liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods. But
I say to them (with a slight Buckinghamshire accent), "Ah, that is how
Cockneys feel. For us real old country people the country is reality; it
is the town that is romance. Nature is as plain as one of her pigs,
as commonplace, as comic, and as healthy. But civilization is full of
poetry, even if it be sometimes an evil poetry. The streets of London
are paved with gold; that is, with the very poetry of avarice." With
these typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on a
stick, with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest Inhabitant; while
in my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot. Exchanging
heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach the station,
where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives. Such a
journey, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, did I successfully
perform only a few days ago; and alone and helpless in the capital,
found myself in the tangle of roads around the Marble Arch.

A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated
my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner
of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London
as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim. The
Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic turning
dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could be
wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people going everywhere
except under it? If I took down my front door and stood it up all by
itself in the middle of my back garden, my village neighbours (in their
simplicity) would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is now precisely
that; an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one can
enter. By the new arrangement its last weak pretence to be a gate has
been taken away. The cabman still cannot drive through it, but he can
have the delights of riding round it, and even (on foggy nights) the
rapture of running into it. It has been raised from the rank of a
fiction to the dignity of an obstacle.

As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what is
strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern as
well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when a
watery sky changes to pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal.
The trees stood up grey and angular, as if in attitudes of agony; and
here and there on benches under the trees sat men as grey and angular
as they. It was cold even for me, who had eaten a large breakfast and
purposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the men
under the trees. And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmer
whites and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantially
as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock
the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real--like the
mockery.

No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions;
but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions. The bigot
is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. The
bigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feel
how it is that other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men
might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men under
the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have been
erroneous--but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in the
picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotence
on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social
machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine; and
we have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless: and it does lift
those rich men high... and such men--good Lord! By the time I flung
myself on a bench beside another man I was half inclined to try anarchy
for a change.

The other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men on such
seats; still, he was not what one calls a gentleman, and had probably
worked at some time like a human being. He was a small, sharp-faced man,
with grave, staring eyes, and a beard somewhat foreign. His clothes
were black; respectable and yet casual; those of a man who dressed
conventionally because it was a bore to dress unconventionally--as it
is. Attracted by this and other things, and wanting an outburst for my
bitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech, first about the
cold, and then about the General Election. To this the respectable man
replied:

"Well, I don't belong to any party myself. I'm an Anarchist."

I looked up and almost expected fire from heaven. This coincidence was
like the end of the world. I had sat down feeling that somehow or other
Park-lane must be pulled down; and I had sat down beside the man who
wanted to pull it down. I bowed in silence for an instant under the
approaching apocalypse; and in that instant the man turned sharply and
started talking like a torrent.

"Understand me," he said. "Ordinary people think an Anarchist means a
man with a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist. But
for that fatal admission of his on page 793, he would be a complete
Anarchist. Otherwise, he agrees wholly with Pidge."

This was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification as to
be a better test of teetotalism than the Scotch one of saying "Biblical
criticism" six times. I attempted to speak, but he began again with the
same rippling rapidity.

"You will say that Pidge also admits government in that tenth chapter
so easily misunderstood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines. But
Bolger has no scientific training. Bolger is a psychometrist, but no
sociologist. To any one who has combined a study of Pidge with the
earlier and better discoveries of Kruxy, the fallacy is quite clear.
Bolger confounds social coercion with coercional social action."

His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly, and he looked
steadily and triumphantly at me, with his head on one side. I opened my
mouth, and the mere motion seemed to sting him to fresh verbal leaps.

"Yes," he said, "that's all very well. The Finland Group has accepted
Bolger. But," he said, suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop me,
"but--Pidge has replied. His pamphlet is published. He has proved that
Potential Social Rebuke is not a weapon of the true Anarchist. He has
shown that just as religious authority and political authority have
gone, so must emotional authority and psychological authority. He has
shown--"

I stood up in a sort of daze. "I think you remarked," I said
feebly, "that the mere common populace do not quite understand
Anarchism"--"Quite so," he said with burning swiftness; "as I said, they
think any Anarchist is a man with a bomb, whereas--"

"But great heavens, man!" I said; "it's the man with the bomb that
I understand! I wish you had half his sense. What do I care how many
German dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began? My
only interest is about how soon it will end. Do you see those fat white
houses over in Park-lane, where your masters live?"

He assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital.

"Well," I said, "if the time ever comes when we all storm those
houses, will you tell me one thing? Tell me how we shall do it
without authority? Tell me how you will have an army of revolt without
discipline?"

For the first instant he was doubtful; and I had bidden him farewell,
and crossed the street again, when I saw him open his mouth and begin to
run after me. He had remembered something out of Pidge.

I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an omnibus I saw again the
enormous emblem of the Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of the
modern mind: a door with no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere.




How I found the Superman

Readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be interested
to know that the Superman has been found. I found him; he lives in
South Croydon. My success will be a great blow to Mr. Shaw, who has been
following quite a false scent, and is now looking for the creature in
Blackpool; and as for Mr. Wells's notion of generating him out of gases
in a private laboratory, I always thought it doomed to failure. I assure
Mr. Wells that the Superman at Croydon was born in the ordinary way,
though he himself, of course, is anything but ordinary.

Nor are his parents unworthy of the wonderful being whom they have given
to the world. The name of Lady Hypatia Smythe-Browne (now Lady Hypatia
Hagg) will never be forgotten in the East End, where she did such
splendid social work. Her constant cry of "Save the children!" referred
to the cruel neglect of children's eyesight involved in allowing them
to play with crudely painted toys. She quoted unanswerable statistics
to prove that children allowed to look at violet and vermilion often
suffered from failing eyesight in their extreme old age; and it
was owing to her ceaseless crusade that the pestilence of the
Monkey-on-the-Stick was almost swept from Hoxton. The devoted worker
would tramp the streets untiringly, taking away the toys from all the
poor children, who were often moved to tears by her kindness. Her
good work was interrupted, partly by a new interest in the creed
of Zoroaster, and partly by a savage blow from an umbrella. It was
inflicted by a dissolute Irish apple-woman, who, on returning from some
orgy to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom taking
down an oleograph, which, to say the least of it, could not really
elevate the mind. At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealt
the social reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation of
theft. The lady's exquisitely balanced mind received a shock, and it was
during a short mental illness that she married Dr. Hagg.

Of Dr. Hagg himself I hope there is no need to speak. Any one even
slightly acquainted with those daring experiments in Neo-Individualist
Eugenics, which are now the one absorbing interest of the English
democracy, must know his name and often commend it to the personal
protection of an impersonal power. Early in life he brought to bear that
ruthless insight into the history of religions which he had gained in
boyhood as an electrical engineer. Later he became one of our greatest
geologists; and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the future of
Socialism which only geology can give. At first there seemed something
like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views and
those of his aristocratic wife. For she was in favour (to use her own
powerful epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while he
declared pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest
must go to the wall. Eventually, however, the married pair perceived
an essential union in the unmistakably modern character of both their
views, and in this enlightening and intelligible formula their souls
found peace. The result is that this union of the two highest types of
our civilization, the fashionable lady and the all but vulgar medical
man, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman, that being whom all
the labourers in Battersea are so eagerly expecting night and day.

I found the house of Dr. and Lady Hypatia Hagg without much difficulty;
it is situated in one of the last straggling streets of Croydon,
and overlooked by a line of poplars. I reached the door towards the
twilight, and it was natural that I should fancifully see something dark
and monstrous in the dim bulk of that house which contained the creature
who was more marvellous than the children of men. When I entered the
house I was received with exquisite courtesy by Lady Hypatia and her
husband; but I found much greater difficulty in actually seeing the
Superman, who is now about fifteen years old, and is kept by himself in
a quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and mother did not
quite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia,
who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable and
pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes in
Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgar
vanity of an ordinary human mother. I took a bold step and asked if the
Superman was nice looking.

"He creates his own standard, you see," she replied, with a slight sigh.
"Upon that plane he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower plane, of
course--" And she sighed again.

I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, "Has he got any hair?"

There was a long and painful silence, and then Dr. Hagg said smoothly:
"Everything upon that plane is different; what he has got is not...
well, not, of course, what we call hair... but--"

"Don't you think," said his wife, very softly, "don't you think that
really, for the sake of argument, when talking to the mere public, one
might call it hair?"

"Perhaps you are right," said the doctor after a few moments'
reflection. "In connexion with hair like that one must speak in
parables."

"Well, what on earth is it," I asked in some irritation, "if it isn't
hair? Is it feathers?"

"Not feathers, as we understand feathers," answered Hagg in an awful
voice.

I got up in some irritation. "Can I see him, at any rate?" I asked.
"I am a journalist, and have no earthly motives except curiosity and
personal vanity. I should like to say that I had shaken hands with the
Superman."

The husband and wife had both got heavily to their feet, and stood,
embarrassed. "Well, of course, you know," said Lady Hypatia, with the
really charming smile of the aristocratic hostess. "You know he can't
exactly shake hands... not hands, you know.... The structure, of
course--"

I broke out of all social bounds, and rushed at the door of the room
which I thought to contain the incredible creature. I burst it open; the
room was pitch dark. But from in front of me came a small sad yelp, and
from behind me a double shriek.

"You have done it, now!" cried Dr. Hagg, burying his bald brow in his
hands. "You have let in a draught on him; and he is dead."

As I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carrying
out a coffin that was not of any human shape. The wind wailed above me,
whirling the poplars, so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes of
some cosmic funeral. "It is, indeed," said Dr. Hagg, "the whole universe
weeping over the frustration of its most magnificent birth." But I
thought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail of the wind.




The New House

Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I am
glad they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's throw;
quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not
yet cast the first stone at the new house--not being, strictly speaking,
guiltless myself in the matter of new houses. And, indeed, in such
cases there is a strong protest to be made. The whole curse of the last
century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is the
idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a
shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity
of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is
dead that he swings. But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one
often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on
inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another
madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they
have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried
Individualism and found it particularly nasty. Thus, many embrace
Christian Science solely because they are quite sick of heathen science;
they are so tired of believing that everything is matter that they will
even take refuge in the revolting fable that everything is mind. Man
ought to march somewhere. But modern man (in his sick reaction) is ready
to march nowhere--so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere.

The case of building houses is a strong instance of this. Early in
the nineteenth century our civilization chose to abandon the Greek and
medieval idea of a town, with walls, limited and defined, with a temple
for faith and a market-place for politics; and it chose to let the city
grow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness; so
that London and Liverpool are the great cities we now see. Well, people
have reacted against that; they have grown tired of living in a city
which is as dark and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful, and
there has been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it,
and some I could name who can't. Now, as soon as this quite rational
recoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme. People went
about with beaming faces, boasting that they were twenty-three miles
from a station. Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed in rollicking
asides that their butcher only called once a month, and that their baker
started out with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale before they
reached the table. A man would praise his little house in a quiet
valley, but gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the head) that a
human habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible on
a clear day. Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most
completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous
heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which
the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked.

In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase that
this or that part of England is being "built over." Now, there is not
the slightest objection, in itself, to England being built over by men,
any more than there is to its being (as it is already) built over by
birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders. But if birds' nests were so thick
on a tree that one could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all,
I should say that bird civilization was becoming a bit decadent. If
whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfare
one crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I should feel
a distress verging on distaste. If one were at every turn crowded,
elbowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack-rented, swindled,
and sold up by avaricious and arrogant squirrels, one might at last
remonstrate. But the great towns have grown intolerable solely because
of such suffocating vulgarities and tyrannies. It is not humanity that
disgusts us in the huge cities; it is inhumanity. It is not that there
are human beings; but that they are not treated as such. We do not, I
hope, dislike men and women; we only dislike their being made into a
sort of jam: crushed together so that they are not merely powerless but
shapeless. It is not the presence of people that makes London appalling.
It is merely the absence of The People.

Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being
built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human
intervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not
myself built over, like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of a
temple, or an American clerk in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I am
delighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which
I am not only attracted by a strange affection, but to which also (by a
touching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiring
deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay
in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every
Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not in
the desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting of
them all right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest human
house to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness.
But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see;
that is my objection to the modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do not
want him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through a
telescope, nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of him
with a microscope. I want him within a stone's throw of me; so that
whenever it is really necessary, I may throw the stone.

Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. Perhaps, after all, it may be
a bouquet, or a snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf; perhaps
they will ask for a stone and I shall give them bread. But it is
essential that they should be within reach: how can I love my neighbour
as myself if he gets out of range for snowballs? There should be no
institution out of the reach of an indignant or admiring humanity. I
could hit the nearest house quite well with the catapult; but the
truth is that the catapult belongs to a little boy I know, and, with
characteristic youthful 'selfishness, he has taken it away.




The Wings of Stone

The preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my private horizon;
I wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as, though it was a week
ago, I have scarcely moved since then (to speak of), I do not see why
I should not go on writing about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; I
have even walked across a field--a field of turf all fiery in our early
summer sunlight--and studied the early angular red skeleton which has
turned golden in the sun. It is odd that the skeleton of a house is
cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see it
after the man is destroyed. At least, we think the skeleton is mournful;
the skeleton himself does not seem to think so. Anyhow, there is
something strangely primary and poetic about this sight of the
scaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there is
no scaffolding round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life as
the daring and ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those open
staircases and empty chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls of
sky. Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock one
wall out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I find the drawing-room
even more impressive when all four walls are knocked out.

I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame; it
seems to me one of the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to see
how high and harsh and fantastic an adventure it is, consider only the
actual structure of a house itself. A man may march up in a rather bored
way to bed; but at least he is mounting to a height from which he could
kill himself. Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters of
oak, stair-rods of brass, and busts and settees on every landing, every
such staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into
the Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire who stumps up inside
the house is really doing the same thing as the tiler or roof-mender who
climbs up outside the house; they are both mounting up into the void.
They are both making an escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sort
of domestic mountaineer; he is reaching a point from which mere idle
falling will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feel
that they may die.

I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flying
ships and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramids
have done something so much more wild than flying. A grasshopper can go
astonishingly high up in the air, his biological limitation and weakness
is that he cannot stop there. Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous
insects can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass any communication
between it and the earth. But the army of man has advanced vertically
into infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in the
ether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road. It would
be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; but
would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon? Yet every
building of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimney
points to some star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising on
these awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and
more mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and
sticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of
these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a
black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by
reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many
a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look
forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose
nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that the
word "giddy" is used to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a high
compliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to say he
is a little giddy.

I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset, a field
of the cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house, its huge size began
to horrify me; and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with an
incredulity as strong as despair that my house was actually bigger than
myself. A minute or two before there might well have seemed to be a
monstrous and mythical competition about which of the two should swallow
the other. But I was Jonah; my house was the huge and hungry fish; and
even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had again this dreadful
fancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man. I climbed the
stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if ascending
a glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved my
hat. The very word "landing" has about it the wild sound of some one
washed up by the sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked sky.
The walls all round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up the
ladder to my bedroom as Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows; sic
itur ad astro. Do you think this is a little fantastic--even a little
fearful and nervous? Believe me, it is only one of the wild and
wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.




The Three Kinds of Men

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The
first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the
most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on,
the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come
to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second
class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance
to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind.
The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes
described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a
desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the
classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good
people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But
the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not
offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of
earnest reflection and research.

The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride,
attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which
are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming, or that
twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a
fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple.
The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent
of being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest, mingled of
a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of
twilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of
sweethearts, is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely
balanced between pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure
tempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a
man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means
many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in
experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really very
subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly. In fact, it does
not express them at all, except on those occasions (now only too rare)
when it indulges in insurrection and massacre.

Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence
of Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can so
express them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate things
that they really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement of the rabble.
Where the common man covers the queerest emotions by saying, "Rum
little kid," Victor Hugo will write "L'art d'etre grand-pere"; where the
stockbroker will only say abruptly, "Evenings closing in now," Mr.
Yeats will write "Into the twilight"; where the navvy can only mutter
something about pluck and being "precious game," Homer will show you the
hero in rags in his own hall defying the princes at their banquet. The
Poets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch;
but let it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments
that they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that
childhood was shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a
man was contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three.
The people who maintain this are the Professors, or Prigs.

The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them. Of
course, most of the Poets wrote in prose--Rabelais, for instance, and
Dickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them:
by saying that all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and
superstitions. The Prigs make the people feel stupid; the Poets make the
people feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were. There
are many weird elements in this situation. The oddest of all perhaps is
the fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets who embrace
and admire the people are often pelted with stones and crucified. The
Prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowned. In
the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of prigs,
but comparatively few poets. There are no People there at all.

By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, or
indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as, having culture
and imagination, use them to understand and share the feelings of their
fellows; as against those who use them to rise to what they call a
higher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility;
the professor differs from the mob by his insensibility. He has not
sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob.
His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in
accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that,
whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets that
ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence.

Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the
contention. Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly
upon a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for the
populace, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be tall and
stout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering. But for all
that, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea. She is a very subtle idea.
The problem is not that she is big and arrogant; she is frequently
little and quite extraordinarily nice. The problem of the mother-in-law
is that she is like the twilight: half one thing and half another. Now,
this twilight truth, this fine and even tender embarrassment, might be
rendered, as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to
be some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith,
or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose "Ann Veronica" I have just been reading with
delight. I would trust the fine poets and novelists because they follow
the fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts. But suppose the Professor
appears, and suppose he says (as he almost certainly will), "A
mother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen. Considerations of sex should
not interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not influence
the intellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another Mind. We should free
ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees." Now, when the
Professor says this (as he always does), I say to him, "Sir, you are
coarser than Comic Cuts. You are more vulgar and blundering than the
most elephantine music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than
the mob. These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social
shade and real mental distinction, though they can only express it
clumsily. You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all. If
you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride have
any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither polite nor
humane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep and doubtful hearts of
human folk." It is better even to put the difficulty as the vulgar put
it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether.

The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb
that two is company and three is none. This proverb is the truth put
popularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untrue
that three is no company. Three is splendid company: three is the ideal
number for pure comradeship: as in the Three Musketeers. But if you
reject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are the
same sort of company; if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss
between two and three than between three and three million--then I
regret to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;
that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be
alone in a howling desert till you die.




The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds

The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I climbed up upon
one of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead seem
to look down upon all the living. It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus
was a mountain of gods. In that church lay the bones of great Puritan
lords, of a time when most of the power of England was Puritan, even of
the Established Church. And below these uplifted bones lay the huge
and hollow valleys of the English countryside, where the motors went by
every now and then like meteors, where stood out in white squares and
oblongs in the chequered forest many of the country seats even of
those same families now dulled with wealth or decayed with Toryism. And
looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow evening, a
lovely and austere thought came into my mind, a thought as beautiful as
the green wood and as grave as the tombs. The thought was this: that
I should like to go into Parliament, quarrel with my party, accept the
Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it up.

We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that
I fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told about the
Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in case there should be here or
there one happy man who has never heard of such twisted tomfooleries,
I will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is. As it is quite a
voluntary, sometimes even an eager, affair to get into Parliament, you
would naturally suppose that it would be also a voluntary matter to get
out again. You would think your fellow-members would be indifferent, or
even relieved to see you go; especially as (by another exercise of the
shrewd, illogical old English common sense) they have carefully built
the room too small for the people who have to sit in it. But not so,
my pippins, as it says in the "Iliad." If you are merely a member of
Parliament (Lord knows why) you can't resign. But if you are a Minister
of the Crown (Lord knows why) you can. It is necessary to get into the
Ministry in order to get out of the House; and they have to give you
some office that doesn't exist or that nobody else wants and thus
unlock the door. So you go to the Prime Minister, concealing your air of
fatigue, and say, "It has been the ambition of my life to be Steward of
the Chiltern Hundreds." The Prime Minister then replies, "I can imagine
no man more fitted both morally and mentally for that high office." He
then gives it you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting how the republics
of the Continent reel anarchically to and fro for lack of a little solid
English directness and simplicity.

Now, the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I sat on the
Chiltern slope was that I would like to get the Prime Minister to give
me the Chiltern Hundreds, and then startle and disturb him by showing
the utmost interest in my work. I should profess a general knowledge of
my duties, but wish to be instructed in the details. I should ask to see
the Under-Steward and the Under-Under-Steward, and all the fine staff
of experienced permanent officials who are the glory of this department.
And, indeed, my enthusiasm would not be wholly unreal. For as far as I
can recollect the original duties of a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds
were to put down the outlaws and brigands in that part of the world.
Well, there are a great many outlaws and brigands in that part of the
world still, and though their methods have so largely altered as to
require a corresponding alteration in the tactics of the Steward, I do
not see why an energetic and public-spirited Steward should not nab them
yet.

For the robbers have not vanished from the old high forests to the west
of the great city. The thieves have not vanished; they have grown so
large that they are invisible. You do not see the word "Asia" written
across a map of that neighbourhood; nor do you see the word "Thief"
written across the countrysides of England; though it is really written
in equally large letters. I know men governing despotically great
stretches of that country, whose every step in life has been such that a
slip would have sent them to Dartmoor; but they trod along the high
hard wall between right and wrong, the wall as sharp as a swordedge, as
softly and craftily and lightly as a cat. The vastness of their silent
violence itself obscured what they were at; if they seem to stand for
the rights of property it is really because they have so often invaded
them. And if they do not break the laws, it is only because they make
them.

But after all we only need a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds who really
understands cats and thieves. Men hunt one animal differently from
another; and the rich could catch swindlers as dexterously as they catch
otters or antlered deer if they were really at all keen upon doing it.
But then they never have an uncle with antlers; nor a personal friend
who is an otter. When some of the great lords that lie in the churchyard
behind me went out against their foes in those deep woods beneath I
wager that they had bows against the bows of the outlaws, and spears
against the spears of the robber knights. They knew what they were
about; they fought the evildoers of their age with the weapons of
their age. If the same common sense were applied to commercial law, in
forty-eight hours it would be all over with the American Trusts and
the African forward finance. But it will not be done: for the governing
class either does not care, or cares very much, for the criminals,
and as for me, I had a delusive opportunity of being Constable of
Beaconsfield (with grossly inadequate powers), but I fear I shall never
really be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds.




The Field of Blood

In my daily paper this morning I read the following interesting
paragraphs, which take my mind back to an England which I do not
remember and which, therefore (perhaps), I admire.

"Nearly sixty years ago--on 4 September, 1850--the Austrian General
Haynau, who had gained an unenviable fame throughout the world by his
ferocious methods in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849, while
on a visit to this country, was belaboured in the streets of London by
the draymen of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins and Co., whose brewery he had
just inspected in company of an adjutant. Popular delight was so
great that the Government of the time did not dare to prosecute the
assailants, and the General--the 'women-flogger,' as he was called by
the people--had to leave these shores without remedy.

"He returned to his own country and settled upon his estate at Szekeres,
which is close to the commune above-mentioned. By his will the estate
passed to his daughter, after whose death it was to be presented to the
commune. This daughter has just died, but the Communal Council, after
much deliberation, has declined to accept the gift, and ordered that
the estate should be left to fall out of cultivation, and be called the
'Bloody Meadow.'"

Now that is an example of how things happen under an honest democratical
impulse. I do not dwell specially on the earlier part of the story,
though the earlier part of the story is astonishingly interesting.
It recalls the days when Englishmen were potential lighters; that is,
potential rebels. It is not for lack of agonies of intellectual anger:
the Sultan and the late King Leopold have been denounced as heartily as
General Haynau. But I doubt if they would have been physically thrashed
in the London streets.

It is not the tyrants that are lacking, but the draymen. Nevertheless,
it is not upon the historic heroes of Barclay, Perkins and Co. that
I build all my hope. Fine as it was, it was not a full and perfect
revolution. A brewer's drayman beating an eminent European General
with a stick, though a singularly bright and pleasing vision, is not
a complete one. Only when the brewer's drayman beats the brewer with
a stick shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise of British
self-government. The fun will really start when we begin to thump the
oppressors of England as well as the oppressors of Hungary. It is,
however, a definite decline in the spiritual character of draymen that
now they can thump neither one nor the other.

But, as I have already suggested, my real quarrel is not about the first
part of the extract, but about the second. Whether or no the draymen
of Barclay and Perkins have degenerated, the Commune which includes
Szekeres has not degenerated. By the way, the Commune which includes
Szekeres is called Kissekeres; I trust that this frank avowal will
excuse me from the necessity of mentioning either of these places again
by name. The Commune is still capable of performing direct democratic
actions, if necessary, with a stick.

I say with a stick, not with sticks, for that is the whole argument
about democracy. A people is a soul; and if you want to know what a soul
is, I can only answer that it is something that can sin and that can
sacrifice itself. A people can commit theft; a people can confess theft;
a people can repent of theft. That is the idea of the republic. Now,
most modern people have got into their heads the idea that democracies
are dull, drifting things, a mere black swarm or slide of clerks to
their accustomed doom. In most modern novels and essays it is insisted
(by way of contrast) that a walking gentleman may have ad-ventures as he
walks. It is insisted that an aristocrat can commit crimes, because an
aristocrat always cultivates liberty. But, in truth, a people can have
adventures, as Israel did crawling through the desert to the promised
land. A people can do heroic deeds; a people can commit crimes; the
French people did both in the Revolution; the Irish people have done
both in their much purer and more honourable progress.

But the real answer to this aristocratic argument which seeks to
identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in action
such as that of the Hungarian Commune--whose name I decline to repeat.
This Commune did just one of those acts that prove that a separate
people has a separate personality; it threw something away. A man can
throw a bank note into the fire. A man can fling a sack of corn into the
river. The bank-note may be burnt as a satisfaction of some scruple; the
corn may be destroyed as a sacrifice to some god. But whenever there is
sacrifice we know there is a single will. Men may be disputatious and
doubtful, may divide by very narrow majorities in their debate about
how to gain wealth. But men have to be uncommonly unanimous in order to
refuse wealth. It wants a very complete committee to burn a bank note in
the office grate. It needs a highly religious tribe really to throw
corn into the river. This self-denial is the test and definition of
self-government.

I wish I could feel certain that any English County Council or Parish
Council would be single enough to make that strong gesture of a romantic
refusal; could say, "No rents shall be raised from this spot; no grain
shall grow in this spot; no good shall come of this spot; it shall
remain sterile for a sign." But I am afraid they might answer, like the
eminent sociologist in the story, that it was "wiste of spice."




The Strangeness of Luxury

It is an English misfortune that what is called "public spirit" is so
often a very private spirit; the legitimate but strictly individual
ideals of this or that person who happens to have the power to carry
them out. When these private principles are held by very rich people,
the result is often the blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism,
which is benevolent despotism. Obviously it is the public which ought
to have public spirit. But in this country and at this epoch this is
exactly what it has not got. We shall have a public washhouse and a
public kitchen long before we have a public spirit; in fact, if we had a
public spirit we might very probably do without the other things. But if
England were properly and naturally governed by the English, one of the
first results would probably be this: that our standard of excess or
defect in property would be changed from that of the plutocrat to that
of the moderately needy man. That is, that while property might be
strictly respected, everything that is necessary to a clerk would be
felt and considered on quite a different plane from anything which is a
very great luxury to a clerk. This sane distinction of sentiment is
not instinctive at present, because our standard of life is that of the
governing class, which is eternally turning luxuries into necessities
as fast as pork is turned into sausages; and which cannot remember the
beginning of its needs and cannot get to the end of its novelties.

Take, for the sake of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless the
duke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in
a little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship.
But this does not prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that
a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man
can get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is no
natural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye view of
common sense there abides a huge disproportion between the need for a
roof and the need for an aeroplane; and no rush of inventions can ever
alter it. The only difference is that things are now judged by the
abnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the normal needs.
The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. The good
citizen, in his loftiest moments, goes no further than seeing it from
the roof.

It is not true that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that it
is only an expensive novelty which we may afterwards come to think a
necessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical meaning; and where there is
a real public spirit luxury is generally allowed for, sometimes rebuked,
but always recognized instantly. To the healthy soul there is something
in the very nature of certain pleasures which warns us that they
are exceptions, and that if they become rules they will become very
tyrannical rules.

Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow Road and give her one
lightning hour in a motorcar, and she will probably feel it as
splendid, but strange, rare, and even terrible. But this is not (as the
relativists say) merely because she has never been in a car before. She
has never been in the middle of a Somerset cowslip meadow before; but if
you put her there she does not think it terrifying or extraordinary,
but merely pleasant and free and a little lonely. She does not think the
motor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it monstrous because she
has eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous because it is monstrous.
That is, her mothers and grandmothers, and the whole race by whose life
she lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognizable mode of
living; sitting in a green field was a part of it; travelling as quick
as a cannon ball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstress
because she mechanically emits a short sharp scream whenever the motor
begins to move. On the contrary, we ought to look up to the seamstress,
and regard her cry as a kind of mystic omen or revelation of nature, as
the old Goths used to consider the howls emitted by chance females when
annoyed. For that ritual yell is really a mark of moral health--of swift
response to the stimulations and changes of life. The seamstress is
wiser than all the learned ladies, precisely because she can still feel
that a motor is a different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accident
of her economic imprisonment it is even possible that she may have
seen more of the former than the latter. But this has not shaken her
cyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which the
artificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, there
is little doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It is
considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sit
in a motor and see meadows go by.

To me personally, at least, it would never seem needful to own a motor,
any more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have luck, I am
told, is a very swift, successful, and thrilling way of coming down a
hill. It is distinctly more stirring, say, than a glacier, which moves
an inch in a hundred years. But I do not divide these pleasures either
by excitement or convenience, but by the nature of the thing itself. It
seems human to have a horse or bicycle, because it seems human to potter
about; and men cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men, enormously
far afield of their ordinary haunts and affairs.

But about motoring there is something magical, like going to the moon;
and I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something
breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but would
have the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound
guidebooks to life; I like the Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony
out of his father's stables, which are of ivory and gold. But if in the
course of his adventures he finds it necessary to travel on a flaming
dragon, I think he ought to give the dragon back to the witch at the end
of the story. It is a mistake to have dragons about the place.

For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is by
this that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All
romances that deal in extreme luxury, from the "Arabian Nights" to the
novels of Ouida and Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of
dream and occasionally of nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there
is something as occasional as intoxication; if that is still counted
occasional. Life in those preposterous palaces would be an agony of
dullness; it is clear we are meant to visit them only as in a flying
vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth, flavour and fierce
colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of wealth, which is
speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at the head of
an armed mob, "I do not object to your having exceptional pleasures, if
you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the strange and
alien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and not
your own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of the
Eighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year at
Margate, I am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protector
of them."

That is what I should say to the duke. As to what the duke would say to
me, that is another matter, and may well be deferred.




The Triumph of the Donkey

Doubtless the unsympathetic might state my doctrine that one should not
own a motor like a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon in the
simpler form that I will always go motoring in somebody else's car. My
favourite modern philosopher (Mr. W. W. Jacobs) describes a similar case
of spiritual delicacy misunderstood. I have not the book at hand, but
I think that Job Brown was reproaching Bill Chambers for wasteful
drunkenness, and Henery Walker spoke up for Bill, and said he scarcely
ever had a glass but what somebody else paid for it, and there was
"unpleasantness all round then."

Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers (or whoever it was) I will
risk this rude perversion of my meaning, and concede that I was in a
motor-car yesterday, and the motor-car most certainly was not my own,
and the journey, though it contained nothing that is specially unusual
on such journeys, had running through it a strain of the grotesque which
was at once wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of that influence was
that ancient symbol of the humble and humorous--a donkey.

When first I saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly
gargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly,
in his car) at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet
woods and hop-fields of that western country. He proposed to drive me
first to his house beyond the village before starting for a longer spin
of adventure, and we rattled through those rich green lanes which have
in them something singularly analogous to fairy tales: whether the lanes
produced the fairies or (as I believe) the fairies produced the lanes.
All around in the glimmering hop-yards stood those little hop-kilns like
stunted and slanting spires. They look like dwarfish churches--in fact,
rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches all of them
small and each of them a little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere we
swung round a sharp corner and half-way up a steep, white hill, and
saw what looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun. It
appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and waving
long ears like a bat's. A second glance told me that she was not the
local witch in a state of transition; she was only one of the million
tricks of perspective. She stood up in a small wheeled cart drawn by a
donkey; the donkey's ears were just set behind her head, and the whole
was black against the light.

Perspective is really the comic element in everything. It has a pompous
Latin name, but it is incurably Gothic and grotesque. One simple proof
of this is that it is always left out of all dignified and decorative
art. There is no perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even the
essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as
it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is
something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of
the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects
swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the
notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a
blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that
Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to
where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers;
all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon of
the world everything was sardonically doomed to stand up laughable and
little against heaven.

It was for this reason that the old woman and her donkey struck us
first when seen from behind as one black grotesque. I afterwards had
the chance of seeing the old woman, the cart, and the donkey fairly,
in flank and in all their length. I saw the old woman and the donkey
PASSANT, as they might have appeared heraldically on the shield of some
heroic family. I saw the old woman and the donkey dignified, decorative,
and flat, as they might have marched across the Elgin Marbles. Seen thus
under an equal light, there was nothing specially ugly about them; the
cart was long and sufficiently comfortable; the donkey was stolid
and sufficiently respectable; the old woman was lean but sufficiently
strong, and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind
they looked like one black monstrous animal; the dark donkey cars seemed
like dreadful wings, and the tall dark back of the woman, erect like a
tree, seemed to grow taller and taller until one could almost scream.

Then we went by her with a blasting roar like a railway train, and fled
far from her over the brow of the hill to my friend's home.

There we paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind of
picnic paraphernalia, and so started again, as it happened, by the way
we had come. Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharp
hill again before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawl
to the top of it; and seeing them under a different light, I saw them
very differently. Black against the sun, they had seemed comic; but
bright against greenwood and grey cloud, they were not comic but tragic;
for there are not a few things that seem fantastic in the twilight,
and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a grand, gaunt mask of
ancient honour and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shining
points, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human life.
I also saw that her cart contained carrots.

"Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast," I asked my friend, "when
you go so easily and so fast?" For we had crashed by so that the crazy
cart must have thrilled in every stick of it.

My friend was a good man, and said, "Yes. But I don't think it would do
her any good if I went slower."

"No," I assented after reflection. "Perhaps the only pleasure we can
give to her or any one else is to get out of their sight very soon."

My friend availed himself of this advice in no niggard spirit; I felt as
if we were fleeing for our lives in throttling fear after some frightful
atrocity. In truth, there is only one difference left between the
secrecy of the two social classes: the poor hide themselves in darkness
and the rich hide themselves in distance. They both hide.

As we shot like a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool of
white roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect.
I looked again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman,
with her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked my
friend to slacken, but when he said of the car, "She's wanting to go," I
knew it was all up with him. For when you have called a thing female you
have yielded to it utterly. We passed the old woman with a shock that
must have shaken the earth: if her head did not reel and her heart
quail, I know not what they were made of. And when we had fled
perilously on in the gathering dark, spurning hamlets behind us, I
suddenly called out, "Why, what asses we are! Why, it's She that is
brave--she and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery and
plate-armour: and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If you
had grown old in a quiet valley, and people began firing cannon-balls as
big as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump--and she
never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast and very far, no doubt--"

As I spoke came a curious noise, and my friend, instead of going fast,
began to go very slow; then he stopped; then he got out. Then he said,
"And I left the Stepney behind."

The grey moths came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to
crown it, as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me
(on the soundest scientific principles, of course) that nothing would be
any good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very
unlikely event of some one coming by to carry a message to some town.
Twice I thought I heard some tiny sound of such approach, and it died
away like wind in the trees, and the motorist was already asleep when
I heard it renewed and realized. Something certainly was approaching.
I ran up the road--and there it was. Yes, It--and She. Thrice had she
come, once comic and once tragic and once heroic. And when she came
again it was as if in pardon on a pure errand of prosaic pity and
relief. I am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. It is not the
first time a donkey has been received seriously, nor one riding a donkey
with respect.




The Wheel

In a quiet and rustic though fairly famous church in my neighbourhood
there is a window supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It does
definitely and indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel;
but there is enough complication in the wheel and sanctity (I suppose)
in the youth to warrant this working description. It is a thing of
florid Renascence outline, and belongs to the highly pagan period which
introduced all sorts of objects into ornament: personally I can believe
in the bicycle more than in the angel. Men, they say, are now imitating
angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that
I have heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle (if he is an angel
and if it is a bicycle) was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, he
showed that high order of intellect which is attributed to angels in the
mediaeval books, though not always (perhaps) in the mediaeval pictures.

For wheels are the mark of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of
an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are
strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not pre-human.

A distinguished psychologist, who is well acquainted with physiology,
has told me that parts of himself are certainly levers, while other
parts are probably pulleys, but that after feeling himself carefully all
over, he cannot find a wheel anywhere. The wheel, as a mode of movement,
is a purely human thing. On the ancient escutcheon of Adam (which,
like much of the rest of his costume, has not yet been discovered) the
heraldic emblem was a wheel--passant. As a mode of progress, I say, it
is unique. Many modern philosophers, like my friend before mentioned,
are ready to find links between man and beast, and to show that man has
been in all things the blind slave of his mother earth. Some, of a
very different kind, are even eager to show it; especially if it can be
twisted to the discredit of religion. But even the most eager scientists
have often admitted in my hearing that they would be surprised if some
kind of cow approached them moving solemnly on four wheels. Wings, fins,
flappers, claws, hoofs, webs, trotters, with all these the fantastic
families of the earth come against us and close around us, fluttering
and flapping and rustling and galloping and lumbering and thundering;
but there is no sound of wheels.

I remember dimly, if, indeed, I remember aright, that in some of those
dark prophetic pages of Scripture, that seem of cloudy purple and dusky
gold, there is a passage in which the seer beholds a violent dream
of wheels. Perhaps this was indeed the symbolic declaration of the
spiritual supremacy of man. Whatever the birds may do above or the
fishes beneath his ship, man is the only thing to steer; the only thing
to be conceived as steering. He may make the birds his friends, if he
can. He may make the fishes his gods, if he chooses. But most certainly
he will not believe a bird at the masthead; and it is hardly likely
that he will even permit a fish at the helm. He is, as Swinburne says,
helmsman and chief: he is literally the Man at the Wheel.

The wheel is an animal that is always standing on its head; only "it
does it so rapidly that no philosopher has ever found out which is its
head." Or if the phrase be felt as more exact, it is an animal that is
always turning head over heels and progressing by this principle. Some
fish, I think, turn head over heels (supposing them, for the sake of
argument, to have heels); I have a dog who nearly did it; and I did
it once myself when I was very small. It was an accident, and, as
delightful novelist, Mr. De Morgan, would say, it never can happen
again. Since then no one has accused me of being upside down except
mentally: and I rather think that there is something to be said for
that; especially as typified by the rotary symbol. A wheel is the
sublime paradox; one part of it is always going forward and the other
part always going back. Now this, as it happens, is highly similar to
the proper condition of any human soul or any political state. Every
sane soul or state looks at once backwards and forwards; and even goes
backwards to come on.

For those interested in revolt (as I am) I only say meekly that one
cannot have a Revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logical
thing, has reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has
(as every society should have) a part that perpetually leaps helplessly
at the sky and a part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust.
Why should people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowing
down one's head in the dust is a very good thing, the humble beginning
of all happiness. When we have bowed our heads in the dust for a little
time the happiness comes; and then (leaving our heads' in the humble and
reverent position) we kick up our heels behind in the air. That is
the true origin of standing on one's head; and the ultimate defence
of paradox. The wheel humbles itself to be exalted; only it does it a
little quicker than I do.




Five Hundred and Fifty-five

Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences: too small to
be worth mentioning except for a special purpose, often too trifling
even to be noticed, any more than we notice one snowflake falling on
another. It is this that lends a frightful plausibility to all false
doctrines and evil fads. There are always such crowds of accidental
arguments for anything. If I said suddenly that historical truth is
generally told by red-haired men, I have no doubt that ten minutes'
reflection (in which I decline to indulge) would provide me with a
handsome list of instances in support of it. I remember a riotous
argument about Bacon and Shakespeare in which I offered quite at random
to show that Lord Rosebery had written the works of Mr. W. B. Yeats. No
sooner had I said the words than a torrent of coincidences rushed upon
my mind. I pointed out, for instance, that Mr. Yeats's chief work was
"The Secret Rose." This may easily be paraphrased as "The Quiet or
Modest Rose"; and so, of course, as the Primrose. A second after I saw
the same suggestion in the combination of "rose" and "bury." If I had
pursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a raving maniac by
this time.

We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn,
only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williams
did walk into a strange house and murder a man named Williamson; it
sounds like a sort of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance
did move quite unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a place
called Overroads. When he had made this escape he was very properly
pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which a political agent
named Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named Burns. And
when he did so another coincidence happened to him: rather a spiritual
than a material coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a magic
number.

For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote in
Battersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the train
slid through swampy woods and sullen skies there came into his empty
mind those idle and yet awful questions which come when the mind is
empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them; knaves make profane poems
out of them; men try to crush them like an ugly lust. Religion is
only the responsible reinforcement of common courage and common sense.
Religion only sets up the normal mood of health against the hundred
moods of disease.

But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they always
have an answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason.
Suppose a man's children have gone swimming; suppose he is suddenly
throttled by the senseless--fear that they are drowned. The obvious
answer is, "Only one man in a thousand has his children drowned." But
a deeper voice (deeper, being as deep as hell) answers, "And why should
not you--be the thousandth man?" What is true of tragic doubt is true
also of trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said to him, "If you
don't vote to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly
do some good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please a
maddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting? You
don't think your man will get in by one vote, do you?" To this he knew
the answer of common sense, "But if everybody said that, nobody would
get in at all." And then there came that deeper voice from Hades, "But
you are not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person on one
occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way about more solid
things, how would it matter and who would ever know?" Yet somehow the
voter drove on blindly through the blackening London roads, and found
somewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote.

The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by five hundred and
fifty-five votes. The voter read this next morning at breakfast,
being in a more cheery and expansive mood, and found something very
fascinating not merely in the fact of the majority, but even in the form
of it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures; one
felt it might be a sort of motto or cipher. In the great book of seals
and cloudy symbols there is just such a thundering repetition. Six
hundred and sixty-six was the Mark of the Beast. Five hundred and
fifty-five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant tribune and citizen. A
number so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of science
into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg-and-dart ornament
or the Greek key. One might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe with
a recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light
exactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost
leapt to his feet. "Why, good heavens!" he cried. "I won that
election; and it was won by one vote! But for me it would have been the
despicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inharmonious figure five hundred
and fifty-four. The whole artistic point would have vanished. The Mark
of the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with a
masterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph--complete and
perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of Destiny when it was about to
make a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five.
Why, but for me the Cosmos would have lost a coincidence!" After this
outburst the voter sat down and finished his breakfast.




Ethandune

Perhaps you do not know where Ethandune is. Nor do I; nor does anybody.
That is where the somewhat sombre fun begins. I cannot even tell you for
certain whether it is the name of a forest or a town or a hill. I can
only say that in any case it is of the kind that floats and is unfixed.
If it is a forest, it is one of those forests that march with a million
legs, like the walking trees that were the doom of Macbeth. If it is a
town, it is one of those towns that vanish, like a city of tents. If it
is a hill, it is a flying hill, like the mountain to which faith lends
wings. Over a vast dim region of England this dark name of Ethandune
floats like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike, and, indeed,
there were birds of prey enough over Ethandune, wherever it was. But now
Ethandune itself has grown as dark and drifting as the black drifts of
the birds.

And yet without this word that you cannot fit with a meaning and hardly
with a memory, you would be sitting in a very different chair at this
moment and looking at a very different tablecloth. As a practical modern
phrase I do not commend it; if my private critics and correspondents
in whom I delight should happen to address me "G. K. Chesterton, Poste
Restante, Ethandune," I fear their letters would not come to hand. If
two hurried commercial travellers should agree to discuss a business
matter at Ethandune from 5 to 5.15, I am afraid they would grow old in
the district as white-haired wanderers. To put it plainly, Ethandune is
anywhere and nowhere in the western hills; it is an English mirage. And
yet but for this doubtful thing you would have probably no Daily News on
Saturday and certainly no church on Sunday. I do not say that either of
these two things is a benefit; but I do say that they are customs, and
that you would not possess them except through this mystery. You would
not have Christmas puddings, nor (probably) any puddings; you would
not have Easter eggs, probably not poached eggs, I strongly suspect not
scrambled eggs, and the best historians are decidedly doubtful about
curried eggs. To cut a long story short (the longest of all
stories), you would not have any civilization, far less any Christian
civilization. And if in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish to know
why you are the polished sparkling, rounded, and wholly satisfactory
citizen which you obviously are, then I can give you no more definite
answer geographical or historical; but only toll in your ears the tone
of the uncaptured name--Ethandune.

I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as important as it is. And
yet even that is not easy. If I were to state the mere fact from the
history books, numbers of people would think it equally trivial and
remote, like some war of the Picts and Scots. The points perhaps might
be put in this way. There is a certain spirit in the world which breaks
everything off short. There may be magnificence in the smashing; but the
thing is smashed. There may be a certain splendour; but the splendour is
sterile: it abolishes all future splendours. I mean (to take a working
example), York Minster covered with flames might happen to be quite
as beautiful as York Minster covered with carvings. But the carvings
produce more carvings. The flames produce nothing but a little black
heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whether
it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical
bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud
figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder
figure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the
energy, but in the effect. When the optimist has said, "All things
are interesting," we are left free; we can be interested as much or
as little as we please. But when the pessimist says, "No things are
interesting," it may be a very witty remark: but it is the last witty
remark that can be made on the subject. He has burnt his cathedral; he
has had his blaze and the rest is ashes. The sceptics, like bees, give
their one sting and die. The pessimist must be wrong, because he says
the last word.

Now, this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one period of
history a dreadful epoch of military superiority. They did burn York
Minster, or at least, places of the same kind. Roughly speaking, from
the seventh century to the tenth, a dense tide of darkness, of chaos and
brainless cruelty, poured on these islands and on the western coasts
of the Continent, which well-nigh cut them off from all the white man's
culture for ever. And this is the final human test; that the varied
chiefs of that vague age were remembered or forgotten according to how
they had resisted this almost cosmic raid. Nobody thought of the modern
nonsense about races; everybody thought of the human race and its
highest achievements. Arthur was a Celt, and may have been a fabulous
Celt; but he was a fable on the right side. Charlemagne may have been a
Gaul or a Goth, but he was not a barbarian; he fought for the tradition
against the barbarians, the nihilists. And for this reason also, for
this reason, in the last resort, only, we call the saddest and in some
ways the least successful of the Wessex kings by the title of Alfred
the Great. Alfred was defeated by the barbarians again and again, he
defeated the barbarians again and again; but his victories were almost
as vain as his defeats. Fortunately he did not believe in the Time
Spirit or the Trend of Things or any such modern rubbish, and therefore
kept pegging away. But while his failures and his fruitless successes
have names still in use (such as Wilton, Basing, and Ashdown), that
last epic battle which really broke the barbarian has remained without
a modern place or name. Except that it was near Chippenham, where
the Danes gave up their swords and were baptized, no one can pick out
certainly the place where you and I were saved from being savages for
ever.

But the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the place
which is best reputed as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bare
and partly shaggy; like that savage and sacred spot in those great
imaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon. The
darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon, the long
fantastic shadows, actually created that sense of monstrous incident
which is the dramatic side of landscape. The bare grey slopes seemed to
rush downhill like routed hosts; the dark clouds drove across like riven
banners; and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the Golden Dragon
of Wessex.

As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself and
the moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house. The atmosphere
was so intense that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes, with some
phantom conqueror on the top of it. Fortunately I was crossing these
wastes with a friend who knew more history than I; and he told me
that this was a barrow older than Alfred, older than the Romans, older
perhaps than the Britons; and no man knew whether it was a wall or a
trophy or a tomb. Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave me a
queer emotion to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with
the torrents of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may have
lifted up his head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of
something and yet suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as we
did, and understood it as little as we.




The Flat Freak

Some time ago a Sub-Tropical Dinner was given by some South African
millionaire. I forget his name; and so, very likely, does he. The humour
of this was so subtle and haunting that it has been imitated by another
millionaire, who has given a North Pole Dinner in a grand hotel, on
which he managed to spend gigantic sums of money. I do not know how he
did it; perhaps they had silver for snow and great sapphires for lumps
of ice. Anyhow, it seems to have cost rather more to bring the Pole to
London than to take Peary to the Pole. All this, one would say, does not
concern us. We do not want to go to the Pole--or to the hotel. I, for
one, cannot imagine which would be the more dreary and disgusting--the
real North Pole or the sham one. But as a mere matter of psychology
(that merry pastime) there is a question that is not unentertaining.

Why is it that all this scheme of ice and snow leaves us cold? Why is
it that you and I feel that we would (on the whole) rather spend the
evening with two or three stable boys in a pot-house than take part
in that pallid and Arctic joke? Why does the modern millionaire's
jest--bore a man to death with the mere thought of it? That it does bore
a man to death I take for granted, and shall do so until somebody writes
to me in cold ink and tells me that he really thinks it funny.

Now, it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the joke is silly.
All jokes are silly; that is what they are for. If you ask some sincere
and elemental person, a woman, for instance, what she thinks of a good
sentence from Dickens, she will say that it is "too silly." When Mr.
Weller, senior, assured Mr. Weller, junior, that "circumvented" was "a
more tenderer word" than "circumscribed," the remark was at least as
silly as it was sublime. It is vain, then, to object to "senseless
jokes." The very definition of a joke is that it need have no sense;
except that one wild and supernatural sense which we call the sense of
humour. Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that
is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as
ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the
giraffe. If laughter does not touch a sort of fundamental folly, it
does not do its duty in bringing us back to an enormous and original
simplicity. Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever
man can make a joke without taking part in it; without sharing in the
general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable
conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is
why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit
and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you
must be the Court Fool.

Whatever it is, therefore, that wearies us in these wealthy jokes
(like the North Pole Dinner) it is not merely that men make fools of
themselves. When Dickens described Mr. Chuckster, Dickens was, strictly
speaking, making a fool of himself; for he was making a fool out of
himself. And every kind of real lark, from acting a charade to making
a pun, does consist in restraining one's nine hundred and ninety-nine
serious selves and letting the fool loose. The dullness of the
millionaire joke is much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is solely
stupid. It does not consist of ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity
expanded. There is considerable difference between a wit making a fool
of himself and a fool making a wit of himself.

The true explanation, I fancy, may be stated thus. We can all remember
it in the case of the really inspiriting parties and fooleries of our
youth. The only real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea.
This explains the perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals.
These fascinate because they give such a scope for invention and variety
with the most domestic restriction of machinery. A tea-cosy may have to
do for an Admiral's cocked hat; it all depends on whether the amateur
actor can swear like an Admiral. A hearth-rug may have to do for a
bear's fur; it all depends on whether the wearer is a polished and
versatile man of the world and can grunt like a bear. A clergyman's hat
(to my own private and certain knowledge) can be punched and thumped
into the exact shape of a policeman's helmet; it all depends on the
clergyman. I mean it depends on his permission; his imprimatur; his
nihil obstat. Clergymen can be policemen; rugs can rage like wild
animals; tea-cosies can smell of the sea; if only there is at the back
of them all one bright and amusing idea. What is really funny about
Christmas charades in any average home is that there is a contrast
between commonplace resources and one comic idea. What is deadly dull
about the millionaire-banquets is that there is a contrast between
colossal resources and no idea.

That is the abyss of inanity in such feasts--it may be literally called
a yawning abyss. The abyss is the vast chasm between the money power
employed and the thing it is employed on. To make a big joke out of a
broomstick, a barrow and an old hat--that is great. But to make a small
joke out of mountains of emeralds and tons of gold--surely that is
humiliating! The North Pole is not a very good joke to start with. An
icicle hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humour in any case. If
a set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystals
from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be something
suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging diamonds on a
hundred human noses merely to make that precious joke about icicles?

What can be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherche
arrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot
poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way. But think
of a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea a piece! Think of
a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby! Imagine such fantasticalities
of expense with such a tameness and staleness of design.

We may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple. We
may concede that apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes useful
things for the education of pompous persons living the Higher Life. But
imagine a man making a butter-slide and telling everybody it was made
with the most expensive butter. Picture an apple-pie bed of purple
and cloth of gold. It is not hard to see that such schemes would lead
simultaneously to a double boredom; weariness of the costly and complex
method and of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the true analysis,
I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul of any
intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks. That is why we
feel that Freak Dinners would not even be freakish. That is why we feel
that expensive Arctic feasts would probably be a frost.

If it be said that such things do no harm, I hasten, in one sense, at
least, to agree. Far from it; they do good. They do good in the most
vital matter of modern times; for they prove and print in huge letters
the truth which our society must learn or perish. They prove that wealth
in society as now constituted does not tend to get into the hands of
the thrifty or the capable, but actually tends to get into the hands of
wastrels and imbeciles. And it proves that the wealthy class of to-day
is quite as ignorant about how to enjoy itself as about how to rule
other people. That it cannot make its government govern or its education
educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasure
we do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its
decrepitude when it cannot make its pleasures please.




The Garden of the Sea

One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the
remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of
the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride of
mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must
either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the
saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect
can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish
taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of
Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk
in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones,
or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly
about pigs; and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly
horsy about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in
a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way. And if by any
chance a simple intelligent person from the country comes in contact
with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's
comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and at worst
it is never a quotation.

Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity the
ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subject
of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham had never
seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she was asked what
she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is a
piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent and original,
and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with an analogous kinship
which I could never locate; cabbages always remind me of the sea and
the sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps, the veined
mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost dark
red may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue
sea as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that
curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy
repetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and
Shakespeare, use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But just
where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to
speak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, and
the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling, and opaque.
Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of the
rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole
sea were one great green plant with one immense white flower rooted in
the abyss.

Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see
the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected
with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and
songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and
philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would
say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To
which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, "I
would you were so honest a man." The mention of "Hamlet" reminds me, by
the way, that besides the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girl
who had never seen a stage-play. She was taken to "Hamlet," and she said
it was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial point
which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions. We are so used
to thinking of "Hamlet" as a problem that we sometimes quite forget that
it is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast
and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and green.

But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman
of culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of the
cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view of the sea
is that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it is
quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile was partly created
by exactly the opposite impression, the impression of boundary and of
barrier. The girl thought of it as a field of vegetables, even as a yard
of vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity when
you cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea. So far
from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight line in
Nature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made that
really looks like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud
are chaotic and doubtful, but solid mountains and standing forests may
be said to melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron
line. The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks, is not
a frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head of some genuine
sea-dog, when he was genuinely looking at the sea. For the edge of the
sea is like the edge of a sword; it is sharp, military, and decisive; it
really looks like a bolt or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangs
in heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changeless
in form, behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage
softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even. It hangs, a
perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides behind
all compromises and all legitimate variety; the one straight line; the
limit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world.




The Sentimentalist

"Sentimentalism is the most broken reed on which righteousness can
lean"; these were, I think, the exact words of a distinguished American
visitor at the Guildhall, and may Heaven forgive me if I do him a wrong.
It was spoken in illustration of the folly of supporting Egyptian and
other Oriental nationalism, and it has tempted me to some reflections on
the first word of the sentence.

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his
cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not see
that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see
that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its own
terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him;
another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourth
idea pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual
harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. The
Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture every
mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will not even
be off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a man
were to say, "I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity in
some other woman," he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, "I
will eat my wedding-cake and keep it." Or if a man should say, "I am
a Republican, believing in the equality of citizens; but when the
Government has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as a
kind landlord and a wise legislator"; then that man would be a
Sentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic
austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat.
Or if a man should say, "I am in favour of religious equality; but I
must preserve the Protestant Succession," he would be a Sentimentalist
of a grosser and more improbable kind.

This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every
idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.

Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent
sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr.
Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists. For the Imperial
theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our relation to Eastern
races is simply one of eating the Oriental cake (I suppose a Sultana
Cake) and at the same time leaving it alone.

Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards Eastern
peoples, and there are only two.

First, he may simply say that the less we have to do with them the
better; that whether they are lower than us or higher they are so
catastrophically different that the more we go our way and they go
theirs the better for all parties concerned. I will confess to some
tenderness for this view. There is much to be said for letting that calm
immemorial life of slave and sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as it
has always flowed. The best reason of all, the reason that affects me
most finally, is that if we left the rest of the world alone we might
have some time for attending to our own affairs, which are urgent to
the point of excruciation. All history points to this; that intensive
cultivation in the long run triumphs over the widest extensive
cultivation; or, in other words, that making one's own field superior is
far more effective than reducing other people's fields to inferiority.
If you cultivate your own garden and grow a specially large cabbage,
people will probably come to see it. Whereas the life of one selling
small cabbages round the whole district is often forlorn.

Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a commercial traveller; and
a commercial traveller is essentially a person who goes to see people
because they don't want to see him. As long as empires go about urging
their ideas on others, I always have a notion that the ideas are no
good. If they were really so splendid, they would make the country
preaching them a wonder of the world. That is the true ideal; a great
nation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet. Men went to the mediaeval
Sorbonne because it was worth going to. Men went to old Japan because
only there could they find the unique and exquisite old Japanese art.
Nobody will ever go to modern Japan (nobody worth bothering about, I
mean), because modern Japan has made the huge mistake of going to the
other people: becoming a common empire. The mountain has condescended to
Mahomet; and henceforth Mahomet will whistle for it when he wants it.

That is my political theory: that we should make England worth copying
instead of telling everybody to copy her.

But it is not the only possible theory. There is another view of our
relations to such places as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable.
It may be said, "We Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire; when
all is said we have the largest freedom, the most exact science, the
most solid romance. We have a deep though undefined obligation to
give as we have received from God; because the tribes of men are truly
thirsting for these things as for water. All men really want clear
laws: we can give clear laws. All men really want hygiene: we can
give hygiene. We are not merely imposing Western ideas. We are simply
fulfilling human ideas--for the first time."

On this line, I think, it is possible to justify the forts of Africa and
the railroads of Asia; but on this line we must go much further. If it
is our duty to give our best, there can be no doubt about what is our
best. The greatest thing our Europe has made is the Citizen: the idea
of the average man, free and full of honour, voluntarily invoking on his
own sin the just vengeance of his city. All else we have done is mere
machinery for that: railways exist only to carry the Citizen; forts only
to defend him; electricity only to light him, medicine only to heal him.
Popularism, the idea of the people alive and patiently feeding history,
that we cannot give; for it exists everywhere, East and West. But
democracy, the idea of the people fighting and governing--that is the
only thing we have to give.

Those are the two roads. But between them weakly wavers the
Sentimentalist--that is, the Imperialist of the Roosevelt school. He
wants to have it both ways, to have the splendours of success without
the perils. Europe may enslave Asia, because it is flattering: but
Europe must not free Asia, because that is responsible. It tickles
his Imperial taste that Hindoos should have European hats: it is too
dangerous if they have European heads. He cannot leave Asia Asiatic: yet
he dare not contemplate Asia as European. Therefore he proposes to have
in Egypt railway signals, but not flags; despatch boxes, but not ballot
boxes.

In short, the Sentimentalist decides to spread the body of Europe
without the soul.




The White Horses

It is within my experience, which is very brief and occasional in this
matter, that it is not really at all easy to talk in a motor-car. This
is fortunate; first, because, as a whole, it prevents me from motoring;
and second because, at any given moment, it prevents me from talking.
The difficulty is not wholly due to the physical conditions, though
these are distinctly unconversational. FitzGerald's Omar, being a
pessimist, was probably rich, and being a lazy fellow, was almost
certainly a motorist. If any doubt could exist on the point, it is
enough to say that, in speaking of the foolish profits, Omar has defined
the difficulties of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannot
be accidental. "Their words to wind are scattered; and their mouths are
stopped with dust." From this follows not (as many of the cut-and-dried
philosophers would say) a savage silence and mutual hostility, but
rather one of those rich silences that make the mass and bulk of all
friendship; the silence of men rowing the same boat or fighting in the
same battle-line.

It happened that the other day I hired a motor-car, because I wanted to
visit in very rapid succession the battle-places and hiding-places
of Alfred the Great; and for a thing of this sort a motor is really
appropriate. It is not by any means the best way of seeing the beauty
of the country; you see beauty better by walking, and best of all by
sitting still. But it is a good method in any enterprise that involves a
parody of the military or governmental quality--anything which needs
to know quickly the whole contour of a county or the rough, relative
position of men and towns. On such a journey, like jagged lightning,
I sat from morning till night by the side of the chauffeur; and we
scarcely exchanged a word to the hour. But by the time the yellow stars
came out in the villages and the white stars in the skies, I think I
understood his character; and I fear he understood mine.

He was a Cheshire man with a sour, patient, and humorous face; he was
modest, though a north countryman, and genial, though an expert. He
spoke (when he spoke at all) with a strong northland accent; and he
evidently was new to the beautiful south country, as was clear both from
his approval and his complaints. But though he came from the north he
was agricultural and not commercial in origin; he looked at the land
rather than the towns, even if he looked at it with a somewhat more
sharp and utilitarian eye. His first remark for some hours was uttered
when we were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury
Plain. He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain was
a plain. This alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. But he also
said, with a critical frown, "A lot of this land ought to be good land
enough. Why don't they use it?" He was then silent for some more hours.

At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called
(with no little humour) Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident,
something I was looking for--that is, something I did not expect to see.
We are all supposed to be trying to walk into heaven; but we should be
uncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked into it. As I was leaving
Salisbury Plain (to put it roughly) I lifted up my eyes and saw the
White Horse of Britain.

One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type, such as
Swinburne and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have eulogized England under the
image of white horses, meaning the white-maned breakers of the Channel.
This is right and natural enough. The true philosophical Tory goes back
to ancient things because he thinks they will be anarchic things. It
would startle him very much to be told that there are white horses of
artifice in England that may be older than those wild white horses of
the elements. Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how old are those strange
green and white hieroglyphics, those straggling quadrupeds of chalk,
that stand out on the sides of so many of the Southern Downs. They are
possibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times. They may well be
older than British, older than any recorded times. They may go back, for
all we know, to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet. Men
may have picked a horse out of the grass long before they scratched a
horse on a vase or pot, or messed and massed any horse out of clay. This
may be the oldest human art--before building or graving. And if so, it
may have first happened in another geological age, before the sea burst
through the narrow Straits of Dover. The White Horse may have begun in
Berkshire when there were no white horses at Folkestone or Newhaven.
That rude but evident white outline that I saw across the valley may
have been begun when Britain was not an island. We forget that there are
many places where art is older than nature.

We took a long detour through somewhat easier roads, till we came to a
breach or chasm in the valley, from which we saw our friend the White
Horse once more. At least, we thought it was our friend the White Horse;
but after a little inquiry we discovered to our astonishment that it was
another friend and another horse. Along the leaning flanks of the same
fair valley there was (it seemed) another white horse; as rude and as
clean, as ancient and as modern, as the first. This, at least, I thought
must be the aboriginal White Horse of Alfred, which I had always heard
associated with his name. And yet before we had driven into Wantage
and seen King Alfred's quaint grey statue in the sun, we had seen yet a
third white horse. And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike
a horse that we were sure that it was genuine. The final and original
white horse, the white horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big,
babyish quality that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors. It really
has the prehistoric, preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native
drawings. This at least was surely made by our fathers when they were
barely men; long before they were civilized men.

But why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much trouble to make a
horse nearly as big as a hamlet; a horse who could bear no hunter, who
could drag no load? What was this titanic, sub-conscious instinct for
spoiling a beautiful green slope with a very ugly white quadruped?
What (for the matter of that) is this whole hazardous fancy of humanity
ruling the earth, which may have begun with white horses, which may by
no means end with twenty horse-power cars? As I rolled away out of that
country, I was still cloudily considering how ordinary men ever came to
want to make such strange chalk horses, when my chauffeur startled me by
speaking for the first time for nearly two hours. He suddenly let go one
of the handles and pointed at a gross green bulk of down that happened
to swell above us. "That would be a good place," he said.

Naturally I referred to his last speech of some hours before; and
supposed he meant that it would be promising for agriculture. As a fact,
it was quite unpromising; and this made me suddenly understand the quiet
ardour in his eye. All of a sudden I saw what he really meant. He really
meant that this would be a splendid place to pick out another white
horse. He knew no more than I did why it was done; but he was in some
unthinkable prehistoric tradition, because he wanted to do it. He became
so acute in sensibility that he could not bear to pass any broad breezy
hill of grass on which there was not a white horse. He could hardly keep
his hands off the hills. He could hardly leave any of the living grass
alone.

Then I left off wondering why the primitive man made so many white
horses. I left off troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man had
sought to scar or deface the hills. I was content to know that he did
want it; for I had seen him wanting it.




The Long Bow

I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G.
Wells, I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with
fatigue. I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which
I agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny. I deny
that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire
biology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking the truth. My
mind cannot find anything which denies my mind... But what is all this?
This is no sort of talk for a genial essay. Let us change the subject;
let us have a romance or a fable or a fairy tale.

Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who was very
fond of listening to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights.
The only difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this king
believed all the stories that he heard. It is hardly necessary to add
that he lived in England. His face had not the swarthy secrecy of the
tyrant of the thousand tales; on the contrary, his eyes were as big and
innocent as two blue moons; and when his yellow beard turned totally
white he seemed to be growing younger. Above him hung still his heavy
sword and horn, to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warrior
in his time: indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies.
But he was one of those who will never know the world, even when they
conquer it. Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of the
telling of tales, he was, like many old English kings, specially
interested in the art of the bow. He gathered round him great archers of
the stature of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of these he gave
the whole government of his kingdom. They did not mind governing his
kingdom; but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessity
of telling him stories. None of their stories were true; but the king
believed all of them, and this became very depressing. They created the
most preposterous romances; and could not get the credit of creating
them. Their true ambition was sent empty away. They were praised as
archers; but they desired to be praised as poets. They were trusted as
men, but they would rather have been admired as literary men.

At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club
or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even the
king could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow; thus
attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its
heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.

At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come. The king
commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by four doors,
and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him on an
April evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door, telling him
to return at morning with the tale of his journey. Every champion bowed
low, and, girding on great armour as for awful adventures, retired to
some part of the garden to think of a lie. They did not want to think of
a lie which would deceive the king; any lie would do that. They wanted
to think of a lie so outrageous that it would not deceive him, and that
was a serious matter.

The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow, very
dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more interested in the
science of the bow than in the sport of it. Also he would only shoot at
a mark, for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and atrocious
to kill men. When he left the king he had gone out into the wood and
tried all sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branches
and the impact of arrows; when even he found it tiresome he returned to
the house of the four turrets and narrated his adventure. "Well," said
the king, "what have you been shooting?" "Arrows," answered the archer.
"So I suppose," said the king smiling; "but I mean, I mean what wild
things have you shot?" "I have shot nothing but arrows," answered the
bowman obstinately. "When I went out on to the plain I saw in a crescent
the black army of the Tartars, the terrible archers whose bows are of
bended steel, and their bolts as big as javelins. They spied me afar
off, and the shower of their arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling
roof above me. You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or
even a Tartar. But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science
that, with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me. I
struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird. Therefore, Sire,
I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows." The king said, "I know
how clever you engineers are with your fingers." The archer said, "Oh,"
and went out.

The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical, and rather
effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon.
When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery, even for his own
wide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again. And when the king said
"What have you been shooting?" he answered with great volubility, "I
have shot a man; not a man from Tartary, not a man from Europe, Asia,
Africa, or America; not a man on this earth at all. I have shot the
Man in the Moon." "Shot the Man in the Moon?" repeated the king with
something like a mild surprise. "It is easy to prove it," said
the archer with hysterical haste. "Examine the moon through this
particularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find any
traces of a man there." The king glued his big blue idiotic eye to the
telescope for about ten minutes, and then said, "You are right: as
you have often pointed out, scientific truth can only be tested by the
senses. I believe you." And the second archer went out, and being of a
more emotional temperament burst into tears.

The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair
and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, "I have
lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds." Then as he saw that
they all stared at him, he said "Well, you know everything changes on
the earth; mud turns into marigolds, eggs turn into chickens; one can
even breed dogs into quite different shapes. Well, I shot my arrows
at the awful eagles that clash their wings round the Himalayas; great
golden eagles as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perching
on them. My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turned
slowly into fowls in their flight. See here," and he threw down a dead
bird and laid an arrow beside it. "Can't you see they are the same
structure. The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp point is the
beak; the feather is the rudimentary plumage. It is merely modification
and evolution." After a silence the king nodded gravely and said, "Yes;
of course everything is evolution." At this the third archer suddenly
and violently left the room, and was heard in some distant part of the
building making extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of mirth.

The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood,
but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive. His
comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they had
soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there was
literally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face of the
little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in, and
when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment. "Ha, the
last," said the king heartily, "welcome back again!" There was a long
pause, and then the stunted archer said, "What do you mean by 'again'?
I have never been here before." The king stared for a few seconds, and
said, "I sent you out from this room with the four doors last night."
After another pause the little man slowly shook his head. "I never saw
you before," he said simply; "you never sent me out from anywhere.
I only saw your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in here by
accident. I was born in an island in the Greek Archipelago; I am by
profession an auctioneer, and my name is Punk." The king sat on his
throne for seven long instants like a statue; and then there awoke in
his mild and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction of
untruth. Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false.
He rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him, plucked
it out naked, and then spoke. "I will believe your mad tales about the
exact machinery of arrows; for that is science. I will believe your
mad tales about traces of life in the moon; for that is science. I
will believe your mad tales about jellyfish turning into gentlemen, and
everything turning into anything; for that is science. But I will
not believe you when you tell me what I know to be untrue. I will
not believe you when you say that you did not all set forth under my
authority and out of my house. The other three may conceivably have told
the truth; but this last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will kill
him." And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted
sword; but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told the
world that there is, after all, something which an Englishman will not
swallow.




The Modern Scrooge

Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting,
author of "A Higher London" and "The Boyg System at Work," came to the
conclusion, after looking through his select and even severe library,
that Dickens's "Christmas Carol" was a very suitable thing to be read to
charwomen. Had they been men they would have been forcibly subjected
to Browning's "Christmas Eve" with exposition, but chivalry spared
the charwomen, and Dickens was funny, and could do no harm. His fellow
worker Wimpole would read things like "Three Men in a Boat" to the poor;
but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle, or (what was
the same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in their
vulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature.
Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order,
of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite
fitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve.

He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes of
warning and criticism. He explained that Dickens was not a writer of the
first rank, since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold.
He also feared that they would find the characters of Dickens terribly
exaggerated. But they did not, possibly because they were meeting them
every day. For among the poor there are still exaggerated characters;
they do not go to the Universities to be universified. He told the
charwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad wicked old miser
like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as each of the
charwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who was
exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, the
lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, and
towards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction,
talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying
quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane)
always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely
austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all
go to heaven just as we can all go to a classical concert, but if we
did it would bore us. Realizing that he was taking his flock far out of
their depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly, and was soon receiving that
generous applause which is a part of the profound ceremonialism of the
working classes. As he made his way to the door three people stopped
him, and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurry
which he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class.
One was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish
meekness that she was troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said that
Dickens was not really Progressive; but she thought he was Progressive;
and surely he was Progressive. Of what being Progressive was she had
no more notion than a whale. The second person implored him for a
subscription to some soup kitchen or cheap meal; and his refined
features sharpened; for this, like literature, was a matter of principle
with him. "Quite the wrong method," he said, shaking his head and
pushing past. "Nothing any good but the Boyg system." The third
stranger, who was male, caught him on the step as he came out into the
snow and starlight; and asked him point blank for money. It was a
part of Vernon-Smith's principles that all such persons are prosperous
impostors; and like a true mystic he held to his principles in defiance
of his five senses, which told him that the night was freezing and the
man very thin and weak. "If you come to the Settlement between four and
five on Friday week," he said, "inquiries will be made." The man stepped
back into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture as of apology; he had
frosty silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow, seemed to wear
something like a smile. As Vernon-Smith stepped briskly into the street,
the man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace. He was, however,
guiltless of any such dandyism; and as the young philanthropist stood
pulling on his gloves with some particularity, a heavy snowball was
suddenly smashed into his face. He was blind for a black instant; then
as some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as in a dim mirror of ice or
dreamy crystal, the lean man bowing with the elegance of a dancing
master, and saying amiably, "A Christmas box." When he had quite cleared
his face of snow the man had vanished.

For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the people
and more their brother than he had been in his whole high-stepping
pedantic existence; for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one. And
you never really regard a labourer as your equal until you can quarrel
with him. "Dirty cad!" he muttered. "Filthy fool! Mucking with snow like
a beastly baby! When will they be civilized? Why, the very state of the
street is a disgrace and a temptation to such tomfools. Why isn't all
this snow cleared away and the street made decent?"

To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain of
in the condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both sides in white
walls and towards the other and darker end of the street even rose into
a chaos of low colourless hills. By the time he reached them he was
nearly knee deep, and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind.
The solitude of the little streets was as strange as their white
obstruction, and before he had ploughed his way much further he was
convinced that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon some
formless suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low,
dark houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow. He was
modern and morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly; anything
human would have relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of a
garotter. Then the tender human touch came indeed; for another snowball
struck him, and made a star on his back. He turned with fierce joy, and
ran after a boy escaping; ran with dizzy and violent speed, he knew not
for how long. He wanted the boy; he did not know whether he loved or
hated him. He wanted humanity; he did not know whether he loved or hated
it.

As he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing in
shape though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and disappear
in hills of snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise in tattered
outlines of crag and cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of all
these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. When he did he saw
the child was queerly beautiful, with gold red hair, and a face as
serious as complete happiness. And when he spoke to the boy his own
question surprised him, for he said for the first time in his life,
"What am I doing here?" And the little boy, with very grave eyes,
answered, "I suppose you are dead."

He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny. He
looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, and
said, "Is this hell?" And as the child stared, but did not answer, he
knew it was heaven.

All over that colossal country, white as the world round the Pole,
little boys were playing, rolling each other down dreadful slopes,
crushing each other under falling cliffs; for heaven is a place where
one can fight for ever without hurting. Smith suddenly remembered how
happy he had been as a child, rolling about on the safe sandhills around
Conway.

Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's, but
curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a cavernous
crag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape seen from a
balloon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away. He saw a little
boy stagger, with many catastrophic slides, to that toppling peak; and
seizing another little boy by the leg, send him flying away down to the
distant silver plains. There he sank and vanished in the snow as if in
the sea; but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once
more, rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last,
which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy and
the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale. The other
boy also sank like a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but Smith
had no leisure to concern himself with this. For the collapse of that
celestial crest had left him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like
a church spire.

He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and he
knew by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump. Then
for the first time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just known
the fierce nature of charity. Or rather for the second time, for he
remembered one moment when he had known faith before. It was n when his
father had taught him to swim, and he had believed he could float on
water not only against reason, but (what is so much harder) against
instinct. Then he had trusted water; now he must trust air.

He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the same
blinding swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet
he seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast.
He knew that the whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars are
snowballs. He knew that no man will be fit for heaven till he loves
solid whiteness as a little boy loves a ball of snow.

He sank and sank and sank... and then, as usually happens in such cases,
woke up, with a start--in the street. True, he was taken up for a common
drunk, but (if you properly appreciate his conversion) you will realize
that he did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness is infinitely less
than that of spiritual pride, of which he had really been guilty.




The High Plains

By high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interest
one very much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without the
pleasure of a peak. Also they arc vaguely associated with Asia and those
enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts, as did the army
of Xerxes; with emperors from nowhere spreading their battalions
everywhere; with the white elephants and the painted horses, the dark
engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the moving empires of the
East, with all that evil insolence in short that rolled into Europe in
the youth of Nero, and after having been battered about and abandoned by
one Christian nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeli
and was christened (or rather paganed) Imperialism.

Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean "high planes" such
as the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about. They
spell theirs differently; but I will not have theirs in any spelling.
They, I know, are always expounding how this or that person is on a
lower plane, while they (the speakers) are on a higher plane: sometimes
they will almost tell you what plane, as "5994" or "Plane F, sub-plane
304." I do not mean this sort of height either. My religion says nothing
about such planes except that all men are on one plane and that by no
means a high one. There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saint
only means a man who really knows he is a sinner.

Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a rather
singular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at
school learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was puzzled by
the phrase OINON MELAN that is "black wine," which continually occurred.
I asked what it meant, and many most interesting and convincing answers
were given. It was pointed out that we know little of the actual liquid
drunk by the Greeks; that the analogy of modern Greek wines may suggest
that it was dark and sticky, perhaps a sort of syrup always taken with
water; that archaic language about colour is always a little dubious, as
where Homer speaks of the "wine-dark sea" and so on. I was very properly
satisfied, and never thought of the matter again; until one day, having
a decanter of claret in front of me, I happened to look at it. I then
perceived that they called wine black because it is black. Very thin,
diluted, or held-up abruptly against a flame, red wine is red; but seen
in body in most normal shades and semi-lights red wine is black, and
therefore was called so.

On the same principles I call the plains high because the plains always
are high; they are always as high as we are. We talk of climbing a
mountain crest and looking down at the plain; but the phrase is an
illusion of our arrogance. It is impossible even to look down at the
plain. For the plain itself rises as we rise. It is not merely true
that the higher we climb the wider and wider is spread out below us
the wealth of the world; it is not merely that the devil or some other
respectable guide for tourists takes us to the top of an exceeding high
mountain and shows us all the kingdoms of the earth. It is more than
that, in our real feeling of it. It is that in a sense the whole
world rises with us roaring, and accompanies us to the crest like some
clanging chorus of eagles. The plains rise higher and higher like swift
grey walls piled up against invisible invaders. And however high a peak
you climb, the plain is still as high as the peak.

The mountain tops are only noble because from them we are privileged to
behold the plains. So the only value in any man being superior is that
he may have a superior admiration for the level and the common. If there
is any profit in a place craggy and precipitous it is only because from
the vale it is not easy to see all the beauty of the vale; because
when actually in the flats one cannot see their sublime and satisfying
flatness. If there is any value in being educated or eminent (which is
doubtful enough) it is only because the best instructed man may feel
most swiftly and certainly the splendour of the ignorant and the simple:
the full magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains. The
general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, not to look down at
his soldiers. He withdraws himself not because his regiment is too small
to be touched, but because it is too mighty to be seen. The chief climbs
with submission and goes higher with great humility; since in order to
take a bird's eye view of everything, he must become small and distant
like a bird.

The most marvellous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricate
and exquisite verse in England in the seventeenth century, I mean
Henry Vaughan, put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal and
practically forgotten--

"Oh holy hope and high humility."

That adjective "high" is not only one of the sudden and stunning
inspirations of literature; it is also one of the greatest and gravest
definitions of moral science. However far aloft a man may go, he is
still looking up, not only at God (which is obvious), but in a manner
at men also: seeing more and more all that is towering and mysterious in
the dignity and destiny of the lonely house of Adam. I wrote some part
of these rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock and turf overlooking a
stretch of the central counties; the rise was slight enough in reality,
but the immediate ascent had been so steep and sudden that one could not
avoid the fancy that on reaching the summit one would look down at the
stars. But one did not look down at the stars, but rather up at the
cities; seeing as high in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a lit
sunset cloud, and away in the void spaces, like a planet in eclipse,
Salisbury. So, it may be hoped, until we die you and I will always look
up rather than down at the labours and the habitations of our race; we
will lift up our eyes to the valleys from whence cometh our help. For
from every special eminence and beyond every sublime landmark, it is
good for our souls to see only vaster and vaster visions of that dizzy
and divine level; and to behold from our crumbling turrets the tall
plains of equality.




The Chorus

One of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathy
is the gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singing
in chorus. Even when it is done nowadays it is done tentatively and
sometimes inaudibly; apparently upon some preposterous principle
(which I have never clearly grasped) that singing is an art. In the new
aristocracy of the drawing-room a lady is actually asked whether she
sings. In the old democracy of the dinner table a man was simply told to
sing, and he had to do it. I like the atmosphere of those old banquets.
I like to think of my ancestors, middle-aged or venerable gentlemen, all
sitting round a table and explaining that they would never forget old
days or friends with a rumpty-iddity-iddity, or letting it be known that
they would die for England's glory with their tooral ooral, etc. Even
the vices of that society (which 'sometimes, I fear, rendered the
narrative portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as the
chorus) were displayed with a more human softening than the same
vices in the saloon bars of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard
Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy
wine in order that the wing of friendship might never moult a feather
to the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskies and sodas, but declares
all the time that he's for number one, and that you don't catch him
paying for other men's drinks. The old men of pleasure (with their
tooral ooral) got at least some social and communal virtue out of
pleasure. The new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige of
a tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion,
anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselves
with hashish or opium in a wilderness.

But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this obvious one
of asserting the popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song, even
of a comic song, has the same purpose as the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
It reconciles men to the gods. It connects this one particular tale with
the cosmos and the philosophy of common things, Thus we constantly find
in the old ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain about
the grass growing green, or the birds singing, or the woods being merry
in spring. These are windows opened in the house of tragedy; momentary
glimpses of larger and quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduring
landscapes. Many of the country songs describing crime and death have
refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole
company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view
of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire
Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the
consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which
should come in a kind of burst) runs:

  "And I'll be true to my love
  If my love'll be true to me."

The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced, I think,
as a kind of throw back to the normal, a reminder that even "The
Berkshire Tragedy" does not fill the whole of Berkshire. The poor
young lady is drowned, and the wicked miller (to whom we may have been
affectionately attached) is hanged; but still a ruby kindles in the
vine, and many a garden by the water blows. Not that Omar's type of
hedonistic resignation is at all the same as the breezy impatience of
the Berkshire refrain; but they are alike in so far as they gaze out
beyond the particular complication to more open plains of peace. The
chorus of the ballad looks past the drowning maiden and the miller's
gibbet, and sees the lanes full of lovers.

This use of the chorus to humanize and dilute a dark story is strongly
opposed to the modern view of art. Modern art has to be what is
called "intense." It is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly
speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long
stories (as the man said of philosophy) cheerfulness would creep in.
Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful. And doubtless
they bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our successful
scientific civilization; lives which tend in any case to be painful, and
in many cases to be brief. But when the artistic people passed beyond
the poignant anecdote and began to write long books full of poignancy,
then the reading public began to rebel and to demand the recall of
romance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quite
insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the London
tragedy has no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return of
adventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant and
swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of the
romantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought
to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and
sceptical soul ought to be preserved, if it be only for the pity (yes,
and the admiration) of a happier time. But I wish that there were some
way in which the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of each
chapter of stiff agony or insane terror the choir of humanity could come
in with a crash of music and tell both the reader and the author that
this is not the whole of human experience. Let them go on recording hard
scenes or hideous questions, but let there be a jolly refrain.

Thus we might read: "As Honoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and went
wearily to her window, she realized that life must be to her not only
harsher, but colder than it was to the comfortable and the weak. With
her tooral ooral, etc.;" or, again: "The young curate smiled grimly as
he listened to his great-grandmother's last words. He knew only too
well that since Phogg's discovery of the hereditary hairiness of goats
religion stood on a very different basis from that which it had occupied
in his childhood. With his rumpty-iddity, rumpty-iddity;" and so on. Or
we might read: "Uriel Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals, as
he realized for the first time how senseless and anti-social are all
ties between man and woman; how each must go his or her way without any
attempt to arrest the head-long separation of their souls." And then
would come in one deafening chorus of everlasting humanity "But I'll be
true to my love, if my love'll be true to me."

In the records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developments
of the foundation of St. Francis of Assisi is an account of a certain
Blessed Brother Giles. I have forgotten most of it, but I remember
one fact: that certain students of theology came to ask him whether
he believed in free will, and, if so, how he could reconcile it with
necessity. On hearing the question St. Francis's follower reflected a
little while and then seized a fiddle and began capering and dancing
about the garden, playing a wild tune and generally expressing a violent
and invigorating indifference. The tune is not recorded, but it is the
eternal chorus of mankind, that modifies all the arts and mocks all the
individualisms, like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea.




A Romance of the Marshes

In books as a whole marshes are described as desolate and colourless,
great fields of clay or sedge, vast horizons of drab or grey. But this,
like many other literary associations, is a piece of poetical injustice.
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its
sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There
are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sightseers. It is a matter
of taste, that is of personality, whether marshes are monotonous; but it
is a matter of fact and science that they are not monochrome. The tops
of high mountains (I am told) are all white; the depths of primeval
caverns (I am also told) are all dark. The sea will be grey or blue
for weeks together; and the desert, I have been led to believe, is the
colour of sand. The North Pole (if we found it) would be white with
cracks of blue; and Endless Space (if we went there) would, I suppose,
be black with white spots. If any of these were counted of a monotonous
colour I could well understand it; but on the contrary, they are always
spoken of as if they had the gorgeous and chaotic colours of a cosmic
kaleidoscope. Now exactly where you can find colours like those of a
tulip garden or a stained-glass window, is in those sunken and sodden
lands which are always called dreary. Of course the great tulip gardens
did arise in Holland; which is simply one immense marsh. There is
nothing in Europe so truly tropical as marshes. Also, now I come to
think of it, there are few places so agreeably marshy as tropics. At
any rate swamp and fenlands in England are always especially rich in
gay grasses or gorgeous fungoids; and seem sometimes as glorious as
a transformation scene; but also as unsubstantial. In these splendid
scenes it is always very easy to put your foot through the scenery. You
may sink up to your armpits; but you will sink up to your armpits in
flowers. I do not deny that I myself am of a sort that sinks--except
in the matter of spirits. I saw in the west counties recently a swampy
field of great richness and promise. If I had stepped on it I have no
doubt at all that I should have vanished; that aeons hence the
complete fossil of a fat Fleet Street journalist would be found in that
compressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude of
energy, or even of joy. But the last point is the most important of all,
for as I imagined myself sinking up to the neck in what looked like a
solid green field, I suddenly remembered that this very thing must have
happened to certain interesting pirates quite a thousand years ago.

For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I so nearly sunk was
the fenland round the Island of Athelney, which is now an island in the
fields and no longer in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stone
still stands to say that this was that embattled islet in the Parrett
where King Alfred held his last fort against the foreign invaders, in
that war that nearly washed us as far from civilization as the Solomon
Islands. Here he defended the island called Athelney as he afterwards
did his best to defend the island called England. For the hero always
defends an island, a thing beleaguered and surrounded, like the Troy
of Hector. And the highest and largest humanitarian can only rise to
defending the tiny island called the earth.

One approaches the island of Athelney along a low long road like an
interminable white string stretched across the flats, and lined with
those dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At one
point of the journey (I cannot conceive why) one is arrested by a toll
gate at which one has to pay threepence. Perhaps it is a distorted
tradition of those dark ages. Perhaps Alfred, with the superior science
of comparative civilization, had calculated the economics of Denmark
down to a halfpenny. Perhaps a Dane sometimes came with twopence,
sometimes even with twopence-halfpenny, after the sack of many cities
even with twopence three farthings; but never with threepence. Whether
or no it was a permanent barrier to the barbarians it was only a
temporary barrier to me. I discovered three large and complete coppers
in various parts of my person, and I passed on along that strangely
monotonous and strangely fascinating path. It is not merely fanciful to
feel that the place expresses itself appropriately as the place
where the great Christian King hid himself from the heathen. Though
a marshland is always open it is still curiously secret. Fens, like
deserts, are large things very apt to be mislaid. These flats feared to
be overlooked in a double sense; the small trees crouched and the whole
plain seemed lying on its face, as men do when shells burst. The
little path ran fearlessly forward; but it seemed to run on all fours.
Everything in that strange countryside seemed to be lying low, as if to
avoid the incessant and rattling rain of the Danish arrows. There were
indeed hills of no inconsiderable height quite within call; but those
pools and flats of the old Parrett seemed to separate themselves like
a central and secret sea; and in the midst of them stood up the rock of
Athelney as isolate as it was to Alfred. And all across this recumbent
and almost crawling country there ran the glory of the low wet lands;
grass lustrous and living like the plumage of some universal bird; the
flowers as gorgeous as bonfires and the weeds more beautiful than the
flowers. One stooped to stroke the grass, as if the earth were all one
kind beast that could feel.

Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred and his
fort in Athelney, in the marshes of the Parrett? Not a very historical
novel. Not about his Truth-telling (please) or his founding the British
Empire, or the British Navy, or the Navy League, or whichever it was
he founded. Not about the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (as
an eminent historian says) to be called the Pact of Chippenham. But an
aboriginal romance for boys about the bare, bald, beatific fact that
a great hero held his fort in an island in a river. An island is fine
enough, in all conscience or piratic unconscientiousness, but an island
in a river sounds like the beginning of the greatest adventure story on
earth. "Robinson Crusoe" is really a great tale, but think of Robinson
Crusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen England and Spain from
his inaccessible isle! "Treasure Island" is a spirit of genius: but
what treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred? And then
consider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that was
more of an island than it looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; many
a heavy harnessed Viking may have started bounding across a meadow only
to find himself submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendour
spreading round me; I see glimpses of a great romance that will never be
written. I see a sudden shaft quivering in one of the short trees. I see
a red-haired man wading madly among the tall gold flowers of the marsh,
leaping onward and lurching lower. I see another shaft stand quivering
in his throat. I cannot see any more, because, as I have delicately
suggested, I am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustain
me, and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.





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import glob
import nltk

texts = {}

for f in glob.glob("*.txt"):
    print f,":",
    thisText = ""
    started = False
    for l in open(f):
        if (l.find("***") == 0) and ("START OF" in l):
            started = True
        elif started:
            if (l.find("End of") == 0) or (l.find("***END") == 0):
                title = l[:-1]                
                if "End of" in l:
                    if "EBook of" in l:
                        title = l.split("EBook of")[1]
                    elif "Gutenberg's" in l:
                        title = l.split("Gutenberg's")[1]
                    title = title.split(", by")[0]
                else:
                    title = l.split("EBOOK ")[1]
                    title = title.split("***")[0]
                    newTitle = ""
                    for w in title.split():
                        newWord = w[0] + w[1:].lower()
                        newTitle += newWord
                        newTitle += " "
                    title = newTitle[:-1]
                print title,
                print "\n===========================",len(thisText)
                texts[title] = nltk.word_tokenize(thisText)
                break
            else:
                thisText += unicode(l[:-1],errors='ignore')

allWords = {}
taggedText = {}
taggedWords = {}
              
for t in texts:
    print "ANALYZING",t
    taggedText[t] = nltk.pos_tag(texts[t])
    words = {}
    for (w,p) in taggedText[t]:
        if (w,p) in words:
            words[(w,p)] += 1
        else:
            words[(w,p)] = 1
        if (w,p) in allWords:
            allWords[(w,p)] += 1
        else:
            allWords[(w,p)] = 1
    taggedWords[t] = words
    wsort = map(lambda (w,p): (str(w),words[(w,p)]), (filter(lambda (w,p): p in ["NN","NNP"], sorted(words.keys(),key=lambda wp:words[wp],reverse=True)))[:50])
    print wsort

print "EVERYTHING:"
wsort = map(lambda (w,p): (str(w),allWords[(w,p)]), (filter(lambda (w,p): p in ["NN","NNP"], sorted(allWords.keys(),key=lambda wp:allWords[wp],reverse=True)))[:50])
print wsort